Leyla Seka: [00:00:00] For me, AI is giant opportunity to rebuild everything. It's so fast. Rebuild. Like all the things that I was frustrated building on a cloud database or God forbid, a client server database for that. Like, I mean, I have been doing this for a long time. And as a product person, this unlocks the ability to really fix customer problems.

Trisha Price: If you build software or lead people who do, then you're in the right place. This is hard calls. Real decisions, real leaders, real outcomes. Hi everyone, and I'm Trisha Price, and welcome back to Hard Calls. I'm really looking forward to today because as you guys all know, there are people who come into your life and see something in you that maybe you don't see yet.

Trisha Price: They take a bet on you, they help you. Well, about, I don't know, 12 years ago, maybe more, fairly early in my [00:01:00] executive career, I met today's guest. I was working at nCino. She was at Salesforce. And it was a pivotal moment for me. I'll never forget it. I'll never forget this moment, this time of walking into your office in San Francisco, meeting you, working together. For our listeners, you may or may not know, nCino was one of the larger companies in the app exchange, and Leyla, who is our guest today, was leading the app exchange and I came into her office just to work on the relationship, get to know her, figure out how we better work together.

Trisha Price: And I walked out of there with a mentor and a friend and a champion, and that moment definitely changed my career, changed my personal brand in tech, and I probably wouldn't be here with today's Hard Calls podcast if it wasn't for Leyla. So I'm so excited. Yeah, 

Leyla Seka: That's not true. That's not true at all.

Leyla Seka: But you are a sweetheart. You would agree, you were [00:02:00] going here whether I helped you or not. But you were easy to help, Trish. 

Trisha Price: I don't know about that. You saw something in me and I help, and I really appreciate it. And so everyone, today's guest on Hard Calls is Leyla Seka.

Leyla Seka: Hi. I'm so excited to be here.

Leyla Seka: I love you so much, Trish. This is gonna be fun. 

Trisha Price: This is gonna be really fun. It really is. For those who don't know, I'm sure you do. Leyla is a veteran when it comes to enterprise software, to SaaS, to partnerships. She really built and scaled the AppExchange. She has been iconic in helping with equal pay and diversity for women and I also really look up to you for how you stood up for all of us, and thank you for that.

Trisha Price: So. Welcome to Hard Calls. 

Leyla Seka: Thank you. I'm very excited to be here. And yeah, we have lots to talk about. I'm very proud of you too. There are not a lot of women product leads. There are some, but there should be a lot more, and you've [00:03:00] always done such a great job of doing that job and showing up, so I'm thrilled to be here talking to you and let's talk.

Leyla Seka: What do you wanna talk about Trish? 

Trisha Price: Well, it is Hard Calls is the name of the show. So before we jump into a million things that I want you to share with our guests and me today, I'd love to start with just share with us one of the hardest calls you've had to make from a career perspective. 

Leyla Seka: I mean, there are a lot of hard calls, right?

Leyla Seka: Like, I mean, especially if you're a tech executive, like it seems like you are constantly making hard calls, whether it's like, do I go to my kids' saxophone concert, or I do a go out to dinner with this big deal? We're trying to close, you know, that's hard calls in business. But, when you asked me to be on this podcast, I was thinking about you and that always brings up Salesforce.

Leyla Seka: And so I was thinking about Salesforce and I did have one, right? So, I mean, there were many, trust me, but one, one stood out. And that was back a long ass time ago. I can't even remember how many years, but let's just say a long, long time ago. When Facebook was online and, you know, it was sort of this thing we didn't [00:04:00] really understand.

Leyla Seka: We were all like, your high school friends were on there and all your work colleagues were on there, and you were like showing pictures of your baby. You know, it was weird. Like, what are we doing? What's social media? And enterprise software has historically been a poll based system. You go in there and you try to get the data that you need out of it to figure out what you need to do.

Leyla Seka: Right? Whereas on the consumer side thing got very pushed. Right? Hey, I mean, Instagram basically tells me what to buy. It's ridiculous. I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna buy those shoes. And I'm in like, so completely stuck on them. It's, they have my number right? 

Trisha Price: The algorithm is correct. 

Leyla Seka: Oh my gosh. I mean, it's ridiculous.

