Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Talk to Brazil with Tom Rioch, the business
connector to business in Brazil. Talk to Brazil's a leading
business podcast talks with business experts throughout the world. I'm
Tom Rioch nown As, a king of network and connecting
people from my studio in Brazil. Joining us again today
from Paris, France is Uriel Jooslovsky's product development and technology expert,
(00:25):
author of Digital Irreverent, available on Amazon. It's a book
about leadership in the digital space in multicultural environments. So, Uriel,
how does one prepare for the global challenges in product
development across startups, large corporations, fintech and mobility industries.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Hi, Top, thanks for having me again. Jumping to your question,
let me dissect this into probably three parts. One is
you talk about the fintech, mobility and e commerce industries,
and these three industries have something in common. In the
(01:07):
last twenty years, they have been absolutely disrupted and one
of the things that changed is that people today have
a very easy way to choose. You have examples like
New Bank in Brazil. You have examples like Mercato Libre
across Latin America. You have examples like uber or other
(01:30):
right haling solutions in the region as well and all
around the world.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
And what you can see is people can choose.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
People can leave a bank in five minutes and download
an app and get a debit card right away, and
that wasn't the case many years ago. So if you
want to succeed in product development, and let's say five
(01:59):
probably you need to conquer three skills I would say,
or behaviors. The first one you need to know how
to define success. The second you need to embrace, not
only accept or acknowledge, but need to embrace uncertainty. This
(02:19):
space is embedded in uncertainty and you need to know
how to deal with it. And the third point is
customer centricity. You need to understand who you're actually working for.
All of these three skills, of course need to be combined,
combined with the data analytics understanding how to look at
(02:41):
data and how to make decisions, and of course your
technical field skills if you're a software engineer, if you're
a product manager, if you're a designer, of course you
need also your specific skills.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
There.
Speaker 2 (02:59):
But the three aspects I will repeat them again, how
you define success. The second is how you deal with uncertainty,
and then how you become customer centric. Are the things
that successful product development people do well.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
The two points I want to pick off. I agree
with you on uncertainty because many persons, many technical oriented
people that I know, they want to be perfect. They
want to be one hundred percent before they take another step.
That world doesn't exist anymore because you know as soon
as you take a step, things have changed. So I
start with nothing is certain anymore, but the customer centricity
(03:43):
changes as fast as certainty changes because customers are being
fed people persons. We consider people customers, but actually they're not.
I consider customers somebody's actually paid for a service that
I render. The rest are leads, their prospects, there whatever
out there, right, So understanding the the end of the
(04:08):
of your business during your professional journey is to serve
somebody absolutely and understand what they're looking for. It's not
what you want to offer, it's what they're looking for.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Definitely, definitely, and and uh, what change probably in the
last couple of decades is that information moves faster and
people have more choices. So basically, when when we talk
about uncertainty means what the people actually want? How do
I understand what my users for my customers actually want
(04:43):
or what they actually need in fact, and we are
coming from a product development world that is more dominated
by people telling other people what to build, and that's
something that that still represents more than ninety percent of
(05:03):
the digital talent's reality.
Speaker 3 (05:05):
That's what they do every day.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
They work with somebody who defined how this application should
look like, they build it, they celebrate, but then if
users don't use it, or if they don't succeed, that's
an afterthought. And basically that decision making is something that
should involve everyone.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
And now that everyone is changing. When I first interviewed
for our listeners, you have vast experience in Argentina. When
I interviewed last year, were here in Brazil, you're working,
you were an expert here in Brazil. You've moved on
to Dubai spent and now you're in Paris, so you're
in motion, right, and you're in different cultures and the
(05:51):
different cultural aspects goes back to what we're talking about technology. Technology,
it doesn't have any more boundaries, there's no more frontiers.
So what have you felt as you've gone from Argentina, Brazil,
Dubai and now into France. What what do you feel
has made you better?
Speaker 2 (06:14):
Uh, I think I would. I would say that I
skilled this awareness of the multicultural experience from the time
that I was already working at Mercalli Liberty in Argentina.
