Please note : This transcript is automatically generated and provided for your convenience.

Mike: [00:00:00] A scalable organization needs to look like this and it's missing X, Y, as you go into this kind of scale up phase, which I kind of where I found a kind of a sweet spot things, I think things need to change. You need to kind of. Break it apart, provide autonomy. which, uh, you can't, which, uh, you can't, the mission, what's the vision, but also what's, what's the plan to get there,

Rob: welcome to Superpowered, the unique stories of modern leaders.

My name is Rob D. Willis. I'm a storytelling consultant and speaker. And today I'm talking to Mike Jones, the CTO at Love Holidays. Mike is an expert in scaling technical teams. Having done it Not just once, but twice to amazing heights. And what I love about Mike is his holistic approach to leadership. So in this episode, you're going to get an inside look at his frameworks for making sure that as you grow, things don't fall apart.

It's going to be packed with value for anyone who's navigating rapid growth and trying to align their team whilst also managing themselves throughout the process. If you haven't done so already, Please make sure to subscribe [00:01:00] wherever you listen to podcasts. We've got some really good people coming up and you don't want to miss those conversations.

Without further ado, let's get into it. Please enjoy this conversation with Mike Jones.

Rob: Hi, Mike. Welcome to the show.

Mike: Hey Rob, it's great to be here.

Rob: Great to have you here, man. Now, you are currently CTO at Love Holidays. And you told me that one in 17 people in the UK go on holiday with you.

That's right. Yeah.

Mike: That's right. We sold enough holidays

for one in 17 people in the UK to go on holiday with us last year.

Rob: had a bit of fun with this. So I, I worked out that every day you send roughly the population of Bath on holiday. And in a year you could populate a city the size of Birmingham.

Mike: Wow. And if every, if all of your guests traveled on the same day, you would need 80 Heathrow airports.

That's really cool. There are better numbers than I came up with. That's really cool.

Rob: It's really big. It's really exciting. But for listeners who don't know you, Mike, just [00:02:00] introduce yourself. Tell us a bit about what you do.

Mike: So yeah, as you said, I'm currently CTO of Love Holidays. I've been there for five and a half years. Uh, but before that, I suppose, I'm a technologies, a technologist at heart. Uh, I love building things. I like, um, especially with, uh, with engineering in mind, I suppose for the last, I've been doing that for the last 20 odd years, um, 15 years as a, as a CTO, um, before like love holidays, I worked at a company called you switch, which was a price comparison website in the UK, um, which we bought for 5 million pounds and scaled, sold three times the last time as part of ZPG for 2 billion. So, uh, yeah, it's a bit of background for me.

Rob: You have some experience in scaling tech companies successfully, for sure. And I'm just wondering, could you give us very broad high level, what do you think are like the fundamental elements to successfully scale a company effectively. Mm hmm.

Mike: It's a very difficult question to answer off the bat, I suppose. It's been what I've been trying to kind of figure out for the last, well, 15, 20 years, if I'm honest. Um, I think there's three main things I see that are really important when you're, you're scaling a technology business.

It's one, you have to really understand how the. The structure of the organization affects the technology teams and the, your [00:03:00] ability to do technology. Well, um, that's, that's, that's really key for me. Another thing is if you want to be really kind of exceptional at technology, you have to make sure that the technology teams are able to speak in business outcomes, not in technology terms.

We have a tendency to just describe how smart we are, which kind of distracts from the impact that we're trying to help. Uh, and the, the third real kind of big area, I think it's, it's really important if you're, you're a business person, When you're scaling in particular is allowing people to leave the footprint.

So again, it was Something that my mentor told me was, um, you really want people who, um, who enjoyed like similar to myself, enjoy building things to be able to say, look back and say, that's, that's the thing I did. And there's a certain mentality that they, that they have. Uh, you want to surround yourself with those, those people, but create a culture and an environment that, uh,

kind of encourages that.

So yeah, if there was like three core things, I think it'd be those.

Rob: Those sound like three really important pillars. And I'm wondering, which one of those do you think took the longest to learn?

Mike: The longest to learn, I think it was like personally for me, it was the, um, the speaking in like business outcomes, not necessarily the, uh, the other two. I think. I've always wanted to build things that just came quite naturally. Um, the kind of the, the, I suppose the, the structure of the organization, the technology piece that came a little bit soon, but the, the speaking outcomes is the, is the thing that I've been like working on for the

longest period of [00:04:00] time.

