Ep. 24 – Documentation-First Product Philosophy with Josh Angotti.

Transcript

00:09
Ellie Tehrani
So welcome to the elusive consumer. Josh Angadi, VP of Product Development at Windstream. We're so happy to have you here with us today.

00:17
Josh Angotti
Thank you, Ellie. Thanks so much for interviewing me. I've been looking forward to this for a while.

00:22
Ellie Tehrani
Great. So I'm going to jump straight into the journey that you've had from studying economics to leading product development in major telecoms companies like Comcast and now in Stream. Could you talk us through that a little bit?

00:38
Josh Angotti
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Like you said, studied economics quickly. Got into tech right out of undergrad and realised that I wanted to get back into school, get a graduate degree focused in the area of telecommunications. I was in the D.C. Metro area at the time and telecommunications was a really large part of the economy in that. In that region. So it seemed like a logical choice. There was a lot of opportunity. Studied telecom with a focus on wireless and satellite. Got recruited right out of grad school into the defense industry, into Lockheed Martin. And I did not last long. I lasted about 18 months. And I just absolutely could not deal with the drab, windowless office space that comes along with defense contracting.

01:24
Josh Angotti
So, so quickly found new opportunities and found a position, to your earlier comment, at Comcast and relocated to Philadelphia, which is where Comcast is based. And when I was there, I was very fortunate that someone took a chance on me. And I think that's sort of a common thread throughout my career. I know a lot of people can claim to have been self made and I think that's fantastic. I cannot claim that. I think much of my career is centered around the opportunities that people gave me and people taking a chance on me. That someone was an extremely patient and knowledgeable director who taught me product discipline. And after a while I ended up leading a product team that supported the video on demand product, which was on the rise at the time.

02:11
Josh Angotti
When I started, I think were at maybe 1 or 2 million views per month. And by the time I shifted out of that product, were at upwards of over, I think over a couple hundred million views per month. So a massive change in scale and popularity, which was a wonderful time to work on. As you know, working on a product that's on an upswing is such an exciting place to be. So I shifted out of video kind of at its peak in retrospect, and moved into the network. And that was an interesting timing as well in that when I shifted into the network, it was just before COVID So as soon as Covid hit, of course, everyone left the office and went home. There was a massive increase in network traffic.

03:02
Josh Angotti
And it was a really meaningful business to support in that time just because so many people were at home and dependent and reliant on their broadband connection. Shortly after Covid, I left Comcast and joined a consulting firm that focused mainly in cable and telecom. A company named Pure Integration was there briefly and then got recruited into Windstream. And Windstream is a telecommunications Internet service provider and they provide service mainly in rural parts of the US which is quite different from of course, Comcast. Comcast is mainly focused in larger metropolitan areas. And now at Windstream, I lead product across all three businesses, residential, business and wholesale, which is sort of dedicated bandwidth. And I also have the opportunity to lead an engineering team that's built kind of a homegrown analytics platform for real time network health assessment and self healing abilities.

04:01
Josh Angotti
So it's an extremely kind of exciting opportunity for me to be responsible for end to end, which is not always the case when you're in a product role.

04:11
Ellie Tehrani
That's quite the journey. I was going to ask you what sort of pivotal moments shaped your career, but this seems to be an interesting mix of external factors and key mentors that have had impact on your journey. I want to talk a little bit more specifically about your 17 year tenure at Comcast. You mentioned that this particular mentor shaped some of how you approach product. And you have an interesting philosophy in terms of product management, which we'll get to. But what key lessons did you learn during your tenure at Comcast that has been the most valuable for you in your professional life, but also in your current role at Windstream?

04:59
Josh Angotti
Yeah, I think that. Thank you. Again, a really good question, ellie. It was 17 years lengthy period of time at Comcast and there were a few things that definitely stood out. And as you said, I think we'll get into kind of product philosophy in a moment. But it is very exciting to work on a product that's on an upswing. It's much more difficult to become motivated and feel inspired to work on a product that's on maybe less of a kind of positive trajectory. I was so fortunate to be at Comcast when Video on Demand was on the rise. And were doing a lot of really exciting integrations in terms of working with Netflix and working with Hulu. And that was roughly the time that Comcast purchased NBCUniversal.

05:45
Josh Angotti
So there were also sort of these synergistic projects that we worked on where we would highlight the Olympics, which of course is this massive international event in the Video on demand space. So when a product is on an upswing like that, there's so much opportunity around it, and I hadn't always had that opportunity. I haven't always worked on products that were on an upswing like that. And then similarly, even moving into the network space, while of course the network is maybe not quite as exciting as it's a bit more commoditised than, say, a video on demand, but even then, when there's such kind of public reliance on the product that you're supporting, it's just. It feels good and it feels exciting. Contrast that with, for instance, the time that I spent at.

