Episode 104 | Scaling Confidence Through Validating Skills with Frank Gartland

 Frank Gartland  00:00

And that’s the thing. Hands on experiences allow individuals to lean into things, as opposed to hope they don’t get called on. That’s what organizations need, that evidence. So, if I’m a manager and I look at the user profiles of my learner on my LMS, or whatever I’m doing, to see like, hey, this person’s actually done the work. Now I have confidence, and I know that that user probably has the confidence too.

Voiceover  00:04

Welcome to the lead at the top of your game podcast where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now your host, leadership tactics and organizational development expert, Karan Farrell Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:36

Hello, my superstars. This is Karan, and welcome to another episode of the lead at the top of your game podcast. Well, I am so pleased to have on today’s show Frank Gartland, who’s the chief product and technology officer at Skillable. Now, Skillable is a company who is one of the premier developers of Training Management application software which is intended to empower organizations to accelerate technology learning through hands on experience and skills validation. Now, yes, that is a mouthful, but we’re going to let Frank pull back the layers of the onion on that a little bit more for us and for my regular listeners, you may remember that we learned a tad about skillable Back in episode 90 when we chatted with their C, S, V, P of product named Nate Barrett. So definitely take a listen if you haven’t already with to Nate’s episode after you finish listening to Frank’s, and kind of compare the two in their approaches, because they, although they both work at the same company, they do have a similar direction, obviously, because they work in the same on the same teams. But everyone has their own unique approaches to leadership within their environments, and we were so honored to be able to get on the schedule of Frank, and he’s agreed to join us to talk about kind of what he faces at the highest executive level. So welcome to the podcast. Frank

Frank Gartland  02:10

Karan, thank you. I’m so excited. This is fun. Like, yeah, I’m so glad that you know Nate love the conversation. So it’s fun to follow Him, for sure,

Karan Rhodes  02:19

it is is, and we’ve done this once before where we had a couple of different execs from the same company, and it’s so insightful to see both the different approaches, but them still having the same North Star, and it gives a lot of insights on leadership. So we’re glad to be able to feature you now on this episode. So

Frank Gartland  02:41

Happy to be here, for sure.

Karan Rhodes  02:42

So before we get going and talking about your role and your vision and approach, we always love to hear just a tad about our guests. So for as much as you feel comfortable, would you mind giving us just a sneak peek into your life outside of work?

Frank Gartland  02:59

Oh, outside of work. Yeah, you know, yeah, that’s why we all work, is so we can have it outside of work, right? So, you know, I’m really blessed. I’ve got a wonderful wife of about 20, almost 28 years. Rochelle is her name, and we live in Scottsdale, Arizona. We have four kids, two out of the house, one going to college, you know, one in eighth grade. So we spread it out pretty, quite a bit nicer, the best, like, we just have a great time with them. To the older two live out of the country, so they’re, they’re all, they’re doing great. And we’re, we’re just, we’re excited. We’re excited. It seems like every year there’s a new, new season of life for us,

Karan Rhodes  03:33

Isn’t it always? And I will say, you know, we just became empty nesters on our end. So it is a new season of life, but a very exciting one as well. And it’s so wonderful seeing our daughter kind of go make her way in the world. So I’m sure you’re experiencing that as well

Frank Gartland  03:54

Oh, 100% and it’s the best.

Karan Rhodes  03:56

It is. It truly is.

Frank Gartland  03:57

Every year it’s a little more fun. It feels like, you know,

Karan Rhodes  04:00

It does! Time flies, I tell you. Well, thank you for sharing that Frank. We really appreciate it. So let’s move to talk a little bit more about your role and at skillable. So if you don’t mind starting off by sharing with our audience a little bit more about what skillable does and the types of clients they service. Let’s start there first, to get a good foundation.

