The productivity habits of top performing marketing teams

Hello, lovely humans, welcome to four o'clock. Oh my goodness, it's late in the day, but thank you all so, so much for being here today. It's dead, dead appreciated. And hello to everyone who's dropped in the chat where you're watching from as well. We've got folks like Theon, Elle, Laura, Lana, Paul, I need to turn my brain on, Bagel, Christiana and so many more. A big hello to Dave Hughes in the chat who said it's wet and miserable outside. It's wet and miserable outside in Ely, Cambridgeshire today, but you know, it's nice inside if a little bit dark. So let's get going with today's session and say a big hello to everyone. So some things to do before we get started. First things first, it's our conference in forty four days. So if you haven't got your ticket yet for the Marketing Meetup Conference, we would love to see you there. So you are very, very much invited. Nineteenth of March in London, ten phenomenal speakers, the community coming together from all across the world, you'd be super welcome. Second thing, we have a space for you to hang out after today's session. Probably not after today's session because you're going to want to stop working. But if you want to hang out with the Marketing Meetup community after today, then head to our private, space, which is called Hive, right there. There's a lot of conversations going on. A really lovely feature in there at the moment. It's called Ask for Help. We've seen so many people helping and supporting one another in Hive after today's session. So please do head to Hive if you'd like to. Okay, cool. So that's two things that you need to know. Let's get speaking about today's guest. So today we have Danny Spires, who is the VP of Digital over at Asana. Now, when we were putting together this season all about doing a lot on a little, we were thinking that one of the things that really, really matter is about productivity. And I can't think of a better company to sort of represent that idea of productivity than a company like Asana. But then you match that with the words that are associated with Dani when you come to speak to people who work with Danny. Now Danny is very self effacing and will not take compliments too gladly. But when we speak with like the CMO of Asana, a lovely person called Jessica, there could not be warmer words that are thrown Danny's way. So we have a fantastic session today which is structured as a Q and A format. So if you have your own questions, pop them into the Q and A function, which is found on the right hand side, and we'll make sure we incorporate them into today's session. Before we get started, in truth, I want to say a big, big thank you to all of our sponsors because without them, we wouldn't be able to make these sessions happen. So a big thank you to Wistia, to Mailchimp, to Cambridge Marketing College, to Frontify and Planable, all our unbelievable companies that are here to serve as marketers, folks like our community. And as I say, without them we wouldn't be able to do what we do. We speak about each on rotation, but you'll also see them in our newsletter very regularly. So a big shout out to them and a big thank you too. Now, as I get rid of my slides and add Dani in, I'm just gonna say hi to Jean, to Susan, to Trasmita, to Fanola, to Sasha, to Lauren. Thank you for being here. You're absolute legends. And also thank you Dani for taking the time today. And I appreciate the wave. So, Dani, let me queue you in with the first question. And let's point to some of Asana's research as part of this. So like, one of the biggest problems with productivity, it would seem, is that we end up doing, like, work about work, which kind of means stuff like status chasing, meetings, switching tools, etcetera, etcetera. And there's probably quite a lot of people in the chat right now who can resonate with meetings about meetings. So in twenty twenty six, where are you and Asana sort of seeing the biggest waste in Teams? And therefore, what's the fastest lever to pull in productivity? Yeah. I mean, hey, glad to be here. I'm sorry to bring everyone up so late. It's early on my side, eight AM. So I'm trying to get my coffee energy up. But I think, you know, I was reflecting a lot on last year, and I feel like last year was all about experimentation with AI. And what I really saw like work about work, and you know, it wasn't the promise of AI of getting rid of work about work, it actually made work about work very different. So instead of writing status and you know, funneling things for approval, you're writing prompts for AI to consolidate and write your statuses for you. So it's really about how that the busy admin work changed versus, you know, work about work going away. What I think going into this year that excites me is we've all had some time with the new tools. Things are moving super fast. And really, what I've been advising my team on and what I'm seeing at Asana is that, you know, we have to focus, like block out some of the noise, there's new tools coming at you every day, and work with some of the systems you have and see what you can get the most out of there first before adding more tools to the mix. Because adding a layer of AI on broken processes and, you know, stuff just makes them even more chaotic than it is without it. I love that. It is so true. I was gonna say worse words there. It's so true. It feels like we're all guilty of this to a certain extent. We're trying to add things in, and so to, to just sort of take a step back is really, really important. Also, the way, thank you for waking up at eight o'clock. It's very much appreciated. Let's head to the next space because I think this really incorporates elements of your answer but allows us to go a bit deeper. So we're operating all the time in a space where, like, in the spirit of the tools that you've just spoken about, where we're constantly getting pinged, whether it's Slack, whether it's email, whether it's WhatsApp, etcetera. How are you seeing people actually sort of move away from that sort of place of being pinged all the time and and being distracted? You use the word focus in your last answer and actually produce that focus. Yeah, I mean, it's really hard and people are probably not gonna like the answer, but it sometimes takes some discipline to do it. And one of the first things I guide my team on is like, get your personal life organized. You know, if you think about your day, there's only so many hours and you can only divide things into so many slices. And I start with having like a good morning routine because it just helps me get into that like focus and flow state much faster. And then when I think about, like, creating focus for teams, it's really about the rituals we all share together. So, like, if one team says no meeting Wednesdays, but the rest of the marketing organization doesn't adhere to that, it's really hard to block that time for people to do focused work. And maybe it's not a whole day, maybe it's like a time block, you