Antwain Daniels, @wellsfargo

Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode of the Breaking Changes podcast. I’m your host and Chief Evangelist for Postman, Kin Lane. With Breaking Changes we explore topics from the world of APIs, but we look at things through the lens of business and engineering leadership. Joining me today we have Antwain Daniels, VP and product manager at Wells Fargo. Antwain provided me with another solid example of someone who’s moving API operations forward by bridging business with IT, but this time it’s specifically for the financial sector, showing how API-first is helping Wells Fargo meet their business needs. I always start really simple with the basics: who are you and what do you do?

Awesome. So, Antwain Daniels. I have been in the fintech, sort of financial and technology, space somewhere around 15 years now. I started my career off in the call center because I wanted to utilize sort of my background. I really didn’t know finance, so I thought this would be a good idea to start, and now I’ve been in here 15 years, mainly in the financial space but moving more towards the technology side, currently as a product manager, which is what I’ve been doing for my career in the last maybe six to seven years of that 15.

So I know a lot of product managers, you’ve got a technical base and background. Do you consider yourself more tech, developer, or do you consider yourself more business, or is it a blend?

Yeah, I think it’s more of a blend, right. I have a degree in computer science from Benedict College. I started off in programming, but now I prefer to be more in the middle, between business and technology. I enjoy the technology and it makes more sense to me, however I think I have sort of a knack for understanding both. So right in the middle. Someone has to translate the tech side, and then the business side sometimes doesn’t understand the tech side, so I’m sort of, I’ve made a career in that middle space, understanding both and being able to translate it to both sides clearly. So that’s been the fun part for me.

Yeah, so important. And I would say it’s one of the top areas that we’re hearing right now. The usual narrative that I’m getting, and I used to hear this from tech companies, but I’m hearing it from mainstream companies, you know, banks like you, and insurance, healthcare, and they’re saying that, hey, we know we’re doing APIs, we’re doing this API thing, but all the APIs have been tech-led, an IT-led initiative, and they don’t always speak to the business realm. And a lot of companies are still very waterfall-ish, and that divide between business and IT exists. But this is why I got in the API business, because I feel like that gap’s closing and being kind of smoothed over, and most of the companies I’m talking to want more business stakeholders involved in the process. So they’re going to need more translators like you to get this done.

Absolutely, and that’s been the fun part for me, because, as you mentioned, sort of the Lost in Translation between business and technology, a lot of technology that we used to build was primarily done from a tech perspective, right. And that’s tough when you have a business need but you have someone on the tech side answering that or coming up with a resolution or solution for that problem. Sometimes it’s not quite as easy to just dive in and say, okay, this will fix it. I think when you have both sides, the tech side and the business side, sort of merging on ideas, you get a better product in the end versus the latter, when you just have tech creating it versus collaborating with the business.

Yeah, there’s a lot of, I mean, I think us developers, technologists, tend to think we’re pretty smart people, and I think some of the times we are. But my journey over the years, I’ve been a developer up to development engineering manager, architect, and I didn’t really understand how government works and regulation works until I went to work for the Obama administration in 2013, and I kind of hit head-on with it and got a crash course. But regulatory and compliance, I feel like this is an important area to make aware to tech people, because it’s completely a blind spot for us, right.

Yeah, and that’s a good comment, right, because you run into this pretty often, especially in the financial system or space that I work in. There’s regulatory bodies that govern what we do. You have FINRA, you have the SEC, you have the OCC, you have so many regulatory bodies there for good reason, right, to make sure that we’re doing things properly, things are done in order. But you also have a lot of times the solution needs to come from the tech side, but you also want to make sure when you’re building the product, when you’re going through this full ideation process, that you include those folks as well. And once again, that me as a product manager, that’s been a good sort of space for me to play in, because I can speak that language as well. I understand what it means when you have regulation. Some of them are written almost in attorney language where it’s hard to understand, and I would run into the developers who would get frustrated because it’s just not a space that they play in often. So it’s a lot, but that’s the good part, I get to collaborate with everybody. So I have the ability to talk the language, I understand the regulatory side, but I also understand when it’s something that needs to have both and you can come to sort of a medium where everyone can, this is, I pride myself in coming up with a solution that’s pretty simple and efficient, so everyone can understand it. I hate to come up with a solution that confuses one side or the other, and because I can talk compliance, risk, legal, technology, I think I’ve done well so far.

