How Tiama Hanson-Drury Leads Product, Tech, and AI Through Change Part-1

Speaker A: I don't have any desire to be the person that knows everything. In fact, everybody I hire needs to be better than me in at least one area. Otherwise I'm not hiring them. What's the point?

Speaker B: Welcome to Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners, the podcast where leading executives share how they cut through the noise and act on what matters most. We go beyond the headlines to explore the pivotal decisions, opportunities and and inflection points that define their careers and shape the future of the companies they led. It's time to cut through the noise and get to the signal.

Speaker C: Hi everybody. Welcome to Signal to Noise Today. I'm your host, Glenn Murphy, Managing partner in Riviera Europe. Today I'm going to be interviewing Tia Mohansen Drury, who's an award winning CPTO chief product and technology officer at, uh, Opus 2. She's an incredible leader who we've got to know over the years who's been through massive transformations across a ton of different legacy industries. So she's got a wealth of knowledge, she's incredible at simplifying things and she's one of my favorite execs in the US or in Europe. She's an absolute rock star and we're very lucky she's agreed to join today. What's the biggest signal you're paying attention to at the moment? And um, what are you tuning out?

Speaker A: So I think I'll start with what I'm tuning out. I'm working in legal tech now, have been for nine months and anyone who's watching that space knows the velocity of new features and new entrants to the market. But also the incumbents are able to be adding value at just a really rapid pace. And that's because obviously the language that underpins law is perfectly suited for uh, specifically, um, gen based work. I think what I'm tuning out is every post, every alert, got all my, obviously my setups on new litigation tech stuff. If I spent all the time looking at everything, I would be distracted from my day job. And it's a really motivating thing because it's a great time to be shipping in this space, but I kind of have to put my blinders on and make sure that I'm staying focused on our opportunity. So that's what I'm, I guess, um, screening out. What I'm listening to and tuning into is evidence where our clients are really using the platform, including the AI capabilities to create genuine blue space for them. And there is absolutely, for the same reasons that everyone's being able to ship so quickly. There is actual differentiation that our clients are creating using our platform, at least in part for it. So why was really lucky. When I first started, one of the first things I did advisable or not advisable, I'm not sure, is do, uh, a conference with four of our clients. And I didn't know anything about legal tech, but so what I did know is how to talk about competitive advantage. And we spent the whole time talking about how those clients were using AI, including our product, to create competitive advantage. And I'm listening now for those signals. So I'm listening for when a client says that the legal outcomes that they're creating are being done more effectively, not because it's faster or cheaper, but because they're actually leveraging AI to help them spend time on the high impact stuff, which is judgment, reasoned judgment. And they're able to get to that same level outcome, sometimes even better with fewer steps or less time, because it leaves them time to do the thinking and to do the reasoning. So what I'm looking for is really signs that our product is helping to productize expertise at our law firms. That's really what they want to do. That's why they win business, is because their unique approach to solving legal problems for their customers.

Speaker C: Got it. Yeah. And you've always, ever since I've known you as well, it's been very clear you are able to tune out the noise very well, I think, and not just chase brand names or your tech trends that you think I just need to get that on my CV or chasing team sizes. You've definitely seeing a business opportunity. Because when I think about it, we're working right now with Lovable lagora, uh, obviously Opus 2 granola. There's so much good stuff happening. At the same time, where do you spend your time and energy? So it makes sense that you are already looking and have been looking for that competitive advantage, which is awesome and not surprising at all. And if you don't mind as well. Yeah. Tell us about a pivotal moment in your career or especially in your leadership journey. What changed and how did you navigate that?

Speaker A: I think we get a lot of feedback in our career, women in particular get a lot of feedback on how to be effective, how not to be effective. And I think a pivotal moment for me was actually when I rejected some coaching that I was given. The coaching was given to me that I needed to be the smartest person in the room. I needed to be the person who had all the answers. I needed to not have the reliance on asking a team Member, hey, you know, give us the most up to date information on this. And that came from someone well intentioned. I think they, they were coming from their perspective of how to. But I operate in a much higher trust leadership environment. And I also know myself, I'm m nicknamed as the Octopus. I do have eight arms going and eight brains going at all times. But for me, what motivates me is to be the best trainer of firefighters, not the best firefighter. And so I know where I get my energy from. And it's when each of those eight octopus legs is creating more impact and more leverage. So instead of listening to that, um, and it was hard to hear, I remember it really especially because that person was in a position of power over me. It shook me for a while and I had to contemplate on it. Every time I was in an exact meeting, I knew they were judging me against that. Every time I was presenting to clients, I knew that they were, um, judging me against that. And in the end I just, I rejected it and I just said, look, I'm going to do what I do really well. My motto is repeatable, scalable. I get the most satisfaction, I would say, actually from seeing my teams achieve those goals as opposed to me achieving those goals. And so not that I don't carry the responsibility ultimately to meet them or not. And so I just continued to double down on my leadership approach, which is build systems where the right decisions are made when I'm not in the room and give those teams a chance to step up and shine. That was a pretty pivotal moment for me because it was that moment of just saying I have things that you could see as a advantage or a disadvantage. I'm attention deficit that I've learned through a lifetime of how to create hacks. So that that uh, diversity of thought and sometimes hyperactive thought is actually harnessed. And if I partner well with people and empower them to be able to take that stuff and execute on it, then we can have massive impact. And I can be a high impact player much more than I would ever be if I was just that best firefighter.