know, during specific days, but I found that very successful just blocking time for people to do heads down work. The other part, and this is where the discipline comes in because I'm guilty of it myself is I get plenty of emergency pings. I manage all of our web properties here at Asana. So anytime someone sees something that may not look particularly right, it gets flagged to me. And instead of, like, piling twenty people into a Slack channel to solve it, it's really about having the discipline to follow the process for, like, escalations. So on on our side, we have a really robust intake process in Asana. Over the past year, we've layered in, like, AI to help route things appropriately to reduce the human lift there. But it's really helpful if I'm just like, oop, create a task in Asana, add the requester, and then AI kind of picks it up from there and make sure it gets routed to the right person to solve the problem. And having the discipline to not be reactive to the pings goes a long way. And it also is like one ping at a time training someone to just go through the right process instead of trying to take the fastest path. I imagine there's like a more diplomatic way than than just saying go away, please stop pinging me. But I I wanna could I dive in a little bit more into I don't know why I just said dive in. That that sounds me makes me sound very cool. But can I ask a little bit more about getting that group consensus on stuff like blocking out time for the meetings across the company because I think that's a really great point that like a lot of people struggle with? Like we're a relatively small team and I'm gonna use Elle who's watching in because she's a great example. So Elle has a a million pings coming in every day from lots of different directions and this year at the beginning of the year, she said, I'm gonna protect that time and I'm gonna start blocking out stuff, which kind of works because we're a four person company. But I imagine when you sort of step into a fifty person organisation or a hundred person organisation and you're not able to protect it in that way, that becomes quite tricky for you to protect your own time in that way. How have you seen people be successful in blocking out their time and sort of doing that? Like, I'm doing this now and I'll come back later. Have you seen any great examples of that? Yeah, I think there's like a couple of things. One, we're lucky at Asana, there's generally a company wide consensus on no meeting Wednesdays, although my Wednesdays never get to have no meetings, but I try to protect the team's time. I think one of the things I've tried to do is really block focus time on my calendar. So I know like the times of day where I feel more productive, and I'll block that. And if someone tries to schedule over it, I have a much higher criteria for saying yes to that meeting. And we can probably talk more about meeting productivity as well. But if it's like a fifty person meeting, I'm probably just going to decline. Someone from my team's already there. I trust that someone will send notes or actions and I can catch up and watch the recording. And that way I protect my time. If I'm needed to be like a decision maker in the meeting, that's a very different, you know, conversation and then I'm a little more flexible. But I would say like balance, you know, being super protective of your time with flexibility in the right moments for the right types of meetings because obviously we can't all protect different times on the calendar. Nothing will ever get done. Definitely. I love that. And Donna in the chat, in the Q and A actually has followed up on on one of your points of view, right from the off where you sort of said about sorting out your personal stuff as well. So Donna's asked, which work productivities have you used in your personal life? I manage my workday well but feel like personal tasks still get missed. And I guess, like, it's impossible to ignore that these things do intersect with each other. So what what have you into your own world? Yeah. I mean, candidly, I have my own Dani project in Asana where I keep a lot of my personal tasks or if I just, you know, have a thought and want to jot something down to come back to later. My wife, on the other hand, is a big fan of the paper calendar. And it's like knife to the heart for me, but we use that to stay aligned and I end up putting it on my personal Google Calendar. So it's like all connected to me. I would love to get Ariel using Asana, like on a personal plan so we could just sync up our days a little bit better. But I've, you know, I've seen Google Sheets work like we used to do that when we travel, you know, plan trips is just kind of make our checklist, go go through it, you know, stuff like that. You don't have to have fancy tools to stay organized. And I I think that's it's it's interesting that that's the point that we've returned to twice already is the the fancy tools, point. I'd actually be interested in chat, for the folks watching in, of the productivity habits that you have brought in. So my wife and I, we we have a a joint Google Calendar. And honestly, I think it's, well, it hasn't saved our marriage, it's definitely overstating. But it's definitely been a a positive impact, on our on our lives. So I'd definitely be curious, on that. And in the meantime, let's branch into AI, Dani, because, you answered that in, you referenced AI in the previous answer as well. So we have, a question that says, and I can even add these things to the stage. So we have a common question. So do you personally use AI agents or other types of AI automation to help you, with your personal life and productivity? So if we take personal life out of the question because, we we've covered this off. But in terms of your productivity and work, how are you seeing AI agents actually come into to your work day to day now? Yeah. I mean, for us, I'm I'm lucky at at Asana, we've been, prepping to roll out AI teammates. So our version of agents, which is, on track to launch this March, which I'm excited to get more customer feedback on. But we were we were one of the teams that really helped pilot the the new features and the product. And one of the things I found, and maybe this is helpful for AI adoption as well, I see a lot of stuff, like I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, there's a lot of noise of like all the things that are available to us. And what I really focused on was like, okay, we can go buy a bunch of tools. We also have a bunch of tools that are going to be releasing their own versions of AI agents and workflows and stuff. So I took a step back and I was like, most of our work is in Asana. I wish everyone used Asana like we use Asana. But because all the context is there, leaning into our own product agents was like a very simple first step to kind of use AI to accelerate our team's work. And I started with myself personally, I made my own personal assistant called Atlas. And it was, you know, a bunch of different prompts. I