Leading & Developing Change Agents with James Barrese, SVP of Fintech at Intuit

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to James Barrese, Senior Vice President of Fintech at Intuit, about becoming a change agent as a leader. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:16) James, good to see you. Nice setup. You've got a studio? You got a producer over there?

(James Barrese at 00:00:18) I'm set up. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:22) What? Are you at Intuit right now?

(James Barrese at 00:00:24) I'm at Intuit. They have a really nice — it's like my living room here. It's very chill, very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:30) Yeah. Start hosting your meetings from there.

(James Barrese at 00:00:32) That's right. I might start another podcast of some sort.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:36) So I got introduced to you through Alex. How did you meet Alex?

(James Barrese at 00:00:40) So I work for Alex. I am part of Intuit leading the fintech organization, and we're driving a lot of transformation. I'm both part of the business unit here with our Global Business Solutions Group as well as part of the CTO office, so I've got two bosses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) Oh, very cool. So one of the things that I like to do at the beginning of the conversations is give some useful leadership insight or advice to the next generation. So my question for you is, when you have a team — correct, you lead a team?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:14) What type of behaviors do they do that stand out to you and you're like, that's someone I want to invest in?

(James Barrese at 00:01:21) So I always look for people who are change agents. And in every organization that is growing and expanding and thriving, you always need to be doing something different tomorrow than you are today because the organization needs to scale, the systems need to scale. And in order to do that well, you need to be having people at every level in the organization who are naturally helping us go from where we are to where we need to be. And so I think that's a very critical skill. It's learnable, and the more people do it, the better they get at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:00) So what does that look like, though?

(James Barrese at 00:02:03) It depends on what exactly it is. But somebody who can see, "Okay, here's the vision of where the company is trying to go, or here's what we're trying to do with our product or our tech stack, or these are the problems," and they're able to break it down into a vision, be it small or large, on where they need to go and build a community of people who see the same thing and want to drive change. And it could be either something simple like just process change — maybe we don't change the technology at all — to, "We need to come up with a fundamental new technology to accomplish something." But they're able to get a movement going within the organization if it's a larger organization and actually successfully build momentum and get buy-in and actually make things happen.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:55) Takes a lot of people skills.

(James Barrese at 00:02:57) It does. It's one of those really important things. It's both people, it's execution, it's communication, and organizational know-how as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:13) So you look for change agents. That's what's going to stand out to you. Is there another personality type or trait that stands out to you?

(James Barrese at 00:03:19) Yeah. I could go through — there's a long list.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) Let's talk about it.

(James Barrese at 00:03:23) Yeah. But there's so many different things that people need, right? It's that self-starter change agent, somebody who's in the details, rolls up their sleeves, understands the deeper things that are going on within our organization or what needs to happen. They're naturally curious. People who are learners, lifelong learners. So I could go on and on, but, yeah, I wouldn't say there's just one thing that I look for. And then another thing you need to consider is where are you and where are you trying to go, and what are the skill sets that you have within your organization already, within the culture and the DNA? And then what are those skills that you need to foster to help push you in a new dimension? And that might make you accent some skills and behaviors that you wouldn't otherwise. But just kind of like you're navigating the ship of your own organization. And when you do that, you need to hold up certain behaviors. It doesn't mean things that people are doing aren't important, but you're trying to help the organization grow. So you'll highlight and look for people with those missing talents that you need.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:39) And do you get to interact at all with the next generation — maybe like interns or the next cohort of people coming in within the company — or do you just interact with your level?

(James Barrese at 00:04:49) Oh, no. Absolutely. I work to interact with every level, and I think it's super important to do that. You need to be able to go up and down in an organization. And what I love — doing all through my career, I've done this — is it's a great way to test for an understanding of what you're trying to drive. So let's say, for example, I've got a strategy. And as you know, with communication and organization, you can never say something enough times — or people say repetition doesn't ruin the prayer, right? And so we'll be saying, "We're going to do XYZ strategy." Or let's say in the past, it would have been like moving to services or we're replatforming or driving this developer productivity initiative. And then I love sitting with the engineers on the ground who are making things happen, and I'll ask them, "Hey, what's our strategy? What's important?" And test for, "Are they hearing the same thing?" And if they are, they'll tell you what's working and not working with that strategy. And it's magic because you can help diagnose how something's cascading through an organization and what's working and what isn't working, and adjust accordingly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:10) Can you tell me about the time that you almost got fired at PayPal?

