Al Zollar

Rahul Abhyankar [00:04] Al, thank you so much for being on the show.

Al Zollar [00:06] Well, thank you for the invitation. I really value the opportunity to talk about my experiences and the hope that they can benefit someone else.

Rahul Abhyankar [00:15] 34 years at IBM, and I don't imagine that when you joined the company, that you thought you would be there for 30-plus years.

Al Zollar [00:27] No, I never thought I'd be there 34 years. I was just really in need of a job, and one of the things that I've tried to practice is that every job I've had, approach it as if it's the last job you're going to have, and just bring everything you can into it. So I've tended to keep my focus on really what was ahead of me. I was fortunate to join a company like IBM, where the opportunities that they were able to present to me were manifold.

Rahul Abhyankar [01:00] That attitude about having every job as the last job that you would have. How did you come to that kind of mindset and attitude?

Al Zollar [01:07] Well, actually, I'm not sure it was something that I really had thought through that clearly early in my career, but as I began to go into management, one thing I noticed was that there would be some managers who would openly talk about what they wanted to accomplish in their career aspirations, sometimes in front of their teams that they were managing. And I always thought that was weird because it would potentially give the team the sense that maybe your priorities weren't always those of what the team was trying to do. And so I kind of hardened that philosophy into just focus on what you have in front of you in terms of your remit and your responsibilities, and don't wear your ambition on your sleeve. Focus on the job, as if it were the last job you were ever going to have.

Did at any point you think you might leave the company? Well, when you're at a company that long, there are often many times when you question whether or not it's the right place for you. And one that is quite products, but were very focused on providing those software products on its own platforms. In this case it was the mainframe platform, the IBM Unix platform, and that ill-fated platform called OS2. But we had gotten a bit of a reprieve to build an application developer tool. This is in the days of PowerBuilder. It was called Visual Age. And as a developer's tool, we got permission to build a Windows version of it. But Windows had certain systems features that OS2 did not back then, and we made the decision to have our Windows version take advantage of those systems features—the component object model, for those who remember that.

We were stopped from shipping the product because of the fear that IBM executives above me had that it would disadvantage OS2. And I thought, this is crazy. We're actually building an inferior product on purpose so that OS2 won't look bad. And that was the point at which I really thought maybe I need to be at a different place. But fortunately, a guy named Lou Gerstner came along. He was the first CEO that IBM had brought in from the outside, and one of the positions that he took, with a lot of help from great IBMers like John Thompson and others, was that we should build software for the platforms that customers used, including Windows and Solaris and other platforms. That reinvigorated me and a lot of other folks, I believe, to believe that IBM would be serious about becoming a player in the broader software industry.

Rahul Abhyankar [04:13] And that focus on customers and really meeting customers where they were—you think it was missing before?

Al Zollar [04:21] Well, IBM had grown so large and successful as measured by profitability and, in some cases, market share, depending on the products. The culture had become a bit insular. In fact, this is one of Lou Gerstner's big observations to the senior executives at IBM. He used an analogy where he said coming to IBM was like joining a professional team, seeing a lineup of incredible athletes who had incredible capabilities, but the problem was all the athletes were in the locker room fighting while the game was going on out on the field. And that was because of that insular focus. It's one of the things that definitely resonated with me, because I spent the first nine years of my career before moving into IBM's product businesses in sales engineering—systems engineering, we called it then; IBM now calls it client engineering—but basically the technical support, pre-sales technical support, and, in the case when I started, post-sales technical support for major customers. And so that insight into what really happened in the customer's office was extremely invaluable to me.

Rahul Abhyankar [05:33] Over 34 years, I can imagine that you've had multiple careers within IBM. So you started as a pre-sales, post-sales engineer. How did that transition into the product side?