set it up to like remind the team when they have a roadmap item, you know, coming up on a due date. If it's overdue, you know, it kind of follows up with them and nudges them to do that. It saves a lot of time for me, Scrubs all of our project status updates and, like, summarizes what's going on. And then we do, like, temp checks. So our team kind of basically says, like, how full their plate is and how they're feeling. And I get a nice summary every Monday with, like, how the team's feeling, and that saved, like, a lot of time for me. And then I took that use case to the team and said, this is what helped in my role. What kind of things would help in your role? And, like, let's figure out how to do it and do it together versus, like, just sending people off on their own to kind of figure things out. So we've we've launched about ten to fifteen different use cases across functions all the way from, like, our intake and routing to SEO work, copywriting for the help center, things like that. And my role of thumb is like, generally speaking, I like to see AI do like the research, the synthesis, first drafts of things, data analysis, like triaging and routing, and really like retain the strategic, like brand editorial ethical calls, like for the humans and the team. And I I think we've done a pretty good job of that so far. Nice. I love that. And we've actually got a question that comes in from Laszlo, which I think you have answered really, but I think maybe if I answer, ask it explicitly, maybe it will surface something else. So Laszlo asks, in this crazy age of AI, what processes don't you leverage AI for? So, I mean, you've definitely spoken to that in your previous answer, Danny, but, like, but by asking it that way, is there anything which you are avoiding using AI, in the in the productivity space? Because that does I kind of hate having the AI conversation, but, like, in the realm of AI, productivity does feel like that's the biggest promise presently. So, yeah, it's a nice question about avoiding it or not using I think, like, I think we're very close to getting to a point where, like, AI usage is gonna be, like, inevitable. You know? Like, it's just gonna be built into the process. We're not even gonna think about it as it being like AI anymore. It's just part of the workflows that we all have. Where I've been trying to avoid it, and maybe this is just my own personal opinion, but like, I believe humans are creative. A good example is I was playing with OpenAI and I wanted to take Asana's celebration characters and say, Hey, can you make these three d? I gave it a bunch of like guidance, we iterated for a while, and I landed on this place that was like something that I liked. And then two weeks later, I saw someone from the Asana community post three d Asana characters. And they were basically the same as the ones I produced. So like, I think that retaining that strategy and creativity part for the people on the team is really important to me. And that's what makes the work fun. The AI should help take the low value work off your plate so that there's more time to think about the higher value strategic work. Love that. Thank you very much. And I just want to thank you for answering that way. And also, I just want to say thank you to the community because the questions you've been popping into the Q and A so far have been so fabulous. I can already see six more open questions right now, which I I did warn Danny about, before we we started today's session that we would plan a bunch of questions and then we would ignore them and then we would go to the community. I think we'll probably end up coming back to AI, but I don't wanna make this completely an AI chat because, productivity in general, is so, so important. So as a I'm gonna sort of step into your leadership sort of experience, Anthony, because I I think that would be really interesting. And and we spoke about meetings earlier. And so I'm I'm curious about your viewpoint in terms of, like, great meeting etiquette, when to accept meetings, etcetera, etcetera. I'm I'm gonna leave it open in general, and and let you riff on on meetings and productivity if if that's okay. Yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, I love a good meeting as long as it's like productive and there's an outcome. And just to even take a step back just how I like think about managing my calendar. As like someone, I have a pretty large team, pretty senior in the organization, but I also like get into the weeds a lot. And even just recently, I took stock of like, how am I spending my time during the week? So I color coded and like tagged all my meetings, you know, like, do I spend time on, you know, team building, culture one on ones, peer alignment, like managing up to the leadership team here, etc. And that's been pretty illuminating to just like, get a sense of where your time is being spent. And it's super easy to do in Google Calendar, probably other calendars. So like that helps me kind of frame when I wanna take on a specific kind of meeting. If I feel like I'm like falling in the trap of like way too much IC work or am I like way too much thoughts in the cloud and finding that balance with the team based on what we need. In terms of meetings, I think this is really hard to manage. But like in my ideal world, I would cancel, I would decline a meeting if no one put an agenda in it. Like if there's not a clear outcome or decision that we're making in the meeting, we probably shouldn't be having it. You know, status updates can be written in Slack or whatever tool that you want to publish them in. I think really the meeting should be used to like discuss and debate and decide, and then, you know, commit to your decision. And I think that's the trap we all fall into is like meetings just tend to go in circles. And we loosely decide and then we go off to our own worlds and then revisit that decision. And that's like a productivity killer. So I think my biggest thing would be like, try to enforce like meeting etiquette, agendas, notes, document the decisions and next steps. And that also helps people feel comfortable declining, right? If you know that there's gonna be a follow-up, you can probably skip out if you don't have to be in the decision making forum and have trust in your team. So I don't know, it sounds like super simple, but it's really hard to do. I think it's one of these things, you know, when I was thinking about the outcome from today's webinar, if I think about the actions which have been the ones which have actually changed my day to day, then they probably have been simple things. And so in you sort of acknowledging the simplicity of them, I think there's also power in just going through the exercise, like you say, in in color coding everything and going, where am I spending my time? And and sort of having that that as a conscious process. And even if you spend twenty minutes doing that, you probably will acknowledge that you'll save yourself three, four hours later on down the track. And