Product Engineer to CEO: Sten Pittet, A Thinkydoers Career Profile
Text on graphic: Thinkydoers Career Profile (Ep. 24): From Product Engineer to CEO. Host: Sara Lobkovich; with guest Sten Pittet.
Have you ever thought about a career in product -- whether product management, product development, or product engineering?
You'll enjoy this conversation with Sten Pittet, CEO of Tability. In our last episode, Sten interviewed Thinkydoers host Sara about her journey into OKRs; today, we flipped the script for Sara to interview Sten about his fascinating journey starting in software development after uni, into product engineering in a mid-size company (that became a large company during his tenure), and then the transition into the CEO and founder seat with his latest venture, Tability.
For complete show notes and transcript, visit http://saralobkovich.com/thinkydoers-pod.
Episode Highlights:
Sten’s journey from software development in France to becoming a CEO in Australia.
Role of OKRs in shaping Sten’s approach to product management and leadership.
Some of the differences between the role of product leadership in large and smalller or start-up companies.
Importance of stakeholder management and involving others in decision-making.
Creation and mission of Tability, inspired by practical experience with OKRs.
Emphasis on creativity in software development and product engineering.
Learning to involve stakeholders and build collective alignment and collaboration.
Sten’s advice on focusing on people and conversations over perfection.
Common Questions:
What is the difference between working in product at a smaller company and being in product at a larger company? In smaller companies, you have more direct user interaction and creativity, while larger companies require more stakeholder management and strategic alignment.
What are OKRs and how did they influence Sten’s work? OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a goal-setting framework that helped Sten and his teams stay focused and aligned.
What led Sten to start Tability? His practical experience with OKRs and the desire to create a product that helps teams achieve their goals more effectively.
Notable Quotes from Sten Pittet:
“When a company is bigger, for you to change direction, it’s like it’s a big ship. And so if we decide to turn left, you’re moving a lot of people out of what they’re doing.”
“If you try to convince a group of people, the first thing you need to do is not tell them why you think you’re right, but ask them what they think is going to go wrong.”
“I think what’s good about the world is that you have like really different types of people.”
“Don’t try to be perfect. One mistake that I see people doing—trying to have a perfect cascading, perfect set of forecasts, perfect everything.”
“For me, OKRs and our platform, the way we see ourselves is we want to enable the right conversations.”
Sten’s Links and Resources
Sara's Links and Resources
The No-BS OKRs Workbook, currently available as a PDF download from https://findrc.co/pdfworkbook (USD) or https://findrc.co/pdfwkbkAUD (AUD)
Join the Launch Squad for Sara's Upcoming Books: You Are A Strategist and the No-BS OKRs Workbook
Download: No-BS OKRs In A Box one sheet
Virtual OKR Consult: Start your personalized virtual OKR consult
Other Free No-BS OKRs Resources: Access all free resources
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Episode 24: Product Engineer to CEO: Sten Pittet, A Thinkydoers Career Profile
© Sara Lobkovich, Red Currant Collective LLC (2024). All Rights Reserved.
[00:00:00] Sara: Welcome to the Thinkydoers podcast. Thinkydoers are those of us drawn to deep work, where thinking is working. But we don't stop there. We're compelled to move the work from insight to idea, through the messy middle, to find courage and confidence to put our thoughts into action. I'm Sara Lobkovich, and I'm a Thinkydoer. I'm here to help others find more satisfaction, less frustration, less friction, and more flow in our work. My mission is to help changemakers like you transform our workplaces and world. So let's get started.
[00:00:41] Sara: This is part two of my conversation with Sten from Tability. And if you haven't listened to part one, you can go back in part one. Sten actually interviews me and we had a really fun conversation. The reason I wanted to do the second part of the episode with Sten is the [00:01:00] first time we met, what Sten led with was, "I'm a product person," and so OKRs were something that I worked with as a product person. So, while I don't usually talk about platforms, we're going to talk about Sten's career in product and the overlap with that with OKRs.
[00:01:20] Sara: So now I want to turn the tables and ask you a bit about your career and how you got where you are.