Leyla Seka: And then people are, how'd you find that? I'm like, so shamelessly like Instagram, it's terrible. But uh, back in the day in enterprise tech, that really wasn't a notion, like a feed in the system was not really how we were doing things. You navigated from Object to object. You ran reports within the object.

Leyla Seka: Maybe you went into an analytics tool to do some comparative reporting, but you know, [00:05:00] it, it just didn't work that way. And so that the feed was kind of telling you , what should I pay attention to? And so at that point, at Salesforce we released three times a year. And , I know that sounds archaic to people now, and I just, you know, it's funny because I was just talking to someone about this as people are coming back from Davos. We could have released more often. We release three times a year 'cause our customers couldn't take more innovation than that. And now AI is finding itself in exactly the same position of like, we cannot consume. Right? So there's something there. We won't go off on that.

Leyla Seka: But um, back in this day we were building, we released three times a year. So we were well into a release, you know, like we were in QA. Right? We were like, we had coded a whole bunch of stuff. It had been a hard release to agree on what we were gonna build because our boss was pushing this feed notion that all of us were like, dude, we gotta build things that people are actually asking us for.

Leyla Seka: We have to like get this work done, get these [00:06:00] people happy. Right? And for me, running the app exchange, I had a hard time, right? I had customers as an audience. Partners in an audience, developers as an audience, communities and audience. So like I had a lot to contend with when I was having to build stuff inside the marketplace.

Leyla Seka: And this release, we'd really focused on partners finally. Which candidly we hadn't done enough at at that point. And Mark came into the product meeting basically. And we're in qa, right? We are, we're not shipping, but we are coming up on it. Yo, like it's close. Um. And he said, scrap the release. Well, you know, they always say something like, we're gonna put this release on hold, but if you know anything,

Trisha Price: We'll come back to that.

Trisha Price: It's not wasteful effort. It's not wasteful effort. We're gonna come back.

Leyla Seka: You never come back. You can't merge the code line back in. It's just not the way it works. You're basically deciding to throw it away. I mean, I've done it so many times at this point and Oh, best [00:07:00] intentions, right?

Leyla Seka: But never, you just can't. It's not what happens. And he basically, for all intents and purposes, was like, we are stopping all of this and you are all building something. He called Chatter. Which also we were like. What are you talking about? Like, for me, I was like, I don't know how I'm gonna do this.

Leyla Seka: Right? I don't know how I'm gonna like explain to all these people that have been yelling at me for years. And I finally told them it's all coming and now I have to tell them it's not. Right? And something else is coming that no one understands or is asking for. Like, it was very, and my team, you know, my developers, my product team, my marketing team, everyone was ready.

Leyla Seka: And I was like, "oh yeah, no." Great. And at the time I didn't believe, right? There are moments when you're an executive and you get decisions like that and you understand and you agree, and you go back into the room of your team and you explain to them, listen to me. This is not a democracy and there's a lot of hard calls here and this is the way we're going.

Leyla Seka: And I [00:08:00] agree, right? And I understand you might have concerns and I'm happy to answer them, but this is the right decision. This instance, I did not feel like that. I was like, this is ridiculous. I don't understand, like, this is not what we should be doing. But I had to go back in the room and tow the line, right?

Leyla Seka: And be like, and then tell all the partners. And look in the end doing this became the thing that differentiated us as a company, shifted the way people looked at our software, which at that point was getting a little older too, and gave us an edge in a world where social was increasingly becoming the way people wanted to interact with any software and certAInly if you could promise some hope of that in the enterprise, you are far ahead of everyone else, right? 

Trisha Price: I felt like it really changed the perspective from this is an amazing system of record, this is how we run our pipeline, this is how we know if we're really gonna make our number or not, to more of a system of engagement for teams.

Trisha Price: And if you look at to where Salesforce is [00:09:00] today, you know, Slack etc, like it just kind of set it up. Like that was the beginning, right? So I wouldn't have believed either if I were you in that moment. What a fascinating and smart move it was. 

Leyla Seka: No, it did. It turned it into a, it turned it into the customer master. Which is pretty unbelievable.

Leyla Seka: And the customer master in this day and age. Now, as we're transferring over into AI and data is oil or however people are talking, you know, whatever the new phrase is, du jour. Salesforce is an incredibly important company. Right? And it will remAIn important through all of the evolutions of AI. And you can't say that about a lot of big enterprise software companies right now, but when you are the customer master, you will.