so it it, I've given you a hard brief on today's webinar because, I'm asking you to say simple things, as if they're revelationary. But I think actually, the simplicity is is kind of where we're at. I I think also on meeting stuff, like, I I don't know whether it's useful but sort of the I don't wanna overstate it by calling it the killer the killer meetings in the Marketing Meetup Calendar, but the the two which have made the biggest difference for us at TMM and bearing in mind we're a small team is the first one is a weekly check-in and the agenda is a celebration from last week's last week, which is really, really important to us. Like it's usually the best part of the meeting because it sort of forces us to reflect, which I don't think we're that good at. Actions for the next week and then simply blockers for for that that next week and and sort of bringing other people in. The other meeting which I'm really, really proud of, which has made a big difference, is our monthly goals meeting, which is making everyone aware of our goals and just restating what they are, giving an update on those metrics. And then I think the two bits which are really, really solid is proposing an experiment that we're going to do next month to sort of shift those metrics. And then what are we going to drop individually to sort of make that experiment happen? And I feel like those have been solid sort of meeting etiquette and meeting things which have sort of really transformed our business. A thought came to mind when you were speaking about declining meetings there, Danny, which is that I think there'll be some folks in the community who don't feel like they have the confidence or almost the authority, to decline meetings. If you are putting yourself in the shoes of someone more junior in the organization who is keep on getting these meeting requests or or whatever it is, do you have any advice for folks on sort of how to say no, for a better phrase? Or indeed if they should be saying no, if they don't feel like they've got the power to be able to do so. Yeah. I mean, I think the the big thing is like lean on your manager if you don't feel comfortable. I I think like all of our managers are here to guide us to success, right? Like, it's a two way street. I know we're not gonna do career conversation, but, you know, I think if you're uncomfortable or don't have the context to, like, make a decision on to go or not go to a specific meeting, you know, I would be bullish and just reach out to the meeting organizer and say, hey, like, what are you looking to achieve? Let's assume there's no agenda, you know, from this meeting. And am I like optional or like really needed to guide the conversation? Is my expertise needed? And if the answer is no, I'd say, hey, I'm gonna sit this one out, but can you record the meeting for me so that I can follow-up on it afterwards if I need to? Or if they're not comfortable, I would go through the manager channel and have them like field that conversation. Because I think like if if we all were a little more selective on the meetings we had, we'd probably have a lot less meetings. And over time, we'd probably schedule a lot less and they become more impactful because your day is just not wall to wall with calendar invites. Totally. And I guess the follow-up to that question is, for folks who are still unsure, what would your response to be? You know, say a junior person, who sort of came back to you and sort of said, am I needed in a meeting that you've added them to, for example? Presumably, you'd be quite pleased, that that sort of prioritized their time. I I guess I'm I'm hoping that it'll be a reassuring thing for folks listening in that you sat in the position that you're in, that you would be pleased that people are prioritizing their time rather than sort of saying, you know, no, I don't wanna be there because I'm not interested type of thing. Yeah. I mean, I think I think the way to frame it too is, like, I, you know, I have X, Y, and Z I need to do that's like tied to these outcomes. And for me to take an hour away from doing those things, I want to make sure that I'm going to be valuable to the conversation, not just in the room multitasking and doing other work anyway, because that's what typically happens if you're not like a key part of the conversation. And I think just framing it in the way of like being mindful of the business outcomes you're trying to drive with your work will take away any of that like perception that you just don't want to go to that meeting. You know, it's not that you don't want to go, it's that, you know, you want to add value and you want to protect the time to do the things that matter the most for the business. Love that. Thank you very much. I I think, you know, that's a really helpful reframe and would hopefully take some of the heat out of it for some people. But I think those sentences alone probably apply to an awful lot of the etiquette that goes alongside productivity habits. And so thank you for speaking to that because I think even as a boilerplate for folks to fill in from that point, would that would be really, really helpful. Let's take a step into tools because we've referenced this earlier on in the conversation and there's a lovely question from Esme and I feel like I need to caveat this quite often when we come to our conversations that at no point has anyone been asked to come in and plug our respective platforms that our speakers are from. But Esme has asked, what distinguishes teams that consistently get the most value out of Asana from those that struggle? And I I you know, I guess as a third party host here, then I can say from any tool, in in Asana in in particular, what are the habits which sort of help people to get the most out of these tools? Yeah, I mean, think it's a balancing act every day and I've definitely gone to all ends of the spectrum on this, but I think, you know, for successful teams have to use tools in a similar way. So like, it sounds counterintuitive, but there has to be some structure and process built into the tools you're using. Not too much that it like slows you down and people are always trying to like skirt around it. But if you have like the basics in place that your whole team is kind of grounded in, and they're, you know, doing things on the regular, putting their work in, doing a status update, I think it gets a lot easier to like find success in those tools. A good example, even when I came here, we had fragmented teams that I unified, so we had fragmented processes all over the place. And we spent a lot of time just whiteboarding out the process. What's the expectation for like program management or work orchestrator type people versus people that are just consuming the tasks and driving the clarity of expectations of like, hey, really, we're only asking you to do two or three things makes it a lot easier for the rest of the team to kinda get on board with using the tool in the same way. And I think that's been been really helpful. If I take a step