Better Product Weekly: Adapting Your Product to Handle Uncertainty

Episode Transcription

Anna Eaglin:

In a span of two weeks, the ground has shifted and we are all navigating unchartered territory. Product teams are facing a lot of uncertainty and unanswered questions, and it can sometimes feel like you're on this journey alone. We can assure you, you're not. We have set a virtual panel to spark a conversation that we all need. What now? Forget that six-month roadmap or that nice to have feature. Your biggest challenge may be figuring out what to do tomorrow. It was such a great conversation and we want to share it with you.

Anna Eaglin:

So this week's Product Weekly episode is our conversation with three product leaders. Amy Brown, Founder and CEO of AuthentiCx. Andrew Clark, VP of Product and Engineering at Emplify, and Myles Grote, Head of Product at Upper Hand. Discussing how they've found ways to experiment and pivot their product strategy through the uncertainty.

Ellie McCandless:

All right, guys. Thanks to everyone who's here. We're going to go ahead and get started with our panel. We're really excited to be here and thanks so much for joining us for this conversation. We're going to hear from three great product leaders you'll meet very soon. They're going to tell us how they've adapted their products to navigate through this unprecedented time of uncertainty. So with that, I'm going to get us going here. Start by introducing myself.

Ellie McCandless:

I am Ellie McCandless, and I am the Better Product Community Manager here at Innovatemap. I get to manage a fantastic group of product leaders from across the Midwest that are united under one umbrella, which is to build better products. I'm joined here today with my wonderful colleague Anna Eaglin.

Anna Eaglin:

Hi. I'm Anna Eaglin. I'm excited to be here with you today to moderate this panel of really amazing product people, so I'm Product Partner at Innovatemap where I get to help product leaders really bring their ideas to life. You might also know me from the Better Product Podcast, where I am the co-host where I get to talk to some of the smartest people I've ever met and kind of learn how they are changing the product world, so I am so excited to be here.

Anna Eaglin:

In case you're not familiar with Innovatemap, so we are a digital product agency. We help startups, scale-ups, tech-enabled companies really grow their business by focusing on product design, product management, product marketing, product brand, and product research. That being said, again, I cannot wait to talk to this great group of people here today. It's good to hear kind of ... Learning new things, discovering things that we kind of have all take for granted, but I want to kind of shift over now and talk a little bit about your products, the companies that you are kind of running, working with. I'd like to know how things have been going at your company in the last three to four weeks ever since things have really changed. At a high level, what are the big things that you're noticing and what big lever have you been pulling lately? Amy, why don't we start with you?

Amy Brown:

Yeah, so the team has adjusted pretty quickly. At AuthentiCx, we've been able to easily transition to exclusively working from home. The challenge, I think, is in keeping those communication lines open when you don't have the ability to just walk over to someone where they're working and have a sidebar conversation, so being much more intentional about communicating with each other. That's been a big thing in these last few weeks.

Amy Brown:

In terms of serving our customers, we work with healthcare companies and it's just been incredibly important for us to be tuned in to their pain right now and to make sure that we're being responsive to what matters most to our customers. That's been top of mind for us and really, we've tried to be very intentional about being sensitive to the specific needs of our customers and making sure that our product is there to support them during this time.

Anna Eaglin:

Definitely. Yeah, especially ... I mean, healthcare companies hit really hard right now. Andrew, what about you? What's going on at Emplify and leading your product team? What's been the focus these last three weeks?

Andrew Clark:

We went full remote pretty early. It was just before the statewide announcement or the week before. We had remote folks at Emplify, but it was a pretty small percentage, so the majority were in the office every day. That necessary sort of full remote change everybody or so many are going through, but I think the biggest thing that we noticed is our customer needs changed basically overnight. If people aren't familiar with Emplify, we're an employee engagement measurement and improvement company, so we help a lot with org health, with employee engagement, and the employee experience. All the sudden HR and company leaders have a brand new batch of employee engagement issues that they've never dealt with before, so that was the big change was, how do we deal with this? We have a program and we have resources for all of the different aspects of engagement that we're used to addressing. This one was brand new, so how do we really deliver for our customers at that time has been the big question on our minds.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think you're right. You're totally right. I mean, all the new customer issues and I like how you said you're focusing on your customer needs. I think that's something we all do as good product people, but even more so now as things are more acute and magnified. So, Myles, what about at Upper Hand? Again, thinking about the last three weeks, what's the team focusing on and how have you been shifting business as usual?