I was uh collaborating with people in different countries and
(06:35):
and getting a first sense of, uh, how do we
communicate even if we use the same language, how do
we communicate to achieve our objectives?
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Again, connecting to what I said before, how do we
define success?
Speaker 2 (06:52):
And I realized back then that even if we had
a common goal, we didn't actually mean the same thing
every time.
Speaker 3 (07:03):
And that is something that the more you travel, the
more you.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Live in different places, you get to become comfortable with
that fact that you need to learn every time what
it means, what you're saying in that space, specifically the
experience and the way it's much more intense, and considering
that it's a it's a place where everybody almost everybody's
(07:33):
it's immigrant, and and you.
Speaker 1 (07:36):
Well, it's a huge cabbin it's a huge crossroads at
the same time, absolutely, and you you could be any
culture and you could be there right exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
That's that's the exactly the type of of stimulating effect
that that you can you can get in the way,
and and you need to learn from most of the
the community from India and the community from other places
in the Middle East and Europeans and even Latin Americans
(08:08):
living in Dubai. And there there's also a challenge like
how do we agree and this company, this business, this
theme that we need to move a needle in a
certain way, and that is definitely an amazing learning experience.
Then moving on to Europe, then you start facing again
(08:35):
traditions of how decision making happens that is probably more
different than I thought compared to Latin America. And in
some ways, the adoption of changes of new technology in
places like Brazil or Argentina or Mexico, maybe they're even
(08:56):
happening faster in some cases than in Europe. So that
is something that surprised me, I would say positively in
the sense of how a fast Latin America is changing,
but also represents a huge opportunity for talent to move
all around the world and and bring and share experiences
(09:16):
like I'm doing.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And back to that point, so we have companies in
many parts of the world that are sourcing there. They're
looking for professionals who now have that ability. So you
really have to look like you mentioned. Obviously, Europe has
its own its own time frame, all right. Even in
(09:38):
Latin America we have that. We have difference from Argentina
to Brazil. Different within Brazil, within Argentina, from north to Salt,
it's different. So, but what I've seen in my time
here in Brazil that payments. When we're talking FinTechs, we're
talking the use of technology to transaction. Brazil has become
(10:01):
a money less culture. There's no money anymore. We don't
we don't have money. We don't walk around with money.
Everything's automatic, everything's uh digital. So if anybody slaps us way,
you have a couple of bills or some coins, I
don't have those. I don't walk around with money anymore.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
That that's an excellent point. Since last time we talked
around the three years ago. If I'm not mistaken, Picks
has changed the reality of Brazil. You have a money
system compared to uh ah, well in in Brazils picks
in India's Cupi. But in the case of Brazil, the
(10:41):
penetration of Picks was inside. Basically, uh there are no
banks or or payment solutions that can compete with that,
and that is a free tool that Brazilians can use
UH and and compared to UH, I would say more
legacy countries were or you have a mainstream adoption of
(11:04):
credit cards and banking penetration that there was considered in
the past and advantage compared to Brazil or China or India.
Now that's no longer the case. The new technology run
over most of the banks in the region.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
We'll talk about transition, all right. What made you write
a book?
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Well, I was in twenty twenty three preparing a workshop
for my team in Dubai about product development, very centered
on lean and how we make decisions and again these
three topics of how we define success, how we deal
with uncertainty, and how we become more customer centric. And
(11:49):
at some point I found myself building the slides and saying,
I cannot believe I'm doing this again with one more team,
after so many country cities, people I met craving for
this type of guidance or knowledge, and I said to myself,
(12:11):
I need to share this with more people. So coincidentally
I had an invitation from Mustafa. He was he sorry,
the founder of Passionpreneur. He helped me publish my book.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
Two weeks ago.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
Uh and I spent around the year or so between
writing and editing, and I received some coaching from Passionpreneur
that helped me navigate through the writing process.