Speaker C: I love that because I think there's so many people who would have just taken that as and your career would have gone in a whole different direction. Right?

Speaker A: It really could have. I talk about it very succinctly now, like, oh, you know, when I thought about it, it was a real challenging period of about six months where I just, I wasn't my normal self because I just felt like I was being criticized and judged every Opportunity. I knew that to succeed in that person's eyes, I was going to do something that felt really, really inauthentic to me. I really had to come back to my values and think life is too short. Like, what am I going to do? Am I going to win for this person right now in a way that makes me feel inauthentic, or am I going to double down on what I know works and go down that path?

Speaker C: You definitely stayed true to your values there. Uh, I am curious how you identify a great talent as well on that, uh, theme of kind of. You've obviously coached a lot of people and I'm sure mentored a lot of people. But how do you identify great talent, maybe especially from diverse backgrounds or different skill sets, and identify those kind of characteristics you want?

Speaker A: I think. Well, first of all, I know what type of leader I am, so I know that there's certain people who are going to enjoy working with me, and there are certain people who are not. So I always try to be really upfront and honest about that because if I pick the people who are going to thrive, as I always tell the teams, I'm looking for someone who's going to thrive, not survive. So if I pick the people who thrive, they're going to get the best out of it. I'm going to get the best out of it. And as a result, our clients, our shareholders, our investors, et cetera, they're going to get the best out of it. But there's three signals that I know work very well for me. The first is the ability to abstract and clearly communicate. So I need people who are able as those eight legs I've got going, right? Like, I need to be able to contact switch quickly. I need people to be able to keep up with me as we're going. And I also need to be able to learn. I don't have any desire to be the person that knows everything. In fact, everybody I hire needs to be better than me in at least one area. Otherwise, I'm not hiring them. What's the point? They're better than me in all eight areas. That might be scary. Maybe m they need my dog. But I need people to be better than me and at least one. So what I'm usually looking for when I meet people is the ability to abstract. We can go into that more if we need to, but they need to be able to very clearly communicate something to me without jargon. And they need to be able to break it down to those smallest pieces, but. And explain why whatever it is that they're saying matters because that's going to be signal that they're going to be able to be influential. They can organize information well, they can communicate well. You need that in most roles but you certainly need that if you're working in product and technology. The second one is I want to make sure that the people I hire are self aware, they are growth minded, they are looking to evolve and usually the way that I see that is they can answer a question with pretty quick specificity about a time that has really evolved the way that they work. And it doesn't always have to be a positive, it can be a uh, negative. They don't have to sit there and say oh gosh yeah that's a tough one. Let me think about it like it's fine, that's totally fine. But it shows me that they haven't really self reflected on the areas that had really been step changes for them in their career. And I'm looking for self awareness because I'm looking for people who want to be the best, they want to lean into that coaching, they want to lean into that gross together. And then the third one is the org fit or the stage of business fit. I've worked for businesses that are a billion dollars and I've worked for businesses that were sub 1 million and the thing that matters most is are you right for that stage of business? Because what it takes to win in a sub 1 million business versus what it takes to win and a billion uh dollar plus business are totally different. And you could hire someone who is amazing at the distribution phase but if they're in a zero to one like it's not to say that they can't be successful. There's just going to be so much context to build and so much competency to build. So I usually try to just be really clear to the extent that my team's telling me I scare people away and it's true I do. But you know what, it's for the benefit of those candidates. I don't want them coming at being really unhappy.

Speaker C: For sure. Yeah, we have same mindset here as well. We're probably over the top talking about the intensity and pace. If you want to push yourself and evolve then sounds like the same with you. It's much more of a good self selecting tool.

Speaker A: It's one of the things that uh, from recruiters that I look for is are they able to really get a sense of our business and what it's going to take to win Because I want them to be Doing that for me. Right. I want them to be screening the candidates to be like, hey, this person is awesome working for Vivit Meta, but not going to be great for you working at boring old Opus. Right. Or you know, like whatever, but you know what I mean? Like it has to exciting and compelling to the person and that comes down to stage of company a lot of times.