Frank Gartland  04:26

Love it. Love it. So when you think about skillable, like, a lot of what we do is kind of in our names, right? It’s there’s skills. And we believe that skills are our most acquired by human beings, like, especially if it’s a hands on keyboard type of a skill, right? By doing something in the real world, like doing what we call a lab. So skills and labs and those labs will help people have abilities, right? So skill is what skills and labs and abilities roll into one word. So we’re a platform company, so we enabled all kinds of companies, you know, from from Microsoft and Veritas and CompTIA and Veen. And you know, Hyland software, like so many different organizations around the world, for their content teams to create hands on learning experiences that they can then get to their employees, their partners, their customers, that help those folks know how to accomplish whatever they need to accomplish with that application. And if you think about how many of us, like a big part of our everyday job, is getting stuff done with our hands on a keyboard, right, right? A lot of it’s all about software. So whether you’re, you know, fighting cybersecurity, you know, kinds of kinds of problems, or whether you’re trying to put together, you know, a pivot table for your boss, right? We enable companies to buy hands on experiences so those those audiences know how to use things. You know how to just get skills, right? That’s kind of what we do.

Karan Rhodes  05:44

Oh, that’s amazing. Now, can you give maybe an example of how one of your clients are using it a little bit? Is it to teach someone like Excel, or is it to do something more robust, so fun?

Frank Gartland  06:00

I’ll give you just a couple. I could go hours on this, because this is what I’m excited about, right? So when you think about like Microsoft, like, like, they’re doing things where they’re, they’re doing all sorts of things where they’re they’re validating people, like, when you go take a certification exam on how to configure Windows, or how to how to administer Azure, how to troubleshoot a particular thing, there are hands on experiences that you trip across on the exam, and we deliver those. And whatever the person does, we validate that they did the work correctly. So instead of validating people on, hey, how long were you in the video? Or instead of validating people based on, did you answer a bunch of multiple choice questions, right? We’re validating Hey, did you do the job? Did you do it correctly? So whether it’s a technical skill or whether it’s a an end user oriented skill like Excel, our customers build learning experiences like that. You know, additionally, there’s things like like partner training. Like, we have some software companies that sell through a channel, and they need to make sure that every new feature and every product and every update, the sales engineers at that partner organization know how to position it, the field engineers know how to deploy it, right? It’s things like that as well. So we’re all about like, here’s, I think the way to think about it is we believe that that skills are what enable human beings to be confident that they can go solve a problem and and that confidence, it Kindles contribution like the confidence, it really enables these human beings to just take something in their elves and put ideas together and actually contribute positively to something. And that contribution, the reason our customers love us so much is because that united contribution is what actually drives progress.

Karan Rhodes  07:37

Right?

Frank Gartland  07:37

You can’t get progress unless people are contributing. You can’t get people contributing unless they’re confident, and they really can’t be confident unless they’ve actually done the work in a real environment. That’s what our platform allows our customers to provide

Karan Rhodes  07:49

Exactly. And I actually knew about scalable before we had interviewed Nate. But what I love about it is it’s almost like you enable an individual to prove that they truly do have that skills and are ready to take the next step to whatever that may be. It’s like the proof is in the pudding, and it’s not superficial. You know that they have obtained the skills that you’re looking for, desiring them to obtain. And I think that’s extremely powerful. You have the confidence companies can have the confidence in ensuring their individuals have those skills. And I think that really empowers companies to take their workforces and their external partners, or whoever it may be, kind of take those relationships to the next level. And but I give you chances to throw tomatoes at me if you disagree. I love to hear your thoughts.

Frank Gartland  08:47

I think you’re putting it together really, really well. I mean, for me, it this confidence is a big word, because I think the first thing is, is that I think human beings need to prove to themselves that they can do the work first. And I think that in corporate America and bigger organizations, like a lot of times, that gets lost is that, you know, that person that’s sitting, you know, in their home office, like working from home, they need to know, should I be on my toes and try to get this promotion? Or should I be on my like, should I go for it? Or do I hope they don’t call on me to fix a problem right? Right? And that’s the thing. Hands on, experiences allow individuals to be to lean into things, as opposed to hope they don’t get called on. That’s what organizations need, that evidence so, so if I’m a manager and I look at my the skilling profile, I look at the user profiles of my learner on my LMS, or whatever I’m doing to see like, Hey, this is person’s actually done the work. Now I have confidence, and I know that that user probably has the confidence too,

Karan Rhodes  09:43

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, let’s take it up a level. And can you share with our listeners exactly what your job entails as a chief technology and product officer?

