Julika Novkova: Reading the human side of a tech product

Pauline Bertry 0:13

Hi, how are you?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 0:14

Hi, happy thought to be here with you, Feline. Thank you for the invitation.

Pauline Bertry 0:18

Thank you so much for finding time to join me. I know we kind of had to make a few adjustments to meet, but I'm glad we finally made it.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 0:28

Me too. What else we can do? Life happens so we accommodate. So happy to be here today and to deep dive into our favorite subject.

Pauline Bertry 0:36

Amazing. I I like starting those podcasts with asking people to tell me their story because I think that's what creates the magic of the conversation. Your story, know, is amazingly interesting. So why don't we start there? Like, what is your story, the past, the present and the future?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 1:01

Well, the past is that I am Jews. I come from Eastern Europe and I grew up in a family full of musicians and artists. And no one really expected me to become a very, very talented psychologist, but I realized early in my life that I haven't that much talent when it comes to arts. But now I'm very happy to be a singing and drawing psychologist. And I realized during my journey in the university that I prefer to become An organizational psychologist and then I got involved in entrepreneurship and business building and then that led me to technology. So now, currently, I am a psychologist in tech companies. I work as a fractional partner that brings back the colors

Pauline Bertry 1:46

Hmm?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 1:47

and musics and help founders and people behind great tech solutions understand better human side of their own story. That's me.

Pauline Bertry 1:57

That's amazing. I think, like when people, when a lot of people hear about like organizational psychology, they will think about like maybe agile coaching or more like frameworks, et cetera, that people use. But could you, could you maybe help me and like everyone else who is listening understand like what is... What is an organizational psychologist and what do you do and like, how is your typical engagement with the company looks like?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 2:36

Well, in tech companies it's all about features, progress, data. It's all about volume and speed and who is owning what and defining the aspects of the product, the market. And people inside this machine completely forget because they have to adapt quickly as possible, that that's not a static machine. It's actually alive one. It's an organism. So my job is to help them understand better the soul. The united soul that they create as a unit. And also to help them to see how that soul is projected out there on the market. And to help them with connect with people who resonate with that essence, with that messages, with that structure and the decision that they've been making. That really creates a strong bond between users, between developers, investors, leaders, and of course buyers. My job is to help them glue everything together. Typical organization of psychologists is more focused on internal dynamics, team dynamics, leadership, management. But living in at my pace from at my angle at the universe, small companies, startups, scale ups, those people are like 20 to 50 max tops at the stage of development

Pauline Bertry 3:50

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 3:51

when I start working them with them or micro teams. So they really rely heavily on their personalities, their own creative decision making, their verbal skills, the ability to communicate your vision, your desire, your tools. Those people are an amazing expert in their field and they need to reconnect with other people. They need to learn fast and quickly new stuff in order to deliver with quality. Because in order to deliver one feature, even one feature, you need to understand all of the aspects that this feature is going to include. You know what I'm talking about, putting legals,

Pauline Bertry 4:28

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 4:28

financials, market opportunities, internal opportunities. What else are we going to need? Resources, what will fit here, what will get stalled in time, everything that will make that feature alive or kill it in progress. So my job is to help people make more informed decisions and to calculate risks. And that's not a typical organizational psychologist business because it also includes Social psychology, economic psychology, economical behavior, and of course, strong vision from VC's perspective, because this is where the magic actually happens. We have the resources here.

Pauline Bertry 5:04

We're good.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 5:05

So I'm trying to objectify all this reality and make it more comprehensive and predictable for every unit, every person, and of course team.

Pauline Bertry 5:13

I love it. And so who is the person who generally will kind of reach out to you to start the collaboration? I I assume it will often be either a founder or some kind of HR the company might have. And what is generally the question they come to you with? So what are they trying to solve when they say, hey, we would love to work with you.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 5:43

Okay, I love this question. It's complex and it's complicated. I often say that there is no general role that really will approach me. It's actually a human consciousness, it's a human decision making. More often, yes, the decision maker itself is going to approach me. When the moment they realize that they have non-technical problem with their product. Everything on paper looks great. The dashboard, it's in even green, but something is off. They struggle to explain what's wrong. The GTM, it's not okay. We have the funnel, we have the message out there, we have the movement, but something is hitting the wall and they see the results. Some founders, especially if they are experienced, already know that if they do not react right now, adding more money and resources won't and more human flow, it won't resolve that problem. They will hit more people in that wall. And they call me. Quickly as possible. For some founders, having a business psychologist in the team, even as a fractional, is just generally a new idea because we cover business aspects, entrepreneurship aspects, market aspects, product development aspects, and of course human size of the story. Figure out what is going to be the next logical step here and how to risk the venture. But again, people who understand that non-technical problems of the business are equally important as technical and financial and legal aspects are the people who are calling me, or they find solutions online, search through the web, watch webinars that I'm delivering, interviews, reading my articles. I'm delivering a lot of trades for free. All my frameworks, for example, Pulina are published on my website. Because I want people to be educated, to understand better. Because this is how creativity works. When you know how to move, even if you don't know how to exactly, you will call the right person.