back, it's really just having a unified perspective of what you're doing and what you expect to get out of any tool, whether it's, you know, Sana, Slack, something else. Nice. Yeah. And it's again, it depends on the level of the team, I remember this time last year we adopted Slack internally and it was an email that sort of said, you know, we're gonna use email for this, we're gonna use Slack for this, we're gonna use WhatsApp for this. And there's a question that that came in from Dave who says, find the always connected situation frustrating. Colleagues use using WhatsApp to contact you, Slack messages, Google chats, etcetera. Any tricks to take a step back from that? And, you know, it's easy for me to say as like a founder here, but like it is that clarity almost that we're gonna be using these things. Just mirroring your answer here, Danny, which is like that clarity of we're not gonna use WhatsApp for personal or business conversations because that's not fair, etcetera. And it may be different in your organization. But in in terms of like that always connectedness and and sort of setting those boundaries, we're speaking about productivity from the perspective of getting them up more out of work, but like preventing work burnout is also such a huge part of it. So like, how how have you managed in such a big organisation to sort of protect people's sort of personal time and and sort of protect them from burning out that way. Yeah, I mean, I think the big, look, I'm terrible at this because I try to be accessible to my team if something pops up, but I think the big thing is like, have a clear definition of what's an emergency. And like, there are parts of your team that are going to have to be on call, right? Like, you're an engineer on a website, like there's an on call cadence, and sometimes there's an outage in off hours that you just have to manage. So I think it's like getting clear on like, what are those things and what's your role in contributing to those things. And if it's not an emergency, you should just feel okay not responding to those things. And, you know, one of the things we do at Asana is have like a guide to each person, which is like, how do you like to be communicated with? You know, what are your days in the office? Whatever that is. And I would just be explicit that, you know, you have clear standards on when you can be contacted off hours and through certain channels so that you can have some off time. You know, like for me personally, I get some of my best thinking done on the weekends because I'm not like running around like a crazy person, but like that's not for everybody, right? Like you should protect your weekends because that one hour of thinking turns into four hours of thinking and then you didn't really have any recovery over the weekend, right? So I think it's just setting the right boundaries, but also knowing what is a true escalation or emergency that you would have to field and be okay with that if it is one of those things. I love that. And I'm gonna return to a question around clarity in a moment because that feels like a really common strong theme throughout the course of this. But when you mentioned the guides to me, that that that felt really interesting. And also, you know, there's a question in the q and a here about neurodiversity, for example. But one just simply recognizing that we're all different and we all like working in different ways. So could you tell me a little bit more about that process of how you sort of built that guide to to me, you know, and how that works in practice? Because that sounds fascinating, in terms of productivity, like a a huge win as well if you can get it working. Yeah. I mean, for for my guide, it was also I use it whenever we get a new employee on the team. And it's just a way to introduce myself, you know, in advance of getting to meet them. Mine is kind of like who I am, like as a human, not just as at Asana, but like, what do I do in my personal life? What are my passions? What are my values? So, you know, how do I value the work and things personally? And then for me, it's a little bit of like a do's and don'ts kind of So like, things I ask of my team, like, don't just bring problems, but like, bring your thoughts on possible solutions. And like, I will spend as much time with you as it's needed to help you get to the right solution and guide you. And then some of the things that I'll do to protect the team, right? Stand up for you, whether it's a win or a loss, things like that. And I think that that just really helps, one, share how I like to work. I don't love to read long form documents. So my team has gotten pretty good at helping with like summaries. Then if we need to go super deep, we will. But it's just been helpful in a way to build trust and also like make the challenging parts of work a little bit easier. I love that. And if someone was looking to build their own, because like we've got James in the chat who's my co founder saying we should do this for our next employee, you know, what should folks be, Is there any watch outs for getting this right or wrong? Because like, it feels really, really productive and really lovely. And like, it sounds like something I'd love to emulate, but I'm sure there'll be other people in the chat who'd love to as well. Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing is like, don't be so specific that it's like, you're asking everyone to curate things like to the letter just for you. But I think knowing where you land on certain things like Coca Cola or Pepsi is really important. Or beaches or mountains, I don't know. But like, I think it's just a good exercise. There's not a lot of gotchas there other than just, like, don't forget to be flexible, right? Like everyone has different ways of working and like we all kind of have to flex in and out depending on who we're working with. Thank you very much. So that, I mean, it sounds fascinating. I'd love to see what would happen if we did it at CMM. Yeah. I'm happy to share mine. It's just I don't think there's anything, like Yeah. Discreetly confidential. That'd be really lovely. Yeah. Yeah. We'd love that. That'd be fabulous. Thank you. One of the other themes that's come through this conversation is clarity. And, like, again, it's, you know, we can answer this about ten minutes ago when we sort of said we're not looking to to create mind blowing moments but what we're looking for is simple solutions to a to an industry and a workforce which feels like we've got too much to do and not enough time. And clarity feels like one of those words that feels really strong in in that conversation. I'd love your take on how to find clarity across teams and, you know, presumably that's a challenge that gets harder as as the team grows and and and so on and so forth. But that finding clarity and alignment is easily said, it feels like really hard done. Have you got any examples or any real wins that you can speak of in the past which has sort of like really sort of like shone a light