Frank Gartland  09:57

You know what great question i So Nate is obviously a big part of it, like Nate leads, our product management discipline, our UX design, you know, teams Listen, so in terms of figuring out, Hey, what is our product strategy, and how are we going to execute on that strategy? How are we going to provide experiences that that our companies need, whether it’s a content team needs to add more labs, or a lab developer, or maybe it’s someone that needs to look at the data a little bit differently, right? How do we enable them to solve their problems? That’s what our product team does. I also have a gentleman name Eric. Tell who our VP of engineering. We’ve got an incredible engineering team that builds all the things that Nate’s team defines, right? Yes, you know. And then once that stuff that Eric’s team builds and produces and puts into production. You know, our infrastructure team under Barry Martin, they need to make sure it’s supported. They need to make sure everything’s working and that we’re actually delivering labs all the time. Give you an idea, we’ll, we’ll deliver well over 10 million labs this year. Amazing. It’s a lot, right? So Barry’s team, like, they’re, you know, they’re probably not listening right now. They’re probably working. They’re probably doing something right

Karan Rhodes  11:05

Or they better be…

Frank Gartland  11:07

Exactly! And then of course, all of this, the customers we serve are financial institutions and major software organizations. So our commitment to security is, is is second to none. And so our VP of security also is on our team just ensure, you know, Paul Atkins, ensuring that everything we do across the board is meeting the highest level of standards, and we’re continuing to push the envelope towards security.

Karan Rhodes  11:30

Very interesting. Now I’m curious how you help to balance the needs and requests from your customers for product improvements with what you agree to to send to engineering to try to create it, because it’s I’ve been in tech, you know, most of my career, and it’s an interesting tension between, you know, sales and them hearing what The customer is desiring, versus what you all can can put into the queue, if you will, for the engineering teams, and sometimes the requests make sense, and then sometimes they don’t, especially if they’re one offs that aren’t serving your full customer base. So I’m curious how you think about managing that tension between request and development?

Frank Gartland  12:25

Yeah, you don’t. Karan, I think this is a super astute question. And, you know, you’re exactly right. Like, they’re always, there’s always, like, the bigger customers have these things, hey, we need this. And it’s like, doggone it, like, that’s not going to help anybody else. Like, that’s all, truly is a one off, right,

Karan Rhodes  12:40

Right.

Frank Gartland  12:41

And then there’s things that it’s like, okay for us to achieve our vision and to actually deliver on new use cases and being able to help more companies. There are things that we need to do that customers haven’t thought about yet, because we’re innovating, right? So how do you balance innovation with reaction? Right? And I’d say that, you know, I’ve worked in this, in the in the industry, in software, you know, in space, since mid 90s, and that’s always a problem, like, it’s a very common thing, I think, for us, because, hands on, there’s so many different types of hands on experiences and so many different reasons why you’re doing it. You know, some run in virtualization. Some are all about cloud like, some are about security, some are about end user skills, right? There’s so much breadth and depth to the simplicity, yet the really complex things that we enable customers to do, it’s a real problem for us. Like, it’s, I’d say it poses a lot of opportunities. It’s not really a problem, right? So what we do is we try as hard as we can to help our product managers make sure they’re prioritizing things that it might be solving a one off need, but the way we implement it is is more likely to serve multiple purposes, right? We also ensure that, hey, if we’re going to assign a developer to go fix this thing, let’s go look at all of the other requests first and see, hey, there’s like, four or five other things we can kind of have him do while he’s there, right? There’s, there’s a lot of things where it’s like, when we choose to make that sort of investment that is for a one off. Are there ways that we can kind of balance that investment with knocking a few other things off the board? But generally speaking, right now, you know, I think we’re in a place where we’re delivering such value to so many customers that it’s starting to be less of a problem. Like, like, right now, you know, we, you know, we just, we have a lot of customers that are just growing, like, most of them are growing. They have a couple things, but they’re not as urgent. So we’re in a spot now where we’re able to focus a little bit more on on simplicity. That’s what we’re trying to do now. How can we make it easier for all of our customers to understand the really cool things that we can do, like, how can we make sure that as they’re doing something like in pay? Did you know you could also do that? Oh my gosh, that’s that would be awesome. I think a lot of this stuff is a little buried now, and so focusing on user experience is a fun thing to do right now. It’s helpful.