I also have this story. I was, um, I remember we just got sold, um, my use, which had just got sold to ZPG. Um, and I was used in the, in the kind of. days, the original days, we were kind of very tech savvy. Uh, and I was able to just talk about the technology and people would understand that. Let me do it. And in a larger organization, I, uh, PLC, it was quite different.

And I, I remember quite vividly. I was talking to the CFO one day, um, we, it was, it was a strange, uh, a strange office for her and it was all painted black. Uh, and I remember that because my. My face was so red as my arms were kind of waving around as I was trying to explain to him, um, like why this idea that I had was so, like, so amazing and so cool.

Uh, and he just wasn't listening. And I got to the idea, like he was even then starting talking about that, whether developers were fungible or not. And I, I couldn't really understand what was going on, but it was only when I stopped talking about the technology and then started to talk about the impact I was trying to have, that he started to kind of listen to me, uh, and to start really, um, you know, Uh, we started to kind of progress and move forward.

That was, that was really cool. So we agreed with him, like, uh, if I started talking about the money, he would stop talking to me about the technology. And so that's how we kind of agreed a

way forward. And so from the kind of that point, I've just been really, uh, working kind of really hard to make sure everything that I'm doing is like translated into the business impact I'm trying to have.

Rob: Yeah. And I guess that [00:05:00] is such a key thing, isn't it, when you're scaling a company, because those early startups will be a few developers. who know how to speak the tech stuff to each other. I'm thinking of like the early, the early series of Silicon Valley when they're still really small, living in Erlich Buchmann's accelerator.

But then when they get big, they've got to almost learn to speak a different, different language.

Do you think, go on,

sorry.

Mike: I suppose we've got, um, the way I've seen is we've got like phases of the business and they kind of. The characteristics of those businesses through each of those phases. So, um, in the kind of examples of like, like you switch, , love holidays and some of the other businesses we acquired along the way, the, the kind of characteristics of like the startup, you know, it's a small kind of generalist team that are working on this, like one platform together.

Um, and it's, uh, they're really focused on finding the business model in the type of like industry that I often like working. So they're not really thinking too far ahead. They're just like, uh, this, this often a very, um, like strong willed founder that's kind of command and control, like dragging everybody along.

Um, but as you go into this kind of scale up phase, which I kind of where I found a kind of a sweet spot things, I think things need to change. You need to kind of. Break it apart, provide autonomy. Uh, you need to bring in specialist skills. You need to kind of like, like change things around. And it's not that the, you know, [00:06:00] looking back back, it's something that was wrong as a startup.

It was like perfect for like finding the business model and getting a business off the ground. But for scaling a business, you just need a very different approach and a, and a, a very, very different way of working.

Rob: Interesting. So you found yourself, you started, I guess, in smaller companies, but then you found your sweet spot in scale ups.

what what made you feel okay, this is the place for me, this particular phase of a company is where I really shine.

Mike: That's, I suppose, I just kind of not fell into it, but, um, my, uh, early career, I was a, uh, technology consultant. So I helped out various different companies. I ended up, uh, a really amazing company called ThoughtWorks, uh, which is where I like, I learned like so many things about like agile, about, uh, extreme programming, those sorts of things.

But the what was great about it was the focus on technology. But I think, as I said, I like to build things and I want to have an impact. So being a consultant, you just kind of bounce from one project to the next. And I always wanted, I

always had like 100 ideas about what I could do next on this project.

But I was on to the next thing, just going back to enable team. So I kind of, um, there was like the worst, the last project was almost probably the worst. It was very much body shopping. I'm [00:07:00] like, I've had enough of this. And my friend was going to, uh, work at a startup. Uh, and I just asked him if I could follow.

So he, he got me an interview, uh, ended up working there and it was, that was kind of, you know, Quite transformational. Um, like the first 12 months, um, uh, working at this new place, which was called traffic broker, um, we had, we, we created nine failed startup ideas in those 12 months, which was, which was amazing.

It was, uh, it was a really, but I learned a lot. Um, I learned so much about the connection of technology and business and what, what made sense, what didn't, where you should invest your time. Um, but even though there's kind of a lot of those kinds of failures we're going through, there was, Quite a few that were really successful.

Um, one was a traffic arbitrage thing, which would take a long time to describe it, very boring, but, uh, it was making a lot of money, but it wasn't worth anything.

Um, but it was, we were doing like, like huge volumes of data before that was a thing we were installing, like Hadoop underneath people's computers in the office, we were like, it was like really, really interesting time.

