Episode 32: Keeping Business Technology Efficient

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast, a podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up.

If you're wondering how technology can support your business goals, rest assured our guests have been there and done that.

Fun fact: A 2021 survey by Okta found that companies, on average, deploy upwards of 90 different business technology applications, and larger companies can deploy double that amount. Not so fun fact: Somebody has to be in charge of making sure all of those tools work together.

Luke here with the SphereCast, and this week on the podcast, I interviewed Justin Tung, Head of Business Technology at Segment, an enterprise platform that allows businesses to activate their customer data. The platform supports a variety of use cases, including activating data in marketing, product, and engineering. Segment is used by over 20,000 companies, including elite organizations like VMware, Google, Optimizely, Gap, Instacart, and more.

In November 2020, Segment was acquired by Twilio for $3.2 billion US. As the Head of Business Technology, Justin has been tasked with the seemingly impossible task of streamlining tools and processes between teams in a high-growth environment, from marketing to sales, from sales to finance, and everywhere before, after, and in between. And today, where there seem to be more applications than employees, that job is both painful and necessary.

On the podcast, Tung explores his role, discusses some of the key challenges in the world of business technology management, and describes the importance of team building and development. So without further delay, here's my conversation with Justin.

Justin, we're thrilled to host you on SphereCast today. Welcome.

Thank you so much. Really glad to be here.

Excellent, excellent. So I'm going to start with an icebreaker. Share with us something interesting about yourself that, let's say, most people wouldn't know.

Yeah, sure. I was actually born and raised in Brazil, São Paulo. Lived there for about 12 years. My family decided to immigrate here. That was in middle school, and as a result of that, I And then I, my parents come from they lived in Taiwan, in China, and so I'm also, multicultural background, so I speak four languages: English, Portuguese, Mandarin, and Spanish. Learned Spanish in school, and the joke is just that I'm not great at any of them. But as a result of that, I have also worked in various stints in different countries like India and China before, so that's been that's been a great experience.

Wow, that that is that is amazing. You you you are geared up for the future, so you probably know all the continental languages that will help you navigate, you know, the tech space for the next 30, 40 years, I guess.

I can be randomly dropped in places of the Earth and feel confident I could probably somewhat get around.

I see. So, what about Portuguese? Did you try to learn that as well, or Spanish? I'm just curious to understand, since you say

Yeah, Portuguese was upbringing in Brazil, right? So that that was, you know, something that I learned as just through going through school. And then Spanish, I learned more recently within, you know, when I immigrated here, starting in middle school and all the way through college, essentially through more formal classes. Yeah. I mean, it obviously came pretty easily to me, cuz the two languages are very similar in the in the sense. So.

Mhm. Excellent. You're a learner, I guess. Right. Thanks for sharing that. Okay, let's switch gears a little bit, so we're going towards business and technology. So, I'm going to start with the most recent venture of yours. You're Head of Business Systems or Technology at Segment, which is part of Twilio. Could you share with our audience what's your mission there? What do you do?

Yeah. So, I joined Segment about 3 years ago. Actually, just had my third 3-year anniversary when it was Series C, and my goal was to establish a new go-to-market business technology team in order to deliver world-class experiences to our growing company, growing sales team, and essentially oversee our technology roadmap.

In the last 3 years, things have changed quite a lot, and not only has there been a a lot of different reorganizations and the company has grown dramatically, let's say 4X, and our team has also grown quite a lot. And so nowadays, we don't just support the sales team. We support pretty much every single team within the organization. We sit within go-to-market, but we absolutely work very closely with a lot of finance teams, IT, legal, and, you know, we just have our hands in every single cookie jar.

I see. I see. Very diverse. So, can we maybe zoom in on one of the, let's say, functions? So, how do you work with, let's say, the sales team? In what capacity? Do you do you help them with, you know, with their IT systems, etc., CRMs or something, or could you shine some light on that perhaps?

Yeah, absolutely. So, the sales team is essentially comprised of Like our main stakeholders is is sales operations team.

And essentially, you have everything from the marketing-to-sales handshake, right, in terms of the systems and the passing that lead data, per se, and going to the hands of, let's say, the first team, which is really the SDR team, or sales development representatives, all the way through the handshake between them and the actual sales representative in terms of creating the right, you know, opportunity data, ensuring that the lead is getting to the right account, that there's some sort of matching. There's a bunch of logic integration layers in there.