So I started in software development, and I was in France. I went straight out of uni into a coding job, and I loved it. I love software, I love building things. I find it to be a really creative activity. it's like writing a book, except that at the end, you press a button, and your book becomes something you can play with. The syntax punctuation—I can talk about that for hours. But so, I did that for a while, and then that was in 2009-2010, and at the time in France, it was not the best place to work in startups. I [00:02:00] love France. It's a lovely country, but we have a culture that is, you know, we don't like to try new things, and so it makes it hard. Startups are all about new ideas; you want to find all your adopters. That's not the French market. And so I decided to try something else, and I went as far as I could from France and ended up in Australia. One thing I realized by the end of my time in France—I became a CTO in a small startup—but I also learned that what I liked was more like a product engineer. What attracted me in building software was to think about a problem that someone was having, see that as a puzzle, and try to understand how do we put all the pieces together in such a way that it solves that person's problem. So when I look for a job, I found this company called Atlassian, and they had like product manager, position open. I did not know at all what a product manager was, but when I was reading it, I was like, "I think I can do this." And I applied and got into a company in 2011. We had 450 people at the time, and by [00:03:00] the time I left six years later, the company had 2,500 people. So this was an amazing experience because I saw what fast-growing companies were. Like It was already the biggest company I've been part of. I was in smaller structure before, but at one point, you had a hundred people joining on a monthly basis. So I got into Atlassian. being a product manager for a company that has hundreds of people is very different from being a product manager in a company that has thousands of people. And that was less for me. I was more like yearning to find again that journey of what's a small problem that someone or many people are having and how can you build around this. But it was also very fitting for me because I got introduced to OKRs, I think in 2013 or 2012, when Atlassian was looking for a better way to guide all the teams. You combine all of this together, and then you get to what I'm doing today. I started in development, went in product development, product management, [00:04:00] then, got out. It was such a great company, but I was yearning to be solving, that problem, like doing my own startup. And there was a problem that was really clear that I experienced. And I think that's journey of all startups. You want to solve like a "scratch your own itch," and then it becomes something that you see other people having, and then it can spread out.
I love hearing you talk about development and engineering because I think people who haven't worked in development or engineering don't always realize how creative the field is. I want to ask about what is the difference between being in product at a smaller company and being in product at a larger company.
[00:04:44] Sten: When I started, a lot of my time was dedicated to talking to people, There's four types of people you want to talk to: people that love your product, people that hate your product, people that are not using your product and people that have stopped using [00:05:00] your product. My job was like, "Okay, let's talk to these people on a weekly basis." It's exciting. You go on calls, you learn how to do interviews, how to be silent when someone says something, and to not give pointers, etc. But when I left, a lot of my time was spent talking to my stakeholders. And there's no right or wrong. I think it's just two different types of jobs at the same level of responsibility. All of a sudden, you spend a lot more time talking to your C-suite, the GMs and stuff, because you need to get buy-ins. Because when a company is bigger, for you to change direction, it's like it's a big ship. And so if we decide to turn left, you're moving a lot of people out of what they're doing. So decisions take time, and you can't do the same as if you're in a company that has, like, 150, 100 to 200 people. For you to say, "Hey, we want [00:06:00] to try something," it doesn't take as much effort because there's fewer decision-makers—obvious. But also, everything that you do has a lesser impact. Generally speaking, you might not have as many customers. And so if something goes wrong, it's not going to impact as many customers, etc. So it's a lot of a difference. you talked about that creativity aspect. I really come from that. I've really thrived because the other day I was on the call and I heard on the call, the person say to me, I love, love Tability." And it's one of the most exhilarating sentiment to feel, like someone in a different part of the world is using the thing that the team has built, and they love it. And so all of a sudden, you lose that a bit more because you have to spend a lot more time explaining what the creativity that you're going to do is going to be about. So that, that aspect goes out. And so it becomes a lot more about something really important, which is explaining what you're trying to do, the bets you're making, and trying to convince [00:07:00] people. And you don't convince people by— I had to learn that the hard way. I used to do these things where I would work, work, work on a perfect presentation. It goes back to what we were saying in part one about trying to be perfect. I would work, work, work—it's hard on getting all my metrics for this. And I don't know why I expected that I would just like give my presentation, and everybody around the room would say, Let's go." Now, it's like I think back at it, this is so wrong because you're wasting your time. You're not making anyone participate, and it's a lot of hubris. I think that by the end of it, I was a lot better at it. I would just spend some time doing my research, but I would have a very short keynote that said, "This is what we're thinking about. Now, everyone around the room, tell us what you think can go wrong. what are your doubts?" And then I'll come back next week with like answers to everyone's questions. but this is important. I think for people to learn, if you try to convince a group of people, the first thing you need to do is not tell them why you think you're right, but ask them what they think is going to go wrong. And [00:08:00] then you can start to use that as a basis to um, yeah, to build conviction together.
[00:08:05] Sara: You just explained the default behavior a lot of us have: to do the research, pull together the presentation, try to get it right, try to answer all the questions, make it bulletproof, you know, and then go in and present it.