Myles Grote:

I think Andy hit the nail on the head. Customer needs have changed and so I think it's change in the short-term and it's change pretty drastically very quickly. Most of our customers have been forced to shut their doors, so we've had to find new ways to really help them via our software. This change and needs has really altered some of our teams' day-to-day focus, but the overall mission hasn't changed, so it's more positioning of the different products that we offer. But definitely customer needs have changed and therefore, some of our teams, their day-to-day focus has changed as well to try to cater to those customer needs.

Myles Grote:

Then, in general, we've had to ramp up our internal communication. We've introduced a daily newsletter, weekly virtual happy hours, and we also started doing product team stand-ups. Engineering's always done that on our side, but other teams throughout the company really haven't done it as much. You'll have to excuse my daughter. She's running back here screaming, "Dada," in the background. But, yeah, we started to do some product team stand-ups just to keep communication fluid with each there and half the time, we just kind of talk about how everything's going and the other half we're talking about what we did yesterday and what's coming up today. But yeah, that's pretty much all that's really changed on our side internally is really just focus on customer needs the constant change that we're seeing there right now.

Anna Eaglin:

That's a really good point. First of all, kids and pets are very welcome, I think, in our new reality, so definitely. If she wants to pop on and say something, we can definitely do that. You were-

Andrew Clark:

Anna, I thought ... Sorry, I thought I might jump in there with Myles because we're doing something similar and I would just ... For anybody on the call, I would recommend highly. We are doing a weekly all-company where we just all get together and kind of set the tone for the week. We actually do poem reading, meditation. That's not for every company, but it's good for us. Just really get everybody together and kind of set the tone for the week, and then we did ask all of our leaders to do daily stand-ups with their team. Even if it's just five or 10 minutes at the beginning of the day so that everybody sees each other's faces and can kind of share where they're at and what they're bringing to work that day. It's been really great for people that are stuck in their homes and some people that aren't seeing anybody else most days. It's been good.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, definitely. We talked about this with Amy, I think, when she was on the podcast, but missing that just day-to-day interaction with people it's gone. To have those kind of quick touchpoints are so much more meaningful than they used to be. I think that's a great thing that other companies can take away.

Anna Eaglin:

Myles, I want to follow-up with something that you said. You mentioned that you've been kind of changing your positioning a bit. Your customers are shutting down their doors and it sounds like you need to adapt to what they're doing. I know that you at Upper have extended the 90-day ... your free trial to 90 days, at this point, to kind of help your customers get through this. All of you are here because you have in some way adapted your product to the market and to what your customers are going through right now. Myles, I'd love to learn a little bit more about that idea of how you are continuing to serve your customers as they go through this and as you and your company go through this as well.

Myles Grote:

I think there's a key thing that really everyone should be thinking about on the product side right now of drawing a clear line. There's product marketing strategy and there's product development strategy, and so I think it's really important to really point out the difference between the two because our product development strategy hasn't changed whatsoever. We're still focused on the same stuff that we were focused on before. However, our product marketing strategy has definitely changed.

Myles Grote:

You mentioned the 90-day free trial. Yeah, we extended that out to our customers for our video technology software or our video analysis software. We're really pushing that. It's called APEX. We're really pushing that much more heavily now because it allows our businesses to continue to engage their client base outside of the facility. Again, haven't changed anything with the product development strategy at this point, but all product marketing, I mean, we immediately as team leaders started discussing, "Hey, what do we need to be doing, especially with APEX?" Because we kind of all knew that was the direction we need to be going in the short term to really push that heavily and, how can we use it to help our customers?

Myles Grote:

Because ultimately, they're in a really tough spot right now being forced to shut their doors, so anything we could do on the technology to, I guess, mitigate those issues that they're having and keep their clients engaged, we're all in on that stuff. Yeah, that's really the big thing. Product marketing strategy really shifted pretty quickly.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, definitely. I think that makes a lot of sense. Helping your customers kind of get through this. I like how you differentiated between the product marketing and the product development. That it's not that you're building something different, but you're more kind of ... how you're positioning and messaging it and speaking to your customers about it.

Anna Eaglin:

Amy, I know at AuthentiCx you guys are really focused on kind of ... Again, you're helping the healthcare companies hear from their customers and it sounds like that is something that is so critical right now. How is [inaudible 00:10:35], I don't want to say pivoting because that's not quite right, but kind of shifting toward and leaning into what's going on right now to kind of serve your customers in a similar but somewhat different way?

