Build The Right Product with Eric Weiss, Executive Coach

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Eric, executive coach and founder of Full Cycle Executive Coaching. And they discuss Eric's CTO maturity model, a guide for where you're at in your career as a CTO, and how to stay close to your customers to make sure you're building the right things. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Eric at 00:00:31) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. I like your content. I was a big fan. I think I ran into you about over a year ago, right?

(Eric at 00:00:50) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:51) Yeah. And you had shared in the Slack that we're part of the CTO maturity model. I want to talk a little bit about that. What is it, and how did you come to make it?

(Eric at 00:01:03) Just jumping right in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) I want to jump right in.

(Eric at 00:01:05) Yeah. Well, it's part of my journey. So, I don't know, should I get into background?

(Eric at 00:01:14) Yeah, for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) Yeah, whatever you want.

(Eric at 00:01:17) Okay. I'm just going to start at the beginning because it all ties together. You know, obviously maturity model—I mean, this was me kind of analyzing and assessing my own maturity as a CTO and trying to figure out what should I be doing? What should I be focusing on? What are my priorities and all that? But to go back to when I was a little boy, honestly, I've just been a hacker my whole life. I used to tear apart my old electronics, my old He-Man toys, and rip out the circuit boards and Frankenstein jab at it with batteries and stuff to see if I could make it twitch or whatever. And my dad got one of the first home PCs, and of course, once I found out I could play video games on it, I just started tearing it apart, and I was obsessed with it. And he took me to this computer shop with this bucket of parts and was like, "Can you teach my son how to put this thing back together again so that he can fix it when he breaks it again?" And that was it. I've just been obsessed with computers my whole life. Became a hacker in kind of the early '90s, dial-up days, phone phreaking, and just doing some, you know, nefarious things in the digital realm. And that's it. I've been coding my whole life. I've been just building things and innovating and just obsessed with cyberpunk futurism, you know, technophile.

But I became equally passionate about leadership really early in my career. I got my MBA in entrepreneurship pretty much right away because I wanted to work with startups. And I just started mentoring and coaching and working with startup founders as a fractional CTO, basically, from the get-go. So as I was going through this journey as a technology leader, I just found it's such a complicated role. There's so many different facets of it. It's not just like, "Oh, build a thing and ship it." It's security and compliance and regulations and audits and processes and hiring and culture and you name it. And I just never—I always had a really hard time understanding, at different stages of the company, what should I be focusing on? I can't focus on everything. I can't prioritize everything. I tried, and I burned out really hardcore.

And so I went looking for a maturity model. I went looking for, "Okay, when you're a startup, these are the things that matter. When you're a growth stage, scale stage, enterprise, these are the things you should be focusing on. These are your KPIs." And I couldn't find anything, so I built one. And I kind of—I have a deep product background, so I just took the persona model, and I just created these different kind of user personas for the CTO at different stages of growth. And yeah, what are the priorities? What are your KPIs? And mainly, what are the things that hold you back from reaching the next level? What are your growth challenges? And then I just started shopping it around. You know, part of the Seven CTOs Elevate community, so there's a ton of great CTOs there that I—how we met, right? So through that, webinar, surveying people, trying to understand and get their input. I did a bunch of webinars for VC portfolio CTOs and so on, and basically just gathered data to try to put together some baseline. Of course, you know, you ask ten people, you get ten different answers. But, you know, consolidate it on something that I felt pretty good about, and that's where we are. And so then as a coach, as an executive coach, I work with CTOs and help them assess, you know, what stage of company you're at, what persona do you fit, and then what are the gaps, right? Where—what do you need to let go of? What do you need to grow into and help them mature and to be the right size CTO for their company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:55) No, I love it.

(Eric at 00:04:56) That's how we got here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:57) And the reason why I was so attracted to it is because the first book I wrote, I was trying to do this, essentially, and I couldn't find a good way to do it. And so I instead shifted to just talking about what they care about as far as there's different types of CTOs. There's the CTO that really cares about product. There's the CTO that's an MBA and it's just kind of a CTO, really business strong. And so instead of me going through this maturity model, I instead just sort of listed out these different groupings of personality types that I saw that, you know, sort of transcended the specific maturity model, but was more of where their interest and their heart was as a CTO. But then I saw this, and I messaged you, and I was like, "Hey, can we put it in the book and give you a bunch of credit?" And you're like, "Yep." And I'm like, "Let's have you on the podcast to talk about it." But—

(Eric at 00:05:55) Awesome. And your approach is perfect too, by the way. I mean, it really is important to know what type of CTO you are, and that might fit you at a certain stage in the company. And I deal with this a lot where there are CTOs that are just—they're just the hacker. They love being in the startup stage. And when the company grows, it outgrows them. They're not happy anymore. They need to go back to a startup. And so what I do is I try to see, can I help them mature and grow? But there are definitely cases where I actually coach CTOs out of the company and back into a role that really fits their persona. So, you know, they're both—you're along personality dimensions. I'm along sort of a time dimension, but they're both relevant for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:35) Yeah. One of the things that I noticed—and it is pretty rare, you know, definitely the 20% of the 80/20—but I do these interviews, and I could tell that this individual is semi, you know, depressed about the fact that they don't get to write code anymore. And there's people that say it like, "Oh, you know, I don't get to write code anymore." I know what it's like because I haven't been writing for the past three years after writing for seventeen years. So I'm like, "Yeah, you miss it, but then you also find love in other things," right? But there's some people that miss it and they just want to go back so badly. And one of the things that I saw, a pattern that I saw, is that some of these CTOs were super self-aware. And so what they ended up doing was they ended up creating what I have commonly seen as called the office of the CTO. And that'll essentially be a cutting-edge six to eight person or whatever R&D team that's charged with figuring out problems for the company, you know, throughout that size, if that's luxury at a certain size that you can have a whole team dedicated to that. But they would then go over there and sort of have the VP of Engineering type person fill the role of being the leader for the engineering and the product and everything like that. So I tell people all the time now when I see that they're really upset about not being able to code anymore, I'm like, "Look, you can still be the CTO and code. You just have to make sure that you get the other things taken care of because that engineering org needs leadership."

