How to Make Passion Your Differentiator in an AI-Driven World

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Hannah Clark: If you’d asked me to define the word ‘passion’ two years ago, I’m not sure I would’ve had a great answer for you. I might have said it’s not really excitement, it’s not really skill, but it’s something in that arena. But these days, now that you can generate just about everything, I’ve been thinking a lot about the things that you can’t conjure up with AI, the things that are uniquely human. And at the heart of that, I believe, are the intangibles that feed the connections between people.

So with that in mind, I think I’ve finally figured out what passion really means—it’s not just about being interested in something, or being really good at it. It’s the energy at the center of that. It doesn’t just motivate you to build skill and expertise, but also has the power to galvanize the team around you into action.

My guest today is Norma Løvhaugen, VP Strategy at Meat, and she and I share the belief that passion is that special ingredient that is at the heart of collaboration, innovation, and excellence. Norma pauses that having all the technical building blocks in place is a great start, but that teams need passion in order to build something exceptional. You’re about to hear how the team at Neat folds passion into their culture, the vital role of predictability in your product offering, and an ode to the art of the possible. Let’s jump in.

Oh, by the way, we hold conversations like this every week. So if this sounds interesting to you, why not subscribe? Okay, now let’s jump in.

Welcome back to The CPO Club podcast. We are here today with Norma Løvhaugen. She’s the VP Strategy at Neat.

Norma, thank you for making time to visit with us today.

Norma Løvhaugen: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. I love this topic.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, me too. I’m really excited to dig into it. But before we get into that, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you arrived at where you are today at Neat.

Norma Løvhaugen: I started in tech in around 2020 and then I’ve been in video conferencing industry for 20 years. And the beautiful thing about tech is that you can go in so many different directions and you get to explore both different parts of technology, but also how it is working together with a lot of people.

So I’ve gone into more of leadership roles, so both like project manager and also been leading the project team and I think it’s super exciting and fascinating. How we can bring like brilliant people together and the outcomes beautiful products and experiences. So I’ve been lucky.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, absolutely.

I appreciate a moment of gratitude and I’m very excited to talk about this topic. Today we’re gonna be focusing on the roles of passion and collaboration with an organization, which I think right now in a very generative AI heavy time is so important to really highlight some of these things that aren’t so easily replaced by machines.

So let’s talk a little bit about the magic that happens when passionate teams come together. What are some of the ways that you’ve seen this manifest in your leadership career?

Norma Løvhaugen: Yeah, I think it’s really fascinating. I think, so when we build video conferencing products, it needs to be a really combination of different engineering disciplines working together, cross-functionally.

What I see is that with teams that have a high degree of trust. And that understands each other and play on each other’s strengths. They really make high quality products and I think to get to that, when you really have those teams that are connected and are open with each other, both when it comes to ideas and challenges.

And when that is received in a constructive way and taken seriously, you continuously build both a shared understanding of each other’s discipline, a shared understanding of what it’ll take to bring out those products, but also, how it can be in certain teams if it’s only acceptable to be positive and say the come with new ideas and never raise concerns.

You also don’t see the quality issues early enough. So it’s really good when you then have those teams that are fully open with each other. They will also then bring out potential challenges really early and have that open dialogue between whether it’s mechanics and electronics and software, in that combination.

I think that’s a really good setup. I think that having a shared understanding of context of why you do something is that’s where it starts, right? When everyone understands. Why they are making this product? What’s the core job of the product, the problem that it’ll solve, and the value that it’s going to bring to our customers?

That’s where it starts. And then they can work on, okay, so how do we solve this in the most optimal way? And then I feel like the magic also happens when, let’s say we have a problem that needs to be solved, and we believe that, okay, this is a new type of product that we haven’t had in the market before.

Sitting them together around the table with engineers from the different disciplines, discussing everything from camera technology to how to provide the right type of flexibility. Chewing on challenges like for instance, we have a product called Neat Center. And what Neat Center does is that it picks up people that are sitting across the table and it works together with our main device.