Karan Rhodes  14:55

Well, I’m not a developer, but as a power user of technology, I appreciate that focus, because the easier you can make it for the end user to understand the bells and whistles and the value add, the absolute better things are. So I applaud you

Frank Gartland  15:15

100 and if you happen to be a scalable customer listening to this conversation, be sure to let your team, you know, let our team know. If you have a have a suggestion that’d be great

Karan Rhodes  15:23

Exactly, exactly. So can you give us just a sneak peek into a day in the life of a CTM, and then you’re balancing meeting with your other C suite counterparts and hearing requests and things there, along with your broader team and different departments as well leading that, as well as keeping an ear out for the voice of the customer. But can you give us a sneak peek into a day in the life of CTO?

Frank Gartland  15:54

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. It’s and the day in the life is harder than maybe a week in the life, I guess the week of the life, I think you hit some of these, some of these, like, right like, right between the eye. But I think there’s a The hope is, is that every single week I can, I can balance the way that I, that I that I encourage and enable the business to deliver what it needs to deliver, right and so, you know, if you think about like right now, like right now, the thing is, because of the depth and depth and the breadth of what we offer is really distilling the roadmap and distilling the problems we’re trying to solve in a way that that my peers like, like our revenue our sales leaders, our marketing leaders, our operations leaders, our customer experience leaders, so they can understand The problems in such a way that they can participate in the prioritization. Like, I’ve always found it, and I’d say that, you know, this company is not too different. Like, I think every everybody wants to believe their company is super unique.

Karan Rhodes  16:52

Yeah, right!?

Frank Gartland  16:53

That’s not the case. We’re all kind of similar. So it’s literally, how do you take all these things and know, okay, that’s too detailed to really talk about this is how we talk about priorities. So that’s a thing. There’s a real pursuit throughout my team to really figure, how can we make this more clear, concise and complete? And they hear me say these things all the time. You think about it, clear, concise and complete. Well, those three things compete with one another a lot. They do. How do you do all three in your communication. Like, so I think really just sharpening the saw on comms is a big thing and then helping notice, you know, when people within our team, like, maybe have an opportunity to communicate a little more clearly, like, how do I enable people to do that communication? Because I think product folks and engineering folks maybe more than any other group, like, they get in these cycles where they kind of over communicate, and then they over correct, and they really under communicate and and there’s very, very cool times, like little seasons where they’re like, that’s right, that’s exactly right. And so keeping that balance of, Is this too much detail or too boring, or not like, what does it look like? I’d say the thing that helps us is to constantly remind each other to focus on the problem. Yeah, quit talking about just the what, like, the why is the thing? And that’s, you know, Simon Sinek makes it, made a great living off of talking about, that, right?

Karan Rhodes  18:10

Yeah he does!

Frank Gartland  18:13

I think the deal is, is, Hey, what is the problem we’re solving? How does the rest of the world, like, solve that problem, and how do we work around it? Like, what is their reality? And they’re okay, what is it we’re uniquely doing to make that better? And I think whether you’re talking about our approach to security, whether you’re talking about how we deliver things in our platform team, how our product requirements come into engineering, like, what? Why is it that we’re doing what we’re doing? That’s a big part of it, I think, really, and I’m kind of folding this into it, it’s just finding the cycles to slow down with my team members and say, Look, how are you doing? Like, are you do you feel like you’ve got your arms around this thing or not? Like, like, what are your plans? Like, why are those your plans? And even, like, you started today off, like, like, how are things going? Personally, right? Just making sure that I’m available and that they know that I genuinely care for them and I genuinely care for our customer, like, those are the things that I really try to focus on. I really, I try to keep it pretty simple. But despite that simplicity, it seems to keep me pretty busy. Like, there’s a there’s

Karan Rhodes  19:16

I bet it does.