Pauline Bertry 7:39

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 7:40

And that's what makes the great manager actually great, right? To put the right people in the right places at the right time.

Pauline Bertry 7:47

I agree. And what are your favorite, like from the experience you've had so far, like what are your favorite problems to solve with companies?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 7:59

I really enjoy the moment when people were trying to understand how valuable is their product actually. Sometimes they have the vision, they are hyper positive, they are disconnected from the reality of the buyers, the users, the investors, or even the team members itself. So the aha moment when we see the reality for what it is, without the glamour, without the constant pressure to project success, to project bright future, that's not always a shiny moment. Sometimes it's very humble and the radical acceptance

Pauline Bertry 8:29

Thank

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 8:32

here is important. But that's my favorite part of the job. Because I'm not saying that we always can save the day. That's not impossible. But there are many, many occasions where we can derisk the venture, we can put things on the right trajectory, we can be realistic. And this is what really keeps the momentum, the creativity and innovativeness going on. And this is what I do for life. I know that there is no one single thing that we can do to To decrease every risk that will occur and there is nothing that we cannot do that can't prevent everything entirely. So I'm in this middle ground between the possibilities, constantly juggling with future that's not happening and past that is irrelevant because we only have today. That's my happy moment. To make everything that we can today. Does it make sense?

Pauline Bertry 9:22

I love it. Yeah, no, no, it does. It does. And I mean, I think I was going to go into that into that part of the conversation a bit later, but it kind of so you are giving it to me so obviously that I cannot I cannot

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 9:37

Okay. Okay.

Pauline Bertry 9:39

I cannot wait. So I think if we look a little bit on the last like three to four years. AI changed. so many things in the digital world. I think it did change things in the non-digital world as well, but in digital, like the way we work, the way we consume products, the way we build products, like everything is changing. And I would love to kind of understand a little bit how you are looking at this situation, because there are multiple lenses we can take. And I specifically don't want to go like very deep straight away. Like what's your general kind of scientific observation around what is going on with digital world since AI came in and decided it's going to stay.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 10:36

I love the framing here. Actually, that aligns a lot with a psychological perspective that I would like to bring here because that's very helpful when it comes to business radical changes. I believe that the best way we can use here to understand what's going on is to accept that whatever we were fully aware that AI can bring and it will take from us, and the the the moment we decided that AI will stay with us. That's the normal evolution of the human being. The practical aspect of being applied psychologist like me is that I'm not deep diving into the theory. I'm not looking for a meaning behind and the big whys on a daily basis, which means that my job is to help people ask themselves big questions but then keep them composed and radically accepting. It doesn't matter whether you wanted it, intended it, or it just happened. Life happened. That's it, period. Now we need to rebuild, compose yourself, compose your decisions, lower your expectations, adapt, make your dreams actually compatible with what we call a goal. So AI is here, it's natural part of human evolution. Obviously, we can deny that as a fact. And the only thing that we can do is to accept that it's up to us to decide how we are going to approach that reality. My case it's not different from any other person out there in the field who is working digitally. Think about that. I have three major segments of my work business consultant psychologist, that is working one on one with high performing people, peak performing leaders and entrepreneurs, and of course, people who is observing people, product, market, fit dynamics, which means economic behavior. All of those are absolutely heated by AI. Three years ago, I realized that my profession, the way I delivered before, it's going to be that. And I started to adapt. First thing, I start to understand what AI is, like the decision making behind AI. And I figure out there's a lot of similarities between how we train the models to make decisions and how an actual human being is making those decisions without the

Pauline Bertry 12:52

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 12:53

emotional component, for example. Of course, there are aspects that we will never be able to comprehend. It's a black book box for us. Another layer of radical acceptance. We never understand how an AI makes decisions. It's not like you. They think exponentially, they see

Pauline Bertry 13:07

No.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 13:08

a lot of data. So those are the milestones that I use to train myself to create new type of frameworks. And now I'm helping founders understand better the AI that they are either developing or inserting inside their operations and workflows. So my job is to explore the processes that they're going to adapt, the tools that they're plan to use in order to improve the quality, the speech and the volume and the quality of work to understand better where are going to be the frictions between AI, the capabilities of AI, and the expectations of the human part of the process, where we need to put human in the loop, where the AI is much, much better than us, and how we're going to create that synergy. When I got my PhD in an organizational psychology, I was never thinking about the fact that I will have to train and work with AI agents as well. No one really prepared us for that.

