Michael Harker — The Future of Product Leadership: AI, Customer Empathy & Scaling Legacy Enterprises

David: Hi, I'm David and this is Build to Succeed from Very Good Ventures. Today we meet with Mike Harker, VP of product at Ritchie Bros., a leading omni-channel marketplace for heavy machinery. In this episode, we're going to get into the nuances of product management within a large organisation with very complex user needs. So let's get building. All right, Mike, thanks for joining us today. How are you doing?

Mike Harker: Of course, I'm doing well. How are you doing, David?

David: I'm doing wonderful. To get us started, give us a brief intro, maybe introduce yourself, what you do and get us started.

Mike Harker: Yeah, yeah. Mike Harker. I'm currently VP of product at Ritchie Bros. We are the largest marketplace for used commercial equipment, so think of us like eBay for all the construction stuff you see on the side of the road that makes your commute terrible.

David: So all the big equipment, big construction machines.

Mike Harker: Big yellow iron trucks, tractors, all the way down to government surplus items. We've got a whole website devoted to that.

David: Super cool. Did you play with big trucks and stuff as a kid?

Mike Harker: I did, although I never got the chance to go to... there's a place here nearby in Philadelphia where I live called Diggerland where you can pay to play with some of those toys and now I can just go to one of our yards and drive them around.

David: That is pretty cool. I'm going to have to look into that for a team building exercise, sounds pretty good.

Mike Harker: Oh, yes. Or with the kids.

David: Yeah, great. And I know from our previous conversations that you're big into IRONMAN competitions.

Mike Harker: I am.

David: And so to get us started and want to hear a little bit more about that experience, and maybe how doing something as crazy as that has shaped you personally and professionally.

Mike Harker: Yeah, it definitely is a core part of who I am. I would say it's more than just a hobby. I've got one of my race placards right there. It's funny thinking about this and how IRONMAN relates to product work. It's all about consistency. It's about breaking things down into manageable chunks. I remember the first race I ever did, I'd never done a marathon and you run a marathon at the end of the triathlon, and it was just one mile at a time.

I didn't think about the daunting task of 26.2 miles. It was like one mile to the next state station, one mile to the next station. And I feel like product's a lot like that, especially going through transformation where you've got to treat this thing like a marathon and not a sprint or you're just going to burn.

David: So how do you then reconcile that with sprint being a common language term?

Mike Harker: I did not think about that. You've still got to show progress along the way. That's the key is you've got to put in the legwork. You've got to make sure you understand what's going on, and you've got to have a way to be able to adapt because inevitably things are not going to go the way you would plan no matter how much you thought you trained or planned. In a race, you may have a rainstorm that comes through, you may have crazy winds that come.

It could be a lot hotter than expected. You've got to find a way to adapt your strategy to it. And I think the same is true with the transformation, especially right now. I joined Ritchie five years ago and where we are today with generative AI and the tools at your disposal, the plan we thought we had five years ago, completely blown up with the new things we can now bring to be able to accelerate that transformation.

David: The other thing I think of has been interested in triathlons, which IRONMAN is obviously a very extreme version of is it's not a single thing. It's not just running a marathon, it's not just running a bike race, it's swimming, running and biking. Do you think that sort of multi-skill, multi-focus has changed how you think about things?

Mike Harker: I do. I've definitely gone through ebbs and flows in my life, both in my product career and in training where you say, "Right now I'm feeling like I'm in a season of wanting to focus more on... I want to learn about the technical side," or, "I want to get better at cycling." So the other two, they're still going to sit there. You still need to do them as part of your job, customer research, but right now I want to get a little bit deeper into this and so there's these ebbs and flows of, "Where do I as a person and as a leader want to focus my time into making sure I continue to upskill and be able to stay competitive both in the work environment and in racing?"

David: Nice. Yeah, I think you mentioned AI and how that's changing things and people are talking these days about the rise of the generalists and how to be successful in the future when you have all this capability at your fingertips. Being a generalist, being able to do a lot of different types of things is going to be increasingly important. Has that kind of mental framing for you helped you in your career navigate some of these changes going on right now?