Al Zollar [05:46] That's a great question, and I've had really so many interesting roles. One of the experiences I had was working with the Bank of America as a systems engineering manager. They were in every beta program—we called them early support programs back then—from just about every IBM product you could think of. So it gave me the opportunity to interact with the product engineers at IBM and the product engineering management groups and product managers. The more I did that, the more I realized that's what I really want to be doing. And so I was able to, with the help of some great mentors and sponsors, direct my career toward that path, which most of the people who were in the sales organization thought was crazy, because you tend to make a lot more money with commissions and success in the sales organization. But I just enjoyed the challenge of really figuring out how to create products that customers get excited about, and so I was able to push my career in that direction.

So again, two big areas: client-facing roles for the first nine years. The last 25 years were in product groups. And the distinction I had in the product groups is I got to work from the bottom to the top of the software stack—the modern software stack—operating systems, middleware, and applications. And doing that over a number of years, 25 years, of course, during that time, tremendous changes going on in the overall IT landscape, from the mainframe era to distributed era, to client-server, to the internet, to cloud, and, of course, now the era of AI and Web3. So it was just an incredible collection of experiences that I could have gotten by going to a bunch of different companies, but I was fortunate that I could have all those experiences in one company, IBM, which is really the reason I stayed for so long.

Rahul Abhyankar [07:43] And so when you moved into the product group, which product was that?

Al Zollar [07:47] The first product group that my boss was trying to move me into was PC printers. I finally had to tell him that, despite his great sponsorship, I had zero passion for PC printers. I'm not a hardware engineer. I like to tell people I'm much better at bits than I am at atoms. I convinced him to let me try to move into IBM's software product business, and once I did that, I never looked back. The first products that I got my hands dirty on were the products like DB2 on IBM's mainframe, as well as our business intelligence tools. That's where I first cut my teeth.

Rahul Abhyankar [08:29] At that time within the DB2 engineering team, IBM employed a lot of PhDs—very smart, super smart engineers. You coming into that role, how did you establish your credibility with the PhDs working in IBM's engineering?

Al Zollar [08:48] It was an interesting thing. First off, I was younger than most of them, and I really had never been a developer of code. But in terms of the technical depth around the product, like DB2, the predicate calculus and relational model and the buffering and caching algorithms, I had no chance of trying to keep up with these incredible engineers. But what I had that they didn't have was an understanding of how these products really operated in the client use cases in the customer office. I tried to bring that to the table as I managed these incredibly talented groups of engineers.

Rahul Abhyankar [09:30] You took that role and you established yourself having the opportunity to be the leader, not through org charts, not through line responsibilities, but assert your leadership over the direction of the product.

Al Zollar [09:44] That was quite an experience. The first role I had managing DB2, we called it product manager, but the definition of product manager in that configuration was the product management team as well as the engineering team were the only teams that actually directly reported to me. But I had responsibility, and I took responsibility, for the overall performance of the product in the customer's office from a quality standpoint, from a financial standpoint, from a growth standpoint. I viewed it as my job to really make sure that DB2 was successful, because our organization was siloed both functionally and geographically. The salespeople didn't report to me. The customer success people doing the level one, level two support didn't report to me. At level three, so I created this internal notion of DB2 Incorporated, and I treated it as if I were the CEO of that organization. So that meant communicating, being able to make sure that success stories were shared across the team. That was quite an experience in teaching me about how to lead teams where you have authority but perhaps not line management responsibility.

Rahul Abhyankar [10:58] What you said, Al, just now about DB2 Incorporated and seeing yourself as the CEO of that business—this was not necessarily part of the job description. Nobody said, Al, you are the CEO of DB2. But this is something as a mental construct, as a mindset that you adopted.

This is going to touch the nerve of some people in the audience, because there is a debate in the product industry today about whether the product manager is the CEO of the product or not, and there are people on both sides of that fence. People who don't like to call the product manager as the CEO of the product say that product managers don't really have the final authority CEO level decisions, and it's just something that product managers are self-aggrandizing by calling themselves the CEO of the product, or that they may be misled, their behavior might become more authoritarian as opposed to more collaborative. On the other hand, there are people who say that the product manager is the CEO of the product because it's a mindset and it's an opportunity to have that collaborative approach and drive people, different teams, towards that common vision. And to hear you say that from your own experience of you start DB2 Incorporated and see yourself as the CEO of the product, I think that's just wonderful.