06:35
Josh Angotti
At Lockheed Martin in the defense industry, where of course, I wasn't in a position that I could talk about my product. I wasn't in a position where folks knew about the products I was working on, and it just wasn't as. It wasn't as motivating, it wasn't as inspiring.

06:51
Ellie Tehrani
Now that makes complete sense. I think that I want to cover more of this product philosophy of yours because I think it's very important to some of our listeners in terms of understanding why certain approaches and methods and frameworks can lead to successful outcomes, even though we don't all necessarily work in such organised manners. But let's talk about your approach in terms of be the first to put things on paper. Can you elaborate on that philosophy?

07:22
Josh Angotti
Yeah, thank you. That's a good one. There are probably three or four elements that really stand out to me in terms of product philosophy. All of them are somewhat related. That first one that you listed, kind of be the first to put it on paper, I think, drives clarity. And when I think about kind of the number one responsibility of me as a product person, it is to eliminate ambiguity. And I think putting information on paper really sets up coworkers and colleagues to be able to edit something rather than force someone else to create. And I think that's one of the most critical pieces to moving the product forward is get it on paper first, be comfortable and willing to be wrong, which I know is in direct contrast with a leadership principle from another very large tech company.

08:15
Josh Angotti
And I'll leave it to our audience to identify which tech company that is that has a mantra of leaders are right most of the time. I actually really feel that it's important for product people to be comfortable to be wrong. And I think that comfort allows people to the flexibility and the confidence to start putting something on paper early and to put that early cut of information in front of someone very likely more knowledgeable on the topic than they are, and allow that Person to edit rather than force that person to create. So that eliminating ambiguity, responsibility of a product person, I think is so prevalent because we often find ourselves sitting between technical and non technical individuals. So there's often ambiguity in that space.

09:06
Josh Angotti
And I can think of no better way to eliminate that than to put it on paper, to write it up, to be the first one to publish the information. And then I think that the fourth item that really stands out to me, which also kind of ties in with those concept, is to focus less on roles and focus more on work output, focus less on what is my role in this product, what is my role in this company? And focus a lot more on what am I responsible for delivering. And it isn't a calendar full of meetings. It's something like documentation, it's code, it's reports. That's what we need to deliver. That's what moves the product forward.

09:49
Ellie Tehrani
And do you have examples of when this approach has led to successful outcomes?

09:55
Josh Angotti
Yeah, I think that almost all of the products that I've been responsible for dating all the way back to that very generous director that I had, that kind of taught me product discipline. I was more often than not one of the first people to put it on paper. I think about that now in terms of kind of a product that I'm working on with some team members even as early as recently as this morning, where our chief network officer reached out to us and said, hey, we need to understand the roadmap. We need to understand kind of what are our options in this product as it relates to kind of digital voice for our enterprise customers and our business customers. Can somebody please provide something by Friday?

10:39
Josh Angotti
So of course organise a conversation between my team, the product representative and the engineers that are taking lead in this space and some of the operations teams that also support this area and support these customers. And it's just kind of second nature for me to immediately say, all right, we'll take the first pass at some kind of a roadmap, some sort of an introduction to kind of set the stage in terms of here are the customers needs, here are the various customer segments, and here are the options that we have available for them today. This is what we're looking forward tomorrow. So I think and just kind of took that responsibility on as recently, actually it was as yesterday and put some of this information on paper. Had another follow up conversation today about that very same topic with that same group.

11:30
Josh Angotti
And we're already in a position where we're able to communicate that to our leadership by tomorrow morning just because of the fact that were willing to put information on paper that was definitely controversial. And even in today's call, the conversation that I hosted this morning, there was disagreement about what was in those slides, what was in that narrative. And I don't know that we would have arrived at that disagreement as quickly had we not been willing to put something on paper to give everyone an opportunity to react to. And it put us in a much better position to communicate upwards and establish our plan moving forward for our customer base, you know, as soon as next week.

12:12
Ellie Tehrani
I think that's such an interesting point because so many people in so many different roles these days are afraid of putting things on paper because of what outcome it might have and how people might react. And especially as leaders, as you said, it's even more vital to live and breathe that philosophy. So I really like that. I want touch upon the thing that you mentioned regarding the technical and non technical which I think everyone sees in every industry. How do you navigate that in terms of bridging those teams and what strategies have you found effective to ensure clear communication and more of a collaboration?

