Transitioning from COO to CEO with Dave Wilby

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, Co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with my good friend Dave Wilby. Dave is the CEO of Audiens, which is an analytics company in the Shopify ecosystem. Dave was also the Chief Operating Officer and the Chief Data Officer, and a couple of other things over the years at Return Path for many years we worked together. Dave, I am thrilled to have you here. Good to see you.

Dave Wilby: Matt. It's so nice to be here. Thank you for the invite.

Matt Blumberg: So there are a lot of different routes that people take to the CEO job. Some people come up through sales, some people come up through product and many people come from the COO role, which makes sense. COO roles have lots of different shapes and sizes, but they tend to have a broad purview of what's going on at the company. And you were a COO for many years. So my question to you is, what are the things, the noteworthy things that you brought from your career as a COO to your job as CEO of Audiens?

Dave Wilby: That's a great question. The first thing that springs to mind is the use of data to design systems. So I've always been data- driven, even from my early days in product, and it doesn't change. I think the one thing I brought over from the COO role was how important, all using the same data and using that data to drive decisions, and also to shape processes just enough to be successful, not enough to be a real burden to everyone. So I think that's the first thing.

Matt Blumberg: That makes sense. Certainly I have always found one of your superpowers to be dashboarding and that mentality makes a lot of sense for designing systems, which a good COO does, a CEO does. Excuse me. So what's number two?

Dave Wilby: Number two is top of mind for me at the moment. We're in the thick of OKR setting, so goal setting. Doing it in such a way as to introduce accountability and tracking, but not in a heavy top down way, but doing it in a way where teams feel empowered to set their own goals. As CEO, you should be setting the broad brush, strategic, exciting, challenging goal, but then create an environment where teams can say, in order to take us on that journey, I'm going to hit these milestones and it's coming from them to fulfill that in need.

Matt Blumberg: Makes sense. Goals and alignment. Critical part of the role. And what's number three?

Dave Wilby: Number three is to be a change agent. I know that-

Matt Blumberg: That's a curveball. I was not expecting.

Dave Wilby: Well, we are known as being forward- thinking and maybe, dare I say it, mac pie. It's like what's the next bright shiny thing? But being a change agent I think is also important to look back and to question your own norms. Recently we've been looking at the way that we've been billing, looking at the way that we've been running finance, and it's just good practice to not only keep looking forward to the next opportunity, but also to question why we're doing things in a certain way. You can uncover all sorts of nuggets of great changes that you do and ask the team what's frustrating them. And I think that is also an important role that I brought over from the COO role.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah. Well and from the product role, retrospectives are a critical part of running a healthy product organization.

Dave Wilby: Exactly.

Matt Blumberg: Dave, my guess is you're doing a great job as CEO over there.

Dave Wilby: You are too kind. It is a certain challenge and I have a good role model to follow in these footsteps.

Matt Blumberg: Thanks for being on The Daily Bolster.

Dave Wilby: It's my pleasure, Matt. Thank you.