[00:08:18] Sten: No, it never works because it's like, it's basically telling to people, "I know everything. I don't need you. I just need you to stamp your approval on that thing." And no matter what you think, all these people that are above you are smart. If they're here and it was people in that room, your job is to try to extract their knowledge. And the better you do this, the more successful you will be. But then, it's like a very different job from early product management days, where most of the thing that you do is to try to find the right future customers and talk to them and do the same with them, right? As opposed to do that, internally you go and you're like, [00:09:00] "Okay, let me talk to 50 people that might be potentially like benefit from this," and do the same thing: "What's your problem? What do you think can go wrong too? What was not going so well? Okay, I'll come back out in a couple of weeks, I'll have something to show you." And then we do that again and again and again
[00:09:15] Sara: One of the principles I work with is that every person I meet is a future CEO.What I really appreciate about your story is you just described two ways that people can become CEOs. You can do the large company thing and you can learn how to CEO by doing that kind of stakeholder management and learning those practices in the large company. And you can also decide to go your own way and build it yourself. I just think it's really cool to hear from another Thinkydoer who navigated both of those career paths and found your way into the top spot.
[00:09:53] Sten: I think what's good about the world is that you have like really different types of people. My manager, like [00:10:00] when I left, I looked at what she was doing, and in my head, I was like, "I will never be able to do what you do, and you're excellent at doing this." And that's when you understand the breakage. And I was like, I know I can learn how to do this, but I didn't have a passion for it. My passion was like, I knew where it was and I could look at that person, I'm like, "You're amazing. You're excellent at this." There's no animosity. It's not like a thing where you say, "Hey, companies, this sucks; why am I meeting in stakeholders?" I'm like, no, the company needs that. At that size, that's what you need to do. Now am I the right person to do this? it's almost you can see your expiration date and you're like, "Oh, at some point, this is not going to be for me anymore." But also seeing that other thing that was really exciting. And it's like you have that, you know, it's like your curve of excitement goes down here, excitement goes up here, and then you get that point that says, "Okay, it's time for me to do something else."
[00:10:54] Sara: Speaking of doing something else, we've talked at a high level about how you got into OKRs. There [00:11:00] had to be something that got you into this space. So what was it that got you into the OKR space?
[00:11:06] Sten: it's very practical. I've never been, "Let me think about something I can make money, and then do this." It grows organically from a small thing to a bigger thing. I'd say 98 percent of our customers are using our platform for OKRs, but it wasn't built for that. The problem was one of the last things I did with my team before leaving was working on the CI/CD platform—to build code, etc., in the cloud. We convinced our management that, "Hey, this thing should not be a product, but it should be a feature in an existing product." I'm talking about Bitbucket Pipelines. If you used it, that thing that is now really beautifully embedded next to the code used to be like a separate thing that you had to purchase separately. So, telling a company that they should kill a product to launch it as a feature that you don't pay for it. Like, "No, this is a [00:12:00] product now." Well, let's remove it. That took some convincing. The process took six months. The first time you're like, "Hey, we've got to do this. Okay, just give me the stamp." Then they say, "Oh, we have some questions." But after six months, I was in a meeting with Scott Farquaad, one of the co-CEOs, and he said, "Okay." And you're like, "Oh, okay, we can do this." He said, "Wait, but, I want you to send me an email every week. I want that email to have three to five metrics that you're trying to hit, and you have three months. And every week, I want an email and you tell me where you're at." So, we had OKRs, but the way we used OKRs was really—for me, I like to think OKRs are two-parter for me. There's a North Star, which is what everybody understands. It's like, "Oh, you set some goals." But the way we were using it was, every month, we would look at them. My thing is that if you do that, you're going to forget them on day number six when is your first Saturday. You're gonna forget about it. It's not because you don't care; it's because doing the work that is going to [00:13:00] help you achieve those OKRs will take all your attention away, right? So every month, at the end of each month, I was rediscovering OKRs. I get an email from my manager that says, "Hey, we have OKR review meeting," and I'm like, "Oh, let me open up that spreadsheet or doc—it was in Confluence at the time." And then I was like, "Oh, I was meant to have this many interviews." Let me send a lot of interview requests one week before the end of a quarter, and then I would do that again and again. So that account for me, it was not about account. I was like, "Oh, okay, we have this North Star thing, but we use it almost as a post-market." It's every month, you're like, "Oh what happened?" But you've never used it as something that helps you make decisions. Now on the other hand, when I had to do that thing with Scott, my first reaction was, "Why does this billion-dollar CEO want me to send him an email?" We have 2000 people in the company. He's too busy; he's never going to read the email. But he did. I realized really quickly that was for me; that was an exercise for me. [00:14:00] Because if you're going to write an email to Scott, and it was a metric, I could not obfuscate lack of progress, right? If you said, "We're trying to move this from X to Y, now we're like at this number, and last week I said the same, and last week of the week before I said you would feel the pressure, and now you're using that every week