12:55
Josh Angotti
Well, a lot is to be said for visuals, I will lead with that. A lot is to be said for visuals. Now I think that narratives are extremely important when we get into kind of the maybe business value, the maybe early understanding of what the customer experience needs to be that I think a narrative is a nice way to set the stage. Couple pages that explain here's what it is, here's why we see value, here's kind of the direction that we want to go. However, I do think that when, where, when my team and when the product teams are working between technical and non technical visuals go a long way.

13:40
Josh Angotti
I had a recent experience with that just about two or three weeks ago where we're talking about a major transition from a ecosystem, a set of systems to another ecosystem, another set of systems in support of kind of our sales and marketing and provisioning for our Windstream Kinetic business customers. And it would be a major transition to make that move. And I kind of admittedly having only been with Windstream for about, I think probably 16, 18 months at this point, it's a lot of these details are beyond me. I'm less familiar with these systems than a lot of people are. So one of the first things I asked for was could we get some kind of end state functional architecture?

14:32
Josh Angotti
What is the horizon that we're working towards here because there are so many existing systems supporting this ecosystem and there's going to have to be quite a bit of transition that occurs in order for us to continue to support our customer base. It's not something that I think the organisations that I work with have been familiar with. It's not something that they always do, but they produced it. And that puts the product team in a position to be able to start thinking about phasing out that functionality. And what's important about those phases is not just the evolution or the evolution of the systems and the ecosystem itself, but also the ability to continue to conduct business in a seamless way at each milestone. And I think that's where the, that's where you really get at the root of the ambiguity.

15:25
Josh Angotti
Because if we understand what the desired end state is and look, the end state might change, we may ultimately decide that, you know, six months, 12 months, 18 months down the road that the end state that we had envisioned early on needs to shift a little bit. But at least we've all been working in that direction. And with that end state, product folks can sit down and think about, all right, logically, how are we going to move from this set of systems to that set of systems and what are the business cases, the functional use cases that need to be supported along the way to make sure that our company can continue to conduct business even as this back office transition occurs?

16:07
Josh Angotti
That's where the documentation really comes in and that's where kind of visuals and phasing and milestones become so critical to the success of a project.

16:19
Ellie Tehrani
That makes a lot of sense. I think the other issue, I guess a lot of organisations have is that some of the technical versus the non technical departments are so siloed and have less transparency in what each department's goals and objectives are. So perhaps sharing a bit more of that would help overall as well. I want to cover a little bit more about. In terms of the types of teams that you managed, how has your philosophy to product development and product management generally evolved as you've sort of changed from managing some of the smaller teams to leading larger organisations? And can you talk us through some of the new challenges that you faced?

17:10
Josh Angotti
Yeah, thank you. It's helpful to kind of think through that in one's career. In retrospect, I think early on, of course, we all start with relatively small teams and it's much more like a, it feels much more like a coaching environment. And that's what I experience very much. I keep referencing that sort of, that director who was generous with his time and his patience. It was really at the time, I think I was the only one working for him. So he was able to kind of pour a lot of coaching and guidance into that kind of employee employer relationship. And I found myself doing the same, spending a lot of time when I only had two, three people within my organisation.

17:57
Josh Angotti
And it was easy to kind of build that connection as the team has grown, you know, 20, 30, 50, that one one connection is not going to be as available to us. So I have found it increasingly important to produce templates and examples and I did that recently. I kind of received a product requirements document not too long ago that didn't quite meet the mark. It didn't quite hit the mark and it needed to be geared more towards the operations of the product and the requirements needed to address the kind of making sure that the tools that our operations teams would use to support that product matured and evolved in order to make that a seamless customer experience and that just that information wasn't captured. So I found myself kind of starting anew and kind of writing up the new requirements document.

18:55
Josh Angotti
And I thought, well, I could write this requirements document, I could go meet with these folks. I probably don't have the time to do that. What might better in a coaching kind of framework is to list out here the critical sections of what we need to address with this document. And here are the questions that we need to answer. And here are the teams and or individuals who will be of greatest support, who will be most helpful in answering those questions. So that transition from that one one kind of let's meet, let's have an hour long conversation, let's kind of comb through your document, make edits here and there, which was the way that I coached and led early on has transitioned more to a kind of lead them to water, sort of.

19:46
Josh Angotti
Here are the questions to ask, here are the folks who can help you. And I think that it's probably a, maybe would have been the better way to approach it early on in my career when I had smaller teams. But I didn't, you know, I was still a very early manager. I didn't have that experience yet. But that's been kind of the major transition is kind of helping new teams that I acquire as my organisation grows, kind of coach them through the process.