Al Zollar [12:22] Well, and I should say, I was more the latter example that you gave. The first thing, I didn't call myself the CEO initially. In fact, I never liked referring to myself that way. Other people kind of did. What I talked about was DB2 Incorporated. I wanted people to think about ourselves as if we were a self-contained company trying to make this product successful in the eyes of our customers and against competitors. When I printed up a t-shirt saying DB2 Incorporated, that's when people would say, well, you must be the CEO. Actually, later on, IBM sort of shut that down because they did not like the concept. There's only one CEO of IBM, as Lou Gerstner once told me.

Rahul Abhyankar [13:08] Over the course of your career at IBM, you've had responsibility and you've inherited a lot of foundational products and businesses—DB2, OS2, Lotus, Tivoli—each of them intensely competitive markets. So how did your views about vision, strategy, and then execution in the market—how did you see driving those types of things forward?

Al Zollar [13:35] Well, it was an evolution. It wasn't something that I had day one managing DB2, but it evolved to kind of the following belief. There are incredible markets that we get to serve. In the overall technology industry, there's target addressable markets, or TAMs, and then the serviceable addressable markets, based on a subsetting of those definitions. And I think it's very clear, there are four things that you have to be clear on to be successful in a product business as a product manager, product leader. The first is truly understanding as much as you can, as best you can, that target addressable market or TAM. The second thing you need to understand are what are the priorities that customers have to make them respond to your value proposition compared to the value proposition of a competitive or substitute product. So what is it about your capabilities, your product, your solution and offering, that makes customers allow them to exchange their money for your product?

The third thing that's very important is a business model that is sustainable in terms of the way that you capture that revenue, that value from customers. And then the last part is the financial model. What is the multi-year growth in terms of revenue, and how do you manage expenses so that you can deliver profitable growth? TAM, the value proposition, the business model, the financial model. If you really learn how to be rigorous and deep in those four dimensions of products, that's how I think you can be most successful.

Rahul Abhyankar [15:23] That's beautiful. In a very crisp manner, you just described the crux of product management. Lotus—you were the president of Lotus. IBM had acquired Lotus in, I think, 1995.

Al Zollar [15:39] You're correct, yes.

Rahul Abhyankar [15:39] But it had been left as a separate subsidiary, hands-off.

Al Zollar [15:42] That's right.

Rahul Abhyankar [15:43] But then you became the president of Lotus. So I can imagine that very different cultures. So when you took on that responsibility as president of Lotus, how did you approach the aspect of organizational culture?

Al Zollar [15:58] Again, it's a very interesting sort of situation. Lou Gerstner came to IBM, and one of the first things he did, major things he did, was to acquire Lotus. This is actually initially, you may recall, a hostile acquisition, but ultimately they came around to the pricing and terms that IBM wanted. But one of the things that was agreed to is that IBM would sort of run it from a hands-off fashion because Lotus had a strong brand. It obviously had people that knew the software business. IBM was still kind of finding its way within the commercial software business. It wasn't integrated for five years.

I was asked to be the person to come in and lead the business, but also to integrate it into IBM, and it really was one of the most challenging assignments I've ever had. I described sort of jokingly to people that the culture and the attitudes I found at Lotus somewhat like some folks that might have a rich uncle or rich grandfather. It's like, please keep sending me checks, but I really don't want to show up for holiday dinner. So they didn't really want to be in the IBM family. Yet the odd thing I found from my prior roles that I'd had, every player in the industry was trying to come to meet a partner because we were IBM. Yet Lotus, through the acquisition, had a built-in partnership with IBM that they had no interest in taking advantage of. One of the things that I had to do is to try to understand who I could, especially among the leadership team, who was really with me on leveraging the power and platform of IBM, and who was really in the old model of, we're going to do it all on our own, and very quickly separate those folks who did not see themselves really being a part of IBM, and move forward with the people who were more excited about that possibility.