And then it’s important that product doesn’t pick up people that are on foreign end shown on the other display. So then when you then sit together and discuss how to solve that, both from a design perspective, but then you also have video engineers that can say hey, we can actually use AI and machine learning to detect if there’s people on that display and then not show those people in the video stream.

So discussing the problems together as a group really helps. And when you do that early, you make sure that you have a solid product from the start. And also that people have, when they’ve chewed on these type of challenges together, they also know how to drive the product during the project phase because they’ve all been part of the conversation.

That kind of brings up the details of the product.

Hannah Clark: I’m a big fan of this problem first, and looking for solutions first method of initial development. As it really seems like there is a school of thought of trying to just have everyone collaborate on the specifications of the product as one person envisions it, rather than trying to collaborate, which disciplines can maybe contribute something to solving this problem that another discipline may not have thought was possible, or may not have insight into.

I really think that’s really a great way to go about it. Just focusing on the jobs to be done and how can we respond to it best with all of our disciplines combined. You said before in a conversation we’d had prior, that passion in your view might be more important than data skills, and I imagine that also extends to other kinds of hard skills as well.

Can you talk a little bit more about this? What does passion mean to you? How do you see that play out in your experience?

Norma Løvhaugen: Yes, I believe it. Potentially doing hiring, right? In an interview setting, I’m looking for three areas, and it’s passion, integrity, and competence. But I believe the passion one is the most important, right?

Because when you have people with passion that wants to do a good job and wants to do what’s best for, in our case, for needs. Then they will find a way, right? Then they will make sure that, oh, if there’s something they don’t know, they will bring in the right people. If there’s something they need to learn, they will go and learn and they will also then be a good, often it’s tied to also high integrity, right?

If you also have people with high integrity, they will work really well in a team setting and do what’s best for the team, for the colleagues, and also for the product and and needs. I think like that core passion is just super important. When you can see someone that is just driven by what they do, they believe in the product, they believe in the experience, and they also then tend bring out passion in other people, right?

Because then it’s almost like contagious when someone is passionate about what they do. They talk about it in a positive way. They’re eager to get it done. They bring people together. They talk about it over the coffee machine or over lunch, and it becomes this positive atmosphere of bringing a product out.

I remember once we were a team working on a really cool project. One of the people in the project team, he was like, I can’t believe we’re getting paid to do this. We’re having some fun and we’re getting paid. But that just says something, right? They’re having fun, passion, and just yeah.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of attitude where someone would be doing what they’re doing as a hobby if they weren’t doing it as a career.

I tend to agree. Even when we think about producing this podcast, that is the one thing that is really paramount to us when producing the show, is when we’re talking to people. It’s always possible to ask people about a trending topic or something that might be within their wheelhouse, but really the way we try to lead with is what are you passionate about right now?

Because that energy is so palpable, you can even hear it on the other end. Whoever’s listening right now is gonna hear your passion about passion, I think that translates to so many things in life.

Norma Løvhaugen: Yeah. And I also think from a leadership perspective then it’s important to exactly what you say, right?

Like you do in the podcast, like also detect, okay, how can you trigger the passion in the product team and being mindful about those triggers, right? For instance, it can be things like ownership, for instance. I know that if people have really ownership to the solution, they’re also passionate about it. If they feel like they’ve been part of defining and understanding and setting the agenda for the product, they also often run with it, with passion.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. And I suppose there’s also some element of understanding. I think that a lot of the time we might have someone who is very passionate about the problem, very passionate about the product, who are really believe in the cause of the mission. And then there’s some folks who are just extremely passionate about their field, the craft that they do, that they would just, they’re looking for an opportunity, a challenge to apply that competency.

And so I think it’s important also to know, is this person that I’m speaking to more interested or will they dig more in to the idea of the challenge to apply their knowledge and their skillset? Or are they just going to be really focused on the mission and how do we serve that need and really nail that solution?