(Eric at 00:07:59) Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. That CTO/VPE split, it just—it's part of the journey. It happens, or at least the conversation comes up with pretty much every company. And yeah, I see the same thing, right? That kind of chief innovation officer, that head of R&D, where the CTO goes off. The challenge there is, I think, just there needs to be enough there for them to really push the tip of the spear on in terms of innovation so that they don't end up kind of going into production and getting their hands in all the pies and breaking things. But, yeah, no, that's absolutely—that's the journey. And that's the hardest thing that I find that CTOs let go of is how can I fall in love with headcount and budgeting and process and all of this meta business stuff as much as I love coding? Because coding is—loving my love for coding is the thing that got me here, that got me into the role of the CTO. How do I fall in love with this business and this strategy stuff to the same degree as coding? And some people do it. And there's ways, actually. There's Pavlovian tricks, you know, reward systems. You know, you do the headcount forecast and you get to code for an hour, kind of thing. But some folks, yeah, it's just not who they are. And that self-awareness, actually, that you mentioned, that's actually the key. The number one kind of area that I focus on with every single client is develop self-awareness. That's what this is all about. What's a model of anything? It's a way to assess yourself, your company, dig deep, figure out who you are, and then, you know, make choices.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:35) How much does—the intersection that we're talking about is typically serious life change. I imagine a lot of the people come to you because they're burnt out or some major issue. Maybe with their—for me, I've had issues with my family. I've had issues with all sorts of things, and those were all, in hindsight, just opportunities to grow and make different decisions, right? But this buds up really closely. I find that a lot of the tech conversations, whether it be at conferences or podcasts, they focus on, you know, things like your maturity model or specific technologies or specific strategies to implement technologies or build versus buy. They focus on a lot of these conversations. But the whole personal development side of things that go to an extreme of like a Tony Robbins type deal or, you know, coaching concepts and all of it—that isn't typically—that's the 20%. That's not talked as much. But I have found it to be equally, if not more important than the other thing. What do you—why do you think that is?

(Eric at 00:10:33) Yeah. I'll tell you why. So this kind of goes deep into the philosophy, but there's a pattern that I find most CTOs suffer with. I call it the hero mindset. We are these pinnacle problem solvers, right? We thrive on swooping in and fixing everything, solving all these problems, and we just take a lot of burden on our shoulders. We're also not great at leadership. Naturally, we don't leverage other people or trust other people or know how to communicate to other people as well as, you know, perhaps an entrepreneur CEO would. And so we just take a lot on our backs. And that means we don't ask for help. We don't know how to ask for help. And so that's it. And so we struggle underneath this burden until we burn out. That's what happened to me personally.

So I was CTO of a company. I had a baby at home, second baby, basically. I had a baby, then I decided to go join a startup, which, you know, whatever. Okay. In hindsight, had my second kid, and I swear to God, I was coming to work every day with puke on my shirt, saying, you know, wearing the same clothes. I was completely frazzled, didn't sleep. I was irritable. I was a total mess. I was making mistakes in my code. I mean, I was really—I actually screwed up really bad and blew up our AWS and cost my company a lot of money. And I just realized, I've got to quit. I've got to get out of this. So I took a sabbatical. I actually spent four months just hiking up in the mountains and meditating and doing a bunch of kind of soul-searching. One thing is I came off the mountain with this principle that I'll never let work take precedence over my health or my family again. That's been my core principle ever since. But then that's how I kind of eased into this world of consulting, and I started doing fractional CTO, CTO coaching, and now, you know, primarily executive coaching across product and engineering. And so this is the principle that I coach my clients: you're a leader. You know, when you become a CTO, you're not measured in the hours you work. You're measured in those moments that you show up and you make the right decisions or when you can motivate or inspire people for them to work. You know, I have this kind of—you talk about the 80/20 rule. It's like you can be a 10x coder, but that's not a scalable system. That is ten times maximum productivity of one individual. If you want to scale an organization, even if everybody else around you is only 80% or maybe even one-tenth as good as you are, well, that's still a scalable system if you can lead them effectively. So this transition from the best coder and the best problem solver to an actual leader is really challenging and, you know, takes a lot of work, a lot of effort. Some folks just hate it. They don't want to do it, so they either quit, go back to being a startup, or they hire a VP of Engineering. But even then, it's a cop-out to say, "Oh, you go hire a VP of Engineering, and I'm going to go hide in this R&D cave." You still have to lead. You still have to communicate. You still have to connect the strategy down to the teams. You know, you can come up with this crazy vision of the future, but how do you actually get it down to the ground level where the teams are bought into it and can realize it? So those are the challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:48) I used to say that I hate repeating myself. I was like, "You write code, it's there. It's there forever. As long as the memory is there, you just write it, you know, it's there." And then I was like, "I hate repeating myself," and I'd go about my relationships. And when people would ask me things twice—and this is way earlier on in my life—I'd be really frustrated about it. Little did I know, becoming a public speaker, you know, the same talk that you give with the same jokes, you know, you adjust it slightly, but a hundred times. And so I think it's such an interesting journey that you go on in life. And I was curious because you've been doing this successfully, coaching CTOs, technology entrepreneurs for—for how many years now? How long have you been providing for your family and doing this thing full-time?

