Build To Succeed: Digital Experience Design & Product Development; Flutter, AI & Tech Leadership · Very Good Ventures

Michael Harker, Ritchie Bros. — The Future of Product Leadership: AI, Customer Empathy & Scaling Legacy Enterprises

·43 min·3 clips

Ritchie Bros. auctions off people's entire retirement—their land, house, and equipment—putting immense trust in the company.

Mike Harker gives Rich Bros a plain introduction. It is the largest marketplace for used commercial equipment, covering construction machines, trucks, tractors, and government surplus. David keeps the opening grounded, asks Mike to introduce himself, then moves into product leadership inside a big organization with complicated customer needs. The strongest thread is modernization. Mike says replacing old systems was only part of the job, because important business logic was tucked across the website. One example is serial numbers. Teams uncovered rules that engineers and product managers did not know were there, so the technical work turned into business discovery. That changed the question from how to rebuild a feature to whether a rule still deserved to exist. David sits with that tension: new product work sounds fun, but scaled product work on legacy tech gets much more forensic. Mike describes engineers reading code while product managers searched through years of old documentation. Some of it went far back. The team even tried to find the person who wrote the requirements 15 years earlier, when the role may have been business analyst. The standard was simple: customers could not feel the floor drop while the marketplace changed underneath them. Mike also notes that today's tools could make code and logic discovery a lot less painful than it was a couple of years ago. The episode stays close to customers, product judgment, and the reality of modernizing without breaking trust.

As heard by us

Enterprise product work can feel like code archaeology.

Build to Succeed follows Mike Harker, VP of Product at Rich Bros, as he explains how a large marketplace for used commercial equipment can carry hidden rules that linger for years after their purpose has faded.

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Why you'd press play

You want a product story where the hard part is buried in old code and dusty rules.

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