Mike Harker: It has. I think about my own career history, what got me here and where at times I think all of us as humans feel a little bit inadequate in one area because I didn't come from being a developer in, and so maybe I feel like there's a need to hone some additional skills, but I think one of the areas that it excites me the most is the fact that this is still so highly unknown of what a future career is going to look like as a product manager.

So while today it is skewing a little bit more towards generalists look like they may be the most successful, another two years with these tools and who knows, it may be people who are extremely good with linguistics, who can write the prompts very crisply, don't need technical knowledge, don't need design knowledge. It's hard to say.

David: The product world especially I think you have the skills to the point of being a linguist to actually articulate what a stakeholder wants and what an end user wants. And so I think the linguist thing is interesting. Right now we have to be able to learn how to talk to these tools in order to get what we want back out of it. And I'm curious, have you been able to pick up some of the AI tools and your team faster than other parts of the business?

Mike Harker: Yeah, we're definitely using them a lot faster than some of the other areas within Ritchie Bros. Mostly I would say we're using them for a lot of the discovery and creation of... I mean, we're still doing a decent amount of writing because transforming an organisation, one of the things we found is we need to find a way to bring stakeholders along. And having a document people can read is still critical for us at this stage of where we are in our evolution.

So we're using tools like ChatPRD, ChatGPT, Claude, kind of a mix of the different tools for people to help craft one-pagers, PRDs. And then we're starting to work more and more with tools like Lovable to do that initial prototyping where we run a very lean team and we have an extremely lean design team. So the more a PM can come with a visual concept of what they're looking for, the easier it is for the designer to get a sense of, "Okay, directionally this is where you want to go. Let me take it from here into actual Figma mock-ups all the way through to development."

David: Definitely want to dig into this more and I think especially because Ritchie is such an interesting company, what you guys do, it's the fastest way that I've come to understand is you guys auction marketplace for very big heavy machinery cranes and dump trucks and all kinds of heavy hardcore stuff.

And I think that there's a lot of nuance that I know about your industry and your company that definitely want to get into. But to get us up to that moment, tell us about your journey. How do you end up where you are now working for Ritchie, doing what you're doing? How did you get to this moment?

Mike Harker: Yeah, it's a really interesting question. So I started out my career at a small startup company where we were trying to be a marketplace for carpooling for people. "You and I live in a similar location, let's share a ride." It was around when Uber was really starting to take off and our model was you're not getting paid, you just happen to be sharing a ride together.

A lot of learnings, a lot of failures there. Ultimately Waze ended up implementing this and then shut it down during the pandemic. But I took that, I went back to business school because I knew I wanted to do a slight pivot and break into a little bit of a larger company. And I ended up going to SAP after that, really focused on enterprise software, learned a bunch of different areas of the business and found that my passion always was something in product.

It's what I did in the startup. And so I had the opportunity to go to Comcast and build products for the multifamily space, which was a small group, so we had the ability to be nimble like a startup, but within a much larger organisation that gave us the backing. During the pandemic, just talking through my network, found out about Ritchie Bros., had never heard of it before. Now occasionally I see it when I'm driving down the road. I just did a cross-country move and so drove past a couple locations.

But the opportunity here was to get deep into understanding who our customer bases of a 70-year-old company that has been built on trust and friendship with our customers and how do you take that and modernise it so you can continue to scale for the future and bring the next generation in who maybe do want to be a little bit more tech-savvy and a little bit more technology forward, unlike their parents who were, ultimately the ones, a lot of our business is with mom-and-pop shops.

David: When you first took the job, was that the part that was the most exciting to you or has that changed over time, sort of that working with the mom-and-pop?

Mike Harker: That was definitely an exciting part of it. Being able to work with the customers and see how strong of a voice of the customer we have here at Ritchie Bros., where we go above and beyond. I've truly never seen a company where employees are willing to do whatever it takes to be able to meet the needs of a customer. It's an incredible thing to see.

The flip side to that is, well, when you're willing to do whatever it takes for a customer, you don't really have standard business processes that you're going to go and rebuild as you try to transform as an organisation. So how do you still allow that flexibility without allowing the one-off requests to always meet their way on the roadmap?

One thing is I was thinking about career. I was a DJ for about 10 to 12 years. I did that on the side and I was thinking about this. People always come up, "Oh, you need to play this song. Everyone's going to love it." And it's a lot like product, being a DJ, you need to know how to read the room, understand what people want, because one person asking for something does not mean everyone's going to enjoy that feature or that particular song.

