Transcript
This has been generated by AI and optimized by a human.
Show ID [00:00:04]:
The power of data is undeniable. And unharnessed, it's nothing but chaos.
The amount of data was crazy.
Can I trust it?
You will waste money.
Held together with duct tape.
Doomed to failure.
This season, we're solving problems in real-time to reveal the art of the possible. Making data your ally, using it to lead with confidence and clarity, helping communities and people thrive. This is Data-Driven Leadership, a show by Resultant.
Jess Carter [00:00:33]:
Hey guys. Welcome back to another episode of Data-Driven Leadership. Today we're focusing on EnerSys, a company whose impact is closer to your everyday life than you might think. While you might not immediately recognize the name EnerSys, you've likely benefited from their technology. EnerSys powers the systems behind warehouse forklifts, telecommunications networks, and even critical infrastructure in health care and emergency services.
Jess Carter [00:00:55]:
Though I've never wondered, how does that forklift work? You will find out in an interesting and well-told story in this episode. From ensuring your online orders arrive on time to keeping essential communications running, EnerSys plays a key role in our modern world. EnerSys has been at the forefront of energy innovation, operating in more than 100 countries and shaping how industries approach power solutions. In this episode, we talked to Kerry Phillips, vice president of global product management for the motive power division at EnerSys. Kerry shares his journey and offers valuable insights for anyone looking to switch industries. He discusses how to leverage skills from one field and apply them to another, while building confidence along the way. He also opens up about his experience navigating a challenging situation without data governance and where he stands today.
Jess Carter [00:01:41]:
He'll share the key lessons he's learned over the past four years while building his company's newest application and how each step was focused on ensuring the work was valuable. Don't miss out on an inspiring conversation filled with lessons that could change how you approach your own career and projects. Let's get into it.
Jess Carter [00:02:00]:
Welcome back to Data-Driven Leadership. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Today we have Kerry Phillips, the vice president of global product management, motive power at EnerSys. Kerry, welcome.
Kerry Phillips [00:02:11]:
Thank you, Jess, good to see you.
Jess Carter [00:02:13]:
Good to see you too. So Kerry and I did have the pleasure of working together for a while in our careers, which was a gift for me and I think that's the right way to put it, is it was a gift for me.
Kerry Phillips [00:02:25]:
It was a gift for both of us.
Jess Carter [00:02:27]:
Uh, but a lot of, lot of leadership lessons. And so I want to get into your project and talk about sort of what you've been working on for a minute and talk about you, which I hope doesn't make you too uncomfortable. You have this, like, super interesting career, like even the jump from Resultant to EnerSys. But I think at some point we talk about like you've had a farm, like, can you walk me through, make it make sense?
Kerry Phillips [00:02:47]:
It's really not just my story alone though. It's kind of a family story. So, growing up my parents owned. I've tried to count before. I think it was 11 different businesses and I always worked in those growing up. So I've done lots of different jobs before. I even went to college and then continued to work in family businesses through college.
Kerry Phillips [00:03:06]:
But then once I graduated, I had an engineering degree and felt like I should use my engineering degree. So I went to work for a company based in Chicago. It was a private family company. And then later got acquired by a publicly traded Japanese company called Daifuku.
Jess Carter [00:03:21]:
Wow.
Kerry Phillips [00:03:21]:
And I worked there for a little over 22 years. That was a project-based organization. And that's important because now I'm at what I would call a product-based organization. And it is a little different to work in a product-based world versus a project-based world.
Jess Carter [00:03:35]:
Can you like elevator speech? What does that mean to you? How are they different?
Kerry Phillips [00:03:39]:
Yeah. So the project organization is, you're trying to build some project or a company typically in their setting, right? It's not in our factory or in our business. It's for their business and they're sitting business-to-business still. But it's, it's a project, it's a construction project. You have all the elements of a construction issue that you would go through and it's in random locations all over the world. Frankly, that is different than, I build a product in my factory and then I ship it and the customer then does something with it.
Kerry Phillips [00:04:09]:
I don't typically get too involved post-shipment. Sometimes I help install it. I certainly service it at times. But it's not like I'm integrating it with other equipment. I'm reacting to all these other trades. It's pretty much I sell it, sometimes I ship it directly to an OEM who puts my product in theirs and then they ship it. So it's just a little different, you know, a little different world to have a product base.