(James Barrese at 00:06:13) Yes. So I would say in that case, I was a new CTO, and I discovered a big problem. There was a really large platform initiative and a rewrite that was going on before my time, and it needed a reset. It was big, it was large, but it had some fundamental problems. And I had alignment across all of engineering, right? The tech team — they were afraid. They're like, "We've got this big issue and we need to go a different direction." But what I didn't do was I hadn't spent enough time building partnerships across the organization with the business in particular. And in retrospect, I didn't know my audience that well. And I'm direct, and I know what I'm doing. I've done this before. You know, I found that with platform rewrites, I've been doing them all through my career, right? Sometimes you do run into problems, and it's unfortunate, but it's not a big deal because it's fixable, right? You can always pivot. And I was naive, and I thought just being forthright in the details, technical, I had a track record — you know, in the past I'd done it many times before — I thought that would be enough. But I really hadn't aligned advocates across a bigger organization, especially a global, multinational company. And I didn't really have full context for the history of what I had walked into. And so I think as a leader, one of the messages that I have here is, you know, your job — a leader's job — is to really clear a path for your team. And you need to prioritize, especially if you've got a pivot or something that's bad news. You know, how are you going to get that through and get support for whatever needs to happen across the organization? And so in this case, there was an international board, and they weren't very technical, and they were frustrated — for years this initiative had been going on. And here I was, the new person walking in. And, you know, after years of hearing different stories, I'm coming in with yet another story. And so what I — you know, I had great coaching and I got great feedback. And my takeaways were really for new leaders: focus on transitions. They're important. They're real. You need to manage expectations, build relationships with key stakeholders. And then I think the biggest thing for a CTO, especially in a larger organization — you need to learn lots of languages. You're a translator. You need to understand how the business speaks about the business. You understand the engineering side. You need to understand how to speak product. You need to understand how to speak marketing. And your job is to bring all those together to drive strategic alignment and results. So long story short, I pivoted quickly. I learned what I did wrong, and I just created an analogy. In this case, it was a mountain climbing analogy. Like, "We're climbing to the top of this mountain. You know, we're at Base Camp 2. We tried to go up this face, and it wasn't the right one, and we're going to reorient and go up another way," and translate that to the platform. And I think the important thing here is don't admire the architecture, don't admire the technology when you're talking to different audiences, but instead, figure out how do you break through with your communication and help orient people on where they are on a journey, especially a big transformation. Like, "Here's where we are. Here's where we're going." And I'll always be able to come back to that. So in the long run, that board internationally loved me. I was able to come back to them consistently over time, fixing the problems that we had and navigating forward in a way that they could understand and have confidence in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:14) Nice. Good job. Now, did you start out as an individual contributor in technology? Where did you start?

(James Barrese at 00:10:21) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:22) Where did you start?

(James Barrese at 00:10:23) Yeah. I started out programming. I actually grew up programming. I loved it from an early age. I would type in programs from magazines or hack games. And then I was able to learn different languages in school. And so then I started out programming and did that for a number of years. And, frankly, I was actually torn. Do I keep programming, go as deep as possible, or switch into leadership and management? It was something that I went back and forth with for a while before finalizing my direction in leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:03) What caused you to make that choice?

(James Barrese at 00:11:06) Yeah. You know, one of them — a big driver — was I wanted to help make sure that the right decisions were being made, the right technical decisions for the sake of whatever the company was going after. And I'd seen a lot of times, in my opinion, the senior leadership didn't really have a deep understanding for the technology or what's happening within the engineering teams. And I was hoping to fuse together great technical understanding and great architectural strategy with great management and leadership and be able to do those two things well together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:42) So you — did you think it — like for me, I'll share what it was for me. For me, I was at that crossroads, and when I realized that I could do more by learning the communication skills to lead a team of people that I could amplify myself, and to me, that was attractive — like to be able to create a larger impact. But the thing standing between me and the larger impact was the management, communication, and leadership skills.