And essentially, passing that sales data, you know, all the way through our CPQ system, quoting, and ensuring that it's going into the last handshake, which is to deal execution, deal operations, deal desk, and then finance. And so there's quite a lot of areas where systems has a large play and processes, obviously, have a large play within these stakeholders. And I would say at a high level, you have large teams, such as the SDR team, enablement within sales, a couple of different groups depending on, for example, bands and the way that you look at your opportunity methodology. And then you have sort of true sales op operational groups, and then you have sort of a strategy and analytics. So there's quite a couple of different major groups within within even that that domain.

I see. Interesting. You mentioned something about finance, so you work with them as well. I I we we've also we have interviewed some CFOs on this pod- podcast in the past, and I see this, you know, new wave coming along and it's it seems like the CFOs want to, you know, be responsible for how the data works in the organization. So, is there a handshake between the finance and and the business systems team here where, you know, you are looking at the data and they're as well? Who who's responsible for data, and where's the single source of truth? Is Is are there any, you know Is there any friction there or, like, tension in a way? Who wants to control it?

I I think there's always some degree of friction. But yes, absolutely, to answer your question, there's definitely a a handshake or a a relationship, or many relationships, there. The probably the most common is your quote-to-cash process where you're taking sales data and ensuring that that's playing correctly into downstream ERP systems, invoicing billing systems, right, of which source of truth is it depends who you talk to and what system you look at. There theoretically speaking, different sources of truth. Each system adds its own layer of data, per se, and then you have to bring it all together.

So, I would say that, obviously, for sales data, the source of truth is your CRM system. For financial data, a lot of the sources of truth will be outside of that, within their own applications. And so working with the financial operations team, it's important to ensure that that integration And essentially, who owns the integrations themselves, the way that I describe it, it's it's kind of like building a bridge.

You have two teams building a bridge from both sides, and you sort of have to meet halfway. And so if something were to go wrong, both teams need to take ownership because you have to troubleshoot and resolve where that root cause might be happening, and it could be anywhere within that actual integration. But I think where it starts usually is a heavier sort of precedence as as as far as the source of truth.

I see. Interesting approach that. I like the analogy of, you know, both teams are building bridges, moving towards each other and then you meet in the middle. So, excellent. Thanks for sharing that. Quite detailed. Tell us about your role at Airbnb, if possible. And I'm, you know, keen to understand how did that prepare you for your current position?

Yeah, so my experience at Airbnb was the one previous to Segment. I was also there for about three 3 years, and it was really my first experience going in-house from my my previous life, which was being a consultant within the CRM space and being part of a really fast-growing startup environment.

Yeah, I think some of the challenges that we we tackle that have some alignment to my current position today, there's I think two main parts. One would I would say it's team growth and organization. Within a fast-growing environment, you're constantly thinking about how to add new members really quickly and bring them on board. And so we pursued a very heavily decentralized model of support, which worked really well as as we grew, with combination of BSAs, business systems analysts, and developers supporting each of our business units and ensuring that they were heavily embedded in within their day-to-day activities and cadence, simply to not be reactive, right, to be more proactive about seeing what kind of issues, what kind of problems, what kind of requests or opportunities that were ahead of time.

And I think given my consulting background, that also worked really well, given that we have sort of this what I call the trifecta model of approach. You have someone within the meeting who's, you know, project managing, project product owning, right, the roadmap, which a lot of times is the stakeholder. You have a secondary person, which is your BSA, who's thinking about translating those into business requirements and creating system specs. And then you ultimately, the third person, you have your developer, which is thinking sort of outside the box, thinking like what can we do outside of point and click. And so having those three people, I think, worked really well in terms of supporting that business.

The second part that, you know, aligns with some of the things I see today is just systems integration as part of the project end-to-end delivery. So not only do you have to create the the the process automation and the stand up the application itself, but you have to think of integration into other systems as part of this delivery, whether it's tooling that you already have, creating additional data pipelines. And at at Airbnb, we use a lot of open-source technology, such as Airflow, which was something that was started out of Airbnb, and then later we used MuleSoft as our ETL integration tool. But this is ultimately how I found out about Segment as well, which which I think is an interesting story, so.

Very interesting that, yes. Okay, so let's you know, you mentioned that particular little you know, those two tools, Airflow and So, could I ask you, I mean, if you can share with us, what were the, you know, let's say, not all the challenges, but what were the, you know, a couple main challenges that you tackled in your 3 years at Airbnb? Maybe you could, you know, after a brief description of those challenges, you could share some of the decisions or choices you settled on and and why was that?

Yeah. I I think maybe I'll I'll give one specific example, which is our our Airflow and and sort of more related to our Airflow ETL, MuleSoft, you know, pipelines and things like that.

Okay.