Um, and we made like quite a bit of money. And with that, we bought you Switch, which was the kind of price comparison website.

So we, we picked that up for 5 million pounds. And, um, the, the owner of the, uh, the kind of startup that I started working at asked me to be CTO and he kind of put me in there and, and [00:08:00] basically because of the background that I had in, um, like, uh, consultancy and kind of tech transformations in the kind of big data space in like the kind of, uh, agility was just like, can you go and solve with this problem?

Um,

and that's kind of how I got started in taking. Uh, businesses that are like, cause you switch, it was amazing business. Great, uh, great idea. Um, like great teams in there. Um, it just kind of lost its way from a technology perspective and he just like go and fix it. So we spent the next two years ripping out the technology, ripping out uh, the processes, installing new people and scaling that for 10 years.

And like years.

And we did some like amazing things over that time, like learned a lot. Uh, , uh, went through kind of private equity a few times, ended up being part of PLC. So like lots and lots of different learnings.

Rob: So tell me, you said mentioned that there were some things wrong with the tech without getting too technical. What roughly were the problems and how did you frame that in terms of business outcomes to actually make sure that changes happened?

Mike: It was, it's different in each of the kind of examples that I gave. So with, um, with [00:09:00] uwi, it was, it was, it was acquired, um, it was so, it was privately owned. Um, and because of the kind of confidence and the, um, that I had built over time with the CEO of that business, he just basically said to, to me and my friend Paul, just like, literally just go and fix it.

Like, let us know what you're doing, ,.

But that was a, it was quite a unique time just because they make a high level of trust. It was kind of different, um, coming into the holidays though, which is, which was, uh, the original founders were there at the beginning.

Uh, Uh, so that was a. Like quite a different process of basically going from, uh, it was it was a business that was the actually the fastest growing business in the UK. That was going great guns. It was like scaling really, really, really, really fast. I was brought in to help take the technology to the next level. if the reason why I was excited about it was the.

The technology, the processes, the things behind it, like weren't that great. And all I could see is just the potential that you could, if I, if you could get this right, like, like, like we did at this other business, this it's going to go, it's going to fly even more than it already is.

Rob: hmm. um, the, the way that I kind of approached that was to kind of like really.

Mike: Build a really good relationship with the CEO. So make sure I'm talking to him every day, get his ideas about how he wants to work, about how the things that he sees, um, and in that trying to build an idea [00:10:00] of, um, like what he's doing. So I can start like showing how my approach for technology can, can fit into that.

Rob: Yeah.

Mike: of a way of, I think about that around like the, the people, the platform and the process to be able to share with him that kind of information. But it was, so the first real step was just like getting what, uh, what he was wanting, what he was trying to do, then build

a, uh, to show him if you get these technology things, right, uh, I can accelerate your plan, uh, in that way.

And if you can get that level of agreement, then I can go and start executing on the next stage. And that was the, first kind of 90 days of, of love holidays was building that up.

Rob: Cool. I'm really want to go back into that first 90 days a little bit later. But it's so interesting. And I I've heard this a lot on the show, talking to people about how important it is to connect with your Does it make sense? Horizontal team.

So when you're talking to the other executives, they are really your team.

You need to build the trust with them. Avoiding that mentality of the vertical team. I'm fighting for tech against the others. Now, I just want Mm

Mike: that's really important to me Just generally though, I think if you The way that we, I talked about like how you One of the important things about how you [00:11:00] structure teams And for me, it's uh Arranging functionally never really works You have to have cross functional teams And the way that we set up now is cross functional teams based around long lived problems.

And so you then have, um, uh, a part of the organization that this team owns and that, and every skill that you need to kind of manage that you, you, you give them. So whether that's analysts, uh, product people like engineers, designers, like user researchers, you build teams with those things that can somewhat, uh, somewhat work independently.

I see the same things as like the, the exec team or the, the team that's like running the business. You are, your responsibility is like, so our responsibility is love holidays. We're solving that problem together. And that's, that's, that's our, uh, yeah, our team, our problem, the thing that we're, we're working on.

And I spend a lot of time with them thinking about that.

Rob: Yeah, that makes total sense because you've got this cross functional structure and for that everyone needs to be able to speak in business outcomes.

You know, so the tech people need to be able to speak to someone who's in marketing or product or whatever, explain what's wrong with the tech and vice versa as well. Um, but then there's also that last bit about leaving a footprint. Now the thing is, I [00:12:00] guess you came into this world as a CTO. You can see the footprint quite easily. How do you make sure that an individual contributor is also able to see the footprint that they're leaving in the company?