(James Barrese at 00:12:05) Yeah. Yeah. So mine was similar. So I actually had been an IC. I'd gone into management. I was leading a startup here in Silicon Valley. And two years, very, very aggressive. But unfortunately, like many startups experience, we had to shut down. And after that, I actually switched back, and I joined eBay as an architect and engineer, back to the IC track. And I wanted to go back to my roots. But during that time, it was great because I was able to get deep in technology again, but those things that I was really drawn to — I love leading people. I like strategy, and I like having a large impact as well and be able to drive across a larger, broad landscape. And I'm a systems thinker, right? And as an IC, I couldn't just do that in one area. I found that I could, as you said, really amplify myself and magnify my impact.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:09) Now I know we were talking — or there was a little bit of talk in the prep — about the changes that have been happening inside of finance and all of that, the future of financial technology. What's going on over there?

(James Barrese at 00:13:22) I am super excited. There's always a lot happening within fintech. And, you know, we went through a couple years ago — I'd call it a fintech winter, right? And I just see that there's perpetual innovation. And there are four big megatrends happening in fintech that I can walk through that I particularly am excited about. And what I see is within every technology trend that changes society, right, you need the culmination of a lot of things to kind of mature at once. It could be the technology, it could be how humans are interacting with it — you know, devices, et cetera — and then you hit a tipping point. And four big trends that I'm tracking — one of them is just around faster money movements. So the combination of bank payments and instant money is really maturing quickly. And a lot of people, they don't want to use credit. They prefer to either buy now, pay later or use money that they have, combined with — you see instant money movement happening like UPI in India, PIX in Brazil. In the U.S., the U.S. Federal Reserve has rolled out FedNow. And you just see instant money solutions also coming to bear. And then many companies are also simulating instant where they could use credit or risk models to make it seem like somebody has their money instantly. And so overall, that's just a big trend and is unlocking new experiences. The second thing that is really interesting is digital identity, specifically government-assured digital ID, and it's going to unlock a lot of use cases where you need assurance, or maybe it's an age-based pharmaceutical that you want to purchase. It's going to really help us unlock digital and digital commerce with the next level of assurance. The third big trend is around embedded fintech. I would call it — that's another way of saying digitization and just the weaving together of an end-to-end experience where somebody wants to get something done, and then the money or the lending or whatever it is that's financial is embedded into that experience end to end. And so at Intuit, that could be us embedding partners into our ecosystem to provide an end-to-end solution for our customers, or we're taking parts of our capability and embedding it in our partner ecosystem. And so that's just something that's accelerating, and we're seeing aggressive growth in embedded fintech. And then the fourth one — of course, I couldn't get through a podcast without talking about AI.

(James Barrisi at 00:16:03) But it's really real. And in particular, I'm super delighted with the experiences that we're going to be able to create with AI and just agents that are able to take payments or end-to-end workflows that we can automate. Or, you know, people talk about a virtual CFO, but I can see us creating AI endpoints that have payment capabilities woven into them and are PCI compliant and handle privacy and security and provide seamless experiences in these new channels. Let's say it's through voice or chatbot or some kind of avatar—is the fourth trend. So all of these are coming together, and we're doing a lot of work in these areas.

(James Barrisi at 00:16:50) And I'm having a lot of fun with the next wave of technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:55) Well, I've got questions now.

(James Barrisi at 00:16:58) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) This is the part of the interview where I have questions. The faster money movement, I see that. So not really a question, more of a statement. Like, I've just seen that trend.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:06) So from an outsider, I'm like, yeah, I see that. Now digital identity, government-assured digital—do we have any of this today? Like, is that going on right now or no?

(James Barrisi at 00:17:16) Yes, we do. So the standards have been worked on for quite some time. And so I was an advisor on the board of a company that was building the lower-level infrastructure. But even today—so I live in California. You can download an app and have a California digital driver's license. And in fact, I also have added it—Apple's extending support for it in the wallet. Now what I do want to point out though, the experience has to be phenomenal. And so you still have to beat the driver's license.

(James Barrisi at 00:17:51) So the other day, I was going through the TSA line here at the airport. So they're doing a test, and there's a placard at the TSA agent's site saying, "Hey, you want to use your digital driver's license?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I'm going to do it." I pull up my app, and unfortunately, it was like, "Hey, click here to refresh." And I'm like, "Ah, the line's moving too fast." So I pulled out my license. So that's an example where the technology's coming, and I think we're just at the point where it needs to add value, but it absolutely is. The infrastructure is coming, and it's being woven into the core platforms that everybody uses.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:29) Was that a federal thing or just California as, like, one-off state?

(James Barrisi at 00:18:33) Different states are supporting it. So a number of states are supporting the driver's license.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:39) But, like, globally, that's around—yep. So federal-level standards?