(Eric at 00:14:33) Full-time, yeah, about five years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:35) That's success. Dude, you got it.

(Eric at 00:14:37) Oh, yeah. No, I'm in it to win it from now on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:41) Yeah. Yeah. That will stick, and that will scale, and that will grow. And so because, you know, we don't have all the people in the room with us right now to have people, you know, ask questions and stuff, I was just curious, when you look at your experience as a whole or maybe what you're experiencing sort of now when people come to you, what are the top one or two things that you hear over and over and over? And maybe we can dig into it a little bit because I'm sure there's people out there that are experiencing that if you're seeing it a lot, and then maybe we can give them some value.

(Eric at 00:15:16) Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Burnout and hiring. Main thing. How do I—basically, how do I scale my team? How do I scale myself? They're all interrelated. I'm burned out because I don't have the team that I need. I can't hire the team.

(Eric at 00:15:29) They're too expensive. I don't know how to sell the company well, whatever it may be. So there's a lot of challenges kind of wrapped up into that. But, you know, I do focus on kind of growth and scale stage companies. So those are those kind of challenges.

(Eric at 00:15:41) There's different ones very early stage and later stage. But those are the things I hear about the most is I can't develop or lead the team that I need, and therefore, everything's on my shoulders. I can't delegate, and I'm burned out. Those are the most common things that I hear for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:56) And then do you find, for me personally, learning how to fire and hire correctly? Like, they go hand in hand because if you're not getting it done, that's typically for me, that's the sign I don't trust my team. Right? And so if I don't trust my team, I have to change my team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:13) And that has really difficult conversations. And I don't know, I tend to be more introverted. And so the act of having to let someone go is, like, it was really hard for me to come up with a mental framework for how I could do it. But do you coach people on that? Is that something you find that a lot of people struggle with?

(Eric at 00:16:33) Yeah. There's two extremes to that. One is, and I think more common with CTOs, less with other execs, but CTOs tend to hold on to people too long because they take personal responsibility. I have not led this person the right way. It's my problem that this person is failing.

(Eric at 00:16:49) The other extreme is, you know, this person just isn't performing, and so I'm going to let them go. But, you know, with the CTO specifically, yeah. Again, they take a lot of that burden on themselves. They know they're not a great leader, and so they assume everything's their fault. So then it's all about expectations.

(Eric at 00:17:03) Right? So if you're crystal clear on what I need from the person and they still don't perform, then you just have to make that hard decision. I dealt with it myself, actually. I remember when, you know, when I was CTO, there was a couple guys on my team that were there from the very beginning. I mean, and I love these people.

(Eric at 00:17:22) Like, we had, you know, in the startup days, like, we're a band of brothers and sisters, you know, working on a common journey. And these couple guys just really were checked out, weren't even showing up to work. Like, we're totally getting nothing done. I was doing everything I could and held on to them way too long. And, you know, obviously, in the startup stage, you're burning cash on these people.

(Eric at 00:17:44) And it was the hardest thing I had to do was to let them go. But I read a book at the time, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. And that's kind of what that talks about is you can either hold on to this person because you don't want to hurt their feelings, or you can make the whole company crumble. Right? So by keeping the wrong people, you actually hurt the whole company.

(Eric at 00:18:07) And imagine you have, you know, 100 or 1,000 people in your company. They all have to feed their families. They're all trying to, you know, accomplish things in their life. And by keeping this, you know, this baggage or this dead weight, or sometimes even toxic people, you're actually making the whole company suffer. So in that lens, I thought less about them and more about everybody else at the company.

(Eric at 00:18:30) And that just made it a lot easier because I looked at everyone else who was passionate and committed and pulling their weight. You know? I'm not going to hold on to you and make everybody else suffer. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) Yes. I love that one. And because I'm a super nerd, I had to come up with like a million of them. There's one other one I use that I really like. And it's like, if we're talking about somebody that's not performing at the level at which the other people, the level at which the market can perform, because you have other people performing at that level.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) Right? So it's like a common thing. There are enough people I know I can go hire people at this level. This other person I'm currently dealing with is not close to that level and therefore, they're dragging things down. So you can definitely use that perspective of the greater good concept because they have to feed their families and you have to do right by your teams as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:20) There's also the one of allowing them to grow through this experience of being honest with them about how they're not good enough. And I know it's, that's a way harder. Yeah. It's hard. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:32) But it's true because I've done this a number of times because I would hate, I found my original instinct was to blame it on something else, so that it wouldn't maybe land as hard with them. And be like, oh, it's this or it's like budget stuff or whatever. I'd find other excuses to rather than being more direct with them. And then I found out that if you're direct with them, there's definitely the emotional human response.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:58) But I have actually had people come back to me, like, three or four years later, that are like, you know, you were the fifth person that fired me because I wasn't good enough. And that was the final wake-up call. And then I, you know, became much better. And then I got this job, and now I'm growing in my career. It's definitely the rare case, but I think you kind of owe it to them because you didn't do a good enough job hiring them and vetting them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:23) So it's definitely on you a little bit, but you owe it to them to let them know where they're currently at in the marketplace so that they can have the opportunity to be pissed off at you and just walk away and kick something. Right? Or, you know, get upset, but then realize that this is an opportunity where they can choose to put more time into it.