Rahul Abhyankar [18:02] This topic about IBM and Lotus, this is just very close to me personally, because my business school case study was about IBM's acquisition of Lotus. This was in our MA class.

Al Zollar [18:15] You have a little bit of depth on the subject there.

Rahul Abhyankar [18:18] Yes, and so I just consumed whatever was written, printed, and so on about IBM and Lotus at that time. And I even wrote applications on the Domino platform.

Al Zollar [18:29] Great platform. It was the original low-code platform.

Rahul Abhyankar [18:35] Over 34 years, tough conversations, I'm sure you've had your share of them.

Al Zollar [18:41] Absolutely. Let's maybe talk about some of the tough conversations in the product area. Some of the toughest—when I was given responsibility for OS2 at IBM, it was after we had announced that we were no longer going to be investing in it over the long term, and we actually created a seven-year roadmap that we openly communicated to our major customers. But it was among the most difficult conversations I've ever had to have with customers.

Rahul Abhyankar [19:12] How do you approach a tough conversation?

Al Zollar [19:15] The simplest way to do it is through empathy. Whether it's an employee that had to separate from the business or a customer had to deliver a hard message, to just try to live in their shoes so that you can understand how they will react to what they will perceive as bad news, and just be human. We all want to do good things in these kind of environments. Again, some people may have different motives, but you have to keep in mind the humanity and dignity of people that you're dealing with when there's bad news to be delivered.

Rahul Abhyankar [19:53] You had product and engineering both reporting into you. Typically product and engineering, there's that tension, healthy or unhealthy depending upon personalities. But did you have any opportunity to experience some of that tension, even though both functions were reporting into you?

Al Zollar [20:12] Yes, I have a very clear recollection of two individuals when I was managing the Tivoli business who were just at open warfare with each other, and it got to the point where it spilled out to the organization. People knew that there was strong dislike between these two individual leaders, and it got to the point where I had to intervene. I called both of them into my office, and I said, this has got to stop. You have to figure out how to work as colleagues, and if it doesn't stop, I can guarantee you one thing—one of us will not be here the next time we talk about it. Now, I told them, I don't know if that person who won't be here is you, you, or me, but I guarantee you one of us won't be here. I'm going to ask you guys to figure this out. I'm going to help where I'm available for help, wherever you need it. But that actually improved the situation. Now, whether these individuals became buddies or not, I doubt it, but they became much more effective in front of the organization and showed the kind of teamwork that, especially from senior leadership, you have to show when you are leading across a product organization. So yeah, that was a moment.

Rahul Abhyankar [21:30] And I think what's a great takeaway is that you made yourself vulnerable saying one of us, including me, might not be in the room.

Al Zollar [21:40] And what I really meant by that is that I could be fired, or I would quit. We were not in a sustainable situation.

Rahul Abhyankar [21:46] I'm going back 10 years now to my first interaction with you. This was at Pulse Secure.

Al Zollar [22:07] Yes.

Rahul Abhyankar [22:07] Where this was a business that was spun out of Juniper Networks and sold to Siris Capital, and you are a partner at Siris Capital, and you were on the board of Pulse Secure.

Al Zollar [22:07] I was actually board chair.

Rahul Abhyankar [22:08] Yes. My memory recollection from that very fresh and seeing you in the halls of the new company, just walking the halls, talking to people and really connecting with everybody. And then there was a board meeting where we had prepared some slides, walk you and the board through the product strategy, the product direction and roadmap. And what I distinctly remember from that time was you digging deep into the strategy and the roadmap, even to the point of asking questions like, why does it make sense to do something before the other thing? And to that level of detail. And it was just extremely educational and insightful for me that you would take the effort to understand, to the level of detail that you were ready to go to.