to drive what you're doing. So, I would go and stand up meeting, and if I heard someone saying two-three days in a row, "I'm working on that same thing," i'll be like, "What is happening? Can I help you? Do we need to cut scope? Do we really need to do this?" And that was like the most effective way I've had— like I've never worked like that before, but it was extremely effective to keep us focused and have the right sense of urgency. So that was a success. We shipped on time, we got asked to talk about how we did it in different parts of the company. My first thought was like, "That should be a product." I did this weird thing, where basically, as soon as my wife and I realized we were [00:15:00] expecting a kid, I gave my resignation in advance. I was like, "Oh, I'm having a kid in nine months; I'm quitting." And so I had nine months. It was beautiful because I had a long time and stuff, but I knew this was the last thing I did. I knew it was going to be the last thing; I wanted it to be successful. And it was. But it was also out of that, I was like, "Oh, what am I going to do next?" And then I saw that thing, and I was like, "That was so good. That should be a product because I'm going to be gone, and the next person, they're not going to see—they're not going to have access to my emails." So all that process that happened with Scott—that's lost. And if Scott wants to do that with other people, that's also going to be hard. Could this become a product? So that's a story of how I got to this, and the name Tability comes from accountability. And that was what it was about. It's something that can match really well to OKRs, but it's more about that process of saying, week by week, you need to look back at your goals. You can't lose track of them; otherwise you're going to [00:16:00] forget. Sorry, I get excited about these things, but it was thanks for the question. To me, I come at it from real experience, like not, "Hey, I've seen a lot of people adopting OKRs; maybe they should have a platform for it." it's really more—how we enable teams to achieve their goals faster, to not lose track of that ruthless prioritization. It's like, how do you make sure that you don't work on things that are not important?
[00:16:20] Sara: When we first met, I wasn't even taking meetings with platforms. I don't actually remember what it was about what Nerida said that got the meeting with me because my standard answer was just no at that time. And we sat down for the meeting, and you crashed the meeting with us. What came through before I even saw the product was what you just described. It's the simple, elegant, beautiful solution to a real problem that people have. Every tool that gets used for OKRs has its pluses, and it's situations where it's designed for a specific environment. But what stood out to me and looking [00:17:00] at it is it's just a really elegant solution to a very real issue, and it's notcapitalizing on OKRs. It's just a tool that solves the problem in a really nice way.
[00:17:13] Sten: Thank you. All of this comes from my software development background. So, in the world of software development, especially in open source software, the way you could collaborate on code was by sending each other emails with, like, patches of code. It's "Hey, this is my change. Can you just incorporate it in the code base?" And it was a really complicated way to work together and to achieve things, to build things around code. And then came Git, was a technology that was a lot more flexible to basically, like, version the code. But what someone did that was really smart was to look at this and think, "I can use this to build a platform that will help people collaborate on code much better." Multiple people do that, right? But GitHub is the main [00:18:00] ones, and you have Bitbucket from Atlassian, and you have GitLab. The way I see it was platform. It's not that it's the Git platforms; it's the code collaboration platforms. They happen to use a technology that is Git underlying because that allows them to achieve that goal of making collaboration between developer much easier. Where I'm going with this is like, when I look at OKRs, for me, I see that the same way. I was like this, and this is why I asked you a question. It's like, why OKRs? Why not another goal-setting framework? What I like about OKRs is that it doesn't have a lot of moving parts, right? You have your Objectives, your Key Results. It's really challenging to set good goals, right? But to work with it, it's easy to incorporate it in a tool, right? Because I don't have to think about EOS or scaling up, right? It's like, those are great, very complete goal-setting frameworks, but there are a lot of components to it. Now for me, OKRs, I could be like, okay, that is our Git. So now, how do you build a platform around it that [00:19:00] will help teams work better together but with goals at the center? And so that's how I see it. And so it's really a product-like software approach to that problem. And, it's just like Git; Git wasn't perfect and it wasn't even the best, the easiest technology to use, right? There was arguably Mercurial; if you look into that, was a much easier commands, like simpler, more elegant. But Git won because the platform on top of it helped make everything much easier. And so that is how I see things and I fully support what you said. Before that, I would encourage people to use, start with spreadsheets before bringing another tool, because you're learning something new. But if you want to scale, for me, the way I was seeing it is we can empower teams with, like, tools can help you do things in a more scalable way. And so, the idea was to create something that would feel like using GitHub, using Figma, using a tool like this. What was the main date? It's like, can we build a platform that feels like this modern platform? So, leveraging technology in such a way that you can [00:20:00] do your job better—that's the ultimate goal. It's really a product-based approach to finding a solution to a problem. It wasn't, "Hey, OKRs is popular. Let's build something on top of it." It was never that. It was like, how do we help people achieve a same result? I've had experience with Scott. That was amazing. How do we make that a repeatable experience? And then all of this put together, and you land where we are.