(Eric at 00:20:43) Yeah. Yeah. If you're not, you're robbing them of that chance to grow. Yeah. Another book I'm a big fan of is Radical Candor.

(Eric at 00:20:49) And so what you're talking about there is the ruinous empathy quadrant, either by letting them go without being honest or keeping them around. You're in that ruinous empathy, which means you're afraid to challenge them. You're afraid to give them that direct feedback because you care so much about them and their feelings that you actually allow them to fail. You know?

(Eric at 00:21:08) It's like letting somebody walk up on stage with their fly down because you don't want to embarrass them, and you let them fail in front of a huge audience, for example. But so yeah. So radical candor is something that I weave into all my work and make everybody that I work with read, mainly because, you know, I am very far in that radical candor quadrant, and I speak very openly and very directly, because I care so much and honestly just, you know, don't have time or even the mindset to kind of be political about things. So first, I just, you know, establish trust, let them know that I care, try to be as, you know, diplomatic as possible, but you got to take the feedback.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) That's a good trait of someone you're paying to help you grow.

(Eric at 00:21:52) Right? How much time and energy are we wasting trying to protect our feelings? Let's just get in there. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) Yeah. Did you ever think, like, you know, back when you were in high school that you would be doing something like this?

(Eric at 00:22:05) Interesting. You know, I was an uber nerd myself. I mean, obviously, I was a hacker, coder, all kind of stuff. And I was also social. I was more, so I was a social nerd, and I actually had the nickname the nerd whisperer, which I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but that's kind of what it's called. Like, I would just hang out with the really nerdy guys. And that was my crew. Like, we'd play video games and Dungeons and Dragons and all this stuff. And that's just, those are my people.

(Eric at 00:22:35) But I was also kind of friendly and outgoing with everybody else as well. And so they kind of gave me that, you know, like, why are you hanging out with those nerds? So that's me. That's who I am. And so, yeah, leadership has just something, been very natural to me.

(Eric at 00:22:50) Like I said, I got my MBA, you know, pretty much right out of college, at night school, kind of working full time. But engineering leadership, I always just found that I could get more done with a team than trying to do it myself. And so I decided I was a better leader really than I was a coder, and I loved leadership more than I loved coding. So it's always been a thing. And my leadership style has always been coaching.

(Eric at 00:23:12) I've never really liked managing. I don't really like fiddling with people. I'm fiercely independent myself. And so I really wanted people to realize their potential and be the best version of themselves they can be. And so coaching is just always something I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:28) Yes. I could tell that too when I first met you. And that's one of the reasons why I like having this podcast is because fiercely independent people are doing their own thing. And so you have to have some sort of reason to come together because they're not just hanging out with each other 24/7. They're all doing their own thing with their teams. Right?

(Eric at 00:23:45) I know. It's a little lonely. You know?

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:48) I know. Yeah. I don't have as many friends as I'd like, but it's okay.

(Eric at 00:23:50) But it's more rewarding to help people. That's what I found.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:53) Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I've never, I'm an entrepreneur in my own right and running my own business, but building product, building my own product, like, I never had that thing in me that was like, I've got this idea. I'm not an inventor in that way. I'm more about helping people and helping teams realize their ideas, really.

(Eric at 00:24:15) I'm just not that kind of idea guy. And so it started with consulting and with coaching and everything. And that's where I get my fulfillment is really working one-on-one with people and helping them realize the best version of themselves and accomplish. And then I get just a ton of fulfillment from that. And then I get to work with, like, 15 different executives, and I get to work on so many different things.

(Eric at 00:24:35) That's another thing is I love variety and novelty and newness and innovation and all that. And so I get to work in so many different industries, so many different products, so many different customer bases. So I don't know if I could go back to, like, one company where I kind of have the blinders on and I'm just working on this one thing for five to 10 years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:55) I don't know. I couldn't. I mean, yeah. After, so like, you know, three times a week, I'm like, I get to talk to people putting spaceships in, and then people designing data into DNA, and then organic cloning of salmon. And it's like to get to, you know, jump in and research these things. It's like, it's what I live for.

(Eric at 00:25:14) Now you're going to make me want to start a podcast. That's awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:16) Dude, start a podcast. Start a podcast for sure. Yeah. Dude, we're five years and over 500 episodes into this thing.

(Eric at 00:25:23) Wow. It's crazy. That's incredible. Yeah. I mean, I, yeah.

(Eric at 00:25:27) No. To answer your question, I never thought that I would be an executive coach. And in fact, actually, I am still coming to terms with it as my identity. Like, when somebody asks me what I do, for so long, it's been, you know, I'm an engineer. I'm a CTO.

(Eric at 00:25:44) I'm a tech guy. And it actually has been really hard for me to say I'm an executive coach. Because I don't know. It just, it's just whatever. Maybe it's a career change or whatever, but it is something that...