on how to find clarity? Yeah, I think, you know, in the past we've anchored productivity, I think on like how much we've done and how quickly we've done it. And I think there's some goodness there, right? Like you want to be, you know, launching things as fast as you can, there's quality element. But I think what's really helped like set other teams apart is like not focusing on like how much, but like how much impact the things you're doing have. And if you look at, you know, trying to tie your work to a business number, I mean, in marketing, it's pretty easy, right? Leads, trials, MPLS, whatever, pipeline. If it doesn't directly like influence that number or enable someone to influence that number, I almost put it on like a chopping block conversation. And I know that's hard because there's just stuff we've always done in marketing that it's really hard to say no to. But I'm like super envious of some of these new startups because like imagine coming to like a company where you're thinking about how marketing should run from scratch and not having the baggage of, like, decades of we've done it this way. Like Yeah. If you put your even in your current job, like, you put yourself in that frame of mind, I think you'd probably find some things that you don't need to do or you could outsource those things to AI or whatever. And I I think it's just a really interesting time to put, a lens on that. I I you know, this might be unfair, Dani, so you can push back and tell me to go away. But like in you saying that as an exercise, I I wondered if if you would be able to speak us through how you would think about that for yourself or for your team, you know, starting carte blanche. If you're looking to cut whatever to to enable that productivity and and sort of start from that place, where would you be looking? Because there'll be some people who haven't built those processes right now and are in that sort of like discovery phase. What would you be thinking of? Yeah. I mean, think a good example is we I own life cycle on the team, so a lot of our emails across the customer journey, but we also get a lot of ad hoc requests from other teams to do all these one off sends. That's like an immediate red flag to me. And, you know, the exercise we're going through right now is like, hey, life cycle team. I want you to focus on trial conversion, AI adoption, like whatever those things are. And we need to make those ad hoc requests self serviceable because they're still really relevant, right? Like if you need to send a legal email, you need to send a legal email. But is it really my team's responsibility to do that? Or can we help others and enable them to do it themselves? And that's kind of the lens we're taking, like managing the company pages on the website. Like how do we make that, you know, democratize that so that others can do it and it's not, like, something that our team's constantly getting peppered with. That's that's so interesting though. Like, I would be interested in the chat because, like, I think there's a there's an interesting balance. And and it does come into the productivity conversation, which is control and wanting to have control over stuff like the website, for example, versus, as you say, like, giving other folks from other departments the ability to sort of contribute and sort of handle their own stuff. So, like, how do you begin to reconcile that if you're going through that process at the moment of, like, you can do this yourself, so go and do it yourself versus, like, you know, you need us involved in this. And and the undercurrent is exactly what you said, which is, like, urgent is pretty much the default priority for folks. And so, like, you know, sort of how do you begin to sort of think about that control conversation really? Yeah, I mean, think for those conversations, I always like aim on the side of them coming at you from like a helpful place. It's not that we don't want to support things, want to, it's just, you know, we have finite resources, finite hours of the day, and we need to put our strategic resources to the most strategic things. I think, like, what's interesting with marketing right now is AI is, like, pushing content out everywhere. It's, like, so noisy. It's all fairly generic. So, like, what's gonna cut through is, like, authentically human things. And it doesn't have to be as polished as it was in like marketing's past when you spend like six months designing a campaign or something and a brand message. So like my lens is thinking through things kind of in a tiered strategy. Like does it have to be perfect, pixel perfect? Probably not. Let people self serve, give them some guidelines. If we need to have a review step, we'll have a review step just to make sure it's like adhering to some minimum standard. And then if it needs more polish or it's on a surface that is a key revenue driver, like the homepage, we're all hands on deck. And like, we're gonna put our attention there and optimize it till it's like the most efficient homepage ever on the planet. But I think it's like finding those balances of when things have to be like polished middle of the road, or it's fine to just kind of go out at like its basic self. And I think that helps kind of give people comfort that they're not going to mess things up too badly if something does Totally. What I love about that model is there is a bit of thoughtfulness assigned to all of those tasks, which even if the other the rest of the team aren't trying to interact with, like, even if you're doing this for yourself, right, you know, you sort of know that you know, take the website as as you have as an example. If it's a lower level page, you know, maybe it doesn't matter if I'm not gonna spend the next six hours getting that perfect because a little typo or whatever won't be seen by hundreds of thousands of people or or need to convert. So again, that's really, really helpful. I think I'm combining that with your thought from earlier on around sort of color coding in the calendar, etcetera. Again, you know, these are little things, but they're big things if you sort of know your priority of tasks. You know, all of a sudden I can see someone's calendars are quite rapidly changing as a result of this conversation and your advice. So thank you very much, Danny. It's really, really appreciated. Yeah. Well, also like, all the work is important. It's just finding the balance and trying to orient yourself to spend more of your time on things that are gonna have a bigger impact. It's not that we don't wanna update company pages and send legal emails or customer support emails or whatever those things are. It's just how do you shield the team to focus on like more strategic and more impactful things and still like help the business run, keep the lights on at the same time. It's a tough balancing act. Totally, totally. But if you're cognizant of it, think almost surfacing these things and sort of giving them some thought is a lot, is quite a hard task because it often feels like our