Norma Løvhaugen: Yeah, and I think people are driven by different things, to your point, some are super passionate about technology. Some are super passionate about the customer and the kind of the product innovation. Others are passionate about being part of a team and working together. And yeah, absolutely we need the whole mix.

It becomes magic when you have that some of people with different both competencies but also different passions.

Hannah Clark: Absolutely. I tend to think that, if you’re in, let’s say a room with someone who’s very passionate about the solution and someone who’s very passionate about their craft, the person who’s passionate about the solution is transmitting that passion to everyone to get them excited and on board, and the person who’s excited about their craft is able to just get the buy-in for their vision for how that execution might take place.

I think that’s very energizing. I I think that’s the beauty about collaboration that we don’t get, I no shade to AI as a ideation tool. I think it’s very useful, but nothing really beats that, that energy that gets going when you have a brainstorm happening where everyone is really excited and talking over each other because their ideas are they’re coming to them so naturally that’s a wonderful thing.

So when we talk about getting all of these things flowing in more of an orderly fashion. We can’t just have ideas popping out that aren’t on topic. What are some of the product principles that need that sort of set the tone for what makes a Neat product that kind of everyone has to fall under? Can you tell me a little bit about those principles and how they influence your product development process?

Norma Løvhaugen: Ah, good point. Yeah, so all from the beginning of Neat, even the name frames a little bit about the personality of our product and what we are about. And we really continuously evolved that. So the principles have stayed pretty solid, but we constantly talk about them and remind ourself about them, and it becomes part of our DNA and I think it goes through our product.

It becomes the personality of our product as well. Customers know that if they buy a Neat product, this is what to expect. Of course, the products evolve, experiences continuously evolve. There’s some key principles. For instance, we put a lot of effort in making sure that everything is simple and easy to use, and if we’re not able to achieve that, we try again.

We also constantly evolve our just our out box experience. It’s an experience where we’re never going to say that we’re done. We constantly want small things, and it’s the bigger things, small things are that we, for instance. We automatically detect which time zone someone is the installation is in, right?

That makes it just remove on friction. You don’t have to scroll through the list to find the deal. You just click. I think the QR code to the box, making sure that everything is in the box and just to constantly evolve and figure out what are the frictions in the setup and installation that we can enhance also in for the product, sorry, in the current product.

And we taken that pretty far out as well. When we develop our product, it’s really core to the beginning of defining the product is how easy should it be to set it up. The mounts, for instance. What are the mounts? That’s a big thing for us. And so that’s one thing. Another is focusing in on what’s actually the core job of our products.

What’s the purpose of our product? When a customer buy from us, what is it that they want the product to be and help them with? And it’s so easy to get lost in all types of different corner requirements, right? And we know that we have to solve for, for instance, different network requirements.

Super important, right? And lots of, potential deployment blockers, bugs, we need to fix that, but remind ourself what’s the core job? And for us, the core job is human connection, right? We believe that when people, regardless of where they’re physically located, if they can see and hear each other clearly, see the nonverbal communication, look each other in the eyes, see who’s nodding, who’s smiling, who’s paying attention, who’s looking at who.

And also from an audio side, that everyone should be able to talk without anyone being suppressed, right? So that you can have that natural flow where you say, and yes. And so that part just makes up a really good human connection, which we know in terms build trust, right? Between team members or people meeting on video.

And that also then becomes really good teams, right? Because teams that trust each other have good human communication or human connection. Also work really well together. So that’s the core of our products. So that also sets the tone for how we evolve both audio and video experiences and what we do there.

Another core principle is that we want our product to be very flexible. So then what we mean by that is that we constantly evolve and expand on the use cases with our products so that our customers can use them for more. So that when a customer buys a product from us, it continuously evolves through software upgrades during the lifetime.

So the buy it with one value, but then we take it upon ourselves to continuously increase that value for our customers, making sure that it’s future ready with different use cases, different applications that can run on it. So those are some of the principles. And then of course, it needs to be very neat and tidy and clean, and that’s the essence of it.

If we feel like something is very complicated or not neat, then we go back to the drawing board. Okay, let’s rethink this once more.