Trisha Price: And this was a part of it. Well, I love that your hard call was one that was such a pivotal moment in Salesforce's time in terms of you know, changing and also one [00:10:00] which we've all. Had to do, which is lead through a time of uncertAInty and lead through a time when you're not sure if you believed or not.

Trisha Price: And it's probably one of the hardest things in leadership is to pivot the ship. And I think it's so relatable right now, Leyla, because in this time of AI, almost all of us are having to make pretty big shifts right now too. And not every time we bring the new vision and the new does every team member believe and they'll say, well, show me the data.

Trisha Price: What data tells you that this is the right approach? And look, I'm very data-driven, you know that. But sometimes you can't always be data-driven. Sometimes you've gotta innovate and take a chance. 

Leyla Seka: You do, and I mean, listen, like this is, this, tech is a major shift, right? This isn't like cloud, which I was at the front edge of or any of that.

Leyla Seka: This is very, this is very different. This is bigger, [00:11:00] but the adoption cycle is the same. Humans consuming are the same. I mean, for me, AI is giant opportunity to rebuild everything. It's so fast. Rebuild. Like all the things that I was frustrated building on a cloud database or God forbid, a client server database for that.

Leyla Seka: Like, I mean, I have been doing this for a long time and as a product person, this unlocks. The ability to really fix customer problems in a root way, right? And then have that root data pull back out to give insights without them having to hire like a giant analytic system to try to get semi information on it.

Leyla Seka: Now, there's a lot of issues with this too. Right? Like hallucinating is pretty terrifying. AI hallucinates, that's pretty terrifying, right? If you think about business decisions being put into some motion like that. But the reality is, like the opportunity here far [00:12:00] outweighs the worry, right? And, and I get it.

Leyla Seka: Jobs are gonna change, things are gonna change, logistics are gonna change a lot of stuff. AIrlines are gonna change. So many big things are gonna change that I can't even get my head around them. But I think it's right to be worried and to think through it rationally and to try to look at all the smartest people, you know, and figure out what the right answers are because the rules aren't set Right?

Leyla Seka: Yeah. But I wanna be clear, I was in the room when Salesforce was helping write the Gap Accounting Rules. With the SEC because no one understood a subscription based software model at the time. Right? And that worked. We figured that out. And a lot of companies prospered. You know, not one, right? A lot of businesses prospered, a lot of different industries.

Leyla Seka: Banking, a lot of things changed. 

Trisha Price: I mean, your partner, I mean, it allowed us to innovate at a pace. It allowed us to gAIn confidence of banks putting important data in the [00:13:00] cloud at a pace we might not have been able to without that partnership. And it was monumental for us at the time. It seems like commonplace now to people, but it wasn't commonplace when we were doing it together.

Trisha Price: And you're right, I do see a lot of parallels to AI right now. And you know, it's interesting when I think about AI as a product person, I think about, you know, building AI first systems instead of traditional systems. But I also think about like the day to day and how we work, right? And how do we take call transcripts.

Trisha Price: From a customer call and turn that into code. Not turn that into a PRD, not turn that into Jira tickets, but turn that into code before you're even off the call and you're able to check in a bunk fix for an issue or an enhancement and show it back to your customer before you're even off the call. It's like mind boggling.

Leyla Seka: Mind boggling.

Trisha Price: Everybody's work is changing. Mind boggling. 

Leyla Seka: I mean, even this, you're [00:14:00] talking, do you have an issue in your department? Right? You're talking to some vendors about the issue. They wind up seeing amount of money. They are saying some long implementation time. You come back and in your own system, code the solution and implement it across your organization with no money and no engineering talent.

Leyla Seka: Like we're shifting. This is a platform shift. This is like a fundamental shift. Like I was reading something coming out of Davos, like the head of Google Wizard division or whatever, you know, they're also smart, it's just exhausting. But he said something like, don't go to college and just learn how to use AI tools really well and you will dominate.