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:56) I know what...

(Eric at 00:25:57) That I'm still kind of coming to terms with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) I know what it is for me because I used to look at that as silly stuff. Like, in my earliest, youngest engineering self, I'd see the Tony Robbins, and I would sort of write that stuff off. And then so then I would be a little bit shy to be like, yeah. I do public speaking and stuff now. I would always just introduce myself as an engineer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:19) And then now it's like, I guess I own immediately.

(Eric at 00:26:22) It's funny to say. So I used to do the, before COVID, I was doing the conference circuit. Right? I was speaking at conferences every year and stuff. And I got the nickname the Tony Robbins of agile software development.

(Eric at 00:26:35) Yeah. I was like, I'll take that as a compliment. That's an interesting little niche to put me in. But, yeah, I was doing all these talks around agile first principles and, you know, feedback loops and effective product design, everything, or user-centered design. And so, that's it.

(Eric at 00:26:49) I'm an agile evangelist. I weave feedback loops and iterations and small bites and things into everything I do, including coaching. But, you know, that was an interesting moniker. I was like, okay. I guess I'll take that.

(Eric at 00:27:03) Sure. I'll take that as a compliment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) Well, dude, the dude's helped how many millions of people, and he's, yeah. I mean, he's...

(Eric at 00:27:11) For sure. I mean, I just, you know, I grew up in the '80s and '90s. And, yeah, you're right. Seeing him on TV and the infomercials and stuff was like, what is that? What's that guy doing? But helping people. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:21) What does your wife think about all of this?

(Eric at 00:27:24) She's, I mean, she's my number one fan. She's the reason I'm doing it. When I quit my job, when I burned out, she was the sole breadwinner for at least, you know, I mean, again, I took a sabbatical, but then, you know, it took me a few months to ramp things up, probably a year, year and a half before I was really making kind of like a full-time income. So yeah. No.

(Eric at 00:27:44) She's been in my corner the whole time for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:46) Dude, that's amazing. Yeah. That's like, that's how you do a strong team. And then you said you have two kids now?

(Eric at 00:27:52) Yeah. Two girls. Two little girls.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) Nice, dude.

(Eric at 00:27:55) And they are my world.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:56) Oh, I've got one little girl, one little boy, and then I've got one on the way, and we don't know what it is yet. So...

(Eric at 00:28:04) Which is another reason why I can't work nine to five anymore or nine to five plus, you know, in the startup world. No. I built this life to be flexible around my family. I pick up, I drop my kids off in the morning. I pick them up, you know, in the afternoon.

(Eric at 00:28:18) I take them to the park, things like that. So, you know, I sacrifice, you know, a bit. I mean, obviously, I could work more and I could grow and I could hire people and be bigger and all that. And then I'm like, yeah. But then I have more responsibility and I have to work more and I have to be responsive to people in off hours and, you know?

(Eric at 00:28:34) No. I'm not going to do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:37) Yeah. You can definitely take on too much work. I mean, I think we've all done that. Whether it's...

(Eric at 00:28:41) Oh, yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:41) Within our own company or if we're freelancing, you can take on too much work. And then it's like, why am I doing this? This sucks.

(Eric at 00:28:49) Yeah. The scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset, that was hard for me as a consultant. In that moment, in that mindset of scarcity, I will take every billable hour I can possibly get because it might go away, feast or famine. But then transitioning to that mindset of abundance has been transformational for me. Actually, in my coaching career, the less I work, the more successful I am.

(Eric at 00:29:14) And I've learned that now because the less I work, the more time I have to focus on my health, to be happy, to meditate, to let my brain work on its own, not be this close to something, but let my brain crank on things and make connections. And then I show up, you know, as a coach. I mean, it's a performance. You know? So when I show up for my clients, it's like, boom, it's on. And I can only, I only have so much energy for that in a day.

(Eric at 00:29:43) And so I found that actually by shrinking the number of clients and number of hours I work, I show up so much better. My clients are happier. I get paid more. I get more referrals, all that kind of stuff. So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:53) So do you have a wait list now?

(Eric at 00:29:55) I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:56) Nice. How do people join that if they're interested in checking you out or learning more about that?

(Eric at 00:30:00) Yeah. Well, so my website is fullcycleproduct.com. You can email me at [email protected]. Find me on LinkedIn. Probably find me through your website, through your podcast.

(Eric at 00:30:12) We post this thing, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:13) Yeah. We'll put links in the show notes for sure. Yeah. But yeah, you know, man, I just think you're such a great person that if there's anything else that we can do—I know you have a book, right? I think you have a free book on your website, correct?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:24) I think you have a free book on your website, correct?

(Eric at 00:30:27) I do. Yeah. Yeah. I have a book called Build the Right Things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:29) Okay.

(Eric at 00:30:30) Which, you know, is sort of just this brain dump that I had at a certain point in my career where I was doing this conference talk around user-centered design. And, you know, yeah. So I have this free book, and I will give it gladly to anyone who will read it because that's my evangelism there. Well, actually, you know, kind of brief story about why I wrote that. As a CTO and as an engineering leader, it's all about efficiency. Efficiency of execution, increasing velocity, decreasing waste, right? Increasing that stability of the sprints. And I got really good at it. Right? Like, there it was—it was a tight ship that I was running.