Jess Carter [00:04:32]:
Okay, thank you. So you spent 22 years there?
Kerry Phillips [00:04:35]:
Yep. Then I spent four years at a consulting firm. And that was exciting. That was fun. I learned a lot. And then I transitioned from there to EnerSys. Part of what took me to EnerSys and this is, this is part of the story, so this is important: I was not a battery guy.
Kerry Phillips [00:04:51]:
EnerSys is a battery company. First of all, in case anyone listening doesn't know, we build batteries. Industrial batteries. Not like AA's, but big batteries. The smallest battery I particularly make is about the size of a kitchen cable. Pretty large. So they usually weigh enough that you have to have a crane or hoist to put them in a piece of equipment.
Jess Carter [00:05:12]:
What do they do?
Kerry Phillips [00:05:13]:
Most typical application for me is forklifts. I go into forklifts in the distribution center. So they weigh, you know, 2,000 to 5,000 pounds, maybe a little more. There are some massive forklifts they go into where they're six feet long and four feet tall and three feet wide. And typically they're so heavy, frankly, because think about a forklift. When you lift up a load that's up in the air, that load tends to make that thing want to tip over. And so the battery that sits in the back of that truck acts as a counterbalance and helps keep it from tripping over.
Kerry Phillips [00:05:42]:
That's part of the reason why it's so heavy. You actually want it to be heavy.
Jess Carter [00:05:45]:
This is amazing. I've never once thought about how a forklift doesn't tip over. This is. I, of course. Okay.
Kerry Phillips [00:05:51]:
Well, if it's any consolation, neither did I until I worked here. It was, it was. It's interesting. So. So I did not come from a battery world. What I did is, though, I came from the material handling distribution world. So their customers in the motive power space, the line of business that I work in, were the customers I had for 22 years. So I knew the customers.
Kerry Phillips [00:06:12]:
And the other thing was, I understood a little bit about technology and data and how to apply those things, and that's really what they wanted. My boss, the guy that hired me at the time, said, you know, I got 11,000 battery guys. I don't need another battery guy. What I need is somebody who understands our customers and understands technology and data and how to apply that. Because the battery world is changing. So batteries for like 100 years didn't change. There's. There's literally a clay pot that goes back, you know, through the B.C. times that had traces of citric acid in it with two different elements that they think might have been an early battery.
Kerry Phillips [00:06:46]:
From Thomas Edison's day forward, they didn't change for a long, long time. A lead-acid battery was a lead-acid battery. When lithium came on the scene, that really sort of changed the way the battery world worked. It was a major disruption in the battery world. Then they've evolved a ton after that. You know, the last five years in particular has really accelerated and they've changed a lot the way the way lithium batteries work, and they've become much more widely accepted. So that created the need for a product manager, not a project manager, but a product manager in the motive power battery space. And motive power, just to back up on that.
Kerry Phillips [00:07:24]:
Motive power in our world is basically anything that moves with a battery in it that isn't a passenger vehicle or a sports type vehicle.
Jess Carter [00:07:32]:
Okay.
Kerry Phillips [00:07:33]:
Like no golf carts, no Teslas. We don't make batteries for automobiles. It's industrial things like fork trucks, mining equipment, ground support equipment in an airport, floor care machines, all that kind of stuff. That's the mode of power space. EnerSys does other stuff too, by the way. They make what we call stationary batteries, which go with like solar power or wind turbines. They back up cable tv, telephone networks, things like that.
Jess Carter [00:07:58]:
Wow.
Kerry Phillips [00:07:58]:
And we also make batteries for the Department of Defense satellites, tanks, submarines. My responsibility is all our products on the motive power side, global.
Jess Carter [00:08:07]:
One other question I had for context is when you say globally, where's the headquarters? Some of that.
Kerry Phillips [00:08:12]:
Yeah. We sell our products all over the world. There's a handful of countries we don't sell to for, you know, obvious reasons. But yeah, I mean, we sell batteries in all over the world.
Jess Carter [00:08:21]:
And, and headquarters is where?