Amy Brown:

Our clients are health and hospital systems who are on the front lines right now, as well as pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies. Our product was designed already to listen to customer insight, so we take those recorded customer interactions when they're calling in customer service or their nurse helpline and we evaluate, what are they saying? Our technology really is designed to study the sentiment and the content of those conversations. Well, I agree totally with what Myles has ... distinguishing between product development and product marketing.

Amy Brown:

The only thing that we did from a product development standpoint was we just took what we already had and added analytic capabilities around customer sentiment around COVID-19. We just built onto what we already had and then pivoted our product marketing strategy in March and now going into April to really help our clients understand that as they're trying to rapidly understand what customers are saying about COVID-19 and how they need to pivot their messaging, their services to their patient population and provider population, we are now enabling them with kind of big data insights around those areas so that they can respond more effectively in a data-backed way rather than in an anecdotal way. Rather than focusing on all of our suite of services right now from a marketing perspective, we're really leaning in and trying to stay ... It's really important that we not be tone-deaf from a marketing perspective right now, and so we're really just focusing our marketing messaging on how we can help you in the here and now.

Anna Eaglin:

That's really interesting and it sounds similar, Myles and Amy, that you're doing similar things. It's like all of this is very much in the core focus of your product, but it's more of you are just focusing in on the very specific values that you can give to your customers right now, is what it sounds like. Then Andrew, I want to put that question to you because at Emplify, I saw that you guys are offering a free version of your product. Especially as a company that kind of helps with culture and helps with companies, talk to us a little bit about that process and how you decided that was the best way to serve customers at this time.

Andrew Clark:

Yeah, and I should probably clarify for the sake of our engineering team. It was actually a completely new tool that we built for this, so it was definitely ... reflects our product experience a little bit but it was built for a different user. It was the manager. Any manager that leads a team can use this free tool. It was our first time doing a walk-up experience where somebody could just sign up and start using the tool because we're traditionally more upmarket and kind of a traditional outbound sales model.

Andrew Clark:

As far as what spurred that decision, I think it's one of the advantages of being a purpose-driven organization with a pretty clear vision. We were super fortunate, I think, because maybe a month or so before all of this happened the executive team did a pretty intensive visioning exercise. We had somebody from Zingerman's come out and use ... We did a three-day full team exploration of what our vision was, so we knew where we wanted to head and we had just gotten kind of clarity on that and refreshed that vision. That helped a lot because it put us in a good mindset to make these decisions.

Andrew Clark:

When you're pretty clear in your purpose and pretty clear on where you want to go, the decision's all narrow. Right? You can make decisions faster and easier because you know, does it align with our purpose? Does it align with our vision or not? At Emplify, our purpose is to help all people achieve their true potential at work, and in this context, essentially every employee was faced with this new set of struggles and we had a ton of managers who just weren't equipped to help with those struggles. It was an unprecedented situation and managers ... even the best managers did not have a playbook for this kind of thing. The question really quickly became, how do we help as many people as possible right now?

Andrew Clark:

We threw around a few ideas. Initially, we got really focused on remote readiness because that seemed to be the thing that would be the biggest shift for people, but the more we talked to managers and we spent the first day of this whole spring process was just talking to as many managers as we could, the more we heard that managers were mostly concerned with their employees' wellbeing. How are they feeling? What are they going through? And how is it impacting their work? That's what we ended up making the focus of the tool and all of the decisions that happened because of that were pretty easy make because ultimately, it was, how do we achieve our purpose in this really weird time?

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, I really like that. It sounds like all of you, again ... I love what you said, Andrew, about you have that strong vision. You know where this company is going. Then you're understanding and listening to your customers and it's kind of like, where do those two things cross and what makes sense?

Anna Eaglin:

You all have adapted so quickly. It's only been three to four weeks. I don't know. I'm not sure even where I am right now. This is a very open question and whoever wants to take this first, I leave it open. How did you adapt so quickly? How do you make these decisions so fast? Amy's got a mute off. That means she's going to talk.

Amy Brown:

Yeah. I think that when the world is in crisis everyone, no matter what role, what industry they're in, they want to contribute. Right? Everybody wants to make a difference and at least for us in our company, we work with healthcare and yet ... and our clients are literally on the front lines taking patients in and trying to care for the people affected by this. We just were so driven by a desire to help. That really is what fueled a very intensive effort and collaborative amongst our team about, how can we contribute? Thankfully, because we were already enabled from a technology perspective to work effectively from home, thankfully, because of our backend and our product dev team we were able to respond to our passion and to our ideas really quickly. But it was not without an intense effort, which was fueled mostly by the desire to contribute and add value in a time where it would be very easy to feel kind of helpless, and so that's really why and how we were able to pivot so quickly.