Leyla Seka: Um, and my kid's in college, right? So I immediately was like, Hey, you're taking any Anytime tool classes this semester? You know, like whatever. But um, this is a fundamental shift. This is crazy. And. There are scary parts of it, but as a product executive or a technology executive, you have the wonderful opportunity to look across the board and look at really complicated problems that you couldn't solve.

Leyla Seka: [00:15:00] Right? I mean, we've all BS to solve. I certainly have for many, many customers, right? Because we just couldn't. Do it like there was some block, whatever the thing, it was technical or data or security or whatever the thing was, there was something that kept it from happening. A lot of that is removed. New companies, new empires are gonna be built.

Leyla Seka: You can feel it in Silicon Valley. It's palpable, like it's a shift in like the whole frenetic energy is shifting around because there's no one winner. Right? Yeah. There's no, no one person's gonna win this. This is like a category shifter and a whole bunch of industries are just gonna, I mean, it's very exciting to me.

Leyla Seka: I don't feel scared by it. I feel like exhilarated by it, and I don't, maybe I'm, maybe that's why I'm crazy and do this, but, well, do you feel exhilarated, Trish? Do you feel scared?. 

Trisha Price: I do, I feel exhilarated. I feel like it's a time more than ever to be in the game. Like as a product exec who has the choice, I'm fortunate enough now to be an operator or [00:16:00] to be an advisor, to sit on boards, you know, and it's all those things are fun and they all have their advantages.

Trisha Price: Like for me, right now. There's no way I could sit out and not operate right now because it's so exciting and you gotta relearn everything. Like can't just sit there and like, yes, there's still leadership principles that you and I know and product decisions and customer value and all those things that don't change, but the how you do.

Trisha Price: It's 

Leyla Seka: So exciting. Like I, I mean, and you know, it's interesting, I'm not working right now and I'm getting hungry, right? Like I'm getting the point where I'm like, I can't take it much more like I have to get back just for a similar reason to you. But I do think we're at an interesting inflection point in sort of the evolution of AI to where seasoned experience is required. No matter what the tech is doing now, you need to build it, scale and manage organizational changes at scale. In a world [00:17:00] where the tech is shifting around so much, it's hard to keep your eye on the ball, right? You're like, which way am I going? Well, this happened at Salesforce in the early days.

Leyla Seka: Now we were the only public cloud infrastructure. If you are not gonna build your own data center, you were going to build with us. Essentially. Yeah. And so it's, it's not exactly the same premise, but there's this interesting sort of thing happening and I mean, look, this, there's a lot of opportunity and excitement in this and there's a lot of smart people that I love and trust that are working to make sure that it's regulated, right?

Leyla Seka: Will it be perfectly done? Absolutely not. But as a product exec looking inside your company, if you're not seriously leveraging this in different ways and thinking about how to solve like your worst problems with this. You're not going to have, not gonna last job much longer. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Trisha Price: on a thread that you mentioned that I agree so much with, which is seasoned execs.

Trisha Price: Sort of our gut feel, our decision making, our [00:18:00] leadership through change, our ability to pick the right team and inspire the right team is more important than ever. How the details of how the sausage gets made and the work it's done. Everything is changing, which is fun. And you have been through that before, right?

Trisha Price: When you think about what happened with the app exchange and really the only real ecosystems and partnerships at that point were things like for the iPhone, right? Then you move that to B2B software. You were really a pioneer in that, and I'm sure people thought you were crazy and you had to do crazy things like try to balance people like me and our demands with your direct demands and your own need to build and enter industries, and you had to manage all that.

Trisha Price: It's like those are the same complexities. That are in front of us in this AI revolution. 

Leyla Seka: A hundred percent. And look, we didn't know what we were doing a lot of the time. I mean, [00:19:00] people would be terrified to know that. Like, so much of our business in the early days came through on a fax machine. You know, like, I mean, we it was the, the sales understood in enterprise at that point were OEM sales.

Leyla Seka: You know, or like white label sales. It was very, very different than the notion that we're like going into business together. They're pulling some part of our tech with them or whatever it was. So like, yeah, it was super complicated and running any kind of marketplace like that or any kind, and which more and more software's becoming like that, right?

Leyla Seka: It's our harder to differentiate, or at the very least, your software needs a community around it. And again. You know, I was lucky. I was at Salesforce at the forefront of sort of the definition of a lot of this stuff in the enterprise at least. But listen, leadership is hard earned. I mean, well done. Like if you're a good leader, you've gotten your ass kicked hard many, many times, and you.