Kerry Phillips [00:08:23]:
Headquarters is in Reading, Pennsylvania.
Jess Carter [00:08:25]:
Okay. Okay. So then you've got this product manager.
Kerry Phillips [00:08:29]:
Yep.
Jess Carter [00:08:30]:
And their, their focus is what, trying to help with the modernization with lithium battery. Is that what that is?
Kerry Phillips [00:08:37]:
Yeah, it's everything. So it's not just batteries, but we have three main battery lines. And again, I don't want to get too wonky, but we still sell lots and lots of flooded batteries.
Jess Carter [00:08:46]:
Okay.
Kerry Phillips [00:08:46]:
Flooded lead-acid batteries. We call them flooded because they have water in them and you occasionally have to refill them. They get hot, the water evaporates, you put more water in. Then we have what we call thin plate pure lead, which is also a lead battery, but it's a sealed battery. You never have to water it. It's virtually maintenance free. It gives you a very much lithium-like experience. And it's a proprietary technology.
Kerry Phillips [00:09:07]:
So less template pure lead or TPPL. You hear me say TPPL? That's what that means. And then we have lithium batteries as well. And then we have a whole line of chargers and data collection devices.
Jess Carter [00:09:18]:
How long have you been at EnerSys now? Three years?
Kerry Phillips [00:09:19]:
Four? Just about four years.
Jess Carter [00:09:21]:
A couple years.
Kerry Phillips [00:09:21]:
A couple months shy of four years.
Jess Carter [00:09:23]:
Okay, so it's day one, week one on the job. What's. What's the gig? What are we doing?
Kerry Phillips [00:09:28]:
Yeah. So, first of all, it was during COVID I went to the headquarters building, and it's a pretty big building. A lot of people that would normally work there. There were like, maybe five people there. So it reminded me a little bit about being at the Shining Hotel. If you've ever seen the movie The Shining, I expected a kid on a tricycle to go down the hallway. But it was great because it gave me a, it gave me a nice ramp to kind of learn what was going on and feel my way through things.
Kerry Phillips [00:09:52]:
And I inherited a team. My boss was kind enough to say, you know, hey, here's some folks that have been doing kind of this role. They basically had taken the marketing team and the product management group, kind of had them all lumped together in what they called marketing and product management. So they split out some of the more engineering techie types and put them with me, and then the marketing folks stayed with the marketing team. So I had these people who quickly learned I knew nothing about batteries and were scratching their head about why they hired this guy and started trying to figure it out. And I'll be 100% honest, like, three months into it, I sat down with my wife and said, yeah, I don't know if this is going to work. When I did the consulting thing, this is a true story. I didn't know a lot about consulting.
Kerry Phillips [00:10:32]:
Shocking. And I didn't know a lot about tech. And so I was literally in a meeting where a mutual friend of ours, I was Googling terms, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said, stop Googling. I'll explain it to you later. I thought, hey, I learned that world. I can surely learn this world. But batteries are hard if you know much about the battery space. And there's a lot of conversation today about batteries and.
Kerry Phillips [00:10:54]:
And decarbonization, electrification. If we really want to try to decarbonize, we have to do it with batteries. The electric grid is never going to support the kind of battery demand. Shouldn't say never. But it's years and years away, decades away. And so it has to be with batteries. It's electricity and it's chemistry. And I was a civil engineer, and the two classes in college I liked the least were electricity and chemistry.
Kerry Phillips [00:11:20]:
This was. This was a bit of a learning curve for me, and I was concerned. I like, I don't know if I can do this. But the early days, I got on a call talking about a project. My boss said, hey, come listen to this call. They were talking about building an application. So EnerSys has an existing database of different fork trucks and what compartment sizes they have and what capacity battery they need. Okay, keep it kind of simple.
Jess Carter [00:11:45]:
Yeah.
Kerry Phillips [00:11:46]:
And then we also have this application that we use to, to run some algorithms and try to determine what the best battery and charger combination is for that truck. So we can sort of help our customer figure out what they need. Right, because you don't want to buy more of a battery than you need and you don't obviously want to buy less because you have to get the job done. But it's not the most user-friendly application in the world. So this call was about building a demonstration tool, a Figma-based demonstration tool that would show how the application could work if we basically wanted to rebuild it. And so despite that lousy explanation, that was something I actually understood. I'm like, hey, that's kind of like the world I came from. I get this conversation.