Frank Gartland  19:17

Yeah, right on.

Karan Rhodes  19:20

Well, you know, I’d be remiss if I did not ask as CTO about a little bit about AI, because that’s the buzz word these days. But I am curious about how you think Gen AI will impact the ability to scale the skills development and labs, and if it will, do you see it dramatically changing your product strategy approach at Skillable?

Frank Gartland  19:51

Yeah, like we’re so excited. I mean, we’re now, what, almost over a year and a half into this new world of an AI enabled and AI. Empowered world, right?

Karan Rhodes  20:01

Yeah.

Frank Gartland  20:02

And so, you know, for us, I mean, despite that truth, I mean, AI has been around for years,

Karan Rhodes  20:07

Oh gosh, you took the words right out of my mouth, it has been out for years and years.

Frank Gartland  20:13

Yeah. We were way before this, we had, you know, our customers were building labs on machine learning. And AI, we have a so while it’s, it’s kind of novel to, you know, folks that are technical, right, mainstream, well, said it isn’t who does, but I would say that there are some obvious things that it does enable us to do. And so one this is, well, I’d say this, this is maybe the longest I ever had in the conversation, the last year and a half where someone didn’t bring up AI.

Karan Rhodes  20:43

I don’t know if that’s good or bad for me, Frank,

Frank Gartland  20:48

because all things are AI. But you know, I’d say that just as I say it, everything that we do internally and everything we do to enable our customers to deliver great learning experiences are being shaped by AI. And one is, if I’m a lab developer, like, lab what’s a lab developer? By the way, what’s it’s, you know, you got some instructional designers that are working with some content people, and there’s some tech writers, and there’s some subject matter experts that kind of know the stuff, yeah, what are we trying to do? What are our learning objectives? And then they decide, like, how do we, how do we put those into a lab? Like, what we need to build out an environment, and we need to environment. We need to build some instructions. And what do we want these people to do? Right? Well, the notion of using Gen AI to help these folks have dramatically better starting places, you know, enabling them to really simply take a set of instructions and then flip it to 10 different languages using AI, right? Like, it’s all about better starting places. It’s all about, Hey, you want to write a script that will interrogate an Azure cloud subscription find out, did someone do these things? Right? We’re using Gen AI to give them a great starting place for the script. Like that. We have tools that are doing all these things today, right? On the other end, giving these, these content teams, the ability to create AI tags where Gen AI can help a learner who’s reading something I don’t really understand what that word is, and I can’t complete the lab because I’m going lost. Use Gen AI to add the context so that, so that the tech writer doesn’t need to think about every single scenario where a learner might get confused.

Karan Rhodes  22:19

Exactly

Frank Gartland  22:20

Yeah, we call that Learn to Learn, learning like, there’s a lot of fun things we’re doing with that. So for us, I mean, I could go on and on and on, but I guess I’ll just say, I’ll say this is that there’s not anything about what our like. Almost every month, we’re launching new things that are AI enabled or AI powered. And we’re talking with a lot of our customers about things like, like they would like Gen AI to be, to be leveraging not just the internet data. They want to leverage their their large language model. So how great. So Gen AI is one bit, or, how can we create content, and then how can we anchor that into a specific large language model, or even a small language model, right, right? And so, so making sure our customers have the ability to do that in a secure and reliable way, not a potentially reckless way, has been a really fun, really fun endeavor with some of our key customers.

Karan Rhodes  23:10

Wow, I love that. So do you have any concerns? Or have you heard of your workforce that has concerns about how their jobs may evolve or change as it becomes more integrated in your product, as well as integrated in your customers workflows?

Frank Gartland  23:31

You know, I don’t think we’ve we, because I think we’ve been doing AI related stuff for a while, just the nature of our business, I think our particular team, I think, is just excited, like, I think that they all just want to it’s even so much so that when they when they are assigned a project and they can’t do something with AI, they’re kind of a bummed about it, right? So they’re just enthusiastic, which I think is makes sense, you know? And for sure, there have been some conversations I’ve been in with customers where they’re like, where they’re concerned, for for some of their teammate, like, you know, like some of these folks build a lot of content, you know, and so they have a lot of people. So there’s a question about, okay, well, how much will Gen AI replace that? And I think people are still wondering about it. From from our standpoint, our customers, too. There’s always more to do. There’s never enough people.