Pauline Bertry 14:04

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 14:05

So I had to contact a lot of people who are developing LLMs to understand better the dynamics, the architecture. But now I'm happy that I went through that hectic reality for three years in a row. Because now I'm stress testing AI models and platforms and SaaS products from people, product, market fit perspective and help them, all of them, the agents, the humans, the users,

Pauline Bertry 14:29

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 14:30

stay together. So my perspective here is that if you understand how AI can improve the quality of your expertise, you will definitely go to ride that wave. If you are going to underperform AI will outperform you significantly every single day. And that creates a lot of sadness and sorrows and fears. And it's not fair that so many people are behind right now. This is why, again, I'm publishing everything that I develop as a framework publicly and to bring back the the the the fairness. I mean, f AI creates a lot of unfairness amongst humans, and I believe it's our job to bring back the balance as much as we can.

Pauline Bertry 15:14

Yeah. And I love what you are saying because that's also very similar to the observation I have, especially when it comes to the kind of individual, entrepreneur, startup and corporate gap. Like I have in my network, few people who are like operating almost with like in... A few independent agents that are helping them, around certain things, in, in, in our business, we also, we also do this. Then there are companies who are like bigger, maybe 20, 30 people, like a bit more established. So they will generally have AI in like certain processes integrated. And then you have corporates where. Like you kind of have AI, but you don't really. And you also don't have the same level of exposure when it comes to playing and experimenting with all those tools. And at some point when as a person you decide to take your career elsewhere, you realize that the choice that you have is maybe now very, very different. And like I wanted to go into this like human direction because I know that this is You shared with me that this is the topic that you are passionate about. So what are the... As humans who are stressed, overwhelmed, the world is changing. We hear a lot of like AI is going to take our jobs. We are going into like AI economy, et cetera, et cetera. And you are employed in a like normal company. Maybe, I don't know, you are an engineer or a designer. you have never kind of planned to have AI in your life. How do you deal with all that? Like what are the simple things that you can do in order to keep up mentally, but at the same time also not to become obsolete in two years?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 17:40

Well, that's a difficult reality that I'm trying to navigate as well. You said it. The AI in industrial revolution, it's not as simple as that. in big companies we still observe a lot of manual work because they understand the negative aspects of AI and they want to keep the consistency and the decision making on the human side of the story, which is normal. This is how they guarantee their budget, their wallet, their memory problems that AI creates for them. It's not like that when it comes to small and micro teams. For them, AI is totally a leverage, but that's a dark risk as well. This is why I'm trying to help solopreneurs and micro teams understand better the decision making. Now they have a computing power to make decisions and to see more broader, bigger horizons compared to a year ago. But that comes hand in hand with a huge risk. If I remove an AI entirely, From their processes. They will go blind because they lack understanding, deep expertise, deep knowledge that runs those decision making. They literally outsource crucial aspects of the decision making to AI. And that's a huge liability in business, if you ask me. That's my personal opinion here. The idea that I'm advocating is to build up deep knowledge and expertise and framework that actually govern entire AOI narrative. even if you're a small and micro team, because if you can reverse back the outcome, if you cannot connect the dots, you can fully, but still if you can backtrack how the decision, how the result was made, can what the risk really will mean for your business, you have a huge problem. Huge problem. Because every decision in business comes hand in hand with legal problems or liabilities, with financial burdens and a lot of risk that we cannot predict fully. So sweet spot here for me is to be brutally honest with yourself as an owner, as an expert, as a team, how much of this we understand and comprehend completely. For an expert that can see the result and say, Okay, I don't understand how this is made. I need some time to explore and backtrack the decision making, the original files resources used to make those conclusions. You can learn something new on the road, but in general you got the perspective and say, no, no, that's not my intention. And that's the problem here. Creativity and innovativeness in business create intention that no AI can replicate because no AI has the capacity to understand the human version of creativity and innovation. Why? Because we have that big why. I said that I'm not deep diving into behind the deep meaning as a psychologist, but that's not the entire philosophy here. Every brand that I work with every CEO and founder has their own vision, right? They have it. That's their philosophy,

Pauline Bertry 20:38

Love, guys.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 20:40

that's their personal brand. That's the value that they want to bring in the world pooling. Now think about that. No way I can understand that motivation fully, no matter how hard

Pauline Bertry 20:49

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 20:50

you try to explain it. I can't do that as well, but I'm more trained and more prepared to help them explore that and transfer that back into Operational stuff, but that's only operation. That's not the vision itself, the philosophy, the

Pauline Bertry 21:04

Hmm.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 21:04

core driver behind the processes. So you need to be brutally honest at your at your scope. Think about it. Two years ago, two and a half years ago, I had no new clients for mu eight months, I believe, because now everyone wants to talk with AI. AI is using models for personal companion. therapist or business consultant.