Leyla Seka: Have gotten okay with that or rationalize that through. And you understand that like [00:20:00] different teams are motivated different ways. I remember trying to, all of a sudden my team became very young, right? And they were like asking me if I was like a baby boomer or something like that, which really was like terrifying for me. I mean, I'm like a squarely Gen X. Thank you very much. But yeah, I mean, just so we're clear, but as the younger generation came in, their tolerance for certAIn things that we just absolutely assumed were normal, went away. They didn't wanna work all the time. They didn't really understand when I was texting 'em at 6:00 AM that that had much more to do with me than them.

Leyla Seka: Right? I'm awake and getting it outta my inbox. I don't care when you look at it, like, just get it outta mine. Like, 

Trisha Price: I still do that, Leyla, 

Leyla Seka: I still do that. I, I don't even have a job, Trish. It's like my poor friends getting like lunch invitations. They're like, okay, dude. Okay. It's 4:00 AM am well meet you.

Trisha Price: Good morning. Yes. I love that. Well, Leyla, when you're talking about leadership and, and your passion for your team, what, what? What do you think drove you for that passion? For, for meaning, mentorship, [00:21:00] for your team leadership, like you definitely went above and beyond and still go above and beyond to invest in other people and see things in other people and give of yourself to make others successful.

Trisha Price: Like what drives that? 

Leyla Seka: Listen, like my parents were immigrants. Like I'm first generation American. I was like taught to that. I was super lucky to be born here. Right? And then my dad did pretty well, and then I managed to like, put together a career. I'm, I'm neurodivergent, I'm dyslexic, I'm chubby. Like I'm, I've always been all these things, right?

Leyla Seka: And I've always been underestimated. Sort of consistently my whole life. And so I think when I started getting good, I was like, this is my opportunity not to underestimate people or to show people stuff. And I also really hate it when things aren't fair. I will lose the race most of the time. Honestly, I'm chubby, middle aged ladies, like super menopausal, but like, but I wanna [00:22:00] start at the same start.

Leyla Seka: You don't get to start ahead of me. Right? And unfortunately a lot of this country is set up so that people start ahead of other people. And a lot of life is, and a lot of just the way things work is, but I don't like that. That makes me mad, like deeply angry in my core. Like a fire starts to burn. And outside of my children and my family and my friends, like nothing matters.

Leyla Seka: I don't like burn that. Burn the house down. Like take it like, I'd rather go down fighting than go down quiet with the beach house. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. I love that. I love that. And I've seen that from you. And I love your like analogy to like, are we starting at the same, same start line? Because I've heard so many times people say, well, if you're both interviewing for a job or you both have the same opportunity, you have the same opportunity.

Trisha Price: It's like, eh. Well, really, 

Leyla Seka: if I grew up around people like you, I'm gonna be more comfortable for you than someone who didn't grow up around people like you. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Leyla Seka: That's not [00:23:00] brain surgery. That's pretty simple. Right? Like, I don't know. And, and you know, I think also people need a lot of assurance. I was lucky I had a lot of people along the way that did just totally back me.

Leyla Seka: You know, and they, and I was not like everybody else. I'm very different. I'm crazy. I cuss all the time super loud in the product org. Are you kidding? Back in the day? No, no, no, no, no, no. There was no one like me in the product org. So, you know, and for years it was like, there was only two women, me and Linda in the giant pro, you know?

Leyla Seka: So I was very different. And I love engineers 'cause I appealed to them. They got it. They were like, she's actually weird. But she's, you know, 

Trisha Price: you're smart, you're clear, you make decisions, you speak directly. And I mean, those are, those are helpful attributes. And her cursing. I will, I almost told the story when we started, but I'm gonna tell it now.

Trisha Price: Um, and I hope this ends up out there to the wild, wild world. And no one cuts this part of our conversation. But the [00:24:00] real story that I should have started with was. When I walked into Leyla's office, she walked out and she opened the door and her whole team was sitting there and she said, everybody we're gonna make Trisha fucking famous.

Trisha Price: That's the real story for those who'd like to know. And, um. And Yes. 