So is this how it is moving forward? We’re just going to need to clone you and create thousands of you to be this convey, you know, between business and regulatory and compliance and the tech and engineers and then the consumers of the things you’re building? You’re a product manager. So is this just the role that’s going to be required to move things forward, or are we going to be able to keep business folks, are we going to be able to not leave them behind, and then also not leave tech people behind when it comes to business needs and stuff like that?

That’s a good question, right, because I think when I started in my career I didn’t know product management exists. When younger in my career, I’m trying to find something that gives me a happy medium, right, where I still enjoy doing, it’s not tech or code base where I’m writing python, I’m doing all these things, but it’s also not so far in the business where now I need to have my Series 7 licenses, 63, I have both licenses, maybe a certificate for agile coaching as well as a Series 6. But I think at the point we are now, it makes sense to have both. I think we’ve learned a lot from creating products that only had one side involved, and I think a lot of companies are learning that you need that middle person, that product manager. But I think also, it may be 15 or 20 years from now the business side and the tech side may be one thing, right. There won’t be a tech and a business, the person in that position will understand both going forward, I think. And that depends on the culture of the company, right. If the culture of the company is to learn both sides, I think we’ll eventually move to that where it may not be product manager, may not be a role that’s needed, the business and the technology group could just talk to each other in a sense where they can build things, they don’t need that middle person to translate things back and forth. But it’s going to take a while, because we have companies still learning what agile, you mentioned waterfall earlier, and I have companies that still do waterfall, right, they still utilize that methodology because it’s what they’re used to, whereas agile is now all the rage. But there’s still a learning gap, right, because now where I work they even have the business side learning or participating in these sprints, these discussions, where they now have to understand what it means to point a story or what an epic is. They have to participate in those, not have to, but I think they’re more willing to participate in it so they’re not left out of the discussion and things get done properly.

Yes, I mean, I think there’s a lot of groundwork to be laid, a lot of platform, but I agree that your role, your persona, is paving over that divide that’s existed, and we’ve got to build that, pave that, do all that work, and then hopefully we can get, and it’s just, we’re doing business, it’s not tech, it’s not business, we’re just getting things done and what’s needed here. So I know there’s a lot of material out there about this, but the number one thing I’m hearing from people about APIs is we’ve got to treat them like products. I’m having large insurance companies in healthcare and fintech coming out, how do we train up the next generation of product managers to be savvy, and what does it mean to be creating products in this technical sense and needing to manage them? What is API product, or just product management, what is it?