Pauline Bertry 21:29

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 21:30

It hit me like, as I said, all my three domains were hit heavily. I work with my extended and current network, but I realized that it's going to dry out at some point if I don't have new horizons. And I had to learn how to create new opportunities. Was it scary? Of course, but now I understand what are the limitations when you're using AI for personal development. I consistently help people use AI for personal business development. But we took that into consideration. The liabilities, the risk, the la the blind spots. I trained their consciousness to push back on the decisions, to be sharp, to cut off opportunities that probably could look on paper, but you only have one to two opportunities that are truly yours, much your vision, values, resources, strategies, and you're nodding because you've been a consultant in business and you know not we do that. So AI for me brings a lot of Clarity, data, and structure in no time for less resources compared to the time that a consultant like you or me needed before in order to gather

Pauline Bertry 22:36

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 22:37

that objective reality. And now we have tools that spare our time and energy as well, which means that I'm even more productive because for the same work week, I can have multiple influences across many companies compared to me before. So depends

Pauline Bertry 22:55

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 22:55

on you. I remember my struggles to understand how exactly to use those models. And even if we claim that they evolve, that evolution is for everyone radically, which means that we still have the same plateau, all of us.

Pauline Bertry 23:13

Yeah, to the point that you were sharing on the like, people use AI for everything. We are testing advertisement, like Google Ads for Ron. And I mean, of course, it's very early stage. So we are still testing like the messages, the markets, the audiences, etc. And we had someone like writing to Ron saying, Could you please pretend to be my friend and answer to me like you really like me and you want to be friends with me? And I mean, one angle, you're like, that's funny, that's cute. From another angle, we were like, that's kind of sad. And I think we are observing this more and more. And that's not my fault, to be honest, it's borrowed, but I stand by it and I like it a lot. I was talking to one of the colleagues I've worked with in the past and he has been through several technological revolutions, let's call it this way. And I was talking to him about AI, workplace, et cetera. And he's like, yes. The truth is AI does bring extraordinary things, but at the same time, it is kind of flattening everything and it is creating this distance between people instead of actually bringing them closer and helping them kind of leverage this creative power they might have as a group because the experience Like the creativity comes from exposure. It never comes from the data. I mean, I'm not trying to say the data is useless, but the creativity comes from talking to people, from seeing different

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 25:15

Absolutely.

Pauline Bertry 25:16

things, et cetera.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 25:18

I can agree with you. I have the same level of frictions inside the teams that I work with. Think about it. I I I I'm joking with them that they're creating pocket realities. Me and my AI. We have that discussion. Now read it. I'm proving my point. And the funny thing is that I'm reading those reports and I see all the right points. I mean, that's okay, but at some point, who is the one? Who is going to lead and how team typically takes time, much more time right now to make a decision, which is hilarious because it shouldn't be that way. It should be the other way around now. We have more perspectives, they

Pauline Bertry 25:55

Thank

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 25:56

are all looking like a great opportunity. How is that to make that decision? Well, that's where a business ecologist like me can fit in. And I figure it out that when we talk about the intention, when you talk about the big whys, that's the general framework that actually can make you distillate those decisions and even your team while they're talking with their AIs inside their pocket realities. If they're equipped with that framework, that's easily you can apply that as a skill. So you have to multiply your decision making across all departments, development, market, sales. It takes only a couple of months to create that. If you're not very experienced, if you're very experienced like up to three months and we're ready to fully download and upload your human software operating system for the entire human AI agent system. Yeah,

Pauline Bertry 26:43

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 26:44

it's funny how it just sounds, but that's the reality. So business psychology here is amazing because it helps you provide preserve the intention. And now you know the intention, your intention, your team's intention, they can align the mismatches during the operation, they do declaration. So even if you have a lot of varieties, you still have the same direction. It's actually easier. So my decision here to Help people make better decisions is the best decision I ever made because peak performance now it's about cognitive capacity, emotional resilience, and the speed of the decision. I won't say the volume, it's the speed. And if you have a system, triaging system that helps you remove on a daily basis that's not working, that's not working, you won't be overwhelmed as a CEO. Because your team is so productive, now you have to say yes, no, or maybe. to so many decisions, so many tasks. Yeah,

Pauline Bertry 27:39

That's so true.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 27:40

they are overly, overly stimulated. So this is why I'm creating here a buffer zone using this type of frameworks to help teams reduce the number of tasks that they are rising up again to the s decision makers.