Leyla Seka: I had a hell of a marketing team, Leslie, Tom, I had a hell of a marketing team. They nailed it. Yes, they did. They were on fire. 

Trisha Price: Oh, yes. And, and I love that about you, and I love, I love that directness and clarity and, and comfort in being who you are.

Trisha Price: You know, you kind of, you kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier too, when you were talking about hard calls and you talked about like the balance between raising a family and being an executive in those choices. I've also often described my life as seasons. The working season's been a little, a little big and a little long compared to some of the other seasons.

Trisha Price: [00:25:00] Um, and, and then to your point with. With today's workforce, you know, on one hand you hear about balance a lot more and people in boundaries, but then on the other hand you hear about, you know, the 9, 9, 6 and people working 24 hours a day. So, you know, you kind of, you kind of get conflicting information of what's happening out there.

Trisha Price: Like what do you think? Like what is balance? Should there be balance? 

Leyla Seka: Oh, 

Trisha Price: it's, I'm not balanced. 

Leyla Seka: Well, the balance is a hard word. I'm a Libra, so I like balance, but it's unattainable in a certAIn way. I think that it's really hard. Right? It's really hard to work really hard and build a family and keep a relationship and be close to your kids and take care of your parents and talk to your siblings and see your friends and go grocery shopping and buy new jeans.

Leyla Seka: It's hard. 

Trisha Price: Go to the gym. 

Leyla Seka: Oh, forget it. I didn't even mention that. Tr No was self care. Please. [00:26:00] I mean, I'm joking, but you know what I mean? So, I mean, I think all of that's really hard. I think. I think you have to come up with your own rules a little bit, and you have to be, they have to work within the rules of where you work, right?

Leyla Seka: I mean, you can't be like, I'm not working on the weekend. If you work somewhere where everyone's pounding in the weekend, right? Like that's not gonna work. Right? But you have to find a company and a group of people that are working in a way where you. Can do that with them. And then you need to be really clear.

Leyla Seka: Like, I was a mess. I didn't know, we didn't understand. Everything happened so fast. I didn't know the difference between my work cell phone and my home cell. You know, everything was mushed. Um, I did not, I don't think I did a great job at this. I think I've talked about this a lot, right? And I was just really lucky to have a really nice husband who was super patient and who like sat there and was like, here's why you're hard to live with.

Leyla Seka: And he was Right? You know these professions, when you start doing well at them too, they feed an [00:27:00] ego, right? And it's hard not to feel like. Yep. Here I am. Right? A little bit every now and then, and no one in your family cares about that. None of your friends care about where you work or what you did or what the AppExchange, no one cares.

Leyla Seka: No one knows what you're talking about. So like, remember that your time's no more important than anyone else's. You're no more important than anyone else. Okay? Whatever you did great, someone else did something greater and someone else did something less. Always like, it's just, but it's hard not to be wrapped up in that.

Leyla Seka: I think for me, like figuring out my own rules and even now as I like ponder, going back to work in some kind of fashion like what are these rules? Like how am I, can I do this? Can I do it? Can I not totally go a hundred percent back in like this is my whole life. I have almost no opportunity to see anything else.

Leyla Seka: 'cause that's kind of how I work sometimes or have historically. So, and I think it evolves through [00:28:00] time too. When you're young, you're grinding right? As I'm 52. The world looks a little different to me right now. I'm still young, I'm still ready. I still got a lot of energy, probably more than most people, but like things change through time.

Trisha Price: They do. They do. And I think that a lot of that can make us better leaders. Being able to take a breath. You know, I think some of the motions that got us here worked but maybe there's a better way. And I think some of my patience level has improved. Not like so much so that I'm acceptance, accepting of mediocrity, like I will never be that person, but just being able to better understand life and.

Trisha Price: People's needs and things around you and taking a moment to think before you react, you know, send that message, et cetera. Um, I think it's beneficial for us, like that's a good one. [00:29:00] 

Leyla Seka: I was a hothead. I remember even like, I worked with some older people on the app change when I was like in my late thirties and they were in their fifties and I was irate about something once and they were like, we've seen this before.

Leyla Seka: Everything's gonna be okay. Just calm down and like people have told me, calm down my whole life. 'cause I have such a high energy level, so it's a slightly irritating thing for me. But I remember at the time being like, fools, and now I'm like, oh, everyone just calm down. Calm down. Everything's fine.