We we were We always wanted to ensure that the data that made it into our CRM system, which we used Salesforce, was making it out to our databases. And then also vice versa, right? That some of the data that was being manipulated was making it back into our CRM system in order for our end users to see. And so this two-way pipeline is incredibly important, I'm sure, at every single company. And for us, we used a combination of open-source tools that Salesforce already had, DataLoader.io,

Right.

and Airflow in order to insert sort of that data into, you know, our Hive data database.

And what I think where Segment comes in here is that, at Segment, the thing that's different there is that we obviously use our own tool to do all the exporting. And then we use a different ETL tool, Tray.io, to do the importing. And so I I think different companies look at different tools depending on the culture, their skill set, right, like what's already established, things like that, in order to make this sort of two-way pipeline as efficient as possible.

And, but the sort of aligning thread here is that you have to have a robust solution that can meet not just your current requirements, but potential future requirements as well. And that's where I think MuleSoft came into play for us when we were at Airbnb. We were looking to do a very specific, um I think procurement integration into our HR system, and a lot of the tools at the time, this was granted 6 years ago, just weren't able and weren't flexible to do that. And that's why we started looking into competitors like Boomi, MuleSoft, things like that.

And granted, I think this was before MuleSoft was even acquired by Salesforce. Whereas I think fast-forward, you know, today, 6, 7 years later, there are so many more tools, and the level of flexibility that you can do within these integrations has increased dramatically.

I see a lot of frameworks in the market nowadays that help you connect your work OS or a CRM with lots of different, you know, other components within your business. So there's a lot of growth now compared to 6 years ago. 6 years ago, I think 6, 7 years ago, we would go down the route of custom building custom integrations, which was rather, you know, there's a long time to to develop those things, test it out, etc. So I think things are very fast now.

Yeah. I mean, technology moves at breakneck speeds, and, you know, I've been in the industry for about 10-plus years. I started as an SDR, and some of the stuff that we used to use back in the day to call and email was so manual compared to some of the technology that SDRs get today with automated drip campaigns and being able to structure emails a certain way, and just It's It's gotten so smart, and it's just such an interesting, you know, thing to see the evolution of this these technologies.

I completely agree. Totally on on the same page there. But you only realize it when you look back at the starting point. Quite often, you know, people I I tend to see it this way that I'm looking at last year and what we do this year, and I I see, you know, very incremental changes, and you miss the bigger picture that where we were a few years ago and what people are doing nowadays. So, clearly, you know, chalk and cheese, we're talking about.

Okay. So, thanks for sharing that, Justin. I'm going to switch to, you know, let's say non-business items now, maybe business, but more personal to you. So, could you share a professional achievement that you're most proud of, perhaps?

Yeah. I I had to think a little bit about this one. I mean, there's there's obviously a lot. I think the the biggest one, or the biggest sort of category, is when it comes to hiring and mentorship for me. And this can be out inside of your company and outside of your company, and just the networks of mentorship that you develop.

And the the reason for for that is because hiring can be really tricky, but it's also one of the most rewarding aspects of the job itself. And when when you just see one of your, you know, teammates or reports or adjacent, you know, teammates grow and take on new roles, it it's just it's really cool. You You're definitely really proud, and there's a sense of gratitude that you see them trust you, right, with their livelihood, with their careers.

And the and lastly, the mentorship aspect for me, it it's something that still comes back to today. Like there's just people that I've talked to over the years that I've helped break into the industry or have given advice to, sometimes casually, sometimes, you know, you kind of just talk through your job and give informational interviews, and I also ask for a lot of those in return. And then you see them succeed in in the industry and within your company, and you know, even even actually, a lot of people that I've met and talked to have gone on to you know, be part of the BizTech team at Twilio, which we joined into. And so it's just like a full-circle sort of feeling that you get, and it's it's incredible.

Well, all I can say is you're a very kind person. And I I I, you know, I'll I'll share a little story about my wife as well, which is very similar to, you know, what you're proud of. So she's She manages cafes, and she, you know, opens places, you know, these new, let's say, specialty coffee places from scratch. So she's not proud of opening these places, she's more happy when some barista says that, "You know, I love working with you. I'm learning so much, and I'm growing as a professional because you're helping me, mentoring me." And this is what she's happy with.

And I can see the same that, you know, what makes you happiest about your work is is helping others and seeing what choices you made, you know, for your organization, and investments you've made in into people and how they are helping your team in return. So, yeah, clearly, something we do at Sphere as well a lot, so, yeah, something I could relate to. But absolutely amazing. Thanks for sharing that. Very kind of you.