20:14
Ellie Tehrani
Right. And I want to shift the subject a little bit towards one of the key subjects for our podcast, which is being data informed and being data driven. And in your line of work, do you have a distinction between the two? Data informed versus Data driven.

20:35
Josh Angotti
It's a really interesting way to kind of forward that question. And I think about kind of the two different. When I think about types of products, they categorically fall into two main categories. For me, at least in my career, there are sort of paying customers and subscribers that are either subscribed to a service or are purchasing a product. And then there are operations teams. And those products are a little different. They're sort of internal, maybe back office types of products. And I think depending on which of those two categories the product manager is supporting, I think it may have different meaning. When I think about sort of customer facing, data informed, data driven, I think there's a more meaningful distinction there between those terms.

21:27
Josh Angotti
I think that's where we can end up in a situation where it's like, no, we only make decisions based on data. Well, there are probably some other nuances that need to be considered there. When we're talking about kind of operations style products like tools that support our operations teams, I don't know that there's as much of a distinction there. That nuance maybe is a little less relevant. Data is critically important in the area of kind of back office operations. It's absolutely critical. This is especially true when we start to consider automation, AI, ML. And to illustrate that, I actually, I recently read an article in Harvard Business Review that kind of cited four key sort of smart AI integration tactics and it spoke to the importance of data.

22:19
Josh Angotti
And I think this is kind of where my, the team, most of my team sort of lives and breathes right now. The four that they gave were kind of clearly state the end goal and this sort of aligns to Clade Christensen's jobs to be done theory. The second that they listed was sound data inputs. And when we think about AI and ML, those, those are the nuts and bolts to AIML precision. They're critical. The broader and more granular the information, the better. The third that they listed was kind of this loosely connected tech architecture in which systems are together but they aren't necessarily dependent one another.

23:00
Josh Angotti
And that took me a little while to think that one through because I had to kind of anytime I read an article like this, I always have to kind of put it in Windstream terms like what does this mean to me in my current role at Windstream? I encourage our teams to look at marketing systems and network analytics systems and sales systems, care repair systems, you name it. They're all part of this ecosystem and they all fulfill unique functions on their own. But they also feed this licensed gen system that we've combined for insights.

23:32
Josh Angotti
So there again the data is so critical when it's serving very specific needs for that marketing system, for that network analytics system, for that sales system, but then even grows in importance as it gets aggregated and it serves a centralised gen AI client that's providing even more detailed insights. And then the fourth item that they listed in the article was an experimental culture that's comfortable exploring new ideas and improving them over time. So at Windstream, my team really avoids that analysis paralysis, you know, as it relates to data which often happens in the product space because we focus sort of on smaller data subsets to get started and you know, we prove out our hypothesis and then we move into larger data sets to scale. So that's hopefully that answers your question.

24:23
Josh Angotti
I think about it kind of very differently those that distinction between those two terms when we think about the two kind of categories of products.

24:31
Ellie Tehrani
No, that makes a lot of sense and I appreciate the perspective, I think some of the points you mentioned. I want to ask you for more details on including the analysis paralysis comment that you made that I think is such a common error. But how do you balance the need for enough data, enough comprehensive analysis with the pressure to make timely decisions and also making sure that you got it right, so to speak?

25:04
Josh Angotti
Yeah, that's such a difficult question to answer in this environment that we're in today where AIML is taking such a kind of elite role in how we operate within our companies. And the best way that I have found, and you know, I may find better ways, you know, we're all working in this AIML space kind of very early right now, it's early days is to look at it use case by use case and address like pull data and look for insights on a use case basis. I'll give you an example. We, we recently at Windstream we had, I, we did some analysis of some of our customers. We found a number of customers that are subscribed to voice, but there was a configuration in the system that was preventing them from actually getting a dial tone. Something. In some cases it's a configuration.

26:04
Josh Angotti
In some cases it's because of the hardware configuration in the home. In some cases it's configuration of the account. And this was one individual use case that we found and we started to find a couple of other use cases where configurations were impacting services. And I thought, well, you know, we could try to go after all of this at once, but maybe what's best is for us to just kind of you know, we've got a discrete use case here. We have specific data that can address it. Let's focus here and then we can move on. Like, and I think the agentic AI ecosystem is really kind of positioned to support that in a better way than maybe we have been in the past because we can build agents to address fairly specific issues.