I feel like product management is sort of the, it’s the role that allows you to understand the overall product. Some places you go, someone is a product manager for several products, and in some cases you have to be the product manager for, you have to be the person that understands it in and out, right. I’m not going to be able to talk about the tech side if I don’t understand the systems and the APIs that are needed to run this system. When we go into collaboration, I can look at a story and say, well, I know this group has that API that we need to pull from, and then I also can have a meeting where we know the business need is to collect this data, this information. They’re probably not going to know what an API is, but the fact that I know where the API is, I know which group has it, it saves us time, right. We don’t have to create this API. I worked on a tool recently where I just happened to know this group had an API for what we needed, and now we can just pull from there instead of starting from the beginning. So I think a product manager has to have the ability, has to be comfortable playing in every space, right. You have to be comfortable, because I have to explain what we’re doing to leadership, right, executive leadership, all the way to the top. If it’s not easily understood, then there’s issues, there’s questions, sometimes realistic, but some questions you get really don’t have anything to do with what we’re trying to solve, but that’s just a case of either miscommunication or just not having the understanding of what it is that’s happening. So I think as a product manager you have to research, I hate using the word SME, but you kind of have to be the SME of the product you’re working on, right. I have to know what regulatory issues may come in place. I don’t necessarily have to know it to the extent where I could say regulatory 3-2-5-1 and compliance knows exactly what I’m talking about, but I need to know that that is something we need to talk about, because when you get in that first phase of ideation, if we’re not talking about all of these things prior to building, we’re going to run into trouble, right. You’re going to run into issues later on that you could have avoided if you didn’t, if instead of, if you didn’t have those conversations early on. So it’s just helpful that a product manager needs to be that person that everyone can rely on, that understands that each area needs to be involved and why, right. You have to, and sometimes, to be honest, a product manager role is translated differently depending on the size of the company, the group, the department, the org structure. I’ve been called a product manager before but mainly acting as a project manager, right, where I was putting together the meetings, figuring out funding. I’ve also been a product owner. My title still says product manager, right, but product owner, I’m now writing stories, I’m in every sprint daily standup, we’re pointing stories, I have to know what Fibonacci rule is, I have to understand all these things. But also the next call I have to get on with compliance to understand if this movement of money captures these specific attributes, and is there an issue with this, do we have an issue with passing the client’s social security number from one system to the other, and if we do, what security is involved in that whole process. So I think all in all the product manager just has to be that one person that is responsible for understanding it all, not necessarily doing everything, right, because I’m not going to write code, I’m not going to go research the regulatory, but I need to know that those things are required when we’re building something, I need to know, and everyone involved in this process, making the right choices, the right people at the right time. But in some projects you get a product owner, you get a business analyst, you get a dev, you get UAT. There was one project I was a UAT coordinator, right, and product managers are normally never the product owner or the UAT coordinator, but on this product, being small in size, I had to wear that hat, I had to learn how to go through those bugs and figure out how to get things done. I was even a scrum master on one project, and I wasn’t, back then I had no certification, no scrum master certifications, that was just my role, but I was a product manager. So again, the product manager needs to be comfortable, once again, you have to be comfortable in wearing all those hats if necessary if you want to ship out a good product.

Interesting, and you talk about stories in there. I mean, in this context it’s agile, and you’re aggregating these stories, but for me, stories and storytelling is my job. I’m a technologist, developer, but I’m always trying to become a better storyteller, because it’s being able to tell that story to the C-suite or to developers that gets heard, that is the most meaningful, has the impact, and I’m always trying to learn to be a better storyteller. And one of the ways that I do that is reading books and reading stories of other people who are interesting and applicable to my world, but also diverse voices, like I find reading books by people who don’t look like me is really important, and that all feeds into me being a better storyteller. So it sounds like that’s why your stories, as you’re building these products, you have the experience of talking to all these people, not only talking and knowing them, you’ve lived in that role at some point because of some need. Do you feel like that’s all contributed to your knowledge that goes into those stories?