So that was the challenge here at Ritchie Bros., is how do you take a company that really does cater to any individual and find a way to standardise it so as a business, you don't need to continue to hire heads to be able to scale?

David: I could see how as a product person, that opportunity is very compelling because a lot of times you're balancing the needs of the stakeholders and the business with the needs of the end users. And I think the product... At the end of the day, you're trying to really deliver the thing that the user really wants. And so to have that sort of cultural company mandate to help the customer must be very attractive and exciting.

Mike Harker: Yeah, it was. And look, there was also the great opportunity to be able to build a product culture the way that as a leader you would want your product engineering and design teams to be able to work.

David: And let me dig in that a little bit. I think product is one of those things as a function, as a discipline that these days I think is pretty firmly established, especially for tech companies and digital product companies. It's a vital thing we need to know how to do. I think that there's still some confusion sometimes around product and even that whole stakeholder versus user and what actually do you do? How do you define product in what you do and in the world at large? And what is the highest value that product provides for the type of function that you provide?

Mike Harker: Yeah, I hate to say it depends. I think it really depends on how the company wants to view products because I could view it in a very different way, but ultimately for me it's empathy and understanding of your users, whether they be employees or and customers, and being able to bridge the gap between the two. Because you're going to have competing interests no matter where you are, even within your own product organisation.

And ultimately, we're here to help be a sounding board and a voice for all of those people because it's back to one person says, "I know if you play this song, everyone in the club is just going to go crazy. They're going to love it." It's your job as a PM to understand deeply, "If I do this one thing, is this actually going to be the thing that gets everyone excited or is it only going to serve one customer?"

And now we've just distracted and left the other 99 completely on the side of the road with no enhanced value and benefit for ultimately, at the end of the day, we're a publicly traded company. What matters to us as a company is meeting our stakeholder and shareholder expectations, which is continued growth, continued improvement in our operating margin.

And so when you understand that's the context within which the company's operating, you can better start to say, "Okay, where do I focus my and my team's time and energy to make sure we're building towards ultimately what's going to help lead the company to success?"

David: I love that metaphor. That's a great way to think through product, the DJ, right? Where you can read the room and kind of understand the vibe and make choices live on the fly because I think maybe some people are okay with just a Spotify playlist, but of course that can't react. Or you could go the jukebox model where everybody can manage the queue and put in the next song, and that could be all over the place. And you can imagine how following those different models would fundamentally change the type of product you put out in the world.

Mike Harker: Oh, yes. Yeah. If you've been to a bar that has a jukebox, you've heard how drastically different the songs are that come on. It can be fun, but it's a little strange.

David: Yeah, I love that notion of having the knowledge, the expertise, the ability to read the room and the vibe and make the right choices. Yeah, no dancing queen for this reason, right? Well, let's put that to work then. So the skills you developed building products, I mean one of the things that we're all trying to do out in the world is create digital experiences that connect with our end users or employees or customers, whatever they are. Can you take us through some real world situations where maybe you really felt your expertise had been honed and you got to a point where you were able to lead your team through complexity and maybe a major transformation that Ritchie Bros. was going through or something to help figure out how your product leadership evolved?

Mike Harker: Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of years ago, Ritchie Bros. has grown through acquisition over the years, and we found ourselves at a point where we knew we wanted to bring different brands together and unify our go to market approach. We couldn't do it with the technology we had. So the limiting factor for us was basically our tech stack and being in the industry we're in where we have a lot of long-time customers who are not tech-savvy, the worst thing in the world we can do is introduce a bunch of change.

And I think a lot about the Amazon two-way door, we wouldn't have the ability for people to opt into a new site or not. The reason why is we didn't have the technology to support it. So what we had to do was think kind of deeply about it and say, "Look, are we willing to maybe put in twice the effort to re-platform our current website without making UI changes and then be able to go and make those changes later?"

Ideally, you just do it all at once. You get the most bang for your buck, you already opened up the car and you're working on it. But ultimately we ended up compromising and saying, "What's in the best interest for us and for our customers is, let's make sure we are stable as a business, we can continue to scale and grow as our volume increases, and then we can focus on the actual user experience itself."