Hannah Clark: I really love how you transmit these. I suppose like guiding principles or kind of brand values into the decision making. I really think that this is a piece of branding that doesn’t always get appreciated by product teams is the power of some of those principles to really guide the decision making.

We did a, an episode sometime ago with Veronica Debt that I think of when we’re talking about this, about product vision and how having a very clear vision of how the product should be or what the mission is specifically, or what the values are that guide you as an organization. Really, it’s not just marketing fluff.

It really can be a guiding compass for how do you approach decision making as a team or you know, what’s kind the impartial decision making matrix that you can use in order to decide, does this really match up with who we are as a company and who we are as a product? So I, yeah, I think that those kinds of clear tactics and connecting the dots between some of those principles and how they affect the development process is really useful for us to understand.

I do wanna talk also about the art of the possible, which I think is just a beautiful phrase in general, but as far as approaching the balance of, the engineering side and the desire to push boundaries from a design perspective, how do you keep these things in tandem and translate them into a really exceptional user experience?

Norma Løvhaugen: I think that’s super exciting myself. Because often the design team is amazing at drawing out a vision and different type of stories. Of course, we have our overarching vision, but also within different parts of what we do. What I sometimes think is really magic is also how our design team work really closely with the engineering team.

And sometimes it’s even the engineering team that pushes the design team, right? Because the design team might have a vision, but that’s often also based on technology today. And sometimes the engineering team knows more about, okay, the art of the possible from an engineering perspective. And we see that when it comes to machine learning or AI in our products, when the video team can say, Hey, we can know everything that’s going on. We have the digital camera that kind of knows everything that’s going on in front of the device, and that kind of gives some unlimited potential in a way, right? In terms of how we provide different views for foreign, for instance, but then also how a video team and audio team at need work really closely together.

So sometimes the audio team leverages knowledge that the video team has in their view, right? And based on this magic that then happens between the video team, the audio team, and the design team, and other engineering teams at need as well. I think that’s how we are able to evolve the art of the possible, because then the sign might say, oh, we believe that this could be a strong vision, right?

Then the video team or other teams can add to that or point it in a maybe slightly different direction, and then it evolves and then you see, oh, is that possible? Oh, we thought it was just 16 by nine. No, it can be any side. And then the ball starts rolling. But I think it’s to what you said initially as well, when people are together and they have that human connection and they trust each other, then you get that magic happen when you know one word takes another and they start to draw out potential new, more innovative experiences together. What ties into that is understanding the problem to solve. That’s also a really core part of how we do things. That we spend time and that’s some of what the design team, I think are exceptionally good at this.

Focusing in on what’s the actual problem for the user or for our customers that we’re trying to solve for. And then getting to the essence of that. And then we understand their problem because often they come to us and they have an ask, can you do this? And then our design team is more like what do you mean?

What’s the actual problem? Are you, because that’s how it was sold 10 years ago, or is it and then when we then dig in, we can see that okay, from how technology has evolved, machine learning and ai and. Other parts, the hardware components has also gone through a lot of enhancements and then combining that gives some new opportunities and new ways of solving old problems.

It’s about doing the obvious, right? There’s things in the industry, I’ve been in video conferencing industry for 20 years and there’s certain things that we’ve always been discussing things. How high should the camera be for good eye contact? Would the display be flushed with the meeting room table or should it be a little bit higher?

So the camera be underneath the display, things like that. We’ve always been discussing. And then the design team just did the obvious with the latest word product. They created the lift so the customer can choose because there’s no right and wrong. It’s more type of use case and different type of rooms and so then we provided that flexibility. And it’s just a simple thing in a way. It’s strange that they have done it before in the industry.

Hannah Clark: I think that’s often the case, is the most elegant solution is the simplest one and the one that seems almost so obvious. That it’s, oh, that’s it kind of been done before, but often it’s the low hanging fruit. I’m so fascinated with the ways in which user needs and use cases translates to, like, how do we respond with these really elegant solutions? What are some of the other user experience elements that you find really critical to get right when we’re trying to facilitate effective human connection?