Speaker 3 (12:42):
And I had the chance to.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Give a keynote at the Product Tank event in Dubai
where I tested part of the content of the book,
talking about decision making, how you deal with these three
topics of defining success, uncertainty and and and customer centricity,
(13:09):
but asking the question mainly why are you building what
you're building? Like how aware are you? Why you're dedicating
your time to do what you're doing. And this question
resonated with so many people. So I had a lot
of people waiting to talk to me after the keynote
to ask me, Hey, tell me more. And that was
a sign that that actually this resonates, This resonates. And
(13:33):
and as I said before, the successful cases that we see,
they don't have their companies most of the technical talent
the world. They have a small proportion of that talent.
It's a very privileged proportion. It's part of the UH.
I'm part of that group.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Uh and and and and.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
I would like to share this message with more people
that probably never heard of this type of Francisco.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yeah, I'm looking now at your site where you show
the book that the cover it's digital, you're reverent, and
there it says how tech is triumph over authority, How
tech is triumph over authority. So that's a little bit
of what you said. You and you've you've applied your
own product development to the book. The book has become
(14:21):
a product, right exactly. So it's a process and I
agree with you there that you know, writing a book
is a process of making a book, and you've done that.
But your focal point is how techy is triumph over authority,
and I'm guessing that you help them get out of
the box.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Exactly.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Is that Basically, I take a lot of care in
the book and about how I define authority.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
So the.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
Most difficult authority is the one that lives in our minds.
When I say that I was part of the few
privileged digital talent tool that was part of the booming
successes and e commerce or other companies like Bertal, Liver
(15:14):
or New Bank or even in Silicon Valley, Google, Meta,
et cetera.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Amazon, What I see as.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
The other ninety five percent of the digital talent. They
build things because they were defined how they should build them,
and that is an authority. And it's not that the
CEO told me to build this. But sometimes we call
somebody the owner of the process A, and the owner
(15:45):
of process A tells me that I need to build.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
Something for them.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
But actually, when we go back to saying, okay, what
is success for us in this company this team, sometimes
understanding this better changes everything, right, because the decisions that
I make to build what I'm building imploy a lot
of assumptions that if I don't understand why what is
success for me and there's some certainty in what I'm doing,
(16:10):
then probably I will make the wrong decision. But in
most cases, if I did my part and the other
person has the word owner or manager or something like
that and the job title, maybe that's enough for me.
And I don't know in many cases that there's another option.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
Very good, Well, how can you help our listeners now?
How can they find you to help them reach their
success and understand it better?
Speaker 2 (16:34):
They can definitely follow me on LinkedIn at you George
law Skey. My last name is a little bit difficult.
They will find it in the show notes. I imagine they
can go tow dot digitalirreverend dot com. You can sign
up to the maining list as well. They can read
(16:56):
more content. I will upload some of the blog posts
they as well.
Speaker 3 (17:01):
So that's uh.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
Besides, as you suggested in the beginning, going to Amazon
to get the book directly, right, Uh can on kindle
or paperback.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
A very good. Well, you're rel Nice talking to you
again and thanks again for sharing your time and experience
with us.
Speaker 3 (17:17):
Nice talking to you, Tom.
Speaker 1 (17:20):
Very good and success keeps on moving.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
Right, absolutely absolutely very good.
Speaker 1 (17:26):
So for our listeners again, you can find more about
Uriel Jooslowsky on LinkedIn as he mentioned and digital re
digital reverend dot com, digital ear reverent dot com. Okay,
jury L, you are I E L. The last name
is j A R O s l A W s K.
(17:47):
I find him on LinkedIn. Talk to Brills Brought is
brought to us by FOCUSMI Market Intelligence. Focus m I
specializes in market research for the Brazilian agricultural market. More
about them on their site. O c U s m
I dot com. Remember when you talk to Tom, you
talk to the world. Goodbye and thanks for listening. Thanks
(18:09):
for listening to Tom Riok on Talk to Brazil, the
Business connector to Brazil,