Strategies for Inclusive Leadership

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My name is Leszek and I will be talking to Henrik Mitsch about organizational culture, inclusion

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and advice for aspiring leaders in the technology sector.

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I'd like to start off with your professional journey.

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Can you take us briefly through your So my current role is called VP Digital, and in this role

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I report to our CTO, and basically I run a team of product managers, digital designers, and

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software engineers, and we build Elli's digital product portfolio.

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So Elli does have hardware components, we have And we have a software product portfolio.

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We have a most popular product is the charging card, the mobility service product, the Elli app.

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And then we also have fleet-based applications, you know, cloud-based software to manage your charging points.

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We do smart charging functionalities for our wall boxes.

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So it's a lot of product work in this hybrid field between hardware and software.

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Speaking of purpose, and purpose-oriented company, can you explain how exactly Elli contributes

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to decarbonizing the society, which is the term that the company uses to briefly, or explain

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in a nutshell, what it does.

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Can you unpack that a little bit? Absolutely.

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So how do we electrify life, right?

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And when Elli was created, it was created as an add-on to the value proposition that electric

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vehicles bring to the market.

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People would think, okay, where can I charge my car when I'm out and about, right?

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And so with Elli, we built the charging network to basically have the value proposition saying,

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look, you can be anywhere, you'll find a charging station, and you can use it with our charging card.

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And then we white label our service for the brands of the Volkswagen Group, but you can also

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use it if you use a different car.

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And so that was kind of just the start of Elli.

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And then later on, the value proposition was kind of incrementally expanded.

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We started to sell wall boxes for people's homes, and then we integrated them into fleet solutions.

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In Germany, there's always interesting taxation systems, for example.

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So if you charge a company car at work, you can do this easily.

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If you charge it at home, you need to make sure you keep track of the amount of energy that

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goes in to basically get the taxes done right.

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And we offer solutions for these kinds of things, right?

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And so basically, this is how we expand the footprint.

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And then about half a year ago, we also started to trade energy at the Apex Exchange.

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So we use batteries from after sales to basically store energy or release energy back to the grid. When it's needed. When it's needed, exactly.

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You know, you kind of, you buy low and you sell high.

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And with these arbitrage deals, you can make money.

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To give the listeners a little bit of context or show the scale a bit first, but one of the

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things that I saw in the office was a 650,000 number, basically.

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These are the, as I understand it, number of charging points. Exactly.

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So we are basically aggregating charging stations in our app.

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And we are currently at a little above 650,000.

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So in particular in the early days, you want to have this safety and assurance that wherever

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you go, there will be a charging station that you can work with, right?

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So these numbers were really important.

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Now, you know, once you are beyond 500,000 across Europe, you basically have charging stations everywhere.

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So it's less about quantity, then it becomes much more about quality, making sure that the data you have is right.

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Then, you know, if the station is busy, that it says it's busy, or if it's free, it says it's

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free and that it's working, that you can charge, start your charging session through the app and so on.

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And so that's why we also built our own, we call this charging network.

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So we used to partner with a third party in the beginning to be fast to the market.

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And then we transitioned because this is a key asset for us, right?

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So we fully own our charging network here.

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What are the most significant technical challenges when building that kind of system, which

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is pan-European, multiple devices, hundreds of thousands of devices?

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What are the challenges you face every day?

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Yeah, so, I mean, as you say, the charging network and our charging service are the most scaled

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up service in our product portfolio. Exactly.

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And so here, I mean, on the one hand, it's about uptime.

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We need to have good IT operations and if something breaks, fix it quickly.

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And then on the other hand, it's also around, we are aggregating hundreds of different charge

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point operators from across Europe in our offering.

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And so it's a very, very heterogeneous system, different charging stations, different.

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Also, for example, if you look at the end of your charging session, when it's time to pay billing

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records, sometimes they are delivered to us immediately.

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Sometimes they are delivered once a month.

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So it's just a huge set of heterogeneous circumstances that you're dealing with.

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And you need to build something from a platform perspective.