Pauline Bertry 27:58

I love it so much because I specifically love your... First of all, I fully agree on the cognitive capacity. think in our team, we started introducing the concept of AI build brain fry because when you build extensively for a very, very long time, at some point your brain are like, my God, what is going on? Good for you if you build the thing that mattered. The problem is that now it's very easy. it feels like whatever you want, it's very easy to build in two days. So you're like, I don't want to build a, I don't want to get this sas tool. I will just build it myself. And I mean, please kind of believe me, I'm not trying to say that you cannot. Like there are so, so, so many things you can now. build yourself. Like for example, we have our own like task tracking system that we built because like all of the others, they were way too complex. And we were like, we just need a very dumb kind of Kanban. We don't need anything 300 million features around. So we built it, but we also fall into the trap of, let us try to build our own CRM. And like after iteration number 15, we were like, no, we should stop here. One thing I really wanted to give an example to is your point on the intention. I have a very funny story to share, to pinpoint to which extent without the right intention in mind, AI can be harmful. Since we launched Throne, people started talking to me about their horror stories and performance reviews. So generally the way it works is like someone will give someone my number and they will be like, I know you are building a tool for performance reviews. Like I have some kind of funny story to tell or like my manager told me that, or like this was the feedback that I got. So it kind of started become like a bit of, I started becoming a bit of a container. And I was like, look, that that's very sad that. people are experiencing that. And apparently, there is really a need to vent it out a bit. And I was thinking, can we create some kind of space where people can come in, share their weird quotes from the performance review, and get something in return? And I was, mean, of course, I was discussing with Claude about it. But I didn't want to give the... like the personality of people, right? So you needed to keep it anonymous so that it's safe for people to donate the idea. And I was telling him, like we should do it somehow in the similar way, like Google Docs, they have this like small avatars of animals

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 31:16

I know it's okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pauline Bertry 31:18

when you join anonymously. And I was just giving him an example. And then he came up with an idea of like, absolutely, we should create like a feedback zoo. And if a person kind of submits an idea, we will tell them like, he's a frustrated flamingo and this is becoming the fun around it. And I was like, no, no, no, wait. Like this is kind of putting the person in the position of being an animal. the intention is completely wrong. We want to help people leave that experience, not make fun of them. So we made an iteration and we turned it into a feedback museum. So now you give a quote and as a result you get a piece, an art piece that is generated. But I think it would have been so easy to go into this like feedback zoo idea, because I mean, I'm sorry, but it's funny. It's really funny to turn it this way. But have I hadn't have this like, this like, this doesn't feel like the right intention to what we are trying to build. That could have been a very, harmful exercise. So I, mean, I'm sorry, I took a bit of a bit of time.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 32:47

No, it's an amazing example, exactly. No, no, that's the exact point why a business psychologist is so crucial every single time when you have an idea. Having an idea means nothing on the market. You need to understand how this idea will connect and reflect to other people. It's amazing that you took that direction. Of course, there is a story where all of the negative aspects of your concerns are addressed correctly and everything is communicated in a different manner, and we still have that humorous stuff around. the role without having that risk in mind. For example, we can always figure out how to communicate that and separate the bad experience from the person in the role and contain that inside this image. And every single time when they feel like

Pauline Bertry 33:31

Yeah

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 33:31

monkey, for example, or a flamingo, I love that flamingo, you said, okay, how many times I need to be a flamingo to decide that I have to leave. So that's another risk here. Organizational culture is amazing tool. That's the the essence of my work. It's the aesthetic and ethic and understanding of how we feel together is so more important than what we're doing currently. What we've learned during the pandemic, after the pandemic with the digitalization of the business and now with AI, with the acceleration of the digital growth and scope of practice that we all have, on a very individual level, we all became more creative. On a global level, we become more and more dull and less and less original. Another space where psychology brings a lot of variety, perspectives, and horizons. When I said that I'm bringing bad colors and music in tech companies, I wasn't joking. There is no such thing as a really good or really bad decision in business. It's all about timing. And my job is to help people understand the teeny tiny window that we have and to jump. It's not that like you're going to develop a product and that product will stay forever intact, unchanged. You need to constantly

Pauline Bertry 34:47

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 34:47

pivot and modify. Well, sometimes you are creating, unfortunately, an over-engineered Frankenstein that's over-promises during the GTM and under delivers you under actual usage. So that creates a lot of friction with the market and a huge, huge disconnection between the Personal realities from a buyer's perspective and from power users perspective. So another layer that where business ecology helps people that are building amazing stuff to understand what's actually going on. People are so obsessed with their own vision at some point. They're encapsulating and isolating and trying to connect with people who thinks feel with people who think, feel, and experience the reality in the same way. That's impossible. You need to have broader perspective when you're developing ideas and to understand that your idea is like well-carved diamond with a lot of fractions, with a lot of segments.