Oh, absolutely, and that’s why I think I’ve been successful, that’s a big reason why. Early on in my career I wanted to find something that I love doing, and I think the product manager role allowed me to play in that space of everything. I could have chosen compliance, I could have continued to write code, but the product manager role allowed me to hear those stories, those roadblocks, those issues. I get to talk to everyone to figure out what they do, you know, unbeknownst to them maybe, I’m learning, so I’m listening to what you do, what you’re doing and why you do it, and like you said, the stories, that’s what’s helpful when I hear the stories of what someone does and how they do it. And I love using my creativity and imagination in general, so I think as a product manager it allows me to be a visionary, it allows me to be that person that has been through so many different issues. I can now use that experience, like you mentioned, experiences help me build the right story, to help me solve issues, because now I’ve gone through this before, or something close to it. You go through these things enough times, you know how to resolve it. If there’s an issue with a team, if there’s a bug of some sort, if there’s some sort of roadblock, hey, we’re not getting any answers from this person and we need them to chime in to make sure we have the information correct, all right, I’ve been there before, I know how to solve that issue, I know the people, I may not know exactly who to go to, but I know how to word the email, the meeting notes and comments, so they understand, hey, this is how this works. And I usually do this in the beginning of a project, I like to ask how you work, right. If you’re a developer, some developers like the details, they want to know exactly what you have in that story, they want it written in that story exactly, because they don’t want to guess, they don’t want to assume, tell me exactly what I need. But I’ve also worked with engineers that prefer, hey, I’m an artist, you paint the picture, you put it in writing, I’ll draw it for you and I’ll use my creativity as well. But not everybody works the same, right, so when you hear those stories you start to understand that everyone just works differently, everyone learns differently, everyone listens differently. You want to see pictures, some developers like to see a Visio, they want to know the steps visually and how it works, some folks just need to hear it, get on a meeting, let me explain to you what we need here and I’ll go from there. So I think it’s just that understanding too, being able to be creative and understand that not everyone does it one way, and that, for me, that’s a better way to communicate, when I know how you communicate.

Yeah, it just feels like you’re this essential human connective layer that I feel like this is always going to be needed in tech. I mean, there will be parts of your job that we can automate and abstract away, I’m guessing, at some point, or codify, but there’s a whole lot of nuance and context in what you just described as far as, and to be able to successfully deliver a technical product, there’s a lot of nuance, and that has to go into all of that.

Yeah, no, I agree, there’s quite a bit that happens, but that’s what I like, that’s what I like about the role of a product manager. It allows me to sort of be free and understand and learn at the same time, versus being on one side or the other. I am now in this space that will allow me to learn from everybody every day, how you do it, why are you frustrated, and then on top of that I get to talk to the end user, whoever that customer, stakeholder, client is that we’re building for. I get to hear your needs, and what you also find out sometimes is when we have a product and we have something we need to solve, those clients a lot of times give you the ideas that you may not have thought of, because they use it every day, they use it all the time, this could be an issue for them, there could be an issue in that product that you didn’t even think was an issue. You send out a survey and they write the information in there, you say, well, I didn’t think about it like that. And then you also get some people that use it so often they don’t know that there’s a better way, but when you talk to a lot of people, then you can understand and bring that in, mind your creativity and imagination and say, hey, I can make this easier for you, I understand you do it this way now and it works, but there’s a better way. So that’s always fun.

Yeah, wow, that’s like, I’m picturing in my head as you’re talking, like the old atom with the center, the nucleus, and then the rings around it is like, oh, right, business, product, you know, development, secure, because I’m guessing security, regulatory, like all of these, and you’re that center that’s like, and the end user, the feedback loop, it feels like it’s a center of several feedback loops, and then you’re iterating on each product and moving forward, and it’s like how things move forward.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, and that’s the ecosystem that exists. When you want to build something and you want it to be successful, you want it to be efficient, you have to have that cosmos of things you just mentioned in that one ecosystem, it has to operate properly so that it doesn’t go down the drain. You know, if you’re missing one of those pieces, there could be issues, it’s going to cost the company more money, it’s going to cost the company maybe reputational damage, because now they have a product that the clients are going to, you know, everything, things go viral now, you have a bad product, bad customer service, bad tool, people are going to talk. Now we have every medium available to us right now to sort of say our likes and dislikes, literally likes and dislikes on social media, you can react to anything. So it’s helpful to have all those things in one place operating efficiently, that way you can get out the best possible product, and you can get your ROI from it, right. You don’t want to just be building something, you want to get your return on that investment. Clients have a better experience, guess what, they’ll tell people they had a better experience, oh, it’s great over here, you go in here, the clicks are easy, it’s understandable, it’s simple, you should use that as well. But on the other side, people also talk about the bad experiences, never go over here and use this product because it’s terrible. So which one would you prefer? If you have that sort of cosmos of people working together continuously, you’ll have the good comments, but if you don’t, you’ll know, if you listen, you’ll know.