hair's on fire. I mean, mine isn't, but, like, you know, I think it can often feel like we're on an endless task list. And so to sort of take a step back and sort of take a look at it all feels important and useful. The one other thing at my time at Salesforce that I thought was like really, really helpful is we had a stack rank list of all the projects we were working on and creative on marketing. And every week, we got the key stakeholders in the room and we looked at that list, we reprioritized things. There was a line of what the team could and could not do. And if we move like something completed, the next thing moved up in that line. But having that conversation with all the stakeholders so that they're aware where they are in the queue and like what the team is doing also helped like reduce a lot of the noise for the working teams because then they weren't getting a VP trying to come in and shoehorn in this project. There was a clear boundary line drawn from that meeting and when to engage with the team doing the work. I think that like those kind of moments are good use of time in That's so, so helpful. Like really, really helpful. How would it work, say for example, someone senior drops in a request on a Tuesday and you'd had your status meeting on the Monday and maybe they haven't been part of that meeting or maybe they were and maybe this is a moot point, I don't know. But like how did then resist the temptation just to pop them to the top of the list at that point because it was a game of politics or whatever it may be? Yeah, I mean, think it obviously it's situational and in some instances, maybe it is something super important that we should be pulling something out of the queue and popping this in. But I think it's on the person who's taking the intake to get enough context about the request and then make the decision of like, hey, we need to reconvene and discuss this or not, or can it get picked up in the next week's prioritization session? And that's kind of how I like running like, we do, sprints, two week sprints on on our team, and I I don't wanna be so rigid that, like, it's difficult to work with us. So, like, having that option to pull something in if it's urgent or super high priority, but that means you have to take some things out, right? You can't just keep piling onto the list of what's gonna get delivered in those two weeks. And I think just having those like conversations with all the relevant stakeholders helps them understand the trade offs. Love that. I love that so much. I mean, that itself is absolute gold, Denise. So thank you for sharing that. That's really, really helpful. I wanna pick up on a question from Claire, which takes us in a completely different direction, but I think is important for this conversation because it grounds us in both the business and like us being human beings in businesses. So Claire's asking in the Q and A, on days where you're feeling super distracted and scattered, how do you bring yourself back to a focused productive mindset? And if possible, I'd love to open that out to the community as well in the chat because I'd love to get your tips. But yeah, I mean like on a very personal level, Dani, and I appreciate this is like you're just riffing on you, you know, what are your own things for sort of getting back productive space? Yeah. I mean, I think the big thing is, like, recognizing when you're feeling scattered and distracted. Like a good example, even just yesterday, I have, like, three big things running right now in, progress. And I just found myself clicking between all three of them and not making progress on any of them. And I was like, okay, I need a time out. So like in the office, I take a walk and go get myself a nice Phil's coffee. And it's really like, it's less about the coffee, but more about like getting some fresh air and just kind of like resetting my system. When I'm at home, I schedule myself with like, I ride bikes a lot. So I'll use a bike ride at midday, like over lunch or something to kind of reset my brain. I also do a lot of really good thinking when I'm on the bike. So it's like kind of a double win. But I think it's really like recognizing when you're in that pattern of not being productive and getting of it and then coming back in with like a mental model of like, okay, I need to park these two things and just focus on this one thing and then I'll come back over here. And sometimes that for me, I have to make some notes on like where my thoughts are, but I think that it's just taking the break. Sometimes you have to slow down to go faster and, you know, it's hard to do in the busiest of work days. At the beginning of the year, everyone's crazy, but pausing is a good thing. I agree. I guess viewing it as an investment, like you said, you know, in other language, you know, just taking those moments to, you know, one hour walking with the dog or whatever it may be may save you three of clicking between three tabs, which Yeah. I ended up on on that team site. A small a small one that I can offer, which is probably more relevant for folks working by themselves or working from home or whatever it is, is that I have like the BBC blocked on my on my computer. So like I'm not just sat there reading the news or whatever. I used to have a a doom cycle of like Twitter back when it was Twitter, the BBC, LinkedIn and then email and then I just start on that cycle again and so blocking those sites has been really useful on that as well. I definitely add in. I fully agree with your walking idea and I think this is not a productive, pleasant way of putting it but it's probably true to my reality is whatever the thing that I'm panicking about when I'm on my walk is probably the thing that I'll do when I get back, which is probably the other thing. But we've got we've got some great suggestions from the community here. So we've got Anne Marie saying that I take a break, create a list. They're very, very similar to you, Danny. We've got Paul, going back to the strategic plan to check if the projects are really necessary. We've got Wendy taking a break as well, circling back to the keyboard. And then we've got Fanola, which I think is really nice actually is to communicate with Fanola's manager and to list out all the priorities together for the week. And so like, I think all of those things are really, really productive. Hopefully One helpful model I use with my team on listing the priorities, like whenever someone's like, hey, I'm overwhelmed. I have all these things. And I was like, put them in a list with a couple of columns and like have a ranking for effort required and impact. And then add those two things and then restack rank your list. And like, that's been a really helpful way to think about what to work on. Like, if it's low effort, high impact, you should definitely do that first. If it's like high effort, low impact, I'd put that at the very, very bottom of the list. And just like little mental models like that just help a lot. Totally. I love that. And we've Wendy saying