Pauline Bertry 35:48

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 35:48

So I'm always saying that the more time you put to create facets, the better is your idea. And this is what makes an outstanding business idea outstanding because it reflects and retracts a lot of refracts a lot of different lights from different angles. That's my job to help. people and equip them with a perspective. Okay, that's an angle. We haven't seen that before, but that's an angle. We can actually use that. So reframing, repositioning, general visibility of human needs, internal needs, external market needs, as I said, investors' needs as well. So who is actually talking about the investor needs inside the organization after they have the after they handled with the check? That's important feature here. So that's my job.

Pauline Bertry 36:32

Yeah, I agree, I agree.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 36:34

To help people understand how to build with intention, but also how to not get lost inside their own intention because something is going to happen and that intention is going to slow them down and narrow their perspective. A lot of flexibility. So it is about agility, it is about openness to new experience, it is about creativity, but that's the funny part. This is not a personality trait, that's not an organizational trait. It's a bunch of decision makings and consecutive actions that you're actually doing on a daily basis here and now with always limited time, resources, and information. And that's the general if I say rule, I would like. You never know what tomorrow will bring or take away. So make it bold, brave, stick it to your vision and stick to that decision until tomorrow. And tomorrow revise. And if you have to Quit that vision, be brave enough to do so and to adapt. And that's an exhausting reality. And as a founder, you know that, right?

Pauline Bertry 37:37

That's true, I think. I I would say I'm at the point where I still enjoy that.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 37:44

That's amazing.

Pauline Bertry 37:46

But I mean, can understand, because I mean, I also have less kind of pressure because we are self-funded. We don't have investor pressure, etc. But I think if at some point we do decide to go that road, I definitely I'm fully with you.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 38:08

Well, bootstrap company always struggles from different angles because that's another amazing angle. you have to make s decisions that you can stick with together long term because you know that you can't pivot

Pauline Bertry 38:19

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 38:19

that quickly tomorrow. Another problem that frustrates leaders because once you make the decision, you acquire the tools, every single time when you invest time, money and energy to develop new resources for to you tomorrow, you're already bleeding. And if you're betting on a bad decision,

Pauline Bertry 38:35

Yep.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 38:36

that's going to be Exponentially a bad outcome for a long, long time. And while you're trying to recover emotionally, physically, financially, you already need to develop the new feature or the new research that can bring you another result

Pauline Bertry 38:48

No.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 38:49

for tomorrow. So I'm not saying that business is impossible, but it's a game of mind, of emotional resilience and information that you need to learn how to adapt to as quick as possible without anxiety, without self-biases, but with strong vision and excellent execution. That's the essence here. It's excellent execution on a daily basis. So peak performance here for me is the DNA of your business.

Pauline Bertry 39:15

Yeah. And I think by the way, what you are saying is also what I hear from a lot of other places as well, like five years ago, strong strategy mattered the most and you could allow a few kind of flaws in the implementation and in the execution. Now, like the boundaries are almost getting blurred between like Since you can build that fast, especially for like smaller companies, because as we discussed, like they have AI all over the place, like everywhere. Like since you can build that fast, your kind of strategy is kind of becoming your execution and you don't need it. I mean, you need to have a vision and you need to understand the intention. Like what is the problem that you are trying to solve? But this... boundary between planning and actually doing, I think it's becoming very, very blurred. And smaller than company is, more blurred it is, I think.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 40:24

And this is why you need to make bold decisions. If you ask me what I've been doing for the past twelve months intensively with founders and decision makers, it's to help them entrain their minds cognitively how to recharge, re-energize because we have decision making fatigue. We become less and less creative, we become exhausted by the gazillion micro decisions that we have to make each and every day. Our biology and neurology is not designed to make so many decisions. That quickly with such high stake, and we feel the urgency constantly. So instead of being creative in terms of conquering, which is our natural state, we are trying to become creative from a survival mode. And survival mode brings unfortunately a lot of stress, this stress to our bodies, to our minds and souls. So people report back a lot of Troubles when it comes to their body-mind connection, and that results later