Leyla Seka: Everything's fine. 

Trisha Price: It's well prepared me for parenting. High schoolers, like when shit goes off the rAIls here. Mm-hmm I'm also much more prepared to just like, you know. Breathe deep and move along here. Contain and prioritize. Contain and prioritize. 

Leyla Seka: That's a great one. ContAIn and prioritize. Listen, life is totally unexpected.

Leyla Seka: Things change on a dime. One day you're this, the next day something happens. Look at, I mean, the life is [00:30:00] unpredictable. As product leaders, it's sort of our job to be. Ready for the unpredictable, which in an age when the technology is shifting so drastically is a hard job. Right? 

Trisha Price: It's 

Leyla Seka: um, it's, 

Trisha Price: it's exactly how I came up with the name hard calls when we were thinking about the podcast.

Trisha Price: 'cause I was like,

Trisha Price: when you're a product leader, you're getting squeezed from every direction you've got. Your CEO's got the next shiny idea. Like chatter. You've got your, your board with your AI roadmap coming down. You've got your team who are amazing and spent all their time with customers and looking at the competition and really owning what their strategy is and the outcomes they wanna drive.

Trisha Price: And then you've got sales sitting there with like, I'll never make the number unless you do these three things and support you squeeze. 

Leyla Seka: Yeah. And if you don't fix this, all the customers are gonna, I mean, it's a hard job. I took product manager a million years ago. I was offered like any job I wanted in like a teeny, tiny startup.

Leyla Seka: Right? Like five people, whatever. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Leyla Seka: And I [00:31:00] was working with all these consultants and they all told me to take Product Manager. And the reason they told me to take Product Manager it was 'cause it was like CEO of the product. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Leyla Seka: And I was 28. Right? And they were like, you will learn how to work with every division.

Leyla Seka: You will learn what every division does. You will understand how it works, how they relate to other divisions. And all of this has proven very true. And you know what else is true? CEO is a really hard job. It's a hard job. It's our job. It's not just like flying around on private jets and having a good time.

Leyla Seka: Like it's a rough hard job. You're getting yanked in 9 million directions and that's what a product leader feels like. And in mass technical, like this kind of an evolution that's happening right now. Job's really hard. Like what are you doing? Are you, I mean, I just started taking a whole bunch of Stanford online computer science classes and I'm not, I don't even try to do the equations.

Leyla Seka: I'm just trying to figure out what they want the equations to do. And that in and of itself is giving me [00:32:00] such an edge right now. I'm like, oh my gosh. Okay, I understand much more now. And people like this guy Andrew Wing, is teaching them. He is fab. I, I like idolize him right now. But I'm just saying like it's as a product leader, running an actual product team right now and trying to make those hard decisions in the midst of all those other demands, like you just said, Trish, like, and trying to educate yourself about what you're supposed to know. 'cause everything's changing yesterday, today, tomorrow.

Leyla Seka: That's hard. I mean, my advice to product leaders is find each other, like find each other where you live. Like, you know, Trish lives somewhere really random. Find her and build a group around her. Like help each other. 'cause you will, you'll share information and you'll make each other better. And you'll also like help set standard.

Leyla Seka: Right? Which you're not even thinking about. I mean, we did that without change. We set like a marketplace standard. 

Trisha Price: Yeah. 

Leyla Seka: That was helpful. 

Trisha Price: Or we could just commiserate, you know? That's a great point. And for anyone [00:33:00] who does wanna get together with like the most amount of product leaders and product managers ever in the world, pandemonium is coming up in March and I will be there and I am sure lots.

Trisha Price: I mean, that is really everybody who's there and it is fun. So hopefully I'll see some of you guys there. Well, Leyla, thank you so much for coming on Hard Calls today. Thank you for your giving me a shot, mentorship, leadership and what you did at Salesforce and the opportunity that provided us at nCino and then for me personally.

Trisha Price: So I can't wait to see what you end up doing next and just thank you again for coming on the show today. 

Leyla Seka: I love you, Trish. You're amazing. Thank you for having me. 

Trisha Price: Thank you for listening to Hard Calls, the product podcasts, where we share best practices and all the things you need.