Speaker C: Yeah. And there's very few people I think like a uh, VIP for instance, who could come out of Meta and go somewhere much smaller and it'd be pretty seamless. But that's often you find those people who want to make that switch because they know that they're getting pigeonholed. So a big part of where we earn our money I think is that same way of actually I know they're coming out of Meta or Google for these reasons. We think they could actually be really good in a much scrappier environment. Our reputation's on the line. But how do you curious when have you seen that work well. Or what do you do in the case where you think someone can context switch and it comes and it's not working out?

Speaker A: Like recently. Uh, uh is a good example. I hired a very senior person from JP Morgan's uh, AI division because on all paper he would not be the right fit for this company. He's worked at Microsoft, he's worked at JP Morgan, he's worked at other big brands, I can't remember. And a lot of people will be like, well are you hiring that person? Like how are they going to do well in a $100 million company? That's PE backscaling. Right. Especially in an industry that he hasn't worked in, which is legal tech. But what I knew was that two things he had the frustration with not being able to ship, he was tired of POCs and not being able to get this stuff into production. So that showed me he was outgrowing this kind of organizational environment that he was in and he was passionate about legal and like access to justice and powering justice mattered to him. He was, to the extent that he was thinking about building a startup on the side. Right. So those were two signals. Now he's coming in am, uh, I having to coach him hard on. He's got to communicate much more effectively because there's not the layers that then take what he said and simplified. Simplified. Simplified upwards. Yes I am right. But I'm open with him about that and I'm giving him the feedback on that and he'll be better for it or he'll go Back to JP Morgan, but hopefully he'll stay with us.

Speaker C: Yeah, it goes back to your having people from diverse backgrounds as well and experiences rather than just yet continuing the same trend. On the kind of trend side of things in the tech wise. What's one recent trend that you think is overhyped and um, what's one that you think is underappreciated?

Speaker A: This was a funny question because it just felt very obvious to me and it's the same answer actually. So it's agents. I think last year was definitely the year of agents. This is the year of like, okay, what are they doing? I think agents are great and I have uh, the privilege of having built some agentic systems already. What I think is overhyped is the idea of an agent that replaces Glenn or an agent that replaces Tiama. Right. That's at this point fairly routine. Not that it's easy because in production it is difficult, but it's pretty well understood and it's pretty everywhere. And I actually think there's a lot of people who are just taking an AI workflow and they're calling it an agent and that's fine. What I think is under hyped and really much more interesting is how do you build agents that resemble the most high performing teams? So how do you have those agents who are subject matter experts? Glenn is the expert in recruiting, he's the expert in European recruiting. TIAM is the expert in product and bringing a US and a UK focus. How do Glenn and Tiama and the agents that are built for them work together to find the best candidate for this new client? And how do we make sure that Glenn is bringing his subject matter expertise and challenging the Tiama agent? How do we make sure that there's a, uh, Riviera brand agent who's also coming in and saying, yeah, yeah, uh, yeah, both of you have really good ideas. But look, this is not on par with Riviera. Riviera does this right. Those are the systems that I find very, very interesting. And I wish I saw more people talking about.

Speaker C: I haven't heard a lot about it as well and you get me excited just hearing about it. But is there anyone doing something similar at the moment or companies that you really admire who you think actually they got them out of the right way?

Speaker A: One of my uh, old companies is doing it and I think they've done a phenomenal job. So that's Zappi. They've built an amazing approach for what would take Pepsi or would take Coca Cola, a agency approach as well. As internal creative teams as well as internal decisioning frameworks to build and launch an ad or create a new product. And they built an entire agentic approach for that that allows them to get that done and fraction of the cost, fraction of the time. And actually, I mean it's been a while but last time I caught up with my product team friend there, they had said that like they were actually the quality of the new product ideas were being selected above the uh, traditional approaches. So I think Zappy is doing some interesting things in that space.

Speaker C: And where are they based again?

Speaker A: I think their headquarters are out of London now. They may have renamed to the US Yeah but they're a global company. They service global brands.

Speaker C: Amazing. And then in terms of Opus 2 kind of and going into a legacy industry where people the automatic thing is tons of regulation, deeply entrenched workflows. What about your first hundred days there? Like how did you identify what truly mattered and how to find the highest leverage opportunities?