(James Barrisi at 00:18:45) Yeah, I got it. Yep. Yep. Assured identity in digital.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:49) I wonder if Tennessee—maybe Josh can take a look at that after the interview. Is Tennessee doing that or not? It'd be interesting. That's where I am currently. All right. Now embedded fintech. So I talked to Sri. I think he's at JPMorgan Chase now. He was at PayPal. And he referred to the embedded fintech as Ambient Payments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:10) He gave me this example of when do you actually pay for your Uber. It's like, you don't. It, like, it knows you completed the ride and it just kind of happened in the sequence of things. Are those two different concepts, the ambient payments and embedded fintech, or is it just two different phrases that kind of mean the same thing?

(James Barrisi at 00:19:27) Yeah, it's—there are lots of phrases that cover it. So those are the same thing. It could be a SaaS platform, embedded payments. Sometimes I use the term PayFac as a service where we're facilitating payments into other platforms, embedded lending. It's not just payments, but being woven into another platform. Let's say you're buying something. Buy now, pay later is a form of embedded lending. Right? And so that absolutely is a trend.

(James Barrisi at 00:20:00) And the reason why is, you know, people really want convenient solutions. They want to do the one-click experience. They don't want to come here to, you know, sign up for a service, and then I've got to come over here and I sign up for credit. You know, I come over here and I make a payment. The more we can all make these single-click or highly seamless solutions, the better. And then look at where the world is going with, like, AI. Right? At some point you'll be talking to an agent. Right? Let's say a digital agent. And it's going to need to be able to do everything and walk you through whatever service you're signing up for, whatever payments you're going to do, or maybe they're on the back end. And so all of these ambient payments, embedded payments, they all need to work together.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:54) Now, first of all, I want to say I enjoy your service because I am a customer, and I have done that instant loan thing, like, a year ago or so, with, you know, the QuickBooks. And it, like, knew my stuff, and it was just, like, one—it was so easy. It was, like, the easiest thing in the world, and then it took the payments out, and it was just—it was great. So that I as a customer, I had a great experience just putting that out there. My next question's about the AI agents. So if you can imagine that in the next year or two, there's likely going to be more AI agents than there are humans, if there's not already. At some point, these AI agents are going to need some autonomy and the ability to transact in payments. Are you seeing anything like that?

(James Barrisi at 00:21:41) I'm—we're building that. So absolutely. That is a key part of the future. And in fact, by the time this podcast comes out, we'll have announced a number of new capabilities that we have under the brand Intuit Assist. And so we're rolling out how we can take conversations and documents and turn them directly into estimates and invoices or bills. And we're going to just make it easier. Again, it goes back to solving the customer's problems, but we're going to be able to take emails to bills, documents that people upload to bills, and this is just the start of a journey.

(James Barrisi at 00:22:13) So I see a generalized need where we're going to be building, let's call it, a back-end capability to collect payments across any channel, be it a voice agent, be it a chatbot, be it a multimodal, you know, self-powered assistant. And it's—you're going to want to have it do anything for you. Right? It could collect payments. It could make payments. It could manage your money. But I'm always a fan of starting with simple use cases. Like, we've got to start with something that's actually solving a customer problem and then expand from there. And that's what we're doing in all of the AI releases that we're making.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:09) I could see that next step because I do Fireflies recordings of my sales calls, and we talk about what they need. And then I end up going and, like, reading through the transcription. They're like, all right, this is what we're doing, and then plugging it in. And that's just, like, this manual step that I could easily see being replaced in the future.

(James Barrisi at 00:23:26) That's a perfect example. Right? Yeah. And then going back to the embedded payments. Right? So how do we make it so that our capability, our QuickBooks platform, our Intuit platform, can embed into any kind of experience. And we can power that as part of bringing safe, secure, you know, fast payment solutions wherever you happen to be as a customer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:52) Yeah. Well, like I said, I'm a user of the product. I enjoy it. It's always doing more than I can learn about. Right? It's always like, "We can do this now." And I'm like, "Yeah, that's great. I got that solved over here." But it's good to see it grow and especially for the people who are just getting started because now when they join, they can use it to run, like, the majority of their business versus having to piecemeal different tools together. And so that's going to be really good for you guys long term.