So that was the, you know, things you're proud of, professional achievement. So, let's go towards some of the difficult decisions now. So, tell us about some of the difficult decisions or choices you had to make as Head of Business Technology.

There's a lot. I I think the I'll just kind of go, you know, off the top of my head. There's there's I think the biggest one that a lot of folks agree, and it it's maybe not even specific to business technology, but it's specific to just every team in out there as as you grow a team, is prioritization and bandwidth of your team, how to ensure that you're growing the team in the right direction, that you're plugging in and finding the right skill sets, sort of this jigsaw puzzle of different skill sets to support permanent requests, but also building your team for success so that, in the future, you know, you're looking way down the line, understanding that you can you can you're able to support, you know, that that future need, and just weighing the balance between what is a short-term win, what is a medium-term win, what is a long-term win.

And a lot of times, everything can seem like a priority. We work a lot with sales teams, and there's there's this concept of like whoever yells the loudest is the one that gets sort of the the support, right? And so there's a bit of that, but it's also understanding that you know, the things that we do, like, yes, they do impact the bottom line, yes, they do impact revenue, right? And that's that's a really great metric to measure yourself by. Oh, we saved the salesperson X number of minutes, X number of clicks. We created this business line, you know, through CPQ, and enabled the salesperson to quote this much revenue in the last quarter. So like all those metrics are are great, and they're incredibly measurable and you can see the impact over time.

But they can they're not always foolproof. That's not the singular metric that you should be measuring your team by. There's a lot of intangibles. There's things like, for example, we should take an additional number of weeks to do further UAT testing, right? Like that's an intangible metric that it it's hard to measure the impact of something like that, but you know that the result of additional testing is going to be less errors, less bugs, more coverage. Or let's take a couple more weeks and create a better, scalable solution that is actually going above and beyond what the original request is because we know in the future, 6 months down the road, you're going to probably want this, right? And if we do it now, it'll it'll take us half the time because we're already inside the project, we already know sort of the inner workings and things like that.

And that's back to my original point around the BSA being really heavily embedded. They're able to weigh those priorities and ensure that the roadmap, you know, stays up to date and say, "Hey, we should do this now," right? And so I think those are some of the difficult decisions that as a business technology team, you you have to make when doing really large-scale projects.

Do you make these decisions as as a team, I guess, if I'm guessing it correctly, or who who has the the power to veto in in your team? Or is it everyone?

Yeah, so like I said, our team is decentralized, so it depends on, you know, which stakeholder we're working with. But I I think it's a discussion. Like ultimately, the the head and, you know, myself and some of the, you know, other managers have veto power, I guess, but it it really is a collaborative decision, and we're not, you know, as managers and leaders, we're not embedded inside the day-to-day activity and work, and so some of the nuance can be lost. And so there's a lot there's definitely a level of trust that we, you know, try to give to the team and a level of independence in terms of making that decision and saying, "Okay, we're going to back you up, right? Let's Let's write this up. Let's bring some data into the picture. Let's help you socialize this, right? Or if if we need to escalate this, let's help escalate." And so that's that's where I think our our roles come in.

And if there's any fallback, if there's any risk, if there's any you know, something that happens to the timeline, like we It falls on us ultimately, right? So we are accountable for that. But I think the decision itself is a collaborative, sometimes, you know, team-based, and I don't mean the entire team, but I just mean the specific BSA developer who's working on said project.

I see. So, trusting your team to make the right choices, and if there's an escalation, then, obviously, you know, team makes a collaborative decision in the interest of whatever the objectives are. So, yeah, great. Amazing approach. Thanks for sharing that. So, let's go a little bit personally here. Education. I'm going to go towards. So, I I checked your LinkedIn profile. I found out that you graduated from the University of California with a degree in entrepreneurship and technology. And then you also mentioned earlier that you started out as a as an SDR. So, how has that experience prepared you for where you are now, or, let's say, you know, for future?

Yeah, so went to Berkeley, Go Bears. I I I study I think because Berkeley was such a liberal school, I studied quite a lot of different classes. Started in business, went into I don't even remember at this point, some some technical degrees, ended up in economics, took a bunch of engineering classes while I was at it.

And I I distinctly remember one of my engineering classes, we had a competition to create a business plan. And my my friends and I, you know, partners, many of which were studying sort of medical, you know, traits and backgrounds like biology and chemistry, we created this plan for an over-the-counter chlamydia testing kit. Just something that they were working on, and it was I think it was really interesting to do the the research. We conducted faculty interviews, and ultimately at the end, we actually won the class award for sort of the criteria, whatever that was, most, you know, plausible or most interesting, you know, idea.