(Eric at 00:31:01) And then we would release these features and, you know, nobody would use them, or they wouldn't work and we'd have to rebuild them five times. Or our product manager would tell us one thing and then change their mind, and we wouldn't understand whatever. And I had this epiphany that it doesn't matter how efficient you are. There's nothing more wasteful than working on the wrong things, on building the wrong things, working on the wrong problems. And so I actually became a product enthusiast, product evangelist, and discovered user-centered design, which is basically the agile equivalent of product development, where it's all about super tight feedback loops with customers every step of the way, whether it's, you know, talking about a problem, talking about a concept, early wireframes, prototypes, you know, every step of the way, getting feedback from customers.

(Eric at 00:32:04) And so in the agile development world, it's the same thing. Right? We want to iterate tightly and get feedback and make sure that we're working along the right direction. I apply those same principles over in the product world and, again, became this evangelist going to all these conferences, talking to all these startup founders and everyone being like, stop just building the shit that's in your head. I hope I can curse, by the way.

(Eric at 00:32:27) You know? Stop building the things that are in your head. Stop building the product that you think people want and then going out and trying to sell it to people. Talk to your customers. Figure out what their needs are, and then co-create the solution with them, right? And engage them in the process every step of the way. And so I'd have these conversations, and people would say, you know, well, my customers won't talk to me. I said, well, then it's the wrong problem. If it's really a big enough problem, they're going to give you their time because you're building them a solution.

(Eric at 00:32:56) Anyway, I'm getting hyped now because this is my thing I'm evangelizing. Right? But then, anyway, I—you know, it came out in this conference talk and all these things and ultimately became the book. And so basically, every company or every client that I work with, I say, okay, it's like a filter. Go read the book and let's have a conversation about it. And if they're jazzed and they're like, yes, that's it. That's what we need. Okay, I know we're going to work well together. If they come back and they start challenging me and they start talking about how—okay, so this is the editor. Everyone talks to me about Steve Jobs. Every single one.

(Eric at 00:33:19) Every time I get up, I even have a backup slide in the deck. Well, what if Steve Jobs—you know, if Steve Jobs asked everyone what they wanted, he wouldn't have built the iPhone. Or Henry Ford. You know, Henry Ford has this famous quote, which is misrepresented, but if I ask people what they wanted, they would ask for a faster horse. Have you heard that one?

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:51) Oh, yeah. I've heard all of it. Yep.

(Eric at 00:33:52) Right? It's bullshit. Yeah. Henry Ford built the car not because people wanted a faster horse. It's because there was too much horse poop in the streets of New York. That's why. He went and figured out what's the problem. Here's the solution to it. It's not that he didn't talk to people. And Steve Jobs said the same thing.

(Eric at 00:34:12) He actually—his quote, and I have this backup slide that I always bring out. It's something like, you have to get so close to your customers that you can anticipate what they need before they do. That's a different thing. That's different from I'm just going to build—I'm a miracle worker, and I'm going to build this thing that's in my head. It's get super close to your customers, understand in great detail what their problems are, and then the right solution will come to you. All right? So that's where that book kind of came from.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:41) Dude, I got goosebumps right now. And his customer for the iPod was his daughter, right? He made it for her because he saw her going around with her compact disc or the tapes or whatever. But, um, yeah, it was for, I think, Lisa's her name. But there's a documentary on it, and whether that documentary was right or wrong is not for me to judge. But in the documentary, the inspiration for making that was for his daughter.

(Eric at 00:35:10) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) He was close to his customer. He saw his daughter. She was into the music. She had these problems and he was like, I'm going to build something you can put, like, so many songs on and then you don't have to carry around—you know, we used to carry around these CD sleeves, you know?

(Eric at 00:35:24) Oh, yeah. Yeah. I know. Oh, yeah. Get that skip protection on there because it's going to—

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:29) 100%. Yes. Yeah. But you're exactly right. It does get mangled. This idea that he was sitting around on a throne and was like, what do the people need next? No. You can watch people struggle with the cases of CDs or you can watch people, you know, interact—like, have difficulty taking their music with them and you can say, everybody has a problem with this. Everybody loves music. Like, I could make a way to solve their problem better than them lugging around all their music physical disc with them.

(Eric at 00:35:59) Exactly. And do you think that they went and they built the first iPhone and didn't test it along the way, that they just miraculously came up with this perfect interface and just released it on the world? Hell no. No. You imagine how much usability testing and things that they did with it? Of course, they iterated on it with real users and customers. So that's it. I just basically evangelize the same agile principles that we use in software development, in new product discovery and development as well. And so that's why I say, as a coach, you know, I came up through this sort of CTO coaching, but I am equally as passionate about product CPO coaching as well for this very reason. Mainly kind of selfishly or through the lens of the CTO is like, you need to serve us better.

(Eric at 00:36:43) You need to serve the CTOs better. Give us more context, more understanding of the problem, and, like, iterate on these solutions. Go validate an idea before you make my engineering team spend a bunch of time building it, and then you scrap it. Right? But, you know, you can never really throw anything away. You have to modify it and mangle it until it turns into this Frankenstein monster that you then have to maintain. And now you're on call fixing broken legacy code that's been fixed 20 different times because you didn't figure out what the customer actually needed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:14) You're bringing up too much pain from my past. You make the mistake so many times, and you're just like, I'm glad I figured out how to do it right. Let's—you know, for me, it was a little backwards because I stumbled into it by accident, doing it right the first time because I was hanging out at my parents' real estate agency. And, like, I was building little widgets and tools to help the realtors, like, do their tasks and then that ended up becoming a suite of tools and then became a business and got bought and and so on. But the origin of it was I'm sitting around these people who are having these problems and I'm building these little solutions because I had those skills.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:46) Then I make, you know, money and I go, oh, what's my next great idea? And then, like, I screw up, like, multiple times and then I get back and then I hear someone say this advice about, like, staying really close to the customer. And I was like, that's why it worked for me the first time. Now I need to do that as, like, my permanent strategy.