Mike: It's, it's a really good and important question, I think. Um, part of the. My answer would be you need, if you're breaking these teams through the around problems, uh, around business problems, the, one of the important things is to see the kind of make sure you've got KPIs because the KPIs show you the, uh, the impact that you're having.

And that's really important because you get learning. So if you

don't, if you're just doing things and you don't see the actual impact of that, you don't know whether it's, you know, you don't know whether it's working or not, and it's

hard to get better at the thing that you're doing unless you get that feedback.

Rob: KPIs are really good and really important, but they're also not always that simple to pick a KPI, because there are some metrics that invoke the wrong kind of behaviors. So I was talking to a dude who, uh, he was work, he works with sales teams basically and he said that there was one team a long time ago and one of their key metrics was call times.

They needed to have a certain amount of call times [00:13:00] and it was tracked automatically and this just encouraged people to call their own mobile phones. to get the numbers up all the time. And also, in sales, again, you see it all the time. People closing deals, making false promises to clients, which then impact negatively on customer attention, because they've been promised something that they couldn't deliver on. How do you pick your KPIs for people? How do you make sure that they're getting the right sort of behaviors for people?

Mike: Well, I think an assumption about that would probably be that they are kind of incentivized financially for those KPIs, right? So I

can give you, uh, If you, if you pay a person based on the, like those KPIs, then they'll go and they'll, they'll try and gain those, those things

Rob: Yeah.

Mike: have the system more from a, um, like it's an ownership, it's a learning perspective, uh, it's, it's, it's quite a different mentality when you're trying to, um, like, this is your problem.

We would like you to own it. We would like you to make it better over the, uh, uh, the medium to long term. This is how we want you to kind of understand like your impact. And it's not that we're going to like, uh, You'll only get your bonus if X, Y, and Z happens, we're incentivizing people at the very kind of the, the top level, which is the, in the, the, the, financial kind of performance of the holidays, not of the [00:14:00] KPIs.

So it's a, it's a mechanism to kind of learn from,

Rob: Mm

Mike: and the ways that we kind of think about those KPIs, actually, it's not, it's not just a single set of KPIs. I think the ones I was like really talking about with the kind of system levels, which is you can think about in terms of. Input output and quality metrics, but it's just a way of thinking about because if you break apart business into it's Uh, into problems, uh, each of those, like take a, take some information from somewhere else.

They have to apply some, uh, like their systems to that. And then they, they have an output. If you understand that you can start like wrapping the KPIs around it and you can start measuring people's impact, but that's only one, one element of the thing that we, we care about the teams. We care. We also care about.

The, um, how are they delivering enough to kind of adapt those systems to our strategy? And we have a metrics around that. Another sort of, uh, measure is the way that we think about it is, are you, is your, are your systems performing functionally well do you have a good set of technology metrics?

So we use kind of the Dora metrics, which is just a way of, uh, like measuring the impact of your kind of engineering team. So, uh, and I think a good example, there'll be like frequency of deployments, just like, are you able to, is it. Is it good enough in a, in a, in a functional way? And we also measure [00:15:00] the, um, the way that the team feels about that as well.

So we have a team health check. So we've got like a whole set, a whole set of KPIs that we, we help those teams. So it's not necessarily a single KPI that we'll get rewarded on. It's a. A set of things that you can learn about the uh, the impact of the work that you're doing

Rob: Yeah. Again, it's, it's coming back to that sort of cross functional thing. It's stopping that one dimensional view of your work, making it much more. How can I put it inclusive of everything that needs to happen for a business to work? Ah, it's fascinating. Uh, Just to completely change course in the conversation now, I just wanted to spend a couple of minutes because we've spoken a little bit about this, about the challenges mentally on working in that kind of environment.

You know, even with great leadership, even with KPIs that are sensitively chosen and not invoking the wrong behaviors, it gets really, really stressful. challenging to be able to exist in that environment for a long period of [00:16:00] time. So I'd love it if you could just break down a couple of the things that you found really helpful in being able to turn up and give your best every day in a scaling company like that.

Mike: Yeah, I mean firstly I massively agree Uh, there's a lot of there Is a lot of stress. There's a lot of um pressure on especially in the early days of Uh abuse which if when you feel like it's your responsibility You take a lot away and you're taking a lot of responsibility. You feel so much pressure. Um, so the, I think, especially when I was a little bit, uh, a bit younger as well, uh, I probably didn't have the same level of self awareness that I had.