Because the hard part with these transformations is people say like, "Oh, well, it's just tech debt. It's tech debt." It is, but it's also in the framing of the problem. Instead of saying, "Oh, it's tech debt." Look, our customers can't get an accurate invoice or an accurate ability to see how much money do they owe, how much is remaining on an invoice. That's a real customer problem that you can go and solve rather than trying to ascribe it to this giant bucket of just "modernization."

David: Yeah, that's interesting because I think you're right. A lot of times when people are talking about a transformation, there's a lot of things tied up in that. There's tech debt and how do we migrate from one system to another, but there are all these other adjacent changes. So you guys were able to keep essentially the customer's expectation of how to engage with the platform and the tools while building the underlying layers?

Mike Harker: So we basically rebuilt the underlying foundation, went API first, before everything was very tightly coupled and the biggest surprise and the thing that ended up taking longer, Silicon Valley Product Group put out an article a couple of weeks ago on this, there was so much business logic baked into the core stack of the website itself that no one knew was there.

And you have this site that was built over a decade ago. Most of the engineers aren't here anymore. And you come to find out there's things like, "Well, okay, after an item sells, you don't want everyone to see all of the photos. You want to hide the photo with the serial number." There was this logic that lived in every area of the website that our teams didn't even know about.

So it was almost a learning experience for the engineers and the PMs as we went through because no one knew that this was a thing and should it still be a core requirement. So in some ways, it also, as we went through, it wasn't just technology transformation, it forced us to ask some of the questions of, as a business, how do we want to operate? Do we want these rules in place? And that's one example. There's hundreds across the board of things that we did.

David: Can we dig into that? I think that's really cool. When you think about product, right? The exciting part that everyone gets all jazzed up about is like, "We're going to do something brand new. We're going to design a new feature. I'm going to join the startup. This thing doesn't exist. We're going to figure it all out." But I think that the majority of the world building stuff at scale is building on legacy tech where like you said, there's no roadmap. No one even knows it's there, and it's almost more like you have to do some sort of forensics investigation to dig in to what actually is going on under the hood. Was that the engineers doing that? Was that the product team doing that? How do you actually unravel that ball of yarn?

Mike Harker: Yeah, it was a combination of the two. We started this a couple of years ago. If we were starting now, I would be more excited because I've heard that some of the tools that are out there now can read the code and tell you where there's logic. We had engineers going into the code. We had PMs combing through years of old documentation to see if they could find the original PM who wrote this 15 years ago or at the time, might've been a business analyst, did they document what it was?

Because the thing that we could not do, our principle going through this was do no harm. So what we couldn't do is lower customer expectations of the service we were going to be able to deliver. We had to at least meet it, if not jump above it with better performance of the systems. So it was a painstaking process. And I'll be honest, there were little things here and there that we missed because even with people combing through, they're needles in a haystack that if you don't know you're looking for this thing, it's easy to miss.

David: How do you prevent that going forward? What are the best practices you recommend to product and engineering teams to communicate with that 15 year down the line?

Mike Harker: Yeah, it's all communication. It's in the communication, it's in the testing, making sure, in this case in particular, our stakeholders all had a voice. Because there may have been one person in this company that knew that that was a feature that existed on the website. We didn't know who that person was. So if you don't give stakeholders and the company an opportunity to test things out and to say, "You know your customers best." Ultimately a huge part of our employee base, they're on the phone with or they're out in the field with customers every single day.

So they're the ones representing, this is what they expect. The more we can give to them, "This is what things will look like in the future," the more feedback we can get to say, "Wait, did you think about this one thing that you've always done for my one customer?" Which back to the point of it then gives us the opportunity to say, "Hey, is that a feature we still want to support going forward, or can we shift the customer expectation of how we're still going to eventually meet the same outcome maybe in a slightly different way?"

David: So when you started this, it sounds like there's the re-platforming transformation side and then there's maybe the opportunity to redesign or improve some things. Your team made a conscious decision to focus more on the re-platforming-

Mike Harker: Yeah.