(Eric at 00:38:04) Yeah. So the core, or one of the first core concepts of the book, is I say, find your tribe. So forget about the product. Focus on the people that you want to help, right? It's, I don't know, doctors, teachers, moms, you know, whatever it is—pick a group of people that you care so deeply about and get super, super close to them. And they'll tell you their problems. You'll see—there's problems abound. There's no shortage of really big problems to solve. You don't need to go off and say, oh, it's this for that, or I got some crazy new idea that's out there. No. Get close to people and figure out, you know, the workflow, the things that aren't working for them, the one-size-fits-all, you know, big solutions that don't really apply in their niche set of circumstances, and then build something custom for them. And, you know, more people like them are going to want to use it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:56) Yes. And you can save yourself a lot of pain if you ask them if they'll pay for it first. Because some problems—absolutely—some problems people want solved and they complain about, but they're not willing to pay for it. Yeah. That's a hard lesson.

(Eric at 00:39:07) Yeah. So I actually—part of the discovery, kind of getting into the process a little bit—we talk about, you know, really, first is, like, how much time and energy are you spending today to solve this problem? Right? What products are you using? How many hours a week does it take? Whatever. And then you kind of get that number as, like, an anchor, and you say, okay, how much would you be willing to pay to make this problem go away? If you had a magic wand and you could just solve this problem immediately, what would that number be? And that's your, like, perfect solution. Like, if you literally had a magic wand, that's how much you could charge. And then as you build the product, you kind of start with, like, all right, we're solving, like, 50% of the problem, or we're cutting the time by X percent. You can kind of work your way up to that optimal solution. So that's how we do not only pricing, but even prioritizing which problems to solve.

(Eric at 00:39:55) You get in there, you get to know people, you kind of lay out—these are all the different problems that you're dealing with. Kind of run through this exercise, and then you can prioritize. Okay. These are the most critical pain points, the ones that are causing them the most frustration, the most time, the most money, the most energy, and those are the things that you go after. So there's your product right there. You don't need to search for product-market fit. It's staring you in the face. Now just go build a solution for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:19) Yeah. And now your company name makes sense to me—full cycle—because at first, I thought there's different types of coaches, right? You can coach people through, you know, hiring and firing and stuff and not have a good understanding of, like, business models and maybe, like, some of these things. And when I was reading about you, because you have these two case studies on your site, and so I was reading them and I was like, oh, wow, man. Like, Eric does—he's got, like, a wide breadth of understanding and he can help from everything from, like, the relationships with your, you know, C-suite executives or co-founders or whatever. He can help with that all the way down to, like, your actual time management. You've got, like—I don't know. I guess I'm just too big of a fan of you right now. I'm excited. You've got, like, this—

(Eric at 00:41:09) Oh, thank you. Likewise.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:10) You've got these skills. Like, you'll know how to actually tactically do these things. Like, here's how you analyze what problems to solve or here's how you manage your time. But you can also help with the relationship side of things. You've just got—you've got a lot of different ways that you can help people, which makes it easy for me to, like, you know, connect people with you or refer you or recommend you because, well, you're also in my network and, you know, Etienne—and Etienne's, like, said amazing things about you. So he built you up huge before I even met you. So—

(Eric at 00:41:42) Oh, great. Yeah. No. You know, it obviously comes with a lot of experience, but, you know, like I said, I've always learned that if you can connect with the people, if you can motivate and inspire people, get them connected to a vision and goals and those sorts of things, and then let them kind of figure out the details, right? I've always been kind of the big picture guy, and I'm a systems thinker. And I trust other people to, you know, to figure out the implementation. But, you know, it's funny you say, like, all of this wide breadth of experience, which—as a consultant, man, I was doing everything. A customer or a client would come to me and be like, what can you do? And I said, well, I can do this and this and this and this and this. I can help with your product, with your strategy, with your roadmap, with your architecture, with your security, with your software development practice, all this and that. And they'd just be like, you need to focus, man. It actually took me a long time. I kind of joke, it was like I had my second career, and then I had five different careers in five years.

(Eric at 00:42:42) And so actually converging on executive coaching was really hard for me to do because I actually had to let go of a lot of things that I was really passionate about. And, and really, you know, it took a lot of thought and consideration, but for me, it's more about, one, I just decided I really want to connect with people more than anything. And two, it's where the leverage is. It's where I get the most leverage in the organization. So as, like, an agile coach, for example, I would get deployed into these software development teams, you know, help them mature, become more efficient, blah, blah, blah. And eventually, it comes to the point where they'd be like, you know, you're trying to squeeze blood from a stone, man. You know? Like, why are we under all this pressure to perform better when leadership doesn't have their heads on straight or they're not aligned or we're getting garbage from product or we're getting all these fires that we have to fight in production because we never got to, you know, develop architecture. We're just pushing features all the time and, you know, that sort of thing, which I'm sure you're also—I might be bringing back some trauma, you know, for you and your listeners here. But, but that's where I found it.