Al Zollar [22:57] Well, I'm sure some people will listen to this and say, oh my God, you have a board chair going down into that level of detail. Certainly, in some public companies, people might think that that might not be appropriate. But with the private companies I had the chance to work with, and with the public companies, I think there's something that any board member should bring, as they support management but also challenge management, and that is an intense curiosity. And so I can't remember the context of what you're describing, Rahul, but I'm sure it was a situation where I just had curiosity, and that curiosity especially gets piqued when I know from my past experiences that something could be done a little bit differently or better. So I was probably coming from that perspective. In my public board roles, I find I have to maybe shut myself off and then follow up with people after a meeting, because I think it's part of your responsibility to bring curiosity to the table and to be in a position to both challenge and support the management teams with an incredible vigor. So that's what I've always tried to do.

Rahul Abhyankar [24:14] And that's what I remember—your questions were very pointed, but they were not meant to make people be defensive.

Al Zollar [24:23] Well, I'm glad to know that I came off the way I intended, because, again, I think we've probably all been in meetings where senior executives will attempt to intimidate members of product teams, maybe bully them a little bit. Anybody who's on a product team and a software-driven business is bringing a high level of knowledge and intelligence to the job. You should respect that and try to augment it with what might be a different set of lived experiences that you have that can make the team better.

Rahul Abhyankar [25:00] Let's come to AI. IBM has had a rich history of innovation in AI. I mean, even all the way back to 1997, when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov, and then with Watson and Jeopardy, and now with Watson X. But when you look at all the press around AI today—OpenAI and Microsoft and NVIDIA getting a lot of press—does it feel like IBM is not getting its fair share of credit for its rich history of innovation in AI and for a long time?

Al Zollar [25:37] Well, I think generative AI really was a moment in our industry, kind of like that moment around the browser or the PC, when things would be different from that point on. Now, before the great algorithms associated with the transformer approach in generative AI—I think goes back to 2017 or so—before that, a lot of great things were happening in AI. You touched on Deep Blue. Watson, which was the Jeopardy-playing machine, was a real breakthrough. IBM has it, just wasn't quite as ready for prime time as folks might have wanted it to be.

But one thing I've learned about the product business is, if you take a set of people and they work on a product, and maybe that product isn't as successful as people would like it to be, but then you take that same core people—it doesn't always have to be the same people, but that sort of institutional knowledge—and you then apply it to another version of the product, maybe going after the same or new use cases, you have a set of experienced people whose ability to innovate is now at another level. And that's kind of what's happened, in my opinion, with Watson X. All of the knowledge and learning that IBM had around the original Watson, around what it takes to really deal with models—models of different types, open source, those proprietary models—what it takes to really deal with the right data, having true data lineage, data quality, both structured and unstructured data, and being able to bring that into training and inferencing around models. And then, lastly, how do you make sure that there really are great capabilities around governance—being able to understand lifecycle, explainability, traceability, prevent bias, prevent hallucination. Those are the kinds of things that IBM has learned.

I think that two of the most transformative technologies of our current time were going to be hybrid cloud and AI. Again, IBM's approach is different than Microsoft or some of the other organizations out there, like OpenAI and Anthropic, Mistral, et cetera. IBM's approach is to bring strong capabilities around consulting and understanding workflows and inside of organizations, with a strong technology platform in Watson X that will ultimately allow us to help our clients with the kind of use cases that are most productive around AI. Use cases like code, code modernization, use cases like digital labor, use cases like customer service. It might not be as exciting and sexy as having ChatGPT compose a very interesting poem in the style of a famous poet, but the true business value that can be created in institutions, I think is what will differentiate IBM over time.

Rahul Abhyankar [29:11] How do you keep yourself learning?

Al Zollar [29:12] It goes back to the curiosity. I also try to take advantage of really smart—well, take advantage is the wrong word—I try to build relationships with really smart people. One of my bosses said, Al, you don't have to be a walking encyclopedia as long as you're a walking index. So I try to maintain pointers to all these smart people who I can learn from.

Rahul Abhyankar [29:39] You've been writing a lot with the hashtag #newwhitemen. Tell us about that.