David: ... and then do that later. How did you set up the guardrails or the rules of engagement? I would imagine as you go through this, there's opportunities where you're like, "Well, we could just improve this little thing while we're at it." Right? But I would imagine that would be a slippery slope. So how did you set this up internally in terms of the North Star of what you're trying to accomplish?

Mike Harker: So the North Star was to get something out the door that looked like the current website as quickly as possible, where we were willing to make trade-offs or where we thought we had the opportunity to say, "Let's enhance this or increment this a little bit beyond what we have today," basically came down to a framework of, "Okay, number one, is it going to take longer? If it's going to take longer than just rebuilding what we have, we shut it out." We said, "We're not going to do it. Our North Star is speed time to market."

Number two, is it somehow going to improve stability? If so, trade off of how much longer it would take because we did want to make sure we didn't have any impacts to our auction events. And then number three, if there were visual changes we thought about making, we went to customers, we went to customers, we had employee groups that we would come to with a very quick mock up and just ask the question, "Hey, what do you think about this?"

In some cases, if it was a deeper feature, we did some user testing with them, letting them walk through to say, "Are people still going to be able to navigate the site the same way they did before?" Because even moving to, I'll tell you with our customer base, if you move to a hamburger menu on the upper right-hand side from what we had previously, people don't understand. They don't know that that is something you can click to get an expanded field.

So you learn those insights, the more you can put designs in front of our actual customers. In some cases, we made trade-offs and we ended up saying we're going to innovate things a little bit and try to stand up a bit of a design system so the pictures may have rounded edges instead of square edges like they did before, because we know that's a stepping stone towards being able to do a full redesign later.

David: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, I mean, how do you balance then that speed versus quality versus user familiarity? And were there moments as a product person where you had to make a decision where, "Okay, the user is familiar with this, but God, is this a tough user experience"? And how did you balance... It sounds like you went to customers, but internally, were there moments where you did have to make a change or a choice and how would you work through that process?

Mike Harker: Yeah, I think it was hard for all of us when we look at comparisons to other companies out there, and everyone talks about Airbnb as having beautiful designs and you look at them and you crave, "I want to be able to bring that in here." But what we needed to understand and what we know the most is that our customers want something that works. It has to be utilitarian for them. They don't care as much about the actual design language or what the website looks and feels like so much as making sure it helps them with either buying or selling equipment.

And so again, we make trade-offs, there were areas where I was challenged by my team deeply, and this is one of the things I love about building a team, is having people that are willing to challenge and not just take from the top down and ultimately tie it to outcomes. If we felt like it was going to increase or improve conversions among our users or clarify some area that we've had complaints from customers for a long time, we made a decision to say, "Yes, we know we are making some changes, which is a little bit divergent from our strategy of get same side out the door with a new tech stack." But it was a very purposeful change that we made to suit the, call it 80% over the 20%.

David: I think this would probably be a good moment to take a step back and talk about why you are making some of these affordances given the nature of your business and the types of customers you have. Can you maybe explain a little bit the nuance around your particular type of end customer and that idea that they don't recognise a hamburger menu and some of the choices you have to make? Maybe kind of catch us up a little bit about some of that.

Mike Harker: Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a whole range of customers, which is one of the most exciting things about this company. We have everyone from farmers in remote areas of Alberta, Canada who don't have internet, don't have cell phones, all the way down to financial institutions, large rental companies who are extremely sophisticated with software and tools that they use. So how do you build a product, a digital products, when people don't even have an email address?

The most basic thing that you come to think everyone has, when you go on site to some of our auction events and you see it, it's not just older generations. I remember talking to a couple of 26-year-olds from Idaho who had flip phones. They didn't have internet, they didn't have anything on it. And when I asked them, they said, "We don't need it. We're out on the farm and then we're home with our families at the end of the day."

So it's challenging to be able to build for a whole range of customers there. In particular when then you look at for some of these people, what we're doing with them, it's not just a transaction. It's not like me trying to resell iPhones. This is their lifeblood and the one that gets me the most, and you hear our CEO, Jim Kessler talk about this a lot. We're trusted with people's retirement.

You talk about selling the farm or betting on the farm, people are literally betting their entire retirement on, "I have a package of land, I've got my house, I've got some equipment. I'm going to give this to Ritchie Bros. to auction off, whatever they get is what I'm going to have for my retirement and to pass on the future generations of kids." So it puts a lot of trust in us as a company and it forces us to say, "We need to make sure we can deliver on the promises and commitments we make to our customer."