Norma Løvhaugen: Through video, for instance?

For us right now, we’re trying to understand what’s actually happening in a meeting, right? Diving into why is it when you sit in a room, you feel a lot closer to people and we believe that. It’s understanding all the context in the room, right? It’s not just seeing the nonverbal communication from each person, but it’s also seeing how people in the room interact with each other and who’s looking at who.

There’s certain things that are hard to replicate, but that’s why it’s so interesting to dive into as well, and for us. We see that in those meetings where we are able to have a good video from every participant where you can see the different facial expressions and also different body language.

And then of course, tone of voice has a lot to say. How something is said is super important. We also know that what we do with need symmetry is that we focus in on each individual so that we crop them out and bring them closer so that foreign gets a closeup view of everyone in the room. But we also know that sometimes foreign actually needs to see the dynamic in the room.

Kind of, they need to read the room in a way. So how do we provide and how do we, through intelligence in our products, understand. What to do when, so problems like that I think is super fascinating. Our goal is always to make sure that foreign feels really included in the meeting room.

And that’s also why we develop needs center so that we can bring far and more in the center of the conversation. A center is placed with audio video on the table, right? So that Farden gets video from directly. On the table if people are talking across the table instead of towards the video system. So things like that really enhances the experience for far end.

And I think the more we can provide all that type of a human connection, the more I think people naturally just trust each other. If we have a meeting now, when someone doesn’t have video on, you feel like you’re in the blind, right?

Hannah Clark: Yeah, and it’s so funny how this is even a user habit that’s changed over time, where I think initially when video conferencing was starting to become more popular and remote work was becoming more commonplace, people were a little reluctant to have the video on.

It seems a little bit invasive. And now the user behaviors really evolved in which when you attend a meeting and people have their video off, it’s like really feels like you’re. Not everyone is actually there, or that people are partially there. I think there’s a lot to be said about that sort of intangible element of everyone being there together.

That I think is really fascinating how you folks are really trying to capture that and bring that into a digital realm. This is really so fascinating how these experiences that we know intrinsically like that experience in an analog sense and how. How much has to go into it, how much thought goes into translating and taking that experience into more of a remote friendly tool.

It’s so cool. Now that we’re on the topic of innovation and thinking about how we translate some of these things into solutions, I feel like innovation, this is something that we’ve talked about before on the show too, how innovation is. It’s more complex than just a verb. It’s really, there’s some, a lot of things that go into creating the conditions for innovation.

So what’s the process at need? How do you create those environments where you can get innovation flowing out of the people in the room?

Norma Løvhaugen: Yeah, I think that’s super interesting as well, because you cannot put 10 engineers in the room and say, Hey, let’s be innovative. Because then i’s what are we going to do?

And it sounds like also this ground work, right? That you have to find out something really crazy and new. And I think that sometimes innovation is also just the smaller things and pieces that kind of adds up and really becomes a good user experience. And for us. It’s often more about what problems and context is provided, to solve a problem. And then I thought it was interesting. A designer that I worked with once said that they’ve been at the design workshop or kind of a training, and then the facilitator said, okay, everyone now design five pots. Five pots for the kitchen, right? And then. Five. That’s really hard to find five alternatives.

You have a handle, you have a lid, then you have what’s the difference? And then they were chewing on that for 15, 20 minutes. And then he said you’re going to actually do this task one more time, but this time you’re going to draw inspiration from the car industry. And innovation bubbled, right?

You got all sorts of pots and they all drew like much more than five each, right? You had windows, you had the speedometer or kind of temperature meter. You got a lot more innovative pots. So for us, we look at innovation more as, okay, what are the problems that we’re going to solve? And then when we know that and the problems go.