Yeah, and people are wanting more of this, treating APIs as a product, as I was saying, so they can have everything that you’re describing as your role, have these many feedback loops creating this amazing product and moving forward that’s in alignment with business and regulation and consumer needs. But one big challenge that we see is if you don’t have diverse voices at that table, if you don’t have a mix of people, stakeholders, at the table, part of that conversation, not just the business roles, but, like me, white male, I’m going to go out and read a survey and interpret a certain view of a product or a consumer. And so how do we repeat the creation of people like you, like how do you find your way into this from university, and how do we create more people who get it at the level that you do and are playing a role in treating APIs as products?

Yeah, I think what you have to do, or the way it worked for me at least, is I got a lot of chances and opportunities, right. I’m ambitious and I want to learn, but I don’t just do something because. I want it to be fun, I understand it won’t be fun every day, right, your job has things in there that you probably prefer not to do on a day-to-day basis, but for the most part you want to make sure it’s something you’re doing that makes you happy, right. At least sometimes you go to work, you have to go to work, but you want to do something you love, something you at least like doing, you don’t even have to love it, but if you at least like it. So I sort of bounced around for a little while doing certain things and picking from those things in my career that I enjoyed, and then trying to find a role that allows me to do at least 80 percent of those things on my day-to-day. So from the time I graduated from college and got a job, I tried to look back after 10 years and say, all right, from what I’ve done so far, do I like any of this, did I enjoy any part of this job? Okay, I enjoyed talking to people, I enjoyed presenting as a relationship manager, I enjoy presenting, it could be to two people or a hundred people, I knew that I knew how to communicate to people in a simplistic way that made sense. And from there, I knew I enjoyed technology, I love learning about it, hearing about it, reading about it. I said, okay, so those are two things, what else do you enjoy? I enjoy fixing problems. It’s like, okay, not everybody enjoys fixing problems, some people enjoy fixing problems, but, like, my dev team, they don’t want to talk to leadership, they just prefer to code, they want heads-down, this is what I do, I don’t want to have to do a presentation to executive management on this. So I said, okay, well, they don’t really enjoy that type of thing, those types of items. So what title can I work in that’ll allow me to combine all of these things and just put it in one place? And throughout my career the product manager was the closest role that I’ve ever seen that allowed me to do all those things and put it in one place. And it’s not all peaches and cream all day as a product manager, but at least for me the things that I described that I enjoy doing I can now do as a product manager. I could talk in front of management, I can create a good PowerPoint, and supplement it in the simplistic form where the business leadership is going to understand it and the technology folks are going to appreciate that I translated it in a way that doesn’t muddle the water but it still illustrates what it is they’re doing to solve that need. So I really tried to just find everything that I enjoyed, put it in one place, and to this day product management is still the role, because, you know, I can use a product management role anywhere, it doesn’t have to be finance, I could be working for a construction company and product management, the skills, those skills, take out the title, but those core skills that you use as a product manager will allow you to be successful there. I can work at a restaurant, product management is still a role. I get told this a lot by my wife, you’ll walk into somewhere or use something and you’re always looking at a way of why they did it this way, or why does it look this way, or things that could change to make it better. It could be the menu, oh man, this menu has too many items, this is going to confuse the client, she would say, why are you doing that, that’s just how my mind works. Product management helps me do that, that’s literally what you do all day, right, you try to find better ways to do something. So that’s what I try to look at. I just enjoy technology, again, I could work in the food industry, but the technology side is really what I enjoy, and technology is so far ahead most of the time, that’s why I say I think this role will be needed for quite some time, right, 20 years, I might be being generous there, 20 years, because it allows me to still be in that place where I can look at something and go, okay, this is how you can do it better or quicker. Sometimes it might not be quicker, but my mind just starts going. And the fourth one I didn’t mention was creativity and imagination, so the fourth one that I know I enjoy is using my creativity and imagination, and that’s what product management once again allows me to do. If you have something that’s broken, as a product manager I can come in there and use my imagination to fix it once I understand it and I talk to the right people, I understand the need, I can creatively come up with a solution, and then guess what, I’m not fixing it, I’m imagining how this should be better or quicker or whatever the need is, and then I’m going to translate that to the group, I’m going to look at the issues, I’m going to ask about the regulatory situations that may come up, and now I’ve got to put on my project manager brain that I use in another role, because I had to be the project manager for that role. Okay, I can schedule the right meetings with the right people, because now I understand the need here. So, to make a long story short, that’s probably what I did to get to this space at this point.