26:51
Josh Angotti
And that was kind of how we focused on this kind of configuration for customer voice service. And that was. So that was one way that I found very practically to avoid a situation where were kind of analysis paralysis. Let's collect more and more data. No, let's focus on this specific issue. We have a discrete set of data. Let's use that data to solve the problem. Let's put our customers in a better position, let's make sure that we're meeting their needs and then we'll move on to the next use case.

27:23
Ellie Tehrani
Such an excellent example of actually taking data and putting it into improving the customer experience overall. Which leads me to my follow up question. You have mentioned past about frequent customer speed tests potentially indicating dissatisfaction. I found that quite interesting. Can you clarify?

27:45
Josh Angotti
Yeah, absolutely. So I think we've all kind of had this experience, right? Whether it's on our mobile phone or whether it's, you know, while we're sitting at our workstation, whatever the case may be, for whatever reason we're getting a choppy signal in a video conference or you know, we keep experiencing buffering as we're trying to watch a video, something along those lines. So one of the first things that we do as consumers is we just start running speed tests. We just start running them like, how fast is this going? Is it as fast as it should be going? What's going on here? And in some cases, you know, a more savvy consumer is going to start to, you know, mess around with the configuration in the home.

28:24
Josh Angotti
That's often a good kind of logical place to start is my, does my modem slash gateway need to be restarted? Does my router need to be restarted? Like what can address this? Are all the plugs connected properly? But not everyone's going to do that. Not everyone's going to evaluate their kind of in home equipment configuration. So what we're starting to look at is try to understand when there are frequent and regular speed tests and that's yet to be defined. What is frequent? What is regular? It may be different from one consumer to another. Is it a leading indicator of frustration?

29:05
Josh Angotti
Because know, honestly Ellie, like we both, like we've been in that situation, we've run those speed tests and if it's a customer that's maybe less likely to work through the configuration in the home, they, it might, they might just land on this conclusion that the service isn't supporting them the way they need to be supported. And it could lead to churn. And churn is, or service cancellation. The term we use in the industry is churn. I think that is always something service providers are chasing. How can I as a service provider reduce customer loss, reduce churn? We've all seen these studies of how expensive it is to acquire new customers, how much less expensive it is to maintain customers. So the last thing we want to do is lose a customer that we already have.

30:01
Josh Angotti
So yes, we've started looking at that data and we're starting to evaluate and try to determine what is frequent, what is regular, is there correlation between certain customer segments, certain customer geography and the frequency of speed tests. So yeah, it seems like a very rich area to explore.

30:24
Ellie Tehrani
And you talk here about how to improve the overall experience for the customers in order to obviously keep them. And that leads me to my second set of questions, which is in terms of how you differentiate in the space that you're in, like broadband services, how do you approach product differentiation at Windstream and what sort of strategies have worked for your team?

30:50
Josh Angotti
Yeah, Ellie, that's so interesting because I think it's so much easier for us to think about product differentiation with when we're talking about customer facing products and services that are maybe less commoditised. So if we're talking about phones or we're talking about running sneakers or you name it, even when I was in the video space, it was a lot kind of clearer. There was more opportunities for differentiation. There was convenience and ease of use and friction reduction and giving the customer the fastest access to content as we possibly could in the broadband space. It's a bit more commoditised and the focus is for my team is on reliability, service predictability, those two things, reliability and service predictability.

31:42
Josh Angotti
And that's why my team is laser focused on building that self healing functionality into our network so as to correct impairments before the customer ever even notices that they're experiencing some level of degradation. And to take us back to the previous question, it prevents the speed test because the customer never notices that there's any kind of inconsistency in service and they don't feel compelled to run a speed test. So that's when I think about differentiation in a more commoditised space. It's really just about reliability and dependability.

32:19
Ellie Tehrani
And one of the factors that sort of Windstream have focused on, or one of the areas that the company is focused on is the rural populations and rural areas versus the urban. And you mentioned reliability, predictability, et cetera. How do you approach that in parts of the country where offering that type of service doesn't come as easy?

32:46
Josh Angotti
It's true. It's so true. And I love that you brought it up because the contrast between the experience I had supporting the broadband network at Comcast is stark from the experience that I have supporting the broadband network at Windstream just because of the density alone, we build out our network operations centers and they were so dense in the Comcast footprint because of the metropolitan areas that were serviced. And that's just less so in the Windstream space, which presents its own set of challenges. I mean, in many cases it's a lot more expensive, you know, to operate a sparsely populated broadband network. It just fewer people, there's less economy of scale there. So it does present some interesting challenges in that space.