(James Barrisi at 00:24:16) Yeah. And I'm delighted you're a satisfied customer, and that's what we strive for in what we're building. It's funny how you mentioned that, you know, there—it does so much. You don't even know everything that is going on. A lot of our customer requests, or when people call us for something, our platform already does it. Right? So we have so much capability. It's more than people have time to learn. And that's where I'm so excited where I can just simplify that. Right?

(James Barrisi at 00:24:46) Like, we can have an expert platform that understands and learns what you're trying to get done, and then it just does it for you. And that's the vision that we're after, and it's why I was so excited to come to join Intuit is that we've made so much investment in our platform, so much investment under technology, and we're at this tipping point in the industry of just creating solutions in this next round of just financial services solutions. I like to call our opportunity here at Intuit in particularly in fintech is we have an opportunity to build the world's best B2B2C financial network across our giant footprint in business, as well as our consumer footprint.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:35) Oh, that's right. Because even my brother's brother-in-law's motorcycle shop uses you guys. I'm using you for, like, business to business, like sponsorships and stuff like that. They're using you with business right to the customer. That's interesting.

(James Barrisi at 00:25:47) Yeah. We have the majority of small businesses in the US, and so, you know, it's across every sector. And so it's a great operating system. And the reason why my role was created is that we hadn't historically done as much in payments. So we have invoicing. We have banking. We do the capital that you're looking for that you're enjoying, and we're really proud of that. But with the world of digitization, we need to drive that across every single area where people are trying to move money, either getting paid or paying. You know, they don't want to do their accounting. They actually want to be paid or make more money or they want to get a service, and then the payments should just happen, and the bookkeeping should just happen. And that's where we're taking our technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:37) Have you guys gotten into Bitcoin at all? Whether you personally or the company?

(James Barrisi at 00:26:41) At this point, we haven't unlocked anything. It's something that we have absolutely extended our platform internally to be able to do, but we're looking at right now expanding our capabilities internationally for basic payments. And then I'm always looking at what's happening in the market. I kind of put it in that bucket of faster money movement and what people are doing with instant, and it's an area that I definitely see us supporting in the future.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:11) I'm a big fan. I wasn't at first. And then I started learning more and more and more about money, and then I was like, all right, I'm a fan. And so—

(James Barrisi at 00:27:19) Yeah. I always look at this as, like, just being pragmatic. Like, where do we solve a problem? Or how can we make something better, faster, cheaper? Right. And there's a lot of interesting work happening now with, like, stablecoins and cross-border money movement, and the regulations are getting figured out. You know? The technology is being simplified, and it's just making it easy and convenient. And so, definitely, there are many opportunities both with the technology and also with the different currencies. And then you can see, you know, different countries are going to come out with central bank digital currencies as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:57) Yeah. It's interesting. Do you read a lot of international finance stuff, I'm assuming?

(James Barrisi at 00:28:03) Yeah. Absolutely. And we have a presence internationally as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:08) That's right. That's right. Hey. So one thing I was curious about was when you have all of these different use cases within your product and your platform, how do you organize and prioritize the work that you're doing? Do you have, like, cohorts? Like, okay, these are businesses that are using it this way, and these are the feature sets that they care about. Like, how do you go about even thinking of those?

(James Barrisi at 00:28:34) I'd break it into there are a few different dimensions that we think along, and this is the way I also operate is, let's say, at one point, it's 70-20-10. So, like, 70% of what we're doing is on work happening that we're going to materialize in the next year. Right? So that are features and functions that are driving the business forward. And then 20% are on where we're expanding into adjacencies or expanding our capabilities. And then 10% are on, like, horizon three. So things that are two, three, four years out that might be experiments, might be proving, you know, a new crypto technology that may or may not manifest immediately into a roadmap item.

(James Barrisi at 00:29:36) And then I break down within those portfolios, their different prioritizations based on customers. And there are lots of different customer groups. So we have direct customers that are using our product. Developers are also customers. Accountants are also people that we're building for, and it's aligned with a strategy and a drive. And a great thing about Intuit is we have a company-wide framework and a discipline. We call them our big bets. And we have five big bets, and we align our strategy in those different areas.

(James Barrisi at 00:30:01) And so we just—I'm a big fan of nested goals and nested alignment because the more you can drive a unified prioritization across a large group, you actually just accelerate progress. You accelerate the business. You accelerate everybody's focus, and you get to market with whatever you're trying to do much more quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:21) So you call them customer groups—direct customers, developers, accountants?