And obviously, at the time, I was not very technical or had or and still don't have any subject matter expertise in the field. And this experience ultimately gave me the confidence that there's there's a role in there for someone who can blend entrepreneurship, technology, in really any industry, and be able to create some sort of plan, product, prototype, and ultimately impact. And so I think that was a really unique experience for me, and it gave me the opportunity to see that there's opportunities everywhere, essentially.

And so fast-forward a little bit to, you know, graduation and figuring out what to do, I did not plan to go into a sales position. I'm really glad I did, ultimately. It made my you know, the ability to to take no and I just think it's a great starting foundational job. You really understand what it's like to pitch a product, pitch a company, pitch yourself, even.

And I actually joined consulting as a first trade. That's a lot a lot of what people do as a first career move if they essentially are not sure what they want to do. I knew I wanted to be in in the technology space, and so I joined a company called Bluewolf, which has been acquired by IBM, and it was part of a rotational program to do sales, operations, and then, ultimately, services, ultimately consulting. And so that's that's what I did for 6 months, and, yeah, I thought it was really interesting.

And the rest is history, I guess.

And, yeah. And now and now here I am.

Excellent. Okay. Can you describe your typical day?

For me, I really prioritize the morning to to do creative work, just deep-thinking work, things that I I take it slower. I do planning of my day. I try to plan the week if it's like a Monday, or if it, you know, it's a Friday, I'll plan the next week. And I do a lot of writing, so I'll write down like a a note, a list of daily goals so I can sort of check them off as I go.

And I also make sure to do like a weekly summary for for myself. So that includes things like, you know, what what have you achieved this last week? What's like work in progress? What are things that you wanted to achieve, but were ultimately incomplete?

And yeah, so that's that's usually my morning. I obviously try to have breakfast. I try to think through, you know, what my physical exercise of the day is going to be, just kind of planning out sort of the whole day before getting into essentially the onslaught of meetings. I even as of recently, I'll I'll get like double-booked or triple-booked, and so just trying to figure out the calendar and how I'm going to join multiple meetings at the same times.

Excellent. And how many meetings do you have a day? I mean, I I typically spend like 4, 5 hours a day, you know, during busy days, in meetings alone. What would what does it look like for you?

Yeah, I I usually start I mean, I go through lunch, so I typically always have meetings through lunch. I I somehow always try to figure out lunch in the middle of it or have something ready in the fridge that can just be microwaveable, but, yeah, I I usually I think four or five is an average. It can be as high as like, um, six or seven sometimes.

Fair enough.

Yeah, with with the recent remote work, it's been interesting. Things have typically started a little bit later, and then typically have ended a bit earlier, which means that a lot of the meetings get sort of compressed. And then you have the sort of no-meeting Friday type culture sometimes that just, basically, is never really adhered to, to be honest, from for my calendar. So, but you also have sort of a compression of a bunch of meetings from Friday transferring into Monday through Thursday, if that makes any sense.

Oh, yeah. Spillover, yes. Uh yeah, I think things never stop, but that's a good idea. I might try and use that approach, no-meeting Friday, no meetings Friday, yeah. Okay, I'll propose that to my leadership team.

Great.

Thanks for sharing that. Okay, great. So, the next question is a bit cheesy. I have to ask you, though. What what's one thing that you wish you had known when you began your career?

I think the the biggest thing that I remember and I'll I'll take with me is just just not be afraid to network, um, or even don't neglect the networking piece because you're busy doing your day-to-day and, you know, busy solving the problems of the business.

And this could be reaching out to someone within your company to learn more about that organization. This could be reaching out to someone outside of your company to learn more about a specific product or a vendor that you've been, you know, hearing about, or simply just reaching out to someone at a different company that you whose product you really like, right, that has nothing to do with your day-to-day.

I think doing those things is ultimately going to benefit you in a a lot of different ways that you, you know, can't even really imagine. And cold is fine. Cold reach-outs is fine. Obviously, warm reach-outs is best. Even if it's sometimes like two to three times removed, like you don't actually have a first-degree connection, but you know someone that knows someone that knows someone, I think it's a totally fine daisy chaining of messages that you can do. Be like, "Hey, can you introduce me to person A?" And then, "Can you introduce me to person B?" Things like that.

And it feels a bit weird to do in the beginning, but it's I think it's totally natural and it it'll pay dividends. So for me, these relationships and essentially acquaintances have created a lot, a plethora of opportunities later on in my life, whether it's job interviews, side gigs, right, intro to other people, things like that. I think that's an incredibly important part of developing your career.