Um, well, I hope I have at the moment, uh, around like how my behavior was impacting people. Um, so, but one of the things I was able to kind of do to get through that was just, uh, exercise. Uh, and that's been, been a really kind of core part of how I've, uh, dealt with stress, um, and. At uSwitch, I did a lot of weightlifting.

So, um, uh, I remember just being at the gym. Um, I think my highest ever squat was 190 kilograms. And just the, just the weight of that on your back, or even when you're just about to pick it up. The nothing else exists in that moment. It's, uh, it's, it's quite mindful. So you, uh, it just clears your mind. And I did that every, every day before I went to work, I did a lot of exercise [00:17:00] and, uh, that, that really helped.

Uh, and I've kind of developed those patterns over time. I've. I do a lot more kind of other exercises like that. I don't do so much weightlifting. It's got my own. Uh, I practice jujitsu, which is another very mindful technique. Um, and I also do a lot of kind of, uh, like breath work now as well.

Rob: any particular, with Breathwork, any particular exercises that you found to be particularly helpful.

Mike: Yeah, I think the, um, one of the ones I kind of keep coming back to, which is quite easy is just box breathing. So that,

uh, in for five, hold for five, out for five, hold for five. And that kind of, um, like focusing on your breath and those things. It's like, It's really kind of calms me down, like, like I gave a presentation in front of like 400 people recently, um, I just sat there just feeling a little bit nervous.

So, you know, just use that to kind of ground myself, center myself,

uh, it was like those sorts of techniques, which, uh, you can't, you can't control the mind with the mind. You have to control it with the body. So, you know,

you change how like you change yourself just through the kind of simple methods like that.

And it really is quite effective. And, um,

Rob: Yeah. How long do you generally do box breathing for? Like, are we talking a minute? Are we talking five minutes?

Mike: just a few minutes usually, and I can, I can just kind of slip into it [00:18:00] now. So

we also do at the end of jiu jitsu. So when we're just to kind of instead of stretching, recovering, we'll. lie down, we'll do those sorts of things. Um, different types of breathing there as well. And it's

very applicable in different situations just to kind of like slow the body down, like take it out of that kind of response that you've had, especially, you know, you've been fighting for half an hour.

Uh, you can apply the same sort of thing to a very stressful situation when you're just about to speak.

Rob: it's extraordinary. I've Several people on this show have mentioned the importance of breathing and you'd think Isn't that meant to be the most obvious thing to do to be able to breathe for heaven's sake but It's amazing how our breath changes when we're anxious, when we're stressed.

Even when we're using a computer, apparently there's computer apnea.

You sometimes forget to breathe whilst using a computer. No joke, man. And it really affects your, your health. So get up, get moving, get breathing. Just to move on to [00:19:00] more kind of practical framework for people. You mentioned your three pillars. people, platform, and process. I'd just love to spend a few minutes thinking about, let's say there's another CTO, it's their first role as a CTO, and they're in a company, they've got the Series B, so they're about to embark on that scaling journey. How would you suggest that they go about that? What would be the first 90 days? Very high level, of course.

Mike: Uh, yeah. Well, my My first 90 days, but, um, I kind of started to allude to it previously, like spend a lot of time with the CEO, like, um, the mission, what's the vision, but also what's, what's the plan to get there, how, how is he thinking about like, um, what are the big things in his head about how he wants to work?

Get a, um, a cadence of working together with the kind of CEO and your wider team, just making sure you're getting as much information as possible. Uh, so once you've got that kind of cadence in place, I, I kind of, well, I then I use those kind of three P's, which is that, yeah, people platform process, I'll agree with the, um, CEO.

Like this is how I view technology. So, you know, for people, it [00:20:00] could be. I'm going to look at the kind of competency, the structure, the culture, like these are the things that I think are really important. Uh, but I do that for each of each of those areas to kind of get agreement and say that this is a good way of like thinking about the technology team.

Uh, and then what I, what I've done is I spend. You know, a month or so I, I went in love holidays. I just went, uh, paired with everybody in the organization, just sat down, uh, kind of in the back of my head, I had that kind of model and I was trying to understand through each of those dimensions, like how things were working, um, like from a platform perspective, like, could they, did they have the confidence to make the changes?