Speaker A: Well, first of all I'm a total nerd and I actually really like if you look at my career like you said, you will see a trend and it's not always obvious to people who don't understand what I'm doing, but it is actually going after legacy industries and bringing technology and innovation to them. And I usually do that just a sidebar when I see what I call like the holy Trinity. So there is a business problem, there is a technology that's meeting that moment and then as a result commercialization is happening. And when those three things come across, that's the holy trinity, not religious. That's usually a signal like ooh, this is an interesting time to get involved and I like that. I really enjoy it. I did it with market research, I did it with advertising, I did it with marketing tech, I did it with banking at Mina and now I'm doing it in legal. And for us it's geni is meeting that moment of the need is these multi step reasoning workflows because that's what lawyers and that's what lawyer teams do is they make judgment based decisions off of a lot of sequential steps and the market is nuts. So it's a really good time for litigation tech in particular. So what I've done in my first hundred days actually looks very similar to what I did at Mina, uh, what I did at Dynada. Uh, I start with listening to the customer and really try to. I was raised by two psychologists so it's easy for me to talk to people and I try to just listen. I Listen to my clients. I listen to them tell me what's working, what's not working. I want them to just kind of talk to me and I just try to say as little as possible. And then I also listen to the teams who serve them internally. That's the first thing. The second thing then is I try to do something that is deceptively difficult. People usually think when I say this, they're like, yeah, well everybody knows how a company makes money. Like, do you really, really understand? Have you really abstracted out how your business makes money? This you have to do if you're going to create a good product vision and strategy. So it's usually A, is something you're selling an orange, B unit of how you sell that in some way or increase the number of oranges minus C, cost of growing and shipping those oranges equals your revenue. And so that's the first thing I try to do is say, okay, how does OPUS do actually make money? I'm m not going to talk about that here, but I try to do that and I do that almost immediately because it's not necessarily going to be right, but it's going to help me filter out that noise. That's one thing that's going to happen right away. Then I try to map what value looks like for our clients. So in this case it was what does a commercial litigation dispute look like? Where does it start? Regardless of where our platform is, where does it start, where does it end? I want to understand that workflow. It's almost like a service map. And then fourth is I dog food the hell out of our clients experience. So I try to really understand how well are we doing this, those four things. And I can usually get those done in 60 days if I'm lucky, depending on the state of the internal teams that I'm coming into. They give me really good indications and bets. And I start to then talk with my ex, my team, my exacts about like, okay, am I right on this? Does this make sense? Is this looking right? And it shows me those kind of low hanging fruit things. It allows me to not make decisions and act too quickly, which, you know, the listeners here, you know, the more senior you are, the easier it is to get in and operate. Almost like the same way you suddenly, well, I don't drive anymore. But the way I used to leave my house in Seattle and show up at my work, right, without even realizing that I was there. So it stops me from doing that because that's dangerous. And then it also gives you the themes and those themes tend to show you like, okay, this is going to be the value themes that we've got. This is going to inform the roadmap, this is going to inform the strategy, the vision, et cetera. So that's what I've done. And at Opus, there was massive. We had massive AI traction when I came in. But actually, you know, boringly, uh, a lot of the stu that I chose to have us focus on was stabilizing those foundations before we started to scale those things. And the innovation, because I could tell that we had, like, everybody in the world moved quickly, and we don't have the benefit of hundreds and hundreds of people working on this. And so we needed to stabilize some of those core finops pieces and core foundational architectural pieces. So that's what we focused on.

Speaker C: Amazing. Yeah. It just sounds like you're world class at simplifying things. Even that example of figuring out how you make money, I often have it with a lot of our clients, and sometimes we won't be able to get deep enough from thinking what is the actual model. I, uh, rarely hear execs talk about it because it's almost like, given that if you were, uh, to actually really go deeper with people, a lot of them don't know.

Speaker A: Yeah. But again, it's leaning into my weaknesses. I was never very good at maths. I was scared of it. I was like, oh, my God, this is nervous. But that, like, it made me really nervous. I sucked in my math classes. I didn't do computer science because I thought I had to be math oriented. Um, but then I got into sales. I was like, freaking hell, I know how to manage numbers. Like, this is fun. And then I started to invest my money and I was like, oh, I also know how to manage numbers. And so I started to think about numbers in terms of business models and that really. I know how much confidence it gives me when I can make decisions quickly because I remember, look, this doesn't increase A, the value of A. It doesn't increase our velocity or number of B, volume of B, it doesn't drive down C. Why are we doing it? Like, why does that matter?

Speaker C: Yeah. Which in this day and age of AI, is very easy to forget. Just chasing things. That's all for part one of our conversation with Tiama Hansen Drury, chief product and technology officer at Opus2. We've just scratched the surface of Tiama's philosophy on leadership and the signals she looks for when hiring elite talent. Join us next time for part two, where Tiama explains the holy trinity of tech innovation, her AH MECE framework for solving complex problems and why she thrives as a CPTO despite not having a traditional computer science background. She also shares her 100 day plan for joining a new organization and why she believes humans can always do more than they think they can. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe, leave a review or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening.

Speaker B: Signal to Noise is brought to you by Riviera Partners, leaders in executive search and the premier choice for tech talent. To learn more about how Riviera helps people and companies reach their full potential, visit rivierapartners.com and don't forget to search for Signal to Noise by Riviera Partners on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to podcasts.