So, we’ll take that clip, that answer, and that’ll become the recruitment video for the next generation of product managers, because that was like the nice little march through what it takes and how you view the world. So, were you, before university, when you were a kid in high school, were you always this curious, or is this something you learned over time and developed over time?

Yeah, I think I’ve been pretty curious my whole life, right. I come from a background of artists. My mom’s a singer, my brother’s a musician, he makes music, he plays the drums, my sister sings, my dad’s a guitar player. So they are always coming up, my mom could, I could hear a song and then my mom sings it and it’s a little different, it’s her way, I’m like, well, how is she doing that? She’s using her imagination, her vocals. My dad would play a song on the guitar and he would put his twist on it, playing the guitar. So I think just growing up as a kid I was raised in a household that allowed me to be creative, right. If you have an issue, my dad specifically is going to challenge you to solve that problem creatively, right, because you have to be creative sometimes. If you don’t have the funding, you’ve got to be creative, right, that’s what I learned from my dad. Okay, we have this business and we need to solve this problem, I would see him get creative on how to solve it. Sometimes money would solve it, right, but what if you don’t have the money at that time, how do you solve it now? Okay, well, let’s do this, this, and this. So I think just growing up, being raised in a household that promoted imagination and made it helpful, right. I used to sing in front of people, I used to have to use my creativity, when we made music you have to use your creativity, that’s all creativity. And you think you just can use your mind and come up with an entire song, the beat, the vocals, the harmony, all of this stuff comes from imagination, the subject, the words, that’s all imagination. So I think that’s where it came from, just being raised in a household that allows me to use that creativity. Now I use it, that’s the fun part, when I can use my imagination.

Yeah, I like the music analogy, because I think that improvisation, creativity, and then you can write a song and all the parts, and you can be a one-man band, but also you need to be able to create something that you could do with a group or a team, where there’s a relationship, it’s more than just what you, you as the composer. So yeah, I like the music part. And I’m kind of musically challenged, but I was always good at the business. I had a record label in the ’90s, and so my friends who had bands and were artists, I could help them and work with them, and it requires a team effort to be able to do it.

Right, and that’s important, right, because a lot of times the creatives don’t understand the business side, right, especially when it’s in music. I know groups now that my family members were a part of and still are a part of, and that was a hard part, understanding the business side. So having someone like you available, I can now take that load off my shoulder, I can just be creative, that’s the space that I can flourish in, and now I trust you enough, you know, if you find someone that you trust enough, then they handle the business side for you properly instead of you getting tied up in some bad contract or some bad deal. The business side is needed, but, once again, you’ve got to find what it is you do well and then the rest of it you’ve got to be comfortable with allowing someone else to do.

Yeah, I used to have to deal with my local pawn shop, that if one of my musicians came in to hock one of their instruments, I created a tab and they would just give them the money, keep the guitar, and then bring it to me, because I needed them to be playing the guitar, I didn’t need them hocking the guitar, right. And so they’d come back and show up and I’d have their guitar, and then they could play, they didn’t have an excuse.

Right, yeah, you’ve got to take care of your folks.

So in your company, I talk to a lot of financial people from the finance space, do you see yourself as a financial company, a tech company, a hybrid? Is it blurring, blending, what’s your view of things?