Pauline Bertry 41:26

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 41:26

in worsened mind-body connection, which is something that we have to rebuild from scratch. It's awful to build a business when you have to constantly develop new business lines or micro business lines from a space where you're already burned out because every new idea needs a lot of physical, emotional, cognitive, social. market and financial energy in order to appear as an MVP if you want. And once you achieve the MVP stage now, you need to prove the value in the market. And then when you do that, you have to scale. And to in order to bring scal scalability, you need to deliver predictability, which means everything that you put in here as an offer needs to behave as predicted, as promised, as expected. And you can do that while you're trying to stay competitive on the market. And from operational internal part of that's hidden from the market, you're constantly pivoting and changing. But that really, really affects your performance. So business technology is something not nice to have anymore. It's an

Pauline Bertry 42:35

No.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 42:36

urgent, especially for micro and small teams that are focused on technical execution and processes because They're obsessing with features. People really don't care about the features. If you want your product to be a necessity, now you need to understand the decision making of your own end client and power user, not your own vision. Not anymore.

Pauline Bertry 42:58

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 42:58

Now, as as a developer, your own you can understand how hard this is to disconnect from your vision and in your intention at the moment when your product touches the market for the first time. Your perception is irrelevant

Pauline Bertry 43:14

It's.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 43:15

anymore at some point.

Pauline Bertry 43:18

That's true. And I think you are very spot on because that's also something like we did in the beginning. Now we are kind of trying to keep the focus, but I see a lot of like a lot of other companies kind of having the same, the same challenge. Like building now is becoming easy. I mean, I exaggerate. Of course you have decisions to make. Of course you have. elements to put in place. Of course you have like architectural decision, design decisions, all that product decision, but the build is easy assuming that you know what you're trying to build. So what happens is that we, I think we've lived for very, very long time into the model of like idea, kind of. idea first, and then we go into the experimentation. So now we finally got all these tools to experiment at scale. I see every single company launching 300 different service line products, features, doesn't matter, depending on the business. We went into that hole as well. we should try launching this and then we should try launching that and we should try launching this and we should try launching that. But then you need to have so many things in place to not only bring it to the market, but to kind of take your place in the market where everyone is doing the same thing. And I think that's such a, like. That's such a difficult change overall to make mindset wise because for a very, very, very long time, we were as an industry going into the direction of like, you should never focus on only one thing. You should build an experiment and try and iterate. But now these iterations are becoming cheap, easy and fast to do. So what we need to... understand is like which iterations you will make. So we are back to like what is specific focus? What is the problem you are trying to solve? And

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 45:41

Exactly.

Pauline Bertry 45:41

I think especially like people who are like my age and maybe a bit, I call it like COVID leaders because we kind of became managers and leaders for the first time when COVID hit. we also were like, we are extremely disconnected from. like humanity, because we are used to sit in front of our laptop and talk to people via Zoom. And I think for our generation, it's even more difficult because we are not used to this in-person work as a leadership.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 46:20

Amazing perspective. I love it, COVID managers. I understand the perspective, you know, because you develop your entire understanding how to develop networks by only using one channel, while standard network development inside organization includes also different channels of communication that you receive. Think about nonverbal expression, the quietness in the the stillness inside the room. Or the boringness while you're delivering a new report. That's something that definitely

Pauline Bertry 46:52

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 46:53

gives you a lot of kicks but also helps you grow as a manager. Well, Zoom meetings are polished. So going step backward to something important that you said about how the dynamics are changing. Sometimes I joke when a founder asks me during a discovery call, okay, why should I tr hire you? And like I'm like, you're not asking the wrong you're asking the wrong question here. It's not why you should hire me, it's why should I want to dedicate my time, energy, and ethics to help your product get more traction and retention. And they're like, what do you mean? And I'm like, Exactly, you don't understand that the new key PIs that you are going to push forwards are traction and retention. It's easy to have people for the demo. It's easy relatively to have a lot of traction on freemium while what's going on with the conversion, while people aren't exploring that is a necessity. A necessity means that they are dedicated to default time, energy, and money to buy that, to embed that inside their workflow and accept with all the friction that the tool creates. For example, sometimes I ask. Hyperpositively oriented founders, do you know how your products affect your end clients' workflows and how this affects negatively their end clients' journeys? And they're like, no. Most of the time they didn't have

Pauline Bertry 48:26

Eugh.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 48:27

that question in mind. And that's problematic. Because now, if you understand what's wrong with your product, what your product can deliver or will deliver with distortion for the end client, you'll never get into that. Dark closet of skeletons that you have. And that's a problem. That's a churn in three to six months. And with a competitive market, some people may say, I'm going to build that on my own. And they will live accepting all the negative aspects of the SAS. Some people say that SaaS is dead, but I don't believe that because SaaS is still investing a lot of time, energy, and tools to improve the client journey. So Client-led product development is a must-have despite your size. Because now it's not important whether you have 100 or 5,000 or two people inside the team that develop the product. The reason between the big teams and small teams is that big teams have the resources and capacity to ask questions that are concerning details or even peculiar aspects of the journey of their end clients. So key account management is something generally missing in small and micro teams. They don't have practices.