(James Barrisi at 00:30:25) Yeah. I think of different cohorts of customer segments.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:32) Okay. So I'm taking notes here, by the way, if you see me typing away. I was like, you got the 70-20-10 features driving the business forward, and then within that, you got your different customer groups that you look at. And then you prioritize based off of what?

(James Barrisi at 00:30:47) We have a strategic framework. So there's a company-level framework. And then there are different initiatives within those areas. So one of our strategies is to disrupt the mid-market. And with that, there are significant investments that we're making in AI and new capabilities and, let's say, new payment experiences. And then that drives a tree of, okay, in order to meet these customer needs in that market, here's what we're ready to go build.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:19) Got it. Okay. That's interesting. How do you guys come up with this stuff? I could be more specific if you want.

(James Barrisi at 00:31:28) Yeah. No, I actually love it. So there's a bold vision. Like, what—I'll say my approach personally is have a bold vision. Like, where is the world going? And as I led with those fintech megatrends happening—so where's the puck going in future years? But then back into it and you don't want to just go invest in, you know, something that's five years out, but back into it and say, where do we have customer gaps or opportunities to provide value in the immediate term that's going to build—build on our product strategy and drive customer benefit. And so it's really sausage making. Right?

(James Barrisi at 00:32:10) Because you have this Rubik's Cube of what you're trying to—where you're trying to take your product, what you're trying to do with the business, what's happening in the outside world. And balancing all of these different factors together so that you come up with a ranked order list of priorities and initiatives.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:30) You have some smart people over there. Alex is great. I asked him who the smartest person he knew is, like, leader was at any company. He told me it was you.

(James Barrisi at 00:32:37) Oh, that's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:38) I'm not lying.

(James Barrisi at 00:32:38) Do you know that? Do you—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:39) You know that's how I found you?

(James Barrisi at 00:32:41) That's—I'm very, very honored. But, you know, one of the things I strive for is to hire people better than me. And so there are lots of people out there, and I'm only as good as the—

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:52) Well, you're doing a horrible job at that.

(James Barrisi at 00:32:56) No, I'm doing a great job at that. That's why it looks like I'm so smart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:58) You've given some amazing insight. I love the strategic framework. Now as far as coming up with that, is it an off-site? Who comes up with that strategic framework that you then align your goals to?

(James Barrisi at 00:33:15) I personally really like to work with a team where there's both a combination of tops down, here's what we're seeing strategically, and then listening for where are there holes in it, what are we missing, how do we refine it. And it's a combination of a series of discussions, off-sites, workshops to synthesize, refine, and then most importantly, prioritize. Because, like, I don't know about you, but there are a million things that I have on my list that I'd love to go do. You can't do everything. You've got to prioritize.

(James Barrisi at 00:33:51) And that—and you also, when you come out of a prioritization, you want alignment. You know, not everybody can be happy. Not everybody's pet projects can happen, but you want to drive a process. And there are lots of tools and frameworks on how to do it. But when you come out the other side, you've got a short list of your top priorities, and you've got leadership and your team backing. Like, yes, those are absolutely, if we had to do it, those are the ones to go after. And then you step forward and you go execute. And the thing I'd really highlight is, like, having the right idea or the right priority isn't good enough. It's all about execution.

(James Barrisi at 00:34:33) Right? You know that famous quote—vision without execution is hallucination. So it's more important that you go make those priorities happen. And in the course of making them happen, you're going to need to pivot and adjust, and you're going to learn information. Maybe you need to slightly change it. But really, today in today's world, it's all about speed, execution, adaptability. And keeping that North Star is, like, what are you doing for your customer? Like, what—okay, this strategy is great, but what end customer benefit is it going to bring?

(James Barrisi at 00:35:10) And you keep that in focus about really driving something for your customer, and it's going to help be your compass as you navigate through that execution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:20) I love it. Well, there's only one thing you could say to the next generation of tech leaders. What would you say to them?

(James Barrisi at 00:35:26) I would say get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Right? There's so much ambiguity and noise and confusion. And your job as a leader is just to get comfortable with it and make the best decisions that you have with the information that you have as fast as you're able, and just move forward.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:50) Well said. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it, James.

(James Barrisi at 00:35:53) My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(James Barrisi at 00:35:56) I feel great. That was a lot of fun.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:59) 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.