33:45
Josh Angotti
It's also very interesting because we have to think about kind of what are some of the, what are the, some of the more severe weather issues that are dealt with in rural areas, like tornadoes. That's not. I mean, sure, there are obviously Comcast markets that have to deal with tornadoes, but I think that's probably less the case as a ratio to the customer base at Windstream. So all of these things have to be taken into account. And it does become really challenging to figure out how do we guarantee service reliability and service support. And I think that's why when I think about this kind of, when I think about the process around this, I think that there are weather events that are going to be unpredictable.

34:37
Josh Angotti
And that's why it is that much more important for Windstream as a company, and for my team in particular, to build a network that when those weather events are not occurring, that our customer base can rely on service consistently and reliably. And we have a network that can address and identify and address impairments, identify and address any kind of health signatures that lead us to the conclusion, like frequent speed tests or whatever the case may be, that something might be amiss and the network needs to be able to conclude what that problem is. So there's a lot of time and effort that's going into data analysis and a lot of analytics are done in order to kind of determine what are those signatures that indicate good and poor health of the network.

35:32
Josh Angotti
And then what are the corrective actions that can be taken remotely that don't require a technician to go to some remote area? That's another challenge that we have to deal with. What can we fix remotely in order to maybe even get ahead of an issue that avoids eventually will turn into a physical issue requiring a technician to go and make a repair.

35:54
Ellie Tehrani
And going back to your customers, how do you incorporate their feedback into your product development cycle and specifically from rural customers?

36:05
Josh Angotti
Certainly we look at churn numbers. We frequently evaluate kind of are we seeing trend changes? That's a big one. We also have a really great mobile app that we've launched that allows for customer feedback. We've also integrated quite a bit of that kind of forward looking network analytics, sort of proactive communication and analysis into that application. So the system that my team has built to analyze and assess the network health is kind of feeding insights into that app so that our, all of our customers, especially our rural customers that might be further away from an available technician are getting information on the regular as to whether or not their service is up or down or if it is experiencing impairments when they can expect a repair to be complete.

37:03
Ellie Tehrani
I think it's so important for companies to ensure that all the voices are heard and especially as they're developing products. So it's interesting to hear that Windstream is actually focusing on a part of the population that is, you know, less served and hasn't been focused on to date. So kudos for that. And then moving to AI and all these talks about automation and integrating more AI into systems and processes. You've described three phases of AI implementation and operations.

37:40
Josh Angotti
Specifically.

37:40
Ellie Tehrani
Specifically, could you walk us through those phases and where most companies, including Windstream, stand currently?

37:48
Josh Angotti
Yeah, absolutely. And this was, I have to give some credit here. Some of this came from another Harvard Business Review article that I read where I was kind of trying to understand how AI is getting deployed in other companies. And I adjusted some of that information a little bit for my environment. But the first phase that I think about is leveraging AI as a work partner. It's the best way for me to think about it. This is sort of the chatgpt Bard sort of environment where users are communicating with the generative AI for the intention of getting feedback. So refining ideas in the product space. It might be working through a new concept and kind of going back and forth in terms of maybe even the framework in which a product person is building a requirements document or defining a customer experience.

38:45
Josh Angotti
That sort of give and take, almost very conversational is sort of phase one. I also think phase one encompasses that leveraging an AI agent to support chat or call routing of customers. Again that sort of an extension of a work partner in the sense that there is communication coming in from a customer and there is feedback coming back to them from an AI agent. Windstream has done a wonderful job of, of kind of adopting that first phase and this happened even before I joined. I can't take any credit for this at all, but I was thrilled when I joined the company and I saw that, I think that it was at some time, at some point in 2023 that they had already licensed a generative AI client and had made it available to the entire employee base for the purpose.

39:42
Josh Angotti
Of course it sits within a walled garden since it's licensed, but made it available to the entire employee base for the purpose of kind of that work partnership. It's fantastic for understanding acronyms of the company. I know we've all experienced that where we start with a new company and we've got an endless list of acronyms coming at us and meetings and on emails. It's a great place to kind of identify, understand what the acronym is and then understand what the system does for the company. So things as simple as that. But then of course it also, since it's sort of a walled garden of a public or of a generative AI client, you can ask it things that aren't necessarily related to Windstream and it still has all of that information and we're able to leverage all the newest and most recent algorithm updates.

40:27
Josh Angotti
That's phase one. Phase two is when a company starts to integrate those AI methods into operations. And I think this is a major step. Not I think some companies are starting to wade into this area, but they're leveraging AI to make operations changes that are actually impacting the customer experience, configuration changes, maybe even customer navigation experiences, things like that where the AI method is making decisions and making changes that are impactful to the customer. So it's no longer just this sort of give and take work partnership in terms of a almost like the smartest intern you've ever had sitting next to you. It's moved beyond that where it's making operational shifts and we are starting to do that at Windstream already. We've started to feed network information into that licensed gen AI client which collects and aggregates data from other systems.