So to our audience, I'll say take some notes at this time. Okay. Thanks for that insight. I think it's it's really important nowadays, especially because we're not going out, we're not meeting many people. Instead, you know, save a couple of hours a week, reach out to some people that you, yeah, like, or you like their products, or companies. Just try and speak, you know, with these guys and and learn something, at least. So, one of the reasons why we do podcasts here as well, for the very reason that we used to go out and network with a lot of organizations, tech startups, scale-ups, enterprises, meet them at at various, you know, events or do our events, but it has completely stopped. So as an organization or as a team, we felt like we were not growing at all. So that was one of the reasons why we started off with the SphereCast.

Perfect use case. Yeah, start your own podcast, you know?

Yeah, I love it. I love it.

That's way above and beyond, but I I I love the idea. Why not, right? Challenge yourself. Turn it into your side gig. Right?

Yep. When When are we going to see your podcast soon? Are you thinking of one?

I I'm not sure that I'd be able to create as much content as people might be might be expecting, but I'm I'm happy to dip my toes by by talking with you first, and then, you know, we'll see what happens.

You can start small, baby steps, always, remember. Yeah. Okay. How do you unwind, Justin?

It's a combination of things. I I have a physical sort of schedule, regimen, right? So like, hands down, that's the best way for me. It's it's the most meditative approach that I have.

I've I ran in high school competitively, so really really comfortable with that part. And then, I picked up triathlon last couple of years, and so that sport in general just requires a lot of commitment and a lot of, I think, planning, and and, honestly, I I really enjoy hitting different goals, whether it's time-based or just hitting your daily goal, like I said, and getting that workout in. And I I think physical health is a really important foundation to mental health, work-life balance, and it's just something that I don't negotiate, essentially. Like I have to have. I have to do.

So that's that's the biggest thing. And then, I also supplement that, I do a lot of reading. Whenever I can, I read everything from sci-fi, you know, fantasy fiction, do a lot of non-fiction, some philosophy. I love comics. I think that the resurgence of online comics today is incredible. I used to do a lot of more audiobooks and podcasts when I had more of a commute, but I'll be honest that I don't do those as much, but I'm starting to again, finding that sort of that time. But, yeah, a lot of reading and sort of consuming of content.

Well, you've got a lot of different interests, so there's never a shortage of things you can do in your free time, I guess.

Okay, so tell me something. How do you manage your time? I think you kind of touched upon it a little bit, but let's say, if you can describe as how do you, you know, how are you managing to get so much done in such a small day or a week or a month?

Yeah, it ultimately comes down to planning, right? I did talk about it a little bit. Some Some things that I that I really have picked up is mental frameworks. And one of them is this Eisenhower Matrix for decision-making that I really like to talk through. And it's it's basically just a 4x4 matrix, like people should look it up, it's great. It's on one axis, you've got urgency, and the other axis, you've got importance. And depending on, you know, where that meets, you kind of either you you can wait on it, you can not do, you delegate, or you schedule for another time.

And so that, to me, helps me prioritize what I need to do and gives me the ability to say, "It's okay to do this at a later time," right? Especially for things that are where people really get tripped up on is if something's important and like not urgent, for example, you should schedule a specific time to do that. And then on the flip side, if it's urgent and not important, you can choose to delegate, right, which is also a really effective skill to have as a manager. And so I think that level of mental framework helps me a lot.

The way that I manage my inbox is always, you know, I try to do Inbox Zero. I kind of organize the important things at the top and always respond to it when, you know, at an appropriate time, right? Like I I never think that email should be used in the sort of way that it's used today, to be honest, which is you should respond every other minute. Like I just don't believe that you should be checking email every single hour of your day. You should have designated times in which to check, and then prioritize and respond when you can, and things like that. I'll try to time-block my mornings. Like I said, it's sort of reserved for deep thinking, creative thinking.

And then, I also suggest this And I sort of have done this internally, so I don't really use a clock or a watch or a dice anymore, but I sometimes will gift this to folks, which is this Pomodoro time time technique, which is you know, you just have something sitting at the table, it measures how long you've been spending on certain tasks, and you can sort of analyze, you know, I spend a lot more time doing this daily task than I usually did because I just went down this rabbit hole, and you can try to pull yourself out of it. So I think that's a really interesting way to, you know, analyze time spent throughout the day.

Yeah, that's good introspection there. So what what is it? Is it like a little time-tracker?