Uh, I find if it, is it the efficiency behind, is it cost effective? Do they have the right metrics to be able to understand the, and the performance, like all those things are. I attend the showcases, the planning, um, like what kind of, how do they coordinate these things? And I'm building out like a picture in my head and I'll, I'll come back and say.

Um, like here's, here's what my, like, here's what I've discovered, right? This, this is, this is where I think we are as an organization. These are the things that I think are sort of missing or that we need. Give me your feedback. How do you feel about this? Like, um, and this is how I think I want to take it.

And so we work kind of collaboratively on building that kind of levels of agreement. It's like, then it's, okay, here's what my plan is.

Here's my [00:21:00] plan, which I'm going to take from that. And as a consequence, I'm This is the thing that I need. Um, it'd be like those sort of steps.

Rob: Yeah. Okay. So I'm seeing it's explore, present, refine, execute, roughly.

And for the explore phase, have you got any go to questions to really understand what's going on?

Mike: Um, go to the question. It was like, I think as I said, it's more like understanding how the teams work. It's not a necessary question. I like to see like hands on like what's happening. So,

um, nothing's kind of as as good as, as Sitting next to somebody, like talking to them about like what they're doing, how are they going to do this piece of work?

Like what, what, what's the, um, what struggles are they having? How, like, um, is it easy? Is it hard? You can just see that it's better to just like work with them rather than that kind of interview. We do have questions around like the team health though, just like kind of generally, um, we kind of stole that from Spotify, which is things like, do you feel like you have a high level autonomy?

Are you having fun? How much collaboration? So we, we do kind of. One of the first things I do is send out a kind of a survey to just check where the team are from a like self reported perspective. [00:22:00] But just to kind of discover it, I just feel like sitting with people being part of their processes and their kind of like routines every day is you get a much better idea than just,

Rob: There are some questions from Spotify that they use there, which you found helpful as well. Yeah.

Mike: yeah, they, it's a, the Spotify team health check. So it's just, I think it's like 12 or 13 questions, which are just, uh, you rate yourself out of, I think like one to five, um, on a serious dimensions about, um, like what makes a good team. And so we, it's a, that's a survey that we run. Every quarter at Love Holidays and we have them for the last five and a half years just to track how the teams are feeling, uh, about like the, the changes that we're making as we're scaling the organization to ensure that we're, we're maintaining that kind of the culture and the enjoyable place to work.

Rob: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds really important. And in terms of, again, of course, from a technical point of view, as a CTO, what are some of the red flags that you're looking out for? Things that will show you, okay, there may be some problems, or there will be some problems when we actually start scaling.

Mike: I'm just, there's a, I think I [00:23:00] could take an example of love holidays. Um, , the obvious examples were, uh, it was like the first year that I'd, I'd been there. Um, I was kind of worried about the, the, the, the platform itself. This is one of the things I've talked about with the, the CEO. Um, the, there wasn't that kind of high degree of confidence in changing.

It was quite risky to make changes. Uh, and the lack of observability of the, of the platform meant, um, we didn't really know what was happening if he was going to fall over. So then coming into the kind of first year I was there, um, it was like a really kind of wet miserable December. Uh, and what happens in travel is on boxing day, everybody starts looking at, um, uh, holidays and the traffic grows massively from that point.

And then every day from boxing day, our website fell over about between eight 30 to 10 o'clock at night. And it, it didn't take that much to kind of figure out that something was wrong. Um, but that's, So whilst I had the kind of indication of the issues because of the kind of things I'd highlighted of the, we couldn't see what was happening.

The confidence wasn't there. Um, it was only a kind of played out just when the business was really kind of scaling massively. And that, and so we were up every night for about a month. Just trying

to keep the [00:24:00] website up and then the next day making sure it didn't fall over again. Um, So it was that was quite exciting time

Rob: So a lot of a lot of breathwork needed at that point, I imagine. And so when you get to that stage of presenting and refining your plan, one of the challenges I guess is being able to get a really honest feedback from the team who are underneath you? I guess horizontally, it's not as much of a challenge, people will stand up to you. But how do you make sure that you're going to get honest feedback from your team?

Mike: Um, well, I think the the surveys that we run in one way are kind of Anonymous, so we get that that kind of information through there um, I think it's there also the kind of the Authenticity that you have as a leader if you're kind of like working alongside people in those early days Like you kind of you build a really kind of Good degree of, uh, like respect, uh, things in that way.

But to be honest, like as I sort of also answer it from a slightly different perspective, it's, it's one of my, my job is to know what works for [00:25:00] technology teams and like to build that kind of environment. And I'm looking for the things that I know, uh, are important. to set up in that kind of organization.