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You need to build a platform that is efficient, easy to operate, and maintainable, right? With high uptime. Exactly. Exactly.

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Basically, how much of the portfolio or what's the part of the portfolio that you consider an

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exploration, looking for something new?

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I assume that some of these products are just like pure exploration of opportunities, not established

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yet, but like you're giving things a try. Is that the case?

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I mean, if you look at smart charging, for example, we are, there are several flavors of smart charging.

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So one thing we already do right now is so-called solar forecast charging.

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So basically we have, to our backend, we have a weather forecast service hooked up.

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And if you use our app and you tell us where your house is and rough dimensions of the solar

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panels on your house, we can then approximate when will you have a lot of sun on your roof and

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then turn on the car to charge.

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And it's kind of, but it's a, it's a purely cloud-based solution, so to say.

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The next step is to connect deeper with your home network, home energy system, and do actual solar surplus charging.

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So you then understand, okay, now I have a surplus of energy in my home network.

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Now I'm going to charge my car.

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The next step would be then to hook this up to a energy contract and do price-optimized charging

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or energy mix-optimized charging, CO2-optimized charging, all these kind of things, right?

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And so we are building these capabilities step-by-step and releasing them to the market.

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And also, you know, for example, with the solar forecast charging, we did actually a super silent launch last year.

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A few people were kind of told that this exists, and then we saw how it, kind of how people

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took it up, and we deployed it more and marketed more openly.

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And so that's the incremental approach we take.

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And then, you know, especially in our industry, a big thing that we will see in the future is bidirectional charging.

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And we are looking at the market very, very closely because there's still a lot of technological

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choices that will have to be taken over the next few years.

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Bidirectional charging can be done through DC, so you discharge direct current from the car,

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or AC, you discharge alternative current, which is also the electricity you use in your home.

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So there's a lot of kind of technical ecosystem or technical foundational decisions that are

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approached differently by different car makers.

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And so in these fields, on the one hand, you want to experiment and kind of make sure you are a technology leader.

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On the other hand, the ecosystem is not at a point yet where you could even scale it.

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And so we're looking at these things as well.

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And the limitations are basically hardware related, right? Vehicle platform, usually, right?

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So electric vehicles have different platforms independently of which OEM you talk about.

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And the automaker decides, do I do DC discharging or do I do AC discharging?

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And then you need a different wallbox in your home.

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And the price points are very different.

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DC discharging, the wallbox costs between 5 and 10,000 euros.

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AC discharging, the wallbox costs between 1 and 3,000 euros.

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So there's going to be a very, very, it's a very technological field.

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I think the decisions, this is not something that will be decided next year, but it will be

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decided in the next three, four years.

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And then five, 10 years in the future, it will be like the VHS versus Betamax.

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We'll have one system and the whole ecosystem can be built around it then.

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I get a sense that this, I think that basically this climate emergency is a really important thing for you.

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And that not only if you look at through the lens of Eli, but also your previous experiences,

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can you tell us or me, why is it important for you specifically that space?

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There's only one planet, right?

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There is no planet B.

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And my generation and certain previous generations have taken choices that are impacting the

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lives of our children and generations to come.

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And we are probably at the, in this last part where we can still influence.

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I mean, a lot of decisions are already irreversible, but we can still do something.

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We can still do something to make this a livable planet.

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And when my son talks to me in 15, 20 years from now and says, hey, dad, what did you do in the 2020s?

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What did you do to make things better?

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I want to have a good answer.

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And I will be able to say, look, I tried to build a better vehicle, a solar electric vehicle.

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I was part of the transition from fossil fuel energies to renewable energies, using all these

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car batteries as a storage to kind of address volatility in production and consumption.

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These are things that are, if we get it right, if we succeed, this is the right bet to be in, right?

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Certainly the right bet to be in.

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And if we get it right, we have a lot of chance to make things better for generations to come. 100% agree. Okay.

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I'd like to shift gears a bit and talk about your previous experiences also, or actually the portfolio of experiences.

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I'm wondering if you have any thoughts how to make European tech scene more competitive in comparison to US.

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You've worked with global companies.