Al Zollar [29:45] Yeah, that's an interesting one, Rahul. Post the murder of George Floyd, I think a lot of people felt the need, and I certainly did, to express things that had been on their hearts. I've been fortunate to be able to work in C-suites and boardrooms with a lot of people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of those people were white men. There's some white women as well and women of color and other people of color, but the overwhelming majority—I guess you could say that white men were overrepresented compared to their place in the population.

And what I noticed is that when it came to the subject of diversity, equity, and inclusion, which is under attack right now, and I'll come back to that—but what I noticed was that there were two kinds of white men. There were old white men and new white men, and that's not a statement of chronological age, it's a statement of mindset. The old white men were the kind of folks who, when this discussion of diversity, equity, and inclusion came up, didn't have much to say, kind of looked at their watches to see when this would be over, really were not comfortable, in my eyes, with the topic of an inclusive environment. The new white men, on the other hand, were people who leaned in, who treated it the way you would treat any business topic. What does the data show? What does the trend show? What does the outside world show relative to what we're doing here? And they were part of the discussion.

It just occurred to me that we need allyship with these new white men if we're ever going to eradicate racism in the United States and certainly globally. So I wrote a challenge to all of the white male colleagues I'd worked with. This is not to exclude people of color or white women who've been great allies, but to invite all the white men that I worked with to jump on the train to be a new white man and to begin that journey of really trying to understand the lived experiences of people who are actually the majority of people who are on the planet. White men are not the majority of people on the planet. And for those who engage in that way, they actually, I think, find new opportunities and new insights that are valuable to them personally and professionally.

Rahul Abhyankar [32:13] That's tremendous, and that's a beautiful message. So if you had an opportunity to have dinner with a courageous woman figure in history, who would that be?

Al Zollar [32:17] Oh my God. There's so many. I think I would possibly pick Rosa Parks because of the courage and the will it took to really begin what we know of now as the civil rights movement in the United States. But you have a lot of respect for the evolution of opening of opportunities to everyone, and to women in particular. I was fortunate at IBM to have maybe more women managers than I had male managers. My first manager at IBM was a woman. I had two very significant women in my mid-career when I managed DB2 that we talked about so much. I reported to an incredible woman named Janet Perna. IBM was ahead of its time. I didn't realize that. I thought everybody kind of had equal access to opportunity the way it happened at IBM. But it really has been a pleasure for me to see that and now to be in a position of working with some amazing women. Adena Friedman, who's the chair and CEO of NASDAQ, is one of the most impressive leaders of any gender in the tech space.

Rahul Abhyankar [33:33] Growing up, a distinct memory that you feel that has shaped you to be the person that you are.

Al Zollar [33:41] There's so many of those, and obviously, my family had a lot to do with that. But if I stick into kind of the technology lane, I think one of the key things was developing my interest in mathematics. We all had those teachers that made a difference in our trajectory. I had a fourth grade teacher that made that difference. I remember a sixth grade teacher that did. But probably the most influential teacher was my 11th grade math teacher, where, among other things, he insisted that you had to write a paper on a famous mathematician. And we were like, you don't write papers in math. He says, well, you do in my class. And Mr. Blakesley was his name. And I chose a mathematician named Pierre de Fermat, and some people will be familiar with Fermat's Last Theorem, which for hundreds of years went without a proof. Fermat noted in the margins of his papers that he had an elegant proof, but he didn't have enough space in the margins to prove it out. And so somehow I thought that I was going to be the guy who would prove that. That didn't happen. But what it did do is spark my interest in math, which is what led to my interest in computers. It really is a key reason why I'm here.

Rahul Abhyankar [35:00] We could go on and on. This is a conversation that, to me, it feels like it should never end. Thank you so much. I'm just deeply grateful and honored to have you on Product Leader's Journey. And thank you is just two small words, but I just can't say them enough.

Al Zollar [35:15] Well, Rahul, I thank you for inviting me to have this discussion. It's really been a great, great discussion. And as I said, if anything I've said benefits someone, then it is more than time well spent. So thank you for having me.