Not just from a business standpoint, but again, these people are literally trusting their life and their future generations with us. You take all of that and you boil it down to, it's not about the most fancy technology or anything here. It's about being able to say, "I have made a commitment to a customer and I'm going to do whatever I can to make sure we fulfil that."

David: I love this story, and I think one of the things that's been most compelling as I've gotten to know Ritchie Bros. and you and the things that you guys are focused on is that obsession with the customer and the fact that you have these unique customers, that they need this, they need your service. And obviously there's a digital component that you need to follow, but in a lot of the things that I think people are doing with digital products and technology, there's a lot of assumptions of a certain level of technical proficiency that people just gloss over. And I think it's a good reminder.

I mean, I think we get into this sometimes when you think about accessibility or are you deploying your service to a country where maybe the infrastructure is good or you don't have to sell bandwidth expectations that we have here. This is really cool to think about going that extra step down like, "What do I need to do to make sure that this is usable for all of the right people in the right ways, even if they don't have an email address?" There's basic assumptions that... I mean, when was the last time someone built a mobile app or a website where you were actually transacting and there was a requirement that says they might not have an email address? It's kind of wild.

Mike Harker: It is, and it makes it difficult when... I'm a firm believer in, you focus on your core competency for when you're going to build and then you buy the rest off the shelf. And look, we've been fortunate that we have a large portfolio of some very strong commercial software partners, but to your point, they're not necessarily built for this. And look at some of the payment providers who were out there where Uber, Lyft, everything, they're easily under the assumption, if you're going to provide a service of driving, you're going to get paid digitally. Great.

We have customers, I remember one in particular, we launched a version of our digital checkout products and we were learning a lot through it. And one of the things was a lot of people didn't want to give us banking information. All they wanted was to get a check cut to them. And so I got on the phone with a bunch of customers to genuinely understand why is it that you want a check cut? And this guy, somehow his business had gotten beaten for about a quarter million dollars of fraud. And so ever since then he does zero online banking. He doesn't want anything that could potentially get out into the ether where he could get beat up.

And so he wants a check cut to him. And it's those types of customers and examples of how big is that population of customers who want something like this versus how much are one-offs? Because if you have a good relationship, are you really going to, "Hey David, I'm sorry, but we're no longer going to support this." If so, you got to give him something in return. "Hey David, we're still going to support it. Maybe we're going to have to charge you a fee for it in the future."

We haven't gone that far. We're still issuing checks and we ended up having to change a lot of our roadmap. But this is the thing, if you're not talking to all of these different customers, you may take a handful of them who are willing to take online transactions and say, "Okay, good enough, we're going to build for them." And only once you actually get it out there do you learn, "This is not going to work for 40% of our customer base."

David: I love that notion you threw in there that you changed your roadmap. I think the other thing is that sometimes we get so laser locked on what we think the most efficient or best path is, we stop thinking about how do we solve the needs of some of our customers. If it's a bell curve and we're kind of always optimising for the middle of the bell curve that most people are engaging with or that meet the needs of the most people, we're leaving a lot of people on the fringes in the edges. And that might be somebody trying to sell their farm for a future generation.

Mike Harker: Yeah. And the other cool part about this, without getting too deep into the specifics, when you're a big enough company that has some of these strong software partners, just like we are taking inputs and feature requests from our customers for what we build, they're willing to change some of their products to be able to build what we're asking of them. So it doesn't have to be an all or nothing or necessarily always changing our roadmap. Sometimes it's putting the burden on our partners to say, "We need your help. Can you make these couple of changes?" Which will dramatically simplify our ability to go to market with this particular offer.

David: So you have this notion of this particular customer base that you have. I'm sure there are plenty of people who are also very digital savvy and can navigate this and they probably want your tools to be even more efficient and set. But then you have a segment of your user base that is very maybe distrustful or not familiar with a lot of these tools, but you have a kind of company desire to really put the customer first and put the individual customer first.

How do you balance, as you think about an industry like this and trying to transform or trying to bring it more tech forward, how do you balance those modern expectations with what's welcome and how do you and your product management decisions on a regular basis, like set up a framework by which everyone's agreed about how you can make these choices?