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Are there any aspects of these organizations that made them more innovative or more successful?

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And those aspects, what are those aspects and how to transplant them into European tech scene? Yeah.

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I mean, this is a broad question, certainly. Yeah, certainly.

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I think there is no, you know, there's no straightforward answer because otherwise we would,

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we wouldn't, we would exactly, we wouldn't even talk about US tech scene, Europe tech scene.

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What I have observed is, I mean, it's a lot around, around culture and mentality.

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And what I've observed working mostly with Mozilla and also we also had with DriveNow, we were

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running or we were contributing to DriveNow USA.

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And I mean, maybe even DriveNow USA is an amazing example. We just did it.

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You know, we, we shipped the product, literally put cars on the streets of San Francisco and

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there were technology-wise and process-wise, there were a lot of questions we had, but we, we did it.

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We learned it as we go and we had inspected and adapted quickly.

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And I think that is this courage and this pragmatism is, is, is very important when you're working

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with these, you know, this is not even cutting edge, this is bleeding edge technology.

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And also if you look at, especially in our, in our digital space, so often the shelf life of

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what we're building is two to five years.

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If I decide for a year and discuss for another year and then build something I'm late to market

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and it will still be crappy and I'll have to rebuild again after three years because that's

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what happens with new product initiatives, right?

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So I'm not saying that you should, you know, I'm not saying you should miss legal or compliance requirements.

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You need to have your things straight.

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I'm also, you know, I'm not a big fan of move fast and break things, but move fast and fix things,

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build resilient organizations, build, you know, anti-fragile organizations that bounce back

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and bounce back in a better, better setup.

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And that is a mindset that needs to be cultivated.

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And, you know, now in a, in a, I mean, I've been in leadership roles for a while, but right

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now I'm in, I would probably say my, my best leadership role yet.

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And so it's my, it's my responsibility to, to, to open a space where people can fail safe, learn

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quickly and be better tomorrow than they were yesterday.

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Move fast and fix things.

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By the way, this is a great book apparently that is out there. I didn't know that.

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I just, I just Googled it as, as you, I love this quote.

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I didn't know that one.

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Like the, I like, I have reservations about moving fast and breaking things.

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And I like the version with fixing things much better. Yeah.

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Because it's also like puts you on a trajectory.

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It's not just about breaking things.

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Speaking of moving fast and fixing things, there's a lot of talk these days, how organizations

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adapt to environments where the capital is somewhat more limited or maybe not somewhat, but significantly limited.

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And there is a shift in the tech industry towards getting things done and being cost efficient.

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And I'd like to ask you about your observations in that field.

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What kind of changes have you seen?

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I think the cost of capital goes up as well.

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And it's not as easy anymore to just say, okay, we'll take the free money and dump it on external

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consultants and, and get the job done. Right.

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We, and we are also seeing that here at Volkswagen, right?

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So we need to be more conscious and more, much more outcome focused than it was probably in previous years.

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I think that's a good thing. A very good thing.

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You should probably be outcome focused every day, all the time. Right.

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That's also another thing I certainly learned when I was working for the sixth family with a sixth and drive now.

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They are very, very outcome oriented.

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And I think that's, again, it's again, a mindset thing. Right.

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And, and so here we are, you know, 2024, the European car industry is, is, is navigating in challenging borders.

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And so what we, what we do here as well here at LA and what I've been working on over the past

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few months is also to, to make sure we are building cost efficient structures, right?

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We, we had a substantial part of, of, of contractors on our team and we are kind of transforming

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the workforce, making sure we, we build up internal employees in, in areas that are strategic, strategically relevant and important.

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And with this automatically you get a much better cost structure.

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And so, yeah, so that's kind of our approach here as well.

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We, you know, we, we want to be fast, but not at all cost, right.

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We want to be fast and, and, and, and still be cost conscious.

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Think a little bit deeper.

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So you mentioned prioritization, a sort of shift in the, the composition of the team, internal versus external.

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And, but have you also noticed any change that go, that actually materialize or surface on technical

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level, meaning, for example, dealing with architectural decisions a little bit different than in the past.