Then it’s often good to discuss and hear from everyone. I think often that’s a key part of it as well, getting everyone to contribute, right? I think that’s also how we create that magic, and again, that’s based on trust and the feeling like, okay, your ideas or concerns are valuable, right? And how to get to that team dynamic where everyone is sharing and contributing and listening to each other, and you get that. Really healthy dynamic. I think that’s a really good foundation for innovation. And then keeping in mind that, and then we also talk about innovation is not necessarily those bigger things.

Sometimes it’s the simple things, the simple changes that adds up, like the lifting mechanism that we did or they did something else. Also, the, our board can be wheeled around and then it looks like a design element because the Floris stand goes in like this. But what it actually is that if you wheel it over a door, is it the door step that it’s called?

Yeah. In English, then that’s a handle for you. You just lift it and then it makes it easier to pull it over the doorstep. So just those minor things that has been thought through. And I think that’s also part of how we do, we do prototypes really early. The design team and the mechanical team works together and they make first it’s just cardboard, right?

To test out device and test out the different pieces of it and testing out all the use cases early, because that’s how you see what would the user need and the customer need from the product. And I think that’s also part of driving the innovation and. The simplicity of it.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. I really like the idea of being able to observe, how is the user likely to use this or get a sense of how they might adapt to the prototype.

How do you adapt the prototype to them? Also, I have to say, the example that you gave with the pot story really reminds me of an innovation workshop that I did early in my career that has never left me, and we did a very similar challenge. The challenge was to design implements for a child’s playground.

And none of us had any background in design. None of us had any background in engineering for children’s ed, recreational structures. So we were lost for ideas. But then the second prompt was, okay, now take inspiration from a bowl of fruit. And then suddenly the ideas just flew out of people.

And it’s so funny, and I, this has really changed my perspective on constraints as a tool for creativity and innovation, is that when you. Inject these sort of unexpected elements, that juxtaposition of unexpected things, even though it creates what could be a challenging constraint, can often really make the whole process feel like play.

And yeah, the energy that comes out of it is just magical, as you mentioned. So speaking to listeners here, if you haven’t tried this as an exercise, I think is really interesting to see what happens when you’re ideating on something and then you throw in something completely out of left field just to see what happens.

Really inspiring. I wanna talk about product predictability and consistency. So when we talk about, you mentioned prototyping early and keeping all of these ideas collaborative in terms of the development process. But a big part of that too, that I can imagine is really challenging is when you’ve got a lot of products that are being developed concurrently.

How do you keep that consistency so that everything feels like a Neat product?

Norma Løvhaugen: Yeah, good point. It ties very closely back to the kind of the core principles that we have on simplicity, easy set, focusing in what’s the core job of the product, what’s Neat and our flavor on the products.

When we focus in on that, I think that’s helps us do that predictability. But then we also make sure that kind of the overall design language is also consistent, right? The design team is continuously working on that, and sometimes I’m really fascinated by how thorough they can be. Right?

Once one of the designers industrial designers came off, the manzi had three pieces of gray fabric on like aboard plate. And he said, what do you think of the difference of these gray fabrics? And I was like, to me, they’re exactly the same. I’m not able to see anything. And he said there is a difference, but we’re trying to figure out if it’s an acceptable difference from our suppliers.

So that if they buy three products from us, that it has the same shade of gray on the fabric. It was really fascinating. And then he explained the difference. One was a little bit more yellow, one had maybe a bit more texture. To me, they looked all the same, but if I really paid attention, maybe I could see some, but that’s how thorough they are. On the different parts of the process or just like the edge, like the corners of the system. Right. If it’s not exactly right, then the fabric doesn’t bend over like the in the right way, they do it over and prototype again. So it’s, I think that’s from the outer side of the product.

But then when it comes to software, we have the same software running across all our products, and I think that’s also. Helps us be very predictable. Of course, there’s, depending on hardware capabilities, there’s variations, but the same kind of way of using the products across, and I think that’s really some of the essence of creating that predictability, that when our customers then buy something from Neat, they know that it’s, oh, it’s super simple to set up.

It’s really solid and good design. It’s great quality, never breaks, but it also ties into a few other things, right? I talk a lot about products, but we, I think it’s also something about us being neat in our way of talking and being with our customers as well. We are approachable, we are available, and I.

