So I will, make sure I can move these slides forward. I think I'm I'm good to go, but I know who's watching today. We've got engineering leaders.We have, we have technical leaders. We we even have go to market leaders. We just we have a lot of builders, people who are heads down, solving hard problems, delivering outcomes, just getting things done, and doing it well. And you know what? That was that was me too at one time. And if you're good at being a builder, you're likely being rewarded for it. But it's that it's that old adage. What got you here is not what's gonna get you to be at the point where you're running a company. You're gonna see, as I talk through my career from builder to CEO, that I followed what looks to be a pretty straight path up, a natural progression.

I went from software engineering to tech lead, then engineering manager to engineering director, and then and then I got to VP. And then came VP of product development, then SVP and EVP, and taking on the CIO and the CTO and the CPO roles, and then chief operating officer, and now, chief executive officer. Smooth and simple on a slide. But it's kind of like watching a sprinter. They just they run from here to there. And it may seem like ten seconds to us, but for the sprinter, it was a lifetime of work to get there. My career, in a way, it it reads like a progression too, but it was a climb. And I very intentionally, with each move forward, leverage the prior move. So let's take another look at those career steps. In those first two bullets, I was going straight up, just engineering all the way.

But after being a VP of engineering for a while, I didn't move up. I moved over. In the VP of product development role, I added product to my responsibilities, And then I went up again to SVP of product development. Then I took on all of the technology, including the CIO role, adding business technology and IT and DevOps and CloudOps and security and so on. So, sure, I continue to move up, but sometimes I simply moved out and not up. I expanded my responsibilities, and importantly, I expanded my overall understanding of the business. So so this is the pattern, not just moving up, but expanding what you're responsible for overseeing. And that's what increasingly prepared me for the role I'm now in, CEO of a public tech company.

Because each step that I took gave me the opportunity to see the business from a different lens. And I say opportunity because it's a choice to see the business from a different lens. And many people don't act on that choice or that opportunity. Me, I was driven to see and understand the business as a whole. The ability to see the business through different lenses and the widening of those lenses and then the connecting them is a very simple explanation of of what it was that prepared me for the CEO role. So why is seeing through different lenses so important? We're gonna start with something really obvious. Technical excellence is seldom enough to prepare you to lead the company. If you're a technical leader, you've likely been rewarded for being excellent.

Excellent at solving problems, at innovating, at executing and delivering results and outcomes, all with speed and with quality. You're doing your current job well, maybe even crushing it. Well, those technical skills that you're being rewarded for, of course, they're incredibly valuable, but they're rarely enough to get the highest level jobs in the c suite. Because as you expand your responsibility, the job requires a different mindset, a different approach, and a different perspective. I mean, think about it. As a CEO, you're accountable for outcomes. It's so much more than activity and effort or intention. It's outcomes that matter, and it's outcomes what you deliver to customers and what you deliver to investors in the market. And it's building a company that can sustain and compound those outcomes over time.

You're owning all the outcomes across the entire business, product and tech and platform and sales and go to market, customers and partner success, finance, people and culture, strategy, corporate development, IR, legal, business technology, security, and on and on and on. But wait. Because there's one more thing. It's not enough to make sure that each of these functions is high performing or even best in class on its own. It's not enough. Because you can have a strong product team, a strong marketing team, a strong sales team, but that's not what your job is. The task of the CEO is to orchestrate all of the functions together to go after that North Star to build sustainable, durable growth. Yeah. You're running the functions, but you're also running a system, and that system is what produces your outcomes. The goal isn't to be able to do every job. It's to understand how each function actually works, why it exists, what it's optimizing for, what it values, and unique perspectives that it brings.

I'll give you an example from take legal. I don't need to know how to practice law, but I do need to understand how legal thinks about risks, about what they're protecting, where they can enable speed, and where they might unintentionally slow us down. Because every function, legal, finance, product, sales, HR, all of them, they're all necessary. And if they're not aligned, you won't get to the outcomes that you want quickly enough. That's the CEO's job. Align all the functions to the same vision and strategy and make sure each function is not just excellent on its own, but contributing to the success of the business as a whole, like the orchestra. Now there's clearly more to the CEO role than what I described, but the concepts that I just went through are critical in bringing to light some some key capabilities that can move you beyond being a builder to where you wanna go.

So I'm gonna take you now through five of these key capabilities. Be able to make tough trade offs, and you can do this well by understanding impacts beyond your function. Be able to operate with and through others. Be able to execute with excellence wherever you are. Be able to broaden your perspective means understanding the goals and the risks and the motivations and the functions that surround you. Be able to build trust and partner and be someone that people can count on. So let's start with the trade offs. It's easy to ask, what's the right answer for an individual situation or a single function?

But the better question is, how do I bring together all the relevant perspectives to find the best answer for multiple functions or even the best answer for the company? What's the trade off that needs to be made? Because there will always be different perspectives that are valid on their own. And I'll give you a couple examples. I mean, customer success might say, sales, you've gotta change how you're selling our solutions because you're impacting our ability to implement smoothly and keep customers happy. Sales is they're just working to expand large accounts and sell multiple solutions. Or sales might be saying, hey, legal. You're stifling our growth. When legal is focused on protecting customer data. All critical objectives in all critical perspectives. And my job as the CEO is not to answer the question, which team is right, but it's to answer what's the right decision for the company as a whole.