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There's a lot of talk these days that, for example, there, an approach of making things simpler.

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There's our stories about the companies that collapsed under the pressure or over engineered,

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very complex distributed architecture that were not sustainable for smaller financing for our teams.

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And I'm wondering if that's the case that you've seen at Ellie or somewhere else that there's,

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there's a basically shift towards making things simpler.

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Well, maybe that was always the case.

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And those teams or organizations that follow that path are in a much better place than others that didn't follow that.

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So I'm wondering, what are your thoughts on this?

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Here at Ellie Digital, we are not a big fan of architects, but we are big fans of architecture.

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So we, we just recently established the AAF, the Architecture Advisory Forum.

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So we are trying to keep decentralized decision-taking, empower the edges and still have some

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central kind of, as I say, forum around it, right?

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So the Architecture Advisory Forum convenes every couple of weeks.

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And we, we, we look at our ADRs, architectural decision records, make sure they move along as

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well as they can, unblock them, make sure certain functions of the organization are informed.

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And so through these, through these groups and through these ADR mechanisms, we are, for example,

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driving a consolidation of PSPs, payment service providers.

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We historically have two payment service providers in our platform, but a business of our size does not need that.

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It adds too much complexity because then you have, for example, when you implement fraud measures,

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they are sometimes very specific to your PSP.

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So you have to implement them twice.

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So these are things where we can gain efficiencies by, by driving a coherent architecture.

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And, and also then, you know, coming up with the right team topology, maybe moving from, from

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moving the payment connection from, from value stream oriented teams into a platform team, things like that. Okay.

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May I ask a little bit about the ADRs?

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Can you tell us how often do they take place?

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Who can participate in those?

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Are these open meetings or limited or constrained to certain group of people?

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How, how, how do they actually run? Yeah.

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So ADRs can come from everywhere.

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And then we have a repo that notifies certain people around when, when, exactly.

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And then we have the AAF is an open meeting.

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And we do have a few people who we ask to regularly participate.

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So a few engineering managers and, and product leads and design leads.

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So it's a very, again, a cross-functional meeting.

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We try to, I mean, we have regular participants, less than 10 people to make sure it's still

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a forum where people can have a dialogue of sorts.

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We have people coming in only for specific ADR that they want to kind of discuss with, with, with this group.

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And then they kind of, they come in, they discuss their point and they leave again.

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So we have a very open culture around that.

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And at the same time, we also, we also measure effectiveness and impact every, every time after

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the meeting, we do a short roti, return on time invested to make sure it stays a relevant and

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meaningful meeting to all the participants.

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Are some kind of decisions made in this meeting or it's more about the alignment?

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We deliberately try not to take decisions because that would make this a centralized decision body.

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So we don't want the AAAF to be a decision board.

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We want it to be an empowering gremium, if you will.

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We are very, you know, we are very, we might even say stubborn about this because we are, we

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have strongly held beliefs that as leaders, we need to foster the central decision-taking.

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We need to work to kind of There might be areas where it's more than me.

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For example, I have one person who takes care of planning the, the shifts that people take for

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the 24 seven IT ops, right?

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So there's one person who is central accountable, responsible for that.

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But again, architecture, we have a microservices architecture and it's not, it's not meaningful

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to have one or two central architects around this.

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The team who runs the thing also owns the thing and makes the decision. Nice.

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Mandate, responsibility and knowledge is all in one place. Nice.

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I also wanted to talk with you about diversity and inclusion.

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I know this is an important aspect for you and I know that Ali is taking some steps in that direction.

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Can you please give us some more perspective on this from the company point of view and how we deal with that?

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Inclusion is, is dear to my heart.

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I, you know, I believe that, I mean, as, as humans, we are, everyone is different from the other

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person, even if we might look the same.

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And, and then in a team such as, such as ours here, LA Digital, we are growing very fast and

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we have people of, I think, two dozen different cultural backgrounds in the team.

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So there is a lot of diversity and to, to allow this diversity to, to come into effect and make

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an impact, that's where we need inclusion.