Karan Rhodes  24:23

That’s true.

Frank Gartland  24:24

So the notion of giving people like dramatically better starting places, but still enabling people to then spend their mental energy and their real time invested in

Karan Rhodes  24:34

improving it, yeah.

Frank Gartland  24:35

tweet like clarifying, as opposed to just like shoving right go, Well, so much of that is the basic stuff, like, let Jen I take over the the foundation. Like, give me a skeleton. Yes, I’m gonna decide what color shirt I’m gonna put on the skeleton, right? That’s that. Those are the sorts of things that I think, I think we’re, you know, we’ll be, we’ll be happy to shed some of these more mundane tasks the more we embrace it.

Karan Rhodes  25:01

So I’m curious, also, Frank, so not just on AI, but just in your role in general, or in the whole technology space, what keeps you up at night? What are some concerns, maybe one or two that you can share

Frank Gartland  25:14

What keeps me up at night. So one is, now that my kids are living out of the country, what are they doing like that keeps me up at night? I would say, uh, seriously, though, although that is pretty serious, seriously though, I think a lot of it has to do with the clarity. Bit like, for me, it really is a like, what we do is complicated, and there’s so many different varieties and so many places where we can innovate, but enabling my peers and the rest of their organizations to really and our customers to help us shape where we should be innovating like that. I really do. I grind over that sometimes, like, how can I make that simpler? How can I make that more easy to understand? Because what I want is I want more people, not just on my team, but across our organization, across our customers, across our partners to feel like they’re collaborating, and that we’re enabling them to participate in some form of collaboration that will shape the way customers train people, you know, because in the end, it is all about, you know, like this word contribute is a big word for me, because what it’s mean the Latin root is trip, right? It’s like a tributary, like a smaller thing that’s adding to a bigger thing and making a better thing time is with so our whole thing is, how do we enable human beings to feel, to know that they’re adding value that matters, right? And so for me, like wording our opportunities in a way where folks can contribute to where we’re going to innovate is really important to me, and I think that’s the place that I probably it probably keeps me up more than anything.

Karan Rhodes  26:44

Interesting. Interesting. Gosh, I could talk about this all day, but thank you for sharing that. Well, I know we’re winding down on time just a tad frame, but can’t let you go without asking you our signature question. And as you know, our firm did research on what we call the last mile of leadership, which is the actual leadership execution, or the execution of any Leadership Initiative. And what came out of our research were seven areas of focus that high performing leaders always seem to be able to accomplish for to become renowned as a strong leader, and so you are so kind to share that leading with courageous agility really resonated with you, and for my new listeners out there, leading with courageous agility is all about having the courage and the fortitude to take calculated risk and stand up for what you believe in and move forward in even if you’re uncertain of the future what will happen. It’s all about taking those having the courage to take data, take your best guess, come up with a course of direction, and then take the baby steps forward and see what happened so curious ones would love to know, Frank, why did leading with courageous agility really resonate with you?

Frank Gartland  28:09

You know, I think that the way that I’ve kind of, I the way I’ve evolved over the last 25, 28 years in product is it has been defined by this notion of courageous agility, and a lot of it has been boy, because of that, I’ve made some big mistakes, and, oh my gosh, some big mistakes, right? You know, I, you know, but I’m so glad. But it’s kind of who is, who I am, and maybe who I’ve become, and who I think I’m still becoming. And it’s this notion of of in product that you can get paralyzed by data, and defend your paralyzed you know, nature by saying, Well, I don’t have the data. We haven’t validated this yet with enough people. It’s kind of like, well, there are some situations I’ve learned that it’s like, hey, take if you’ve got a 25 step journey, taking two steps now is better than taking four steps three months from now, correct? Yes, right. And so for me, I’ve, over the years, grown to be extremely comfortable with just advancing. For me, it’s about we’re gonna go forward. Now we might go forward, you know, two great steps, and then we might go forward off to the side, but if, in doing that, we’ll recognize the problem, and the bumpers will put us back, back on track. But it’s like, if you’re just sitting and you’re and you’re, you know, and you know. And now, by the way, it’s very important to do user testing and validation and look at data. No doubt it’s critical, like critical, and it’s incredible how many things that you learn throughout a UX design is just one example as you talk, but, but really, the real learning comes when you actually go do it. Yeah, right. Like this. This feels awesome. Like this feels like it’s so much better than what we do now. It’s like, Hey, do you want to try our new workflow? And they try it, and they’re like, Well, no, I hate that. I’m going back. Well, why’d they go back? That’s where you learn, right,