Kerry Phillips [00:12:26]:
I don't understand like the, the specific gravity of a battery and why that matters, but I understand this. I can jump in and help this. And so they needed someone to be the champion for the project. And so I raised my hand and said, hey, I'll do this.
Jess Carter [00:12:41]:
That sounds terrifying. Also, I appreciate your context, switching your narration of hey, when you're jumping all over. If you don't have 50 years in batteries or 50 years in energy or whatever it is, one of the things that makes you successful is your ability to say, hey. That is similar to what I just did. I can create some toys around that that I've played with before. I remember coming out of college, a couple years out and going into it, and everyone around me talked over me. Acronyms, technology, tech, stacks. It was just like a bunch of words.
Kerry Phillips [00:13:50]:
Well, it certainly helped. Coming from the consulting space, that gave me two advantages. First of all, I had to learn that business and kind of what the firm did, but I also got exposure to all these different clients, and I had to learn about their business, too.
Jess Carter [00:14:04]:
Right.
Kerry Phillips [00:14:05]:
I built that. That muscle, and I wasn't as afraid to go do that as I've certainly. As I was the first time I did it, right? So. So that made me a little more comfortable to do it. But even then, like I said, it was still pretty challenging. But I think you just.
Kerry Phillips [00:14:19]:
You learn how to learn, right? And so you just learn it and you learn enough to be. To be helpful and know when to get out of the way and when you can go insert yourself. And. And a lot of times it's just. They know what to do. Like, my team is great.
Kerry Phillips [00:14:33]:
The company is great. First of all, I had a guy on my team who. He just recently retired after 43 years. So there's a lot of longevity there. They understand things, but they just needed sometimes a different perspective or someone who could just say, yeah, you're right. Go ahead. Let's keep doing this.
Jess Carter [00:14:48]:
That's awesome.
Kerry Phillips [00:14:49]:
Seems like the right thing to do. So between that and this project I took on, that's how I started to add value until I learned enough to be able to have a good conversation around batteries and chargers and that kind of stuff. Yeah.
Jess Carter [00:15:03]:
Did you ever come back to your wife and say, hey, I can talk about batteries?
Kerry Phillips [00:15:07]:
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it was a. It was a periodic conversation, you know, are you going to make it? You know, is this going to last? Do I need to think about something different? You know? Yeah. Yeah. So I think, you know, I think it took a while, but we got to a point where. Where we're good. And I've had a. I've had a boss change.
Kerry Phillips [00:15:25]:
My boss, my first boss is getting promoted, and so he will be our new CEO.
Jess Carter [00:15:31]:
Wow.
Kerry Phillips [00:15:31]:
And so I have a new boss now, and he's promoted up as a peer. And so we already knew each other, but, you know, I thought, okay, am I going to have to sort of go through a learning curve again? But he gave me all the freedom in the world. So I feel like, okay, at some point in time, I've. They've figured out they could trust me. It's going to be okay.
Jess Carter [00:15:49]:
So that's another meter of things. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out if we can trust other people. I was just talking to my husband about this, like, thinking about, do the people around me at work see me as trustworthy and with, with what things are they trusting me with as that's a good read on where am I situationally in my secure, my job security.
Kerry Phillips [00:16:07]:
Right, right, right.
Jess Carter [00:16:08]:
Well, so tell me about the project. Like, so what, what happened after, you know, I'm jumping in, I'm saying, yes.
Kerry Phillips [00:16:14]:
This application that they're trying to replace, that they're going to build this demonstrator for, I don't even know what that is, really. I mean I get it conceptually, right. I mean I just told you. And you conceptually can get, okay, it's like a battery selector. I get that. But I never used it and in fact I've never used it to this day. But I went to one of the people who trained people on how to use it and I will never forget this conversation. He's running me through it and I'm like, okay, this isn't so bad.