Pauline Bertry 49:44

No.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 49:45

Pre-sales tactics are missing. Brand management brand management and general marketing are missing. What I see are non-elastic, short, very aggressive sales funnels, and people dislike that because it's okay to have a quick experience or warm touch point with a product. It's bad if that touch point is not created to an entry position that mirrors back your needs and helps you navigate and make you create space for you to navigate and experience is this a good product for me in general or not. And and that's something that I don't know why so many people from younger generation that are already using SaaS platforms so much still don't add inside their perspective. So This is why I'm trying to create

Pauline Bertry 50:37

Yeah.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 50:37

a a lot of understanding around people product market fit. It's not about product market fit anymore. If you have the traction and the retention, if you have to pivot, if you have to cut your business line and create new revenue streams, you need to have the ecosystem that supports your vision, your brand values, and your efforts to improve the entire ecosystem, transmitted typically with during the the GTM and marketing. That's the new reality, that's the new value. What's your leader? What's the decision making that he's doing? What's his leadership style on the market? What's the team? Is this team are going to stay together because the pressure is too much right now? It's okay to to pivot the product. It's easy to create a product. It's hard

Pauline Bertry 51:22

No.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 51:23

to keep the team intact and the ecosystem connected and well spoiled, well glued together like all machine. And that's something that psychology actually can help with a little because it creates a culture of how we're doing business all together. But that's intention, again, and that's the vision.

Pauline Bertry 51:43

I agree. And I love it. I have a last question to you. So for everyone, like leading a company or like building a product, building a business, building a new service line, and still kind of trying to figure out how to make it viable in this crazy AI changing world. What would be the three things that you would recommend they focus their attention and energy on?

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 52:19

Okay, that's a lovely question. you gave me just three options to deliver. That's the hard part. It's a lot of pressure. All right, thank you. So, first thing, fall in love

Pauline Bertry 52:26

Hahaha.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 52:29

with developing well-studied hypothesis. Well-studied hypothesis, and I'm saying that from my academic background, it's research different lenses, even lenses that are argumenting against your vision, make informed decisions and get Fall in love with that process, building a hypothesis, build as quick as possible tools. That's going to be the second step here. To test that on the field. Fall in love of falling out of love with your previous version. If you're testing something and in 72 hours you don't have the behavioral patterns that actually confirm your hypothesis, or they confirm that your hypothesis is wrong or partially right, fall in love with the idea that you have to pivot. And that's not a personal failure, that's a market dynamic. And if you're trying to build four people, that's so so different from building for your satisfaction. So being personally able to run this marathon right now is important. If you're going to use AI because you are procrastinating, you have low business discipline, you don't know where to put your efforts in, you lo you would like to achieve big goals with a with an idea. That hasn't been proven yet to solve that much problems and deliver consistently great, excellent solutions for such an amount of people, you're going to burn your 90% leads, energy, money, and resources. And that's a sad reality for current tsunamis that are hitting founders, even experienced ones are getting hit by this wall. No one knows. actually how the market will react. We can predict that, even me, AI as well. We can see trends, we can set a lot of tools that will help us see the trajectory, but that are going to be the three crucial steps. Well educated hypotheses, tools that actually give you access to the market and actual people to test those hypotheses, an agile and flexible mind and creative decision making that actually prevents you from getting sold. insights, rigid processes and old ideas that are not working toward your grand vision and big business goals.

Pauline Bertry 54:50

I love it. Thank you so much.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 54:52

Thank you so much, Pauline, for having me here today. It was a great pleasure.

Pauline Bertry 54:54

Thank you.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 54:56

See you next time.

Pauline Bertry 54:57

Thank you so much. Maybe we do another episode one more time in the future. I feel

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 55:00

Yeah, that's going to be amazing. Thank you so much.

Pauline Bertry 55:03

like we haven't finished all the thoughts.

Julika Novkova Ph.D. 55:08

Yeah, we share so much experience across various fields. Always a pleasure to chat with you, Paline. Until next time then.

Pauline Bertry 55:15

It's a pleasure. Thank you. Bye bye.