(Eric at 00:43:47) I was like, it's all about leadership first. So I would always move up into the C-suite in general. And once I got them aligned, I found everything else would start to fall into place. And so that was the thing where I realized, you know, where I can make the most impact across the most number of companies was working in the C-suite.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:05) Why is it in life that these simple things—they're really, you don't have to have PhDs in them—to understand things like, I'll make it really human for a second, like to lose weight, you have to burn more calories than you take in, right? You know, you have to be active or, you know, you could take it 100 different ways. But the thing I'm curious to hear you explain to me is, why is it that these simple things—relationships with your coworkers or whatever it may be—are so hard?

(Eric at 00:44:39) Yeah, that's a really good question. And there's obviously different facets to it. It's obviously deeply psychological.

(Eric at 00:44:47) When I have an epiphany, when my client has an epiphany and they tell me how great whatever it was, I always say, like, I'm just telling you what's right in front of your face. I'm telling you what's right in front of your face, and you just couldn't see it. So these challenges are often staring us in the face. We're just, I don't know, making excuses. Maybe we're so busy that we can't see the forest for the trees. There's probably a lot of emotion tied into it and hurt and fear of judgment and things like that. It's all in psychology, I guess, at the end of the day. It's not a really pointed answer, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) I like to ask you the answers for the universe. I didn't—

(Eric at 00:45:28) Actually, yeah, 42. There it is. There's your answer. 42.

(Intro Narrator at 00:45:32) I love it.

(Eric at 00:45:33) It's the life, the universe, and everything, man. Yeah, and that's really, I think, what I do as a coach is I work with folks that are incredibly talented and successful at building things, but the people side of things is where they really struggle. They don't know how to communicate. They don't know how to lead, motivate. They don't know how to reflect and work on themselves. And I'll call back to what you said before—it's all about self-awareness. So that's the first thing and the main thing that I focus on is develop a sense of self-awareness, which is really the agile development principle applied to yourself. It's the daily retro.

(Eric at 00:46:14) When I meditate, I meditate every morning. It's my daily retro. It's stepping back, pulling myself out of the fray, observing myself and saying, "How am I doing? How am I feeling? What's working for me? What's not working? What habits are holding me back?" Obviously, I think about diet and exercise and sleep and things like that a lot, right? So for me, meditation is my daily retrospective. And then I actually have an explicit weekly sprint that I do for myself and for my clients where there is a weekly retro on Friday that is digging into yourself. And a lot of it ties to habits. What habits are giving me results? What habits are holding me back? And then I help them break and reform those habits.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:57) Well, that's amazing because life is long, and once you figure out and you get some small wins with a coach, then you can just build up that discipline and run with it. I used various different relationships in my life as coaching, and it—I definitely could have cut off a decade of pain if I would have just gotten an executive coach at the beginning.

(Eric at 00:47:26) I know. I know. Everyone should. And again, back to what you said, I think at the top, it's becoming much more common. Certainly, the CEOs, I think, have been using executive coaches for quite a long time. I mean, that's well established. But these other roles—you know, CTO, CPO, et cetera—are starting to see the value as well. And usually it's like I meet with a CTO and have a conversation, and they're like, "Okay, yeah, yeah, I do need help." And that's really what it comes down to is understanding that the world is really not on your shoulders. There's people around you who want to help you, who can help you, and you just gotta learn how to ask for it and then leverage it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:06) Do you find that age helps a lot with that? People getting older and just getting tired of repeating their mistakes?

(Eric at 00:48:16) I don't know.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:17) What's the average age of your client?

(Eric at 00:48:19) Yeah, mid-thirties. You know, so I'm in my early forties, and I'm kind of like a few chapters ahead, right? And so that helps me kind of resonate well as like, "Hey, I was you not too long ago." I would say that I do have some much younger, like co-founder or founder type clients that still have a lot to prove. And that's something that I see when it comes with age—you have less to prove to others, anyway. So I think that's, yeah, there probably is an age component or an experience component to being willing to say, "Hey, I'm not perfect, and I need help."

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:56) Yeah, especially as you described that. You're right. When I was in my twenties, my world was a lot bigger in the sense that now it's my family. It's so cut and dry, the most important thing in the world to me, and they all go to sleep in my house with me every night, right? So those are the thing, and then everything else is sort of secondary to that. And you don't have that in your twenties. You know, your friends and your groups and everything. Yeah. No, dude, this is great. I want to be respectful of your time. I know you have a tight schedule. We have a few minutes here to wrap up. Any, other than having people go to your website, fullcycleproduct.com—is that correct? And we'll put the links in the notes. They can get on your wait list or contact you, read your book that you have for free on your website to see if they might be a good candidate to working with you, because I know just off our conversation that you don't accept everybody, right? You're going to accept the right people that are ready for it. Anything else we can push out there into the world that could help you?

(Eric at 00:49:54) Take care of yourself, everybody. Yeah. You know, I think the message that I would probably leave with everyone is we're all super stressed out. We're all burned out in our own way. You know, COVID and everything that's going on in the world obviously adding a lot more stress and pressure to us. And yeah, make some space for yourself, make some space for your family, and just realize that by working less, you can actually achieve more if you take care of yourself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:25) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.