The gift itself, yeah, it's it's kind of like, you know, a six-sided dice kind of cube thing, and then you turn it, and depending on which face it's on, it'll start tracking your the time itself. And you can create these custom categories. You can be like, "Oh, one is on emails, one is on" Essentially, it's like for folks that like studying technique is like spend an hour studying, take a, I don't know, 5-minute break. There's all these like sort of schedules that you can build in, you have to force yourself to stop something and then do something else, and then come back to it. That's sort of like a time-blocking technique.

And it works with your phone, as well? Syncs with it, so you can see some

I'm sure I'm sure Yeah, oh, yeah. Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. There's some really cool ones out there. Exactly. With analytics, and you can kind of see bar charts and see how long you spend on different things. I sort of do this internally nowadays when, you know, I I look at the clock and it's been an hour and I'm still on the same problem, I just know I need to step away and like go do something else.

And that's that's I think part of, you know, as you think about complex issues or difficult problems, you likely won't solve it straight away. It's best to like mull it overnight, think about it when you're, you know, doing your exercise or whatever that I do, right? And then come back to it with a with a different mindset.

That that is really amazing. I think I I try and do it, but not really religiously, but I think this this little thing you talked about is a great gift. I might ask my wife to, you know, get that ordered in the next few hours, so I can get it for Christmas. Absolutely. It's a So it's TimeCube. I will look into it. Thanks for sharing that.

Yeah, I'll I'll I'll find a link. Yeah, I can share with you.

Amazing. Okay, great. Right, so we've come to the final part of the podcast. So, let's talk about technology innovations since, I guess, you you have to, you know, keep yourself up to date in order to find out what's best to solve the problems that you come across in your day-to-day work. So, how do you stay on top of knowing what's in the market, what solutions are available or technologies you could utilize to solve problems?

Honestly, from a day-to-day perspective, I don't I don't do this a lot. I don't read a lot of articles or keep up to date on every single major release of all these different applications, just because there's just so much, right? You You learn as as you go, and then on a per-need basis.

But I think that the two pieces that have helped me a lot, one is, I'll go back to my point about networking, having a strong network of people that you can tap into with these different domains and these different end-to-end processes, whether it's like hire-to-retire process, or your quote-to-cash process, or your CPQ process. Like knowing who to tap into and ask about that is is really important, especially if you have a question about a specific solution or a specific way that you've you've done it, and just have them challenge you on that, right? Give you perspective.

I did that a lot when I was looking at quote-to-cash processes and, you know, billing integrations, and just was able to talk to like 30, 40 different people in my network about what they've done at their company, you know, how this has evolved, just, you know. And so that that was an amazing, I I think, benefit there.

And then the second part that I've really enjoyed is being part of the Systematic group that Workato has started, and it's just this forum of business technology like users, managers, leaders who just you can kind of post anything and it's just very specific to business technology as a as a trade, of which, you know, it's a small community, I think it's it's a small like group of folks, and so at some point, you just start to see, you know, how different companies do some of these processes. And, again, you can use that as a area to like reach out to people and like get to know get to know folks.

I love it. You don't just look at something that's literature, but you you see real-world examples how people are solving these problems. And then you're able to critically think, because you have like five or six, let's say, different opinions or different ways of solving things and you can amalgamate everything and find out, you know, create your own best way to solve something. So that's really good, something I can use, I think, in future. So thank you again.

Right, so, Justin, what continues to be your biggest challenge from a tech perspective, and how do you how do you think technology would evolve to make your business more efficient going forward? May- Maybe, you know, there's many different challenges, I guess, but if you want to give us an example, perhaps you could choose like one area that you want to discuss or talk about.

Yeah. Just to set the the the context here, the the number of applications for different domains, right, our processes has risen dramatically for every department or group.

And because of that, also the underlying data schemas, right, the number that data complexity, and then ultimately, the number of integrations that you have to essentially architect in order to support a a better 360-degree view of a customer, all those things play into each other. And so on average, today, every department can have north of like 40 applications or more, right? And they're a lot of times they're best-in-class, but it can also be a combination of things you've built yourself, you know, things as opposed as as much as things that you bought.

And so ultimately, the the challenge there is making sure that you're creating narrative from the data that you're cobbling together. And that's requiring more expertise than ever from every single team. And this is regardless if you have like a solid data warehouse, data lake, and robust BI solution, like you still have to do a lot of analytics, sometimes outside of that destination itself.

And how do I wish the market would evolve to make this more efficient? I think it has a lot already in some ways. The sort of low-code, no-code movements, right, you have a lot of companies around like Airtable, Notion, Retool, all tools that we use at Segment to varying degrees, right, is allowing these users, end users at these different teams across the company with varying degrees of technical expertise to essentially cobble together a bunch of different data sets and create this like coherent dashboard.