Recently, we had a a situation where our product team had a great idea. They made a solid business case, and it was technically sound and forward looking. There was nothing wrong with the product idea or our ability to develop it. We chose not to do it. Because when we looked at the bigger picture, our go to market wasn't set up to take take it to market effectively, and we would've had to pull focus from a more important priority. So if we had made that decision in isolation, we might have improved a product, but we'd have hurt our ability to deliver the outcomes that we needed as a company. At higher levels, a key part of your job is to make a lot of important consequential decisions that often require trade offs repeatedly and under pressure with only the best information available to you at the moment and always with a clear eyed view on what you're working towards for the company and for the team and for customers and for investors.

Second capability, operate through others. It's assumed that you can execute and deliver outcomes. But no matter how good you are at getting shit done, you can't do everything yourself. You have to rely on other leaders across the company. And this means you need to be clear in your communication, your expectations, and the why behind them. And you need to develop and trust leaders and teams to deliver in their area because you need to be able to move on to the next thing. And for those of us who care deeply about excellence and execution and who've been trained to care, you know what? This is hard because you still care about the outcomes and now you're relying on others to deliver them. You're used to making sure you deliver, and now you've gotta find a way to operate through others and still see the exact same level of excellence because the accountability is all yours.

As CEO, you're accountable to the board, to investors, to regulators, the company, and everyone everyone who buys your your products, your customers. You're accountable even when you don't make the decision directly, even when you don't see the issue immediately, even when you trust someone else to execute. When it goes well, the team gets the credit. When there's a problem, you take the hit. K. So the third capability, broaden your perspective. Understand the goals and the risks and the motivations of the functions that surround you. With every new role in your career, you'll have an opportunity to see connections, learn the priorities and success criteria for other functions, and broaden and deepen your perspective well beyond your function. You'll also see how other functions perceive you and perceive your team's contributions and impact. But let me be clear.

Simply moving across roles will not prepare you for the next level. It's what you do within each of these roles that really matters. At every level, I was driven to learn about what was important to the functions surrounding me, especially in how it related to my team's work. I wish I could put a completely positive spin on it, but I'm gonna be candid about why I was so driven to learn. I majored in economics in college. And, sure, I took software engineering courses, but I was not a trained engineer when I graduated. But I ended up being in engineering anyway. And at every step every step of my career, I dealt with the imposter syndrome. And as I look back, I realize that this is what drove me. I asked questions. I wanted different perspectives from different functions from other leaders. I wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything so that I wouldn't make a mistake.

And I'm convinced that this was one of the defining factors in my career. It drove me to go broad and deep, to not take anything for granted. I learned the business. I became equipped, and then I led. So if you have imposter syndrome, don't lament it. Let it drive you. And if you don't have imposter syndrome, congratulations. But don't get lazy. Use whatever motivation you have to be driven and aggressive in your learning because none of this comes by osmosis. Be a sponge. Ask questions. Learn as much as you can. Understand the roles and the functions that surround you. Learn parts of the business that you interact with but don't oversee. The more you understand each segment, the better equipped you'll be to lead broader roles. So our fourth capability, execute with focus and excellence.

Exit with focus on excellence and high performance right where you are. Whatever job you're in, crush it. In my experience and the experience of every other CEO I know, winning at the highest leadership levels today really takes an extreme commitment to performance and excellence. And if you don't execute that way in your current role, it's unlikely that you're gonna be able to do it when you rise in leadership and the stakes are much higher. And finally, number five, build trust, partner, and be someone people can count on. Can your peers rely on you? Do other leaders and functions see you as a partner, or do they see you as a protector of your turf? Do senior leaders trust your judgment beyond your domain? You won't be running more functions just because you're a great builder. People across functions need to trust you and need to trust your decisions.

They need to trust the way you work. I'm gonna tell you a quick story. Not long ago, I had a conversation with a product leader that was modifying a product road map to drive AI native innovation. When she described the product changes to me, she didn't just focus on the impact to the customer roadmap and engineering and UX. She also described the implementations. She also described all the implementations and the implications for sales and marketing and commercial operations and pricing and customer success. She made it her business to understand impact to the other functions. It was well beyond what was expected of her as a product leader. That's what enterprise leadership looks like. Not just owning your piece, but understanding how your decisions and the work you do impact the whole.

Now she is someone that I'm gonna remember this I can see that she's already developing the capabilities to lead at a higher level. So let me leave you with this. Earlier in your career, you're rewarded for delivering, for solving problems, and for executing, and for getting results. But as you grow, the job changes. You're no longer just delivering outcomes in your function. You're expected to see beyond your domain, to understand how the business actually works, to make trade offs that aren't obvious, to operate through others, and to take accountability for results you don't directly control. So if I step back and I simplify what it really takes, it takes making tough trade offs for the company, not just your function. It takes operating through others and still delivering the outcomes you're accountable for.

It takes executing with excellence because if that's not how you roll now, it's not gonna show up later. It takes broadening your perspective and understanding how the system works, And it takes building trust so people believe in your judgment beyond your domain. And when you put that together, you're better prepared to move from being a builder to owning outcomes across the entire business, to shaping the system that produces those outcomes. And, ultimately, you're better prepared to be building a company that can deliver those outcomes again and again. I hope I've made at least one thing very clear. Rising in your career to the highest levels of the c suite is not the inevitable outcome of a career. You earn the right to be there. So thank you, and go learn the business.