Accessible to our customers, and we love to hear from them and we’re not hiding from them. So there’s a lot of parts that need flavor that goes beyond our products as well.

Hannah Clark: Speaking of the gray fabrics, I’m thinking about this and I can see how in, in a decision making capacity, looking at three things on a plate, it can seem like a very immaterial.

Decision, but these are really the things that customers notice. I can think about times when I’ve picked up a product and noticed an inconsistency in the shade of something or how it feels like these are these first impressions that actually make an impression on people that may be looking at things presented side by side on a plate, may seem like they’re negligible, but to the user that really we’re really paying attention.

And I think that the same thing is true with as you mentioned, predictability with the experience of software. As a user, I think that there’s nothing more jarring than finding an update that has disrupted your workflow or that things that used to be intuitive because you felt like you got to know the product have become unintuitive It.

When you find a learning curve again and something that feels it’s very jarring, I can appreciate the respect for the user. In ensuring that the predictability is there and that things are exciting by being couched in the familiar. But as a user, I approve.

Norma Løvhaugen: That’s good. And also, by the way, there’s one more thing that reminds me of that I also think is important is that.

The one that has the discipline makes the decision in a way, right? So for instance, when it came to those gray, three gray, it’s up to that designer to make the decision. But what I think is healthy is that he walks around and collect. Input, right? He asks a lot of people and based on kind of the, some of the feedback that he gets, he makes the call.

And I think that’s important also because when people are responsible for the decision made in their field, like the audio team is responsible for the audio, right? They make the decisions in terms of should we have this microphone area or this speaker, and how should the algorithms be? I think that also creates both pride, but also makes them want to have this as good as possible.

They put their competence and passion into it.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. It comes back to having that passion. Yeah. I’ve seen a lot of coverage lately on the new partnership with Sam Altman and Jony Ive, and it sounds like really what’s being highlighted there is that Jony Ive working together with Sam Altman has more to do with the obsession factor that Jony brings to a process than anything else.

And that they that really speaks to the value of passion within the process. On a very big scale. Yes. To wrap up since we’ve covered a lot of territory here, if we were to leave our listeners with just one thing, the biggest lesson that you’ve learned in terms of facilitating collaboration between design and engineering, what would you say is the most important thing you’ve learned in the process of working with these teams?

Norma Løvhaugen: I think it’s the ownership piece, right? People, when we do something that me or anyone else shouldn’t come into the team, I. And say, this is what we are going to do. This is the product that we’re going to make. Then you get no ownership and it probably won’t be a good product either. But going in there and saying something like, our customers have a problem with these type of spaces, for instance, or these type of solutions, they need something neat.

And then you get the overarching the team and it needs to be the team that is going to make the product. Then they start discussing, okay, how can we then, in the best possible way, provide a need product that solve for that problem? And that’s how I think the magic happens between the disciplines and how we define.

That product together. And when everyone’s been part of that process, everyone knows what to do to deliver the product in a way also and makes decisions themself as they go, and they’re fully empowered to do I think that’s maybe number one. And then also the overall can do attitude, right?

That people believe that things are possible. Yeah, of course we can do that. And then the team magically works together to make it happen.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, it’s all about having the right people in the room. Thank you for this wonderful conversation, Norma. I I can really tell that your passion is shining through for this kind of work, so this is always the best kind of thing to participate in and talk about things that energize us.

Where can folks follow your work online?

Norma Løvhaugen: So you can follow us on Neat.no, that’s where we have all our products and experiences to learn more about that. And also on LinkedIn, you can follow Neat meetings there. And I’m also on LinkedIn. I’m so lucky that my, my LinkedIn handle is just linkedin.com/norma.

Don’t know how that happens, I think I just got lucky Sometimes.

Hannah Clark: Sometimes the most elegant solution is the simplest one. Thank you so much for joining us, Norma.

Norma Løvhaugen: Thank you so much.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.