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And, and for me, inclusion means that I, you know, I use my staff meetings to spend five minutes

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and I call this five minute learning segments where I, where I speak about feedback, feedback mechanisms.

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I love Kim Scott's Radical Candor Framework, or I speak about decision-taking methods.

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I'm, I'm borrowing from the delegation poker from, from Management 3.0.

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I speak about nonviolent communication, you know, kind of building a, helping the team understand

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things that you might not have learned in your, at your previous, previous employer or in your,

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you know, in school or where, whatever you did before.

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And so it's really, really important that we build a, a culture where we can. talk to each other

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and also talk about how we talk to each other and, and also give us language, language cues

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maybe that also help us express if something makes us feel uncomfortable.

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So we have, we have introduced a, a purple flag where we also have kind of a Slack emoji for that.

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It's not too, not used too much on, on Slack, but more when we talk about, when we, when we

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notice there is, is bias or prejudice, we can say, Hey, wait, wait, I think there was a flag

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in your, in, in what you just said.

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Or if you, if you consciously do this, like, say, okay, I'm going to throw a purple flag at myself for saying this.

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And then you say it.

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So you are, you at least express that you are aware of your, your, your biases or your prejudices

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and, and therefore make it easier to, to kind of also say something about this and, you know,

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make sure that you in the end hit the tone that makes everybody feel welcome.

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And that makes everybody get the feeling of belonging into our organization. Very interesting.

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I think a lot of those things that you mentioned are actually are counterintuitive.

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If you go through the system of education or been in other companies, it's usually not out there.

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It's like you have a different kind of habits that you've learned along the way.

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Radical counter is not a popular thing, actually.

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I mean, the book is, but the actual behavior is not the case very often. I agree.

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I think it's, you know, it's, as is so often with, with the, with many, the concept is simple.

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The doing it, the implementation is hard, right?

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It takes a lot of years of training, I would say.

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And yeah, I think Kim Scott does a great, great job in, in promoting her work.

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And I think it's, it's also very important work that she does, but you're right.

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It's, I mean, if you look at this from a geography specific context here in Germany or in Munich,

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I think we are, still have a few, few things to learn.

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Yeah, I mean, for me, delegation poker is, is a very important component in the kind of how

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to work with me manual. Exactly.

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Because I, I, sometimes I have a hard time saying clearly, am I trying to sell you something?

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Am I trying to consult you?

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And so I have the cards at my desk and I hold them to the, to the video screen and say, look,

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I want to sell this to you.

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And, and then, you know, then people, okay, now he's going to try and sell something to me.

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I can, I can put my argument out there, but he's not going to change his mind, right? Exactly.

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Or, or sometimes I say, look, I want to consult you, but you will hear this and it will come

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across like a tell, but I want to hear your opinion on this.

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I just didn't find a better way to say it.

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So I'm going to tell it.

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And then, you know, I, it also helps me to, to invite people to disagree with me.

28:55 - 28:58
My final question to you is related to advice.

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Could you give some advice to aspiring leaders who are stepping up the ladder, maybe becoming

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product leaders or technology leaders at organizations?

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Do you have some lessons learned along the way that could help them become leaders for the first time?

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I mean, on the one hand, I'm conscious that I came up in a world that is very different to today's world, right?

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People who have 10, 15 years less of experience in the, in the field than I have, they will have different trajectories.

29:37 - 29:45
But I do believe that, that there's a few generally valid concepts.

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And I think one of the most important thing is in the end, if you, if you work in the for-profit

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sector, keep an eye on the outcome.

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You're not paid for output, you're paid for change.

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And change is manifested as outcomes.

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So I think that is really, really important.

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And talk about these outcomes.

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Make sure people understand how you contribute to this.

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And I think that is, you know, if I, if I understand how somebody helps drive my impact and

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makes sure to let me know about it, then I will be more than happy to be their sponsor.

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Thank you very much, Henrik, it was a pleasure.

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Thank you for the wise insights and sharing your wisdom. Thank you very much.

30:38 - 30:39
The pleasure is all mine. Thank you very much.

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