Mike Harker: Yeah, it's not easy. The easiest example is probably the email address one. So fortunately for us, COVID shut down our in-person businesses for a while and pushed us online. So you had to have an email address to be able to do business as a buyer. It was a great thing for us as a company as much as it had a lot of impacts all around. But for our consignors, we still don't mandate an email address.

And so the easiest way to think about, we'll use this as a specific problem, here are the implications of us continuing to operate without forcing our sellers to give us a unique email address. And this is where partnering with our engineering and technology partners is critical because people don't think about this. And I talk a lot about in transformations, the butterfly flapping its wings in Texas that causes the hurricane on the East Coast.

The unintended consequences, unless you're able to clearly paint that picture of it seems simple, but missing this one piece of data has all of these implications, which then result in we are going to have a 20% harder time trying to give sellers access to their sold items immediately after they sell. If we can connect that initial problem to the actual impact and outcome on our customers, it's a lot easier than saying something, "Well, it's easier if we collect a seller email address because it's unique."

That doesn't really do a lot for the people who are out talking to customers. And so you really have to take every single one of these one by one, and our teams go and do the investigation to say, "Number one, is this a problem we have to solve? Is there another way we can solve it or offer optionality? And then number two, this is where we partner a lot with our business to say, 'If it's our support teams, we understand you want to continue to allow customers flexibility in this particular area. What we need to agree to then is that what we thought where we were going to cut 50% of your workload by being able to automate it, we're not going to get to that goal. So we have to readjust our expectations of what the product team's going to help you to deliver. You're going to continue to need a staff that's going to sit there to handle incoming calls from customers for things that the rest of the customers can go and self-serve.'"

So it becomes a really a lot of give and take to say, "Where, as a company as a whole, a collective unit, are we willing to make sacrifices versus continue supporting our employees the same way?" And I think that's the area when you think about what a product manager's job is, my job is not to make that decision. My job is to collect the information and paint the clearest picture possible to take to VP of operations or a chief operating officer for him to then feel confident that he can go and make the right call. Do we keep our staff levels the same or are we going to make some changes in the way we go to market and work with our customers to be able to hit some of our operational savings that we're expecting?

David: Super insightful perspective there about taking all of this information that you collect, getting the needs of the customer, the needs of the business, all the things, and putting it in a position where the stakeholders, the executives, the business leaders, can make the right choices for what they want to do. So much of this is tied in transformation process. You have to update that underlying technology. You have to re-platform, you do have to iterate user experience. You have to meet the needs of the customers.

And being such a storied business that's been around for a long time, that's built tech over many years, and then you have COVID and you got to swirl and jump really quickly into new technologies. As you've kind of managed moving a product forward, moving the technology forward through all of these headwinds, all of these different needs and kind of things pushing, what have you learned to help you be more successful when you go through these transformations in a large business like this?

Mike Harker: Communication, you can never have enough communication or enough alignment. And alignment does not mean that everyone is always going to be on board or agree, but if you can set some foundational principles from the start and agree on the framework by which you're going to then go solve and tackle the problems, it becomes tremendously easier when there are disagreements to be able to have people, again, Amazon principle disagree and commit and say, "This is the path we're picking."

The other one is, I call it infinite curiosity. I like this concept of seeking to understand rather than be understood. While it's important for me to have a perspective as a leader, especially, there's a lot of humility that leaders need learning from your teams because I know I'm nowhere near as close to our customers as some of the teams who are focused in a specific area like search. And so you have to learn how to trust people.

And when you take all of that within your own organisation and are able to start sharing it out within your operations, your sales, your marketing partners, it becomes a lot easier to form a bit of a cohesive unit who can go and help decide, "Which are the problems that are worth us solving now and which are the ones that we are consciously going to kick the can down on the road, accepting the implications of not changing?"

David: I love that. What's something, if you could go back in time before you start at Ritchie Bros. or maybe earlier in your career and give yourself one bit of advice, what do you think that would be?

Mike Harker: Never get comfortable, chase learning opportunities. And I'm not saying to chase learning opportunities if it means that you're going to do something for free for others. But I find, and the reason I found myself so drawn to product, I had a career mentor who was... he was the head of corporate development at SAP when I was there. And we were kind of talking about where I saw my career taking me next, and ultimately what landed in Comcast.