41:36
Josh Angotti
As I mentioned before, you know, think care and repair systems and marketing systems and sales systems. And it's pushing out insights to our technicians. So when our technicians are in the field, whether they're doing a customer install or they're doing some kind of line maintenance, repair, whatever the case may be, they're able to use an app that's feeding them information and insights that's coming from the, the generative AI client. So now we're starting to see decisions and changes being made based off of that data.

42:12
Josh Angotti
I think the third phase, and I don't know that there are a lot of companies doing this yet, and it's probably just because we haven't progressed quite as far as we need to in order to get to this point, is when we give phase two basically autonomy and those algorithms are constantly improving on their own, cycling into direct customer experience impacts. I just think that there's probably some hesitation to take this step, and understandably so.

42:43
Ellie Tehrani
And even within that first phase. You mentioned the AI agent, for instance. I mean, what we're seeing today is sort of continuously improving, but I was at a conference not too long ago where they were talking about it's not just the facts, but it's also the tone. Right, so are we there yet with the tone of these agents whereby a customer would be pleased with the interaction they're having with an agent versus a human? Because we've all been there where we get very frustrated when we're getting the chatbots or the agents that are perhaps not as human as we would like them to be.

43:27
Josh Angotti
Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of companies, I should clarify, have done a great job of integrating those clients, those AI clients into that experience. Whether or not those AI clients are always delivering kind of desirable results is maybe a different story. And I think you're right. I think there's still distance to go there for sure. And I, I, I, I will say though, I, I find that at least in my experience thus far, most companies have been very measured, very careful about how they've implemented AI, especially as it relates to customer communications and customer interactions. And that makes a lot of sense. And I think right now it feels like a lot of the refinement and improvement of the algorithms are in kind of in that area.

44:17
Josh Angotti
You know, that's when we think about core AI tools, that's at core AI algorithms, that's really where the biggest focus is. I think it will come down to individual companies and individual industries to figure out how to safely move to phase two. That's probably not a core AI algo problem to solve. At least not at this stage because it's just a little too proprietary.

44:43
Ellie Tehrani
And what advice would you give to organisations that are sort of in the beginning of their AI journey when they're implementing AI tools into their operational environments? Are there any common pitfalls to avoid?

44:58
Josh Angotti
Yeah, I think that there are. There are a few things to consider in that space. I think, like I mentioned, I think Windstream did a really wonderful job. A couple of things really had really wonderful foresight in terms of licensing a generative AI client early on and putting it in the hands of the employees and allowing the employees to start to understand and gain experience with it. I think that there is oftentimes, and there's oftentimes an urge with new technology to centralise control. And I don't know that's the right place to be right now. I think when we talk about, I've given a couple of examples of how Windstream has, you know, the network related systems, the sales related systems, the marketing and the care and repair and so on and so forth.

45:54
Josh Angotti
I really believe that those teams that work on those systems are best positioned to determine when and where AI can apply. That is not, that's not to say that governance has no place. I think governance is absolutely necessary, but maybe at a higher level when we start to think about how those various systems produce insights that ultimately roll up to that generative AI client that's aggregating those insights and providing even more surgical insights based off of aggregated data across multiple systems. That's probably where more centralised control makes sense. I don't, I've never really liked the idea of maybe appointing a quote unquote czar. I don't know that positions our employees to be able to leverage the technology and the way that it's going to be most beneficial for the company. I really like the idea of democratising access to encourage adoption.

46:57
Josh Angotti
I think I mentioned, you know, Windstream's done some really great sort of forward looking steps to make sure that this happens. One of the things that our IT organisation has done is kind of frequently notifying our employees when that generative AI client is improving and ways that they can use that generative AI client to maybe work a bit more efficiently. You know, we're moving from early phase AI adoption using tools as a work partner to that next phase where we integrate them into kind of automated, algorithmically informed operations. And I'm encouraging our teams to use all of the tools available to them at their disposal. I think inclusive of AI tech is an important way to help Our companies move down that path.

47:59
Josh Angotti
And then I think, like I mentioned, providing kind of frequent demos of how AI tech is getting integrated into the company and into different parts of the business that sort of expands everyone's imagination about what could be done and I think that it puts them in a better position to be able to apply it in the specific areas where they're working. I, I host a, every other month technology talk and the first one that I did was on AI and I the guest that I had on that technology talk was an individual in the IT organisational leader who's responsible for most of the AI applications that are in being deployed in Windstream.