urgent important. And there's a phrase which I used to have on a post it note on my desk, was eat the frog, which is really crass. But it speaks to, you know that task which is on your list, but you never want to do it? That's the frog and you kind of just have to eat the frog sometimes and and do that even if it's even if it's not the thing that you wanna do. And I think particularly for those tasks that you've just laid out with that criteria, I can see those combining really well. Thank you. Let's, let's start to come to a close here, Dani, because you've been so useful and there's so many practical things that I think what we need to do as TMM is make sure we list them out because I think it's just become like an incredibly helpful task list. Let's, I can't actually the question comes from Rashi who says, how to be super productive when your work depends on others. And I think this often speaks to a lot of the stuff we've been speaking about clarity. But I wonder whether there's any other tips you can offer for folks who sort of feel like they're blocked by other people and sort of twiddling their thumbs a little bit waiting for a response in an email or whatever it may be. Yeah, that is definitely a hard one. I mean, I definitely would say don't twiddle your thumbs, is very nervous. But look, I think, you know, clarity, like you said, is super important. I would like, if you're waiting on someone, make sure they know you're waiting on them. Also, like, be clear on what you need in that handoff. I think one of the most unproductive things is when people just like huck something over the fence at you with like out the context of your thinking or why we're doing something altogether. So I think like, have some standards for that, hey, I'm waiting on this task. Are you on track to deliver it today? Or is it going to be tomorrow? And then if it's tomorrow, I would just go back to your like run the business list of things that you've been like kind of parking and try to knock out a couple things that are quick wins or easy things to do while you wait for something else. Because like the reality is this dependencies exist and if someone sidetracked, you have to kind of work with them. But I think, you know, also be clear with your manager or the project manager or whomever that it's delayed, you know, they can help intervene too. I wouldn't put it like all on your shoulders, but being proactive and then having a backlog of things you can work on while you wait is like a good way to keep things going. Love it. Super useful. Thank you. And I guess I've seen that, because it sort of relates to this topic. I think it becomes harder in a remote world where folks are sort of apart from each other physically because you can't throw something at one another from one desk to another if if if they're not doing and being helpful. So have you found any sort of particularly useful tips for managing a remote team and and that distributed workforce? Or maybe another way of rephrasing the question is, like, are there any specific challenges that you've really, really focused with a remote team that you found an effective way to to overcome? Yeah. I mean, our team is distributed across five locations across the globe. So we have like EMEA hours, city hours, you know, America hours, whatever, and it's really challenging. So what we have done is like identify the hours of overlap where we should be pushing the teams to like get on a huddle or a meet or whatever and have that collaboration real time and resolve the issues that they're having. So you're not waiting like twenty four hour cycle to get what you need. I think it's challenging, like I think going back to the beginning of the conversation where it's just having the norms of where and how you communicate are super important. So, you know, when you're managing remote teams and across time zones, like Slack's good for urgent stuff, right? But like Slack's disappear after like five seconds in my world. So like making sure the context of the work exists in whatever tool you're using to manage the work is super important. And I think that helps facilitate the handoffs with people. But to, I think someone posted in the comments, like making sure everyone understands like if you delay something, someone else is delayed, they don't get like a shorter window to deliver, that's not fair for that person. And I think one of the bigger things is like, you know, I spent some time in agencies where everything had a hard deadline, right? So like people had that urgency kind of built into their way of working. Whereas like when you're in house at a place, those hard deadlines are sometimes arbitrary. And I think really treating deadlines as deadlines is important because it like limits work in progress. It allows you to deliver things a little bit more effectively versus like, you know, you give someone one hundred feet, they're gonna take two to do it, right? So I think like just holding the standards and, you know, trying to keep people on track helps a lot and making sure they know the impact of the delay is even more important both for a person, but also for the business. Like if I don't ship something on the website, like that could impact our financial forecasts and that's like important for people to know. Yeah. So so helpful. Thank you so much, Jenny. That is our hour. So it's been so fabulous and like genuinely, again, I'm I'm gonna return to to to sort of speaking about this, but like, I feel like almost in the little things there's world changes in there and I know that it's, sometimes, people want big answers to big questions, but I think we've given little answers to big questions which will hopefully build up in a really incredible way. So thank you so much for sharing that and you can see just some really, really lovely comments from the community here. We've got Michael saying superb. We've got Claire saying, I feel like I stumbled into a chat with two marketing friends sharing brilliant ideas, which is very, very kind. But we've we've got so many lovely comments coming your way, Danny. So thank you so much for giving us that insight into your world. It's genuinely appreciated. And likewise, thank you to everyone in the Q and A for asking your brilliant, brilliant questions. Ultimately, these sessions only work if they work for you. So for you to be asking those questions as you have been, is really, really appreciated. With all that said, we'll be returning next week, for another session, in our doing a lot on the little season. We'd love you to have be involved if you'd love to be. More on that in the newsletter, but in the meantime, big thank you to everyone in the community for being phenomenal. A big thank you to our sponsors. And, Danny, once again, thank you again for spending the time with us. It's really, really My pleasure. Thank you. Right everyone, we'll see you very soon. I hope you have a lovely evening or lovely morning, depending where you are and we'll see you hopefully next week. Take care everyone.