Kerry Phillips [00:16:40]:
It's not the most user-friendly thing in the world. Like, you know, the UI is not great, but it's manageable, right? It's a little dated, but it's manageable. So I'm not sure what the problem I'm sanctioning. Okay, what's the problem here? And then he gets to a point, he says, well then I go out of this application and I go into our, our battery database and I start to select the battery that's going to work in this application and I pick this one. I said, well wait a minute, how did you pick that one? And he sat there for a second, he goes, well, I mean I've been doing this a long time. I just kind of know, well, that's going to be a problem. I'm never going to know. I'll be spending days trying to guess the right battery.
Kerry Phillips [00:17:14]:
And so, you know, we had this, this application that worked great if you knew how to use it and you kind of just needed the affirmation. But if you truly were new to the sales process, it wasn't going to help you. And one of the things we really wanted to do with the application, one of the purposes was to what we call democratizing the sales process. So we wanted to be able to hire great salespeople and not necessarily people with 30 years of industry experience. So that was one of the benefits. There's many others that are more important than that one, but it's contextually important for the understanding sort of where I came from.
Jess Carter [00:17:49]:
Well, and I think even in that, you know, as we talk through these different stories, people hearing reasons for technology modernizations that it's not all these like, hey, we gotta figure out how to use AI or we gotta figure out… There's a lot of conversations we have about enterprise data warehouses. And that's cool, that's good, there's a place for those. But there's also just how do you leverage business strategy and execute it using technology? So to your point, if you don't want to have to hire salespeople who have 30 years battery experience, you have to go figure out where are all the holes that that experience is filling and build technology solutions to fill those holes, right?
Kerry Phillips [00:18:23]:
Right, exactly, so that was sort of the problem it was going to solve.
Jess Carter [00:18:25]:
Okay.
Kerry Phillips [00:18:25]:
And so we, we went through this exercise to build this demonstrator that took about, let's call it six months. It worked great and the demonstrator looked great. So we built the demonstrator and we did like a video, snippets of it and we had a long video with a voiceover. I like to sound like I was smart and say this was the plan all along, but I just sort of stumbled into the idea that this actually is a really great selling tool for doing the actual project. People looked at this, this video and they looked at the Figma tool and said, this is great, I want to fund this. And then the other thing it was good for, it became this great change management tool because you could go to the folks who are using it and say, this is what the new tool will be like. And suddenly the idea that their life is going to change and this tool that they use maybe 20 to 50% of the time is going away and being replaced by something new. They could see an idea of what something new looked like and said, yeah, okay, I'm good with this idea.
Kerry Phillips [00:19:22]:
So from an OCM standpoint, it was critical. And like I said, I'd like to say that that was the plan all along, but we just happened to get lucky and it worked out that way.
Jess Carter [00:19:31]:
I think that's also leadership is you're constantly thinking there is some level of scarcity or constraint in your project budget and things. And so for you to be like, we just built this incredible thing, it's getting this great response. We can probably continue to use it in these other ways is also a testament to thinking through the best and most efficient use of the things that you're developing, right?
Kerry Phillips [00:19:51]:
That's an important distinction. Let's step it to the side for just a minute because from a product management standpoint, there's never shortage of great ideas. I mean, the battery world is booming right now. There's tons of things we could do. There's lots of things we want to do. Problem is, we can only do so many at one time. Even if we had all the money in the world, the organization can only absorb so much stuff at a time. My biggest job, frankly, is deciding what not to do, not what to do.
Kerry Phillips [00:20:17]:
Because there's plenty to do. It's what not to do that's tricky. That's why this tool became important too, because it made the case that this is important to do. This will be a good thing for the organization.
Jess Carter [00:20:26]:
Well said. One of my biggest jobs is deciding what not to do. I love that. Yeah, awesome.
Kerry Phillips [00:20:32]:
Okay, so we had this demonstrator, right? And we got everybody excited and they said, okay, great, let's build it. Can you build it in like three months? And we said, no, it's going to take a lot longer than that. You know, if you say this is going to be years in the making and you're going to spend a lot of money by the time it's all said and done. Because we're going to make multiple iterations of this. You know, there's going to be release after release. Then an organization that's not a software application organization can get a little terrified. So we had to sort of break it apart into pieces. You know, we're going to build an MVP, we're going to launch and then we're going to build a product and then we're going to have to do iterations on the product.