So I'm looking for, I'm getting that kind of like the feedback about what specifically they're, they're, they're struggling with, but I'm putting into this bigger picture that I have in my head of like a, A scalable organization needs to look like this and it's missing X, Y, and Z. And I need to go out to go and do those things.

So the feedback is important, but it's just into a, uh, cause I'm there, like my responsibility with the kind of, that kind of horizontal team is to kind of scale this business. I have to have an opinion about how that should scale. And I'm looking to set that up and be able to kind of, uh, like to be able to push that out.

That, that people's feedback is super, super important about how it's influencing their day to day or those sorts of things. Bye. I have to have a, a job and deliver something and it's, and it's that,

Rob: Yeah, and that is the responsibility that you have to shoulder as

well, like, it doesn't matter. You say, Oh, you gave me the feedback that that's not good. You've got to say like, this is my decision. We've got to push through. Awesome. I think that's gonna help people a lot hearing about those [00:26:00] pillars, that process.

For sure. And it's got a few kind of very rapid fire questions. So you can literally just answer with one word if you want. These are short little tips for people. Start simple. Favorite business book.

Mike: favorite business book. Uh, honestly, my favorite book that I keep coming back to is, uh, weirdly Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. I've learned a lot about more than, uh, about technology than, than the thing I've, I've read, uh, a whole host of business books. I think the. After that, my other business book would be a good strategy, bad strategy.

Rob: Okay. Tell me, uh, 'cause I was gonna ask you about a non-business book that taught you a lot

Mike: Okay.

Rob: but you guys came out with it, that zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.

Just what is that about? That sounds great.

Mm-hmm

Mike: Uh, well, Uh, well, I think it's a, it's a, it's probably personally a really, um, awesome book. It just made me really like rethink about. A lot of things. What are the kind of core concepts that I took from it? Um, was this, this idea when you, uh, like schools teach you to pass exams, they don't ask you to like, uh, they don't encourage you to kind of follow your passions.

So one of the parts of the book

was this idea that, um, A guy [00:27:00] who went to, went to university, um, like just kind of dropped out, became a mechanic, but when he became a mechanic, he got really interested in like engineering and he went back to university and he started asking very different questions. And when you start answering different questions, uh, your, the things that you start getting interested in, they're all kind of associated with around those kind of, uh, around that kind of original idea.

And it resonated with me from a. Um, like my journey is like from an engineering perspective, which was, I was really interested in programming,

uh, and I was really interested in building things. So then I had to learn about like agile. I'm going to learn about agile. It's about like those kind of processes.

And then I learned about like managing people and I learned about psychology and then I learned about economics. And then I had to learn about private equity. Then I had to learn about like. And it's just this kind of idea because I was really kind of bought into Building a thing and like building a business the amount of things I learned from that and I had to learn and kind of connect together because uh um It's like really, really helpful.

And I've just taken like this, things like that. And like lots of little kind of, uh, it's all about the metaphysics of quality and about what it, what it feels like to build things with, uh, uh, with, with quality in them. Uh, it's just, uh, there's so much great stuff in the book that it's really

hard.

Rob: I think that's gonna be my next, my next read actually, uh, favorite podcast.

Mike: I listened to a lot. Um, So at the [00:28:00] moment, I think it would be, uh, somewhere between, uh, I, I'd say like Chris Williamson is like a, uh, Chris

Williams, like is a, um, I've been listening to him back in the day, so he's, I, I really like him. He's cool

Rob: Okay. Awesome stuff. Yeah. Um, most underrated quality in a scaling leader.

Mike: listening.

Rob: Good answer. Very good. Now let's go come to the listener challenge. And in this part of the pod, we give listeners a habit or a ritual that they can try out to get a little bit of your superpower. You mentioned something about note taking and I was really interested to hear about your process. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Mike: Yeah, of course. Uh, so like for me, there's just a huge volume of, um, information that you have to process on a daily basis. The context shifting that I have to do. between like strategic deep dives, uh, like technical overviews, like one to one's like, it's, I'm bouncing about from meeting to meeting context to context.

Uh, there's a lot of tasks that I accumulate from that time. Uh, and I've always, I kind of, I'm not really that structured naturally. I'm quite, I'm a bit chaotic. And so, um, the thing that I've kind of lent on to be able to, uh, solve that is, is note taking. So, uh, I started [00:29:00] originally in using just pen and paper, but when the ipad came out and the apple pencil, I was like, I'm going to find the best way to do this.