Karan Rhodes  29:54

Right?

Frank Gartland  29:54

And so just just one small example. But so the idea is knowing that, hey, there’s a 50/50, chance that the people we love hate this. But I’m gonna, but I think it’s our best current thinking, and I’m gonna advance the ball right. I think this never know unless you advance the ball right, you never know it, and neither do your customers, right?  And so for me, like the principle I’ve tried to live by, and I think some, some months, I do this well, and some I don’t, is it’s, I call it the lamp to your feet strategy. So people on my team, if anyone watching this, this is where they’re probably rolling their eyes. I say it a lot. I say it a lot. I say that, you know. I say that, you know for sure. Once in a while, you’ve got to put the line. If you’re in a pitch dark place and you’re in the woods, right? Sometimes you got to put the lamp up really high so the light is thrown further along so you can see, like, is there a bear out there? Like, what? Like, is there any danger, right? You get your bearings a little bit too. Like, okay, I’m going that direction. So then it’s like, you don’t keep it up here when you start moving, because you might fall in a hole right in front of you. You got to put it to your feet so you can see what’s going on. But you got to take a step. That’s true. And for me, the only way to advance the ball in product, and I don’t think this is really just a software thing, is you gotta you gotta trust your instincts, you gotta look at data. You gotta have a balance of that, and then you gotta take a step, because your fit your fifth step, you’ll never see it unless you take the first two. That’s right. So that’s so for me, courageous agility is the way to advance the ball like it’s it so

Karan Rhodes  30:14

Yeah.  Well on that we can drop the mic, because that was a gem of a piece of advice, and we’re not rolling our eyes at Frank, we love we love that. What was it? Lamp to the feet. Lamp to your feet. I love that analogy.

Frank Gartland  31:41

Yeah, it’s a it’s a great principle for everything, for sure,

Karan Rhodes  31:44

It is, it is

Frank Gartland  31:44

And I love the time video for sure.

Karan Rhodes  31:47

Oh, absolutely. Well, thank you again, Frank for the gift of your time. Today, we’re going to have a ton of information in our show notes, including your bio and links for scalable and where to find you as well. But we always love to give our guests a little air time to share as well. So would you mind sharing with our guests the website for skillable and where they could find you if they want to follow what you’re doing these days?

Frank Gartland  32:15

Yeah. It’s skillable.com it’s S K, I, L, L, A, B, L, E. Skillable.com is us, and Sarah Danzel and Jenny Davis and the rest of our marketing team has just done an incredible job, you know, telling our story. So love you to check that out. And of course, best place for me is LinkedIn, like I think, you know, that’s a nice, nice haunt for me. So you find me in Frank Gartland at LinkedIn. I’m the I’m the only one that looks like this. So happy to connect with you.

Karan Rhodes  32:41

Wonderful. All right. Well, thanks again, Frank, we really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Frank Gartland  32:48

Thank you, Karan. Really appreciate your time as well. Thank you

Karan Rhodes  32:51

Awesome. And thank you to listeners for the gift of your time as well. Because, as I always love to say, we know that there are literally millions of other podcasts that are out there, and we don’t take your patronage lightly. All we ask that you please to be sure to subscribe and follow us on your favorite podcast platform or choice, and be sure to share with just one friend, because by doing so, that will help enable us all to better lead at the top of our games. Thanks so much, and see you next week, And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.