Kerry Phillips [00:21:04]:
And so we had to break it into sort of digestible chunks for the organization to think about and at each time—EnerSys, by the way, is a publicly traded organization and we have shareholders and they kind of like the stock to do well—you had to make sure that each time we did a piece, it provided value back to the organization. So that's how we started to look at it. We started to break apart into those pieces and we began work on the MVP. The devil's in the details, right? That's where things started to get really complicated. And probably the second terrifying moment in my four-year EnerSys career hit. We realized that, hey, we have a lot of issues here. So let's start with the one that's probably most pertinent to our discussion today.
Kerry Phillips [00:21:44]:
And that's the data. The data was a mess. I give everyone there all the grace in the world because, you know, I didn't live through it. I don't know what brought them there. And I'm sure that there was a lot of good reasons that brought them to the state they were in, but there was no real data governance. It's all the things you would expect, right?
Jess Carter [00:22:00]:
Yeah.
Kerry Phillips [00:22:01]:
Five different words for the same word. We had dimensions that were literally a millimeter difference for things that we couldn't even build to a millimeter tolerance. In one particular case, we found 84 instances of what was essentially the same product. We had to clean up the data. Then we have multiple ERP systems. All the things you would expect, right? I mean, I don't have to go through the laundry list, but basically all the, all the IT sins that you would expect. You know, we've had multiple acquisitions.
Kerry Phillips [00:22:29]:
Everything you would expect, we had it. And what we thought was going to be difficult was going to be really, really difficult. And we had to be really careful about the scope creep. Our job was to build an application, not to correct all the sins of the past.
Jess Carter [00:22:45]:
Well, and is this all in the MVP?
Kerry Phillips [00:22:48]:
Well, I would say we discovered it in the MVP. We hit a major roadblock with the MVP. And like I said, this is where, you know, we sat down and thought, I don't know if this is going to work. We got to figure this out, and we got to do it in a way that we can actually deliver something. We made some descoping decisions and we made some simplification decisions, and we got back on track. It helped, too, that we brought in a couple new partners and realigned around it with some external partners. We weren't going to try and do everything ourselves.
Jess Carter [00:23:16]:
I think leaders have a hard time realizing they have permission to descope that in order to be successful. Most projects that I've observed in my career required us to realize we got more than we bargained for. And if we want to be successful with the budget we already agreed on, we have to either descope or you can say, protect from scope creep, whatever it is. Was the organization open to that? Was that a hard conversation or was that breezy and hey, we get it.
Kerry Phillips [00:23:46]:
It was a hard conversation. You scope something and you fund it. Then you have to go back and say, hey, look, I know you. You bought a car, but it turns out that car is not going to actually have any tires. How's that going to run? Is that going to be okay? Here's what it can do. You can sit in it. You can listen to the radio. It's not so bad, but it's.
Kerry Phillips [00:24:04]:
We had to. We had to cut it out or we wouldn't get anything done. What we did is we got through the MVP piece and we demonstrated that, hey, this works, and it does what we said it was going to do to about 80%. That was enough then that we went to go get funding to actually build the thing.
Jess Carter [00:24:20]:
Okay.
Kerry Phillips [00:24:20]:
And that's when we said, okay, we've learned all this stuff from the MVP. We were probably a year late at that point. We weren't terribly over budget, but we were late. And so the organization naturally had a little bit of concern. They know what they're doing. Everybody believed in the vision. We had to sort of go back and think about the savings it was going to provide, the opportunities it would create, why it was strategically necessary and sort of repackage and say, look, we can do this piece first and this is what it's going to do and this is why it's valuable. And then we can go do the rest of it.
Kerry Phillips [00:24:54]:
You know, the features that we descoped. But we want to get you this piece first. We owe this to our customers, number one. We owe it to the people on our team. We owe it to our coworkers to make their life easier. We owe it to our shareholders. You know, it's important to them that we're delivering back some value. When we approve those three things, get all the numbers to line up, and we got funded and we were back off to the race.