48:43
Josh Angotti
And I thought what was so helpful is we talked a little bit about what's already been achieved, kind of some of the things that are currently in the works and then some of directionally kind of where we are headed. And I received emails after that technology talk from folks in the field, technicians, other folks in other operations teams with new ideas about how we could leverage the AI tech that we've already got. We've already deployed within Windstream and they kind of applied it to their work area. And I think just the education of hey, this is what we, you've done, this is what we've built. And I'm somebody you can talk to if you have ideas or if you have questions.

49:32
Josh Angotti
I think that connection of here's an opportunity to be creative, here are some tools of creativity and then once you've kind of roughed up your idea, I'm somebody you can talk to help refine it further, I might be there, I might be able to help you take it to the next step. That's what I think is I think those pieces, those building blocks will go a long way in any company.

49:57
Ellie Tehrani
Such a great point. I think a lot of the fears that or hesitancy that a lot of people have in various roles of using tools or AI is because of lack of knowledge of IT mainly. And I think that we will see improvement in every organisation as people are shared that knowledge and understand how they can better use the tools. But I want to use the last few minutes to cover some future outlook and advice from you both to organisations as well as to aspiring product leaders. Starting with the organisations we're seeing across all verticals, that resources are becoming more limited. How should organisations approach prioritising and creating efficiencies within their product teams?

50:52
Josh Angotti
Absolutely. This is something that Windstream like others are dealing with kind of this concept of more with less. And I think that There are a couple of different frameworks for addressing resource constraints in the product teams and beyond. Some of those strategies are. For instance, some companies purely base their prioritisation on business cases and financial value. I prefer prioritisation that's based on a company vision and a company strategy. And I recently published a three-year vision for Windstream that kind of outlined here are four major pillars, and they were aspirational in terms of where the company wants to be three years from now, and then broke that down into a 2025 strategy.

51:47
Josh Angotti
So in order for us to stay on track to deliver against those four aspirational pillars, here are, call it 20 to 25 different projects, products that need to be supported in calendar year 2025. We're going to use that information as kind of a compass for Windstream to inform our quarterly priorities. And that's kind of how we think about it now in terms of quarterly work. It's sort of scaled agile, so to speak. Those quarterly plans then roll up to a 2025 strategy which rolls up to that three year vision and the plan trickles down to, you know, more agile style development in terms of, you know, scoping the work in each quarter.

52:33
Josh Angotti
I think this helps product leaders in a really significant way in terms of where should I spend my time, where, because we always have people coming up with new ideas and concepts and ways to improve the business. But we need to, we need to stay on track. And I think when there is senior level leadership that's able to provide those tracks for us to work on, then we're a lot more effective. And I think we tend to undervalue the importance of that traceability. And I think that when we really think about, when we spend time to think about traceability at all levels, it optimises our work output, it provides transparency and predictability for deliverables.

53:24
Josh Angotti
And I really also find that it inspires our teams in terms of, even if I'm developing against a set of tasks, if I can see how those tasks roll up to some feature functionality that rolls up to some initiative that I'm aware of for that quarter that rolls up to a strategic initiative that's been identified by leadership as important for calendar year 2025 that rolls up to a pillar associated with a three year vision, I find that to be much more inspirational and much more motivational than whatever, it's kind of a popular term, whatever the flavor of the week is, whatever new whiplash direction I'm being pulled in. I think that's.

54:17
Josh Angotti
And I think having that traceability makes it that much easier for us as product folks to serve as liaisons across the organisation to explain and impart the importance of the work being done. Because I also think that's an important role for a product person to be able to draw those connections for folks that might not necessarily see the connections because they're in the weeds every day. And I think that's important for us to be able to do so.

54:47
Ellie Tehrani
Well put. And goes back to your philosophy. I would be the first to put it on paper. And finally, advice to aspiring product leaders. What sort of key skills or experiences do you think they should focus on developing?

55:04
Josh Angotti
Honestly, I would spend time getting comfortable being wrong. I think that is just such an important piece of being a product person because then there's just no hesitation when that new product comes your way or when that, you know, that leader asks you to get involved with some new program or project. There's no hesitation to just start to put pen to paper immediately. And I think if we're comfortable with being wrong, then we can be effective at moving products forward.

55:36
Ellie Tehrani
Thank you so much, Josh. So well put. Thank you so much for taking the time. Especially been such a pleasure having you on the elusive consumer.