Blending, right. I think it’ll have to be more fintech, right, it’ll have to be both finance and technology, because just being finance, you’ll get left behind, because as we know, technology moves a lot faster than finance, and on the finance side you’ll find a lot of people more traditional. I hear the saying over and over again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, well, in reality it doesn’t need to be broken to need to be modified or fixed, it could just be an outdated, antiquated system and information, old APIs that no longer fetch properly, you have to update these things, or retire them and move to a different technology to stay competitive, right. If the goal is to continuously be profitable, you have to do both. And if companies aren’t blending, which I think they are, right, they understand that they need to blend. I think it’s the generation as well, younger executives are coming in that are more open to change, and when you see retirements happening in these companies and younger faces are coming in there and being creative, you get sort of that mixture, that blend, and it’s slowly happening, right, because you still have folks that are just used to doing it the way they do it. Where I work now, you have people that have been there 20, 30 years, that’s a long time to have some young guy like me come in and say, hey, yeah, I know you’ve been doing that for 20 years, but it’s terrible, it’s bad, and we need to move on. That’s a hard conversation, right. Change is good but not easy all the time. Sometimes it’s easy, I appreciate change, I will change as quickly as possible if I understand that it’s going to help me or help someone else, but that’s not always the case with everyone. Sometimes it takes a little massaging first, do it in smaller increments that really don’t disturb everyone’s day-to-day, and then eventually they’ll get to that place where it’s like, oh, okay, this is better. But it’s a tough conversation to have. Once again, I don’t mind having those conversations, as a product manager you have to have those tough conversations, but you also have to understand that not everyone is going to just receive that information with open arms, right. Some people are going to push back a little bit, and that’s fine, I don’t mind that, I don’t mind the pushback, I don’t mind someone saying, hell no. You know, challenging, we talked earlier about the stories, challenges really help me. If I come up with an idea and you challenge me on it, it’ll require me to use my imagination, my resources, skills, to look it up and understand it a lot better, so that now I can explain it. Because once I have it in my mind that it’s a good idea and that it’ll work, I now have to sort of flush out every possible scenario just to make sure I’m right. And then, you know, sometimes you also have, as a product manager, you have to be comfortable with understanding that that idea you thought was your baby, that was so awesome, is not good either, rejection, that’s a rejection, it happens. I’ve come up with things that I thought was going to be a hit, this is going to be awesome, and then compliance will come back and say, yeah, no way possible we’ll get that done. All right, let’s try again, I continue the challenge. But I appreciate being challenged, because now on the next project I know what the challenges are, I’ve already had this discussion with legal and compliance, so I know we can’t do this maybe, but this is a way we can work around it. And then you talk to compliance enough times, you know that going forward I need to make sure I ask these questions, and sometimes it’s the way you ask the question, right, you ask a question in a specific way you might get a different answer, you might get 10 people that give you a different answer, but that’s just negotiation, resolution, all those things coming into play, where you’re using throughout your career to make sure you get to the best possible outcome.

So, wow, yes, yes, and yes, thank you for that. I think that should become a clip all on its own. Well, thank you, this has been great, I really appreciate you coming and sharing your journey, because this is really the human side. I think we’ve done a lot of microservices and other initiatives over the last few years that are API tech-focused, but the one thing I’ve learned over the last decade of doing this is it’s really about the people, it’s about the relationships, it’s about the connections, and if you don’t tend to those, none of it really matters. I don’t care how good your APIs are, I don’t care how good your apps are. So thanks for sharing your journey, I appreciate you being here.

Absolutely, thank you for, thank you guys for having me, thanks for the invite, this has been awesome, thank you.

Awesome. All right, thanks again to Antwain for stopping by. You can find more about Antwain on LinkedIn, and you can learn more about Wells Fargo at wellsfargo.com. You can subscribe to the Breaking Changes podcast at postman.com/events/breaking-changes. I’m your host, Kin Lane, and until next time, cheers.