So I use actually every day. I've got, um, I take notes. I use the. Kind of bullet journaling methods to be

able to like, uh, if it's a, if it's a one to one or that type of meeting, I'll use kind of the kind of Cornell method. If I'm, uh, in a, say an interview and somebody is doing a presentation to kind of extract all of that information and follow along with, but around that, I build a, uh, I've got more of a process to make sure that I'm, I keep on, on top of things.

So I kind of. Bookend the day with, um, like two meetings that I put in with myself, one at the end of the day, just to kind of review all of the notes that I've written, extract all the tasks, put it, uh, do the things that I can do in that kind of couple of minutes. I get things done suggests, um, like build up all of the kind of context.

And then the next day, when I, the day kicks off, I'll review my notes again, but I'll review my, um, the tasks that I've, that I've built and I'll, I'll choose what I'm trying to try to do for the day. I'll be, I'll try to be very intentional about that. Between all of this, the kind of whirlwind of chaos during the day, what I'm going to try to get done and I'll focus on

Rob: Yeah. So it's kind of scheduling a startup and a [00:30:00] shutdown ritual in your calendar. How long do you take for those two things?

Mike: I usually put in about five or ten minutes. So there's a, there's a separate one I have at the end of the week because I also, um, use the kind of second brain sort of, uh, methodology as well. So at the end of the week, I'll have 30 minutes. Well, I'll extract all of these kind of core ideas into it. into another kind of note taking piece.

Um, so

Rob: Mm hmm. that's a much longer process. But daily, it's just a five to ten minutes, uh, like, at the start and end of the day, depending on what happened the day before.

Cool. And the second brain is that like Tiago Forte power method thing?

Mike: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly that. So, uh, but I use the kind of I use obsidian as

a kind of tool for that. And I'm just kind of kind of capturing those kind of notes, kind of building out a graph of all of the kind of key concepts that I've been learning through the week. Uh,

Rob: last little thing because I'm really nerdy about this stuff. Bullet journaling, you've got Was it tasks, thoughts, events? What do you, what are your categories? Do you use those or do you have different ones?

Mike: it's the kind of the time the meetings I'm in will have like a like a dot a task will have a. Uh, [00:31:00] if, uh, I can delegate those tasks to the people, I can move around cyber and the thing for that. If it's a, uh, I'll use a triangle. If it's a, um, if it's an idea that I want to move into my kind of second brain, I kind of think about it.

Um, but yeah, I think they're the kind of major, major ones. I kind of at people as well. So there's a few little things I'll do around that, but it's just mostly those ones that you suggested. Yeah.

Rob: stuff. So it doesn't take long. a startup and a shutdown, five, 10 minutes to go through all of this stuff. But then you need the raw materials. And you need to kind of bit by bit without too much thought, write it down in a book on an iPad or whatever. I guess that that's how you deal with this really fast moving world.

Yeah.

Mike: It is. And I think the other kind of really awesome thing about it is if you've got them all written down, you can look back and just to see how fast you've moved.

So I gave a, like I said, I gave a presentation the other day about the next strategy, the kind of, the way that the technology strategy is evolving at Love Holidays.

And I was able to look back at, uh, how this idea that I was presenting, um, kind of evolved over the last six months, like the conversations that I had with people, the kind of, the way that I was diagramming a change, the kind of [00:32:00] conversations that reminded me of that. It was like, it's. That kind of thing is really cool as well.

Rob: Yeah, that's fun. Last thing, Mike, where can people go to find out more about you.

Mike: Um, I've actually removed myself from most of social media. So,

Rob: Okay.

Mike: do it from a mental health perspective. But the, uh, the one place I am is just at LinkedIn. So, if you search for like Michael Jones on LinkedIn, you'll find me there.

Rob: Awesome stuff. I'll be sure to link to that in the show notes, as well as linking to love holidays for anyone who needs to get away this winter. Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show.

All right. That was Mike Jones. What an incredible way to think about scaling a team from building structure and focusing on business outcomes to helping people leave a footprint.

There's so much value that I think any scaling leader can take away. If you've enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts,

also, if you know a leader in a scaling company who could benefit from Mike's wisdom, Just share [00:33:00] this episode with them. I'd really appreciate that. That's it for this week. My name is Rob D. Willis, Storytelling Consultant and Speaker, and you have been listening to Superpowered, the unique stories of modern leaders.

Thanks for listening and goodbye.

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