SAP is a very heavy sales-driven organisation. You basically have to carry a bag there if you're going to get credibility, respect. And he asked me one question. He said, "When you wake up in the morning, what motivates you the most? Is it winning at all costs or is it intellectual curiosity?" And I said, "It's intellectual curiosity." And immediately that's what really helped to focus my mind on.

I love learning. It's one of the things I love reading books. I love learning about new technologies, biographies, doesn't matter what it is. I'm a curious person. And I think that's what makes the best product managers is people who are just genuinely curious and want to poke around and find how stuff works. They want to take... It's hard to take an iPhone apart these days, but I used to take my BlackBerry apart growing up and change parts out just to see how this physical device works.

And it's harder to do that in the digital world, but it's not that hard to figure out how software works. And so if I went back, I would tell my younger self probably to even be more curious than I was and to take classes, take things that are going to stretch me outside my comfort zone, knowing while it may not seem like it's directionally aligned to a particular path, I'm a firm believer that at some point in my life...

I look back on the last five, 10 years and I can see a story as to how I got where I am. If I had started there, I would never have thought that this path would take me to the same outcome. I think that's the key, is it? It's hard to predict life. You don't know what series of steps is going to take you somewhere.

David: That's super cool. I totally agree that committing to that learning. And also sometimes you get the best learning in situations where on the surface it maybe doesn't look obvious that that's going to be the most fun and the most opportunity for learning. So for instance, if you were to go back to early, you would be like, "Hey, how about you lead product management for a company where a lot of the customers are not into digital products?"

You might be like, "Well, I don't know if that seems right." But also, there's so much to learn from those types of environments. And we work with a lot of gigantic enterprise companies and big companies have a reputation for inefficiencies and complexity and bureaucracy and all these things. But one of the things that's really cool is you can really make change.

It's like a rich environment of opportunity for ways you can learn, get into that old code someone wrote 15 years ago and kind of figure something out. When you're building something new. And I think we get all excited about startups a lot of time in the tech community, you're building something new from scratch, that has its own opportunities and areas of excitement because you don't know what you're building.

But I think that there's a lot to learn from working from very large companies that have a lot of established patterns, processes, behaviours, impediments sometimes, and obstacles, right? Figuring out how to deal with those and optimise around them can be massive learning opportunities. And that's just something I thought is so cool about your story is you guys are moving forward with technology or it's a story business.

It's been around for a very long time. Selling, not big, hardcore machinery that you see out there making the world move by building complex structures and doing things. And all the limitations you face creates so much opportunity to do interesting things with product new technology.

Mike Harker: Yeah, it really does. The ability to have an outsized impact at various levels in a company like Ritchie Bros. There are other organisations that are old companies going through transformations. To your point, you're not going to get that opportunity if you join an extremely large enterprise company that's functioning well unless you're coming in at the highest of levels. And even then, we talk a lot about innovation, how quick it is. Yes, organisations like OpenAI are shipping things incredibly quickly, but what we can do with what seems like a rather small change can end up having a huge impact on our customer base.

David: Awesome. Well, thanks, Mike. Really appreciate your time today. Learned a lot. If people want to learn about Ritchie Bros., maybe get a job or explore what you guys are doing, how can they learn more?

Mike Harker: LinkedIn I say is always the easiest place to go for myself. We're often sharing open roles that are going on. We're sharing a lot of our wins. Our sales team does a phenomenal job of highlighting a lot of our customers. Same with our marketing team. Especially when it comes time for some of our larger events, there's a lot of content that's on there and people can feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn as well. Always happy to talk about Ritchie Bros.

David: Awesome. Well, it sounds like a great place with a lot of vision, a very customer-focused mindset, and obviously great product leadership. So thanks, Mike. Thanks so much for sharing with us.

Mike Harker: Thanks, David.

David: Thank you for joining us on Build to Succeed, a Very Good Ventures podcast. We hope you enjoy exploring the experiences and insights of leaders that have built successful digital products. Please take a moment to leave us a review and don't forget to subscribe to get our latest episodes. Thanks again, and see you next time.