[00:20:22] Sara: Yeah, it's funny, the word that I would use is warmth. That warmth comes through in the product; like, it feels different. Sometimes you can look at a product and tell where people come from. It just stood out to me right away that you guys came from product.
[00:20:35] Sten: No, thank you for that. Because that's the thing for me is I'm a really bad sales person, but, if you get me to talk about product and processes and stuff, I also have, like, strong conviction. It's almost like, as soon as I start to talk about it, I almost can't stop. But yeah, it's like, as someone that is building part of a team that is building a product, there's so many things that I still want to fix. And, but I find it exciting when you get on the [00:21:00] call and someone in Brazil or someone in in England tells you, like, "Hey, this is great. I've tried so many other things and this is the best thing." Really, that's the best thing you get as a team. You've built this thing with your own hands, and someone tells you this is really helping them. That's why we do this, for this sentiment and this feedback again and again. And if you do that, then the money comes, right
[00:21:21] Sara: As you were talking, I was thinking about it. It's the same thing for me. part of why I keep doing this is the success stories are so compelling —the wins that I get to see other people have because of working with OKRs, or because of shifting how they approach their strategy. I get to watch people do incredible things all day, and then have them say, "I never would have been able to do this, I never would have thought to try that," or, "We couldn't have done this without the alignment," or "We found this really big problem because of the alignment." The success [00:22:00] stories that clients and users have, I think, are part of what keeps me in the field, 'cause it's just so cool to see people have those light bulbs go off and see folks learn all the time.
[00:22:11] Sten: I fully agree.
[00:22:12] Sara: Sten, I have kept, you're a CEO, and I always end on time with CEOs, and I've kept you past our time, so in wrapping up, is there anything that you'd like to share with the Thinkydoers audience before I let you go?
Don't try to be perfect. One mistake that I see people doing—trying to have a perfect cascading, perfect set of forecasts, perfect everything. And if you're listening to this, I think the best thing can do is sometimes it's like, rely on the—it's weird to say that as someone building a tool—but rely on the people a lot more because a lot of the answers to your questions are going to be found in the conversations you have. I think for me, OKRs and our platform, the way we see ourselves is we want to enable the right [00:23:00] conversations. And so it's far better to do, like, a small workshop but then to have frequent conversation than to try to do a four-week-long goal-setting process and then to never talk about those things anymore. That's my message: if you're listening to this, whatever you're using, our tool, anything like a spreadsheet, a doc, a notepaper, get that weekly conversation with your team, but it's going to solve at least 50 percent of our problems, no matter how you do it, because at the end of the day, it's all about the people we're working with until we're all replaced by AI. But that's, my message. It's all about the people. I love coding. I can spend a lot of time with the screen, but, yeah. People is what matters. That's such a good point to end on. Sten, thank you so much. This has been so much fun and I just really appreciate you taking the time and getting up early and, thank you for sharing your perspective with the Thinkydoers.
No, thank you. So friends, that's it for this two parter. I can't [00:24:00] thank Sten enough for joining me. This was so much fun, and Nerida for helping make this happen. If you're with a platform and you're wondering how to connect with me, please reach out via email at hello@redcurrantco.com. One of the projects on my to-do list by client request is to make an OKR platform resource guide. So it's a great time to connect with me. More information and all of the links from today's episode are in the show notes and a full transcript is available at findrc.co/pod.
[00:31:24] Sara: Thank you for joining and listening. I really can't wait to hear from you about what in this episode resonated, so I would love to hear your feedback. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter at findrc.co/newsletter, so you can hear about everything happening all at once before the general public.
If there's anything I said today that you have questions about, you can find
me at Sara Lobkovich pretty much everywhere. I'm pretty sure I'm the only one. You're always invited to contact me by email. The easiest one to [00:32:00] spell is sara, S A R A at Thinkydoers.com. If you have other Thinkydoers in your work world, please pass this episode along. We really appreciate your referrals, your mentions, your shares, and your reviews.
Thank you for tuning in today. And I look forward to hearing the questions this prompts for you.