Jess Carter [00:25:15]:
That is really impressive. It's helpful to hear you unpack. And that's kind of what I was looking for too, is the process of managing the descoping. Like, one of the things that you had was the North Star, that whole training video. Hey, this is. This is where we're headed. You're still going to get here. You're expediting the value that you can.
Kerry Phillips [00:25:35]:
Yep, a hundred percent.
Jess Carter [00:25:37]:
So where are you today?
Kerry Phillips [00:25:38]:
Where are we today? Yeah, great question. So we are right on the edge of launch. We're right in the final pieces of it. We'll start doing the live launch with users. And again, we learned our lesson about breaking things up into smaller bits.
Jess Carter [00:25:54]:
Yeah.
Kerry Phillips [00:25:54]:
So we're even going to roll out to users in small pieces. And then in the fall, we'll launch into Europe and other parts of the globe. I know we've done a good job. We have a great team. Our OCM plan is strong. You know, we have at the elbow support ready to go. We have a way to track issues. You know, we know how to category.
Kerry Phillips [00:26:11]:
We're set. We're right. I'm not too worried about that. Now we’ve got to build all the rest of it, we watch it, we talk to the customer, we bring that voice of customer back and we make that product better, and then we do it again. We keep iterating throughout the life of the product until we get to a point where it's time to sunset and move on to something new. We have that mindset, which is what you're going to need in this application as well, just like you would with any software application.
Jess Carter [00:26:33]:
Yeah, absolutely. Anything that we have not discussed about this experience?
Kerry Phillips [00:26:37]:
This is probably worth mentioning real quick. One of the challenges we run into in a global organization in particular is that there's just different ways things are done, right? I mean, just the simple thing like inches versus centimeters. But there's also different standards, there's different rules, and then there's what I would call more of, like, preferences, our cultural preferences. If you're going to build an application that's going to work globally and you're trying to simplify it. And I think EnerSys has a tendency to. It's one of our. What I would call accidental value, which is a term I know you'll understand. It's.
Kerry Phillips [00:27:09]:
We overcomplicate things. And so part of what I have to do occasionally is step in and say, look, I know that you think it's important that we categorize these things by color. That's just not going to work because I got nine other people that want to categorize it differently. So we're going to do it this way. And every now and then you have to sort of crunch it to get there. You try to do that as little as possible because you want everybody to be heard, you want their voice in, and you want a tool that they're going to embrace. But sometimes you’ve got to narrow it down or you're just not going to get it back.
Kerry Phillips [00:27:36]:
And people get super passionate about it, right? I mean, what I think minimum weight means versus what you think minimum weight means, that's the hill we're going to die on. Especially when you're dealing with engineers, you know, like, this matters. This is a big deal. And so sometimes I'm just kind of like, be the resident jerk and say, no, it's not going to matter. Like I said, I don't do that a lot, but every now and then we have to do that. I think that's just part of what I have to do.
Kerry Phillips [00:27:57]:
It's part of the role we play.
Jess Carter [00:27:59]:
That's awesome. Okay, well, so there are going to be people who listen to this who think, I want to follow that guy. I want to hear how the story progresses. If people want to follow Kerry Phillips, how do they find you?
Kerry Phillips [00:28:08]:
I'm on LinkedIn. You can follow me on LinkedIn and I will occasionally post things about EnerSys. I'm sure I'll post about the launch of this so you'll see where it's at. If you see that my job changes, you'll know the launch didn't go well. Probably best to look at EnerSys as well. It really is a great company and they're doing a lot of really good things around decarbonization, electrification. That's really important for the world at large. So I encourage everybody to take a look at EnerSys as well.
Jess Carter [00:28:29]:
It sounds like a really cool company and I'm so glad that you're bringing your skill sets to bear at a company that's doing such important work. Kerry, thank you for doing this. Thanks for joining us today. This is. It's nice to get another chance to chat with you.
Kerry Phillips [00:28:41]:
Really good to talk to you again. I appreciate the work that you do as well, guys.
Jess Carter [00:28:45]:
Thanks for listening. I'm your host, Jess Carter. Don't forget to follow the Data-Driven Leadership wherever you get your podcasts and if you will rate and review letting us know how these data topics are transforming your business or what other topics you'd like to hear about. We can't wait for you to join us on the next episode.
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