And yeah, that could be using a BI solution, but that that could just be using data sets that are way, you know, upstream in the funnel. And so I think ultimately every team needs some sort of independence in the sense that they need a an analytic arm or function or a contributor within these teams to ensure that the data that you're pulling out, you can create a narrative from that. It's making sense in some way.

And a lot of the companies that I've seen and talking to are having this difficulty, is that this ultimately sometimes fall on business technology, right? Sometimes it falls on the data science or data or specifically the analytics team, who, again, usually are decentralized teams, just like business technology, where we're heavily embedded. And sometimes there's just not enough of those people to really ensure that that's getting cobbled together properly.

And also, these people, if they're not sitting within the teams, they might not know the area so well. So, I think, for the analytics part, you you have to know your department really well to be able to make sense out of data and create the story, you know, or being be able to read between the lines.

Yeah, and that's that's it's a skill set that I think is sometimes a bit hard to teach, and it's it's There's no formal At least not that I know of

There's no training for this. It's just an acumen, isn't it, that some people have, and you can build around it. I think there's 60% acumen, and then you can flesh it out with another 30, 40% by, you know, educating people further.

Yeah, exactly. And I mean, maybe to be specific, the the data challenge is always, "This data is not correct. This hygiene is not, you know, up to par," right? And that that's, again, another I think symptom, or perhaps it's a result, but it it's part of this, you know, underlying rise of applications, complexity in data schema, right, integrations sort of not fully meeting, right, that that passing of data. And then so after a while, it gets skewed, right, as you play sort of this game of telephone.

Yep, these are some of the challenges, I guess. Well, you know, things are improving, so I I would hope in in the next decade or so, we'll be in a better place in these areas.

Right, so we've come to the final part, Justin, and things get a bit personal and trickier in this one. So, what I want to ask you is, what do you think are the top three attributes of a great leader in the current times? And I I think you've already discussed a couple of things when you talked about your professional achievement that you were most proud of. I can I can sense what the answers might be, but I'd like to hear from you.

Yeah, I'll I'll give a few different and more examples, top three. So, first one, I would say is making a a a bigger effort to to socialize and create team bonding, right, through what I like to do is activities. I think a lot of folks just kind of try to get away with that sort of online Friday drinking thing, right? But I I just I try to be more creative. I try to create more of a competitive environment, which I think people enjoy. We've done things like Pictionary or like cooking lessons, and also like not You have to recognize that like not everyone likes to drink, right? That's That shouldn't be the the sort of social occasion.

And so obviously, we've we've done some in-person things, which I really love, and I really have needed that, but I think in in lack of that, you know, people not feeling comfortable, what not, which is totally fine, just getting creative with your social or, you know, organization and be able to appreciate people that way. That's the first one.

Secondly, being really sensitive and understanding of I think each of the team members' priorities, right? Ensuring that they have that sort of safe space to to talk. Like I said before, like not everyone wants to drink, not everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder. Like absolutely some people in this environment are working a lot more. Sometimes, you know, they haven't even realized that, but sometimes that's, you know, they really want to climb. But other folks are taking you know, have more have personal matters, have travel, have family, and and just need another type of support. So I think just being really sensitive to their situation and understanding, you know, those priorities, I think is is really key on a person-to-person basis. So that's the second thing.

And then the third thing, being really clear and and setting realistic expectations with the with our business stakeholders, right? For us, we we were acquired by Twilio a year ago, roughly, and everyone's just been facing a lot of immense changes, product changes. There's just a lot of organizational, you know, hierarchies and just turbulence in general. And because of that, I think as a business technology team, ensuring system stability, right, creating blackout periods, ensuring consistency and smooth, like, end-user experience, like weighing those things above all else is is really important. And then, just being really clear like what we're prioritizing for potentially a a long-term delivery and why we're doing the things we're doing.

So, I think those would be the the top three things of a of a leader that, you know, has to do within these current times.

Great. You know, normally, we sometimes get three attributes as in like couple of different words or something like that, but thanks that you went all the way to give us the examples, not just the attributes as in like, you know, one needs to be honest, blah, blah, blah. So, yeah, that was amazing.

Justin, we have come to the end of the episode. I I really enjoyed speaking with you. So much insight, so much education for me today. So, thank you for your time. Really appreciate this, and I would absolutely hope that you would love to come again in 6, 7 months' time.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Happy holidays. Thank you for the folks listening. Yeah, open invitation. Like please reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have questions or, you know, want to network or just want to want to have a conversation. Definitely always open to that. And, yeah, thanks. Thanks again for having me.

Cheers.

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