Myles Grote:

Yeah, I think for us it was little bit of a different situation. I mean, we've seen our market going remote for some time now well before COVID hit. I'm talking years before. Five-plus years ago video analysis started to really hit the U sports market. Several companies out there that do video analysis pretty well, and then we've had this in-home fitness paradigm shift that Peloton's really spurred over the past several years, and I think this progression we've been seeing come for a while in our particular industry, but COVID's really exacerbated it. I think it's pulled the veil off of a lot of consumers' eyes to the other side of the coin in a really unbelievably short amount of time. It's been wild to see.

Myles Grote:

But luckily, my business partner Kevin, he's your quintessential visionary and had the foresight on this trend in the sports base, and so when we acquired the video analysis company Double Blue a couple years ago I think it positioned us well for this particular situation. I mean, we didn't have to really ... I think we did adapt quickly. However, it was much easier because we kind of saw this trend in our particular space happening, so we were kind of ready for it to a degree. I think if we didn't have that video technology tool it'd be a pretty scary time right now. I mean, some of our competitors like Mindbody have laid off 50% of their staff. ClassPass laid off 50%, so we're seeing it in our industry pretty heavily. It's hitting really hard, but we were in a pretty fortunate position to have this tool to bring out to our customers to make their lives a little bit easier, so adapting quickly, but it wasn't terribly difficult to adapt quickly for us, fortunately.

Andrew Clark:

Yeah, I'd echo that and I touched on that a little bit with the just being purpose-driven and being united around that purpose. I think the other thing I would add is I got out of the way, other executives got out of the way. I read this text thread recently about doctors and nurses and how it's obviously a really difficult time for doctors and nurses to be working actively in the hospital but it's also, for a lot of them, is a really thrilling time because the bureaucracy has totally disappeared. The experts are the ones that are leading the work in a way that they don't normally get to do.

Andrew Clark:

For me, that was the big thing was I knew that I would only slow things down unless I was really strategic about the areas that I got involved in and then let my team, talented team that knows what they're doing, just get in there and get it done. Right? My role was more, "Okay, here's the one-month vision for this thing that we're doing, and here's what it's going to look like in a month." Then kind of lead some conversation and help people get thinking in the right direction then let them do it. I think that executive trust, as in my boss is trusting me, me trusting my team makes it really easy to make those pivots and changes when you need to because you know your team is going to do a great job leading in the right direction.

Anna Eaglin:

That's great. I think that's a great breakdown. I think Marty Cagan would be really proud of you too. Letting your product team kind of have their own autonomy. Yeah, great answers. I think it makes sense. It sounds like all of you ... There are trends that kind of aligned with what you were doing, but at the same time, you kind of were willing to just listen, and pivot, and, like you said Andrew, get out of the way of your team at executing. So-

Andrew Clark:

I also ... Sorry.

Anna Eaglin:

[crosstalk 00:21:14]

Andrew Clark:

I also want to say just real quickly, there's been a ton of amazing momentum and product accomplishments for our team in the past three weeks and it's great. But the other side of that, and I'm sure a lot of people on this call will resonate, our business has been seriously impacted also. This is not an all sunshine situation for us. Even though we've been able to pivot in a really cool way and get some exciting traction, there's that excitement and energy but it's also mixed with this is not smooth sailing. We are struggling in the same way that a lot of people are. It's just that we'd be struggling even more if we hadn't allowed ourselves to make some quick changes and make some quick decisions that impacted the last month or so.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, that's a great call out and I think you're totally right to say. I think a lot of people too, all trying to kind of work in this new environment. It's that idea of we're all trying to understand what's happening and we just kind of ... You have to start swimming in a new direction. Otherwise, you will just kind of sink. Yeah, appreciate that, you letting us know that.

Anna Eaglin:

I mean, all this is going on. A lot of uncertainty in the world. A lot of uncertainty in the economy, but the product still has to get built. How has this affected or impacted what your team was working on or, honestly, your product roadmap? Have things totally changed or are there some things you're still pushing forward? Myles, I'd love to start with you. You mentioned the future around the video. Is that kind of heading forward as usual or have things changed for your team as far as the roadmap is concerned?

Myles Grote:

To answer your question about APEX, we have a huge spike in usage. If you look at the charts it's like software usage like this and videos like this, so we're having ... We have a lot more feedback from our customers coming in from APEX because we're seeing usage from it that we've never seen before. In that respect, it hasn't really changed the roadmap per se yet, but we're getting a lot more feedback, which is great because I think it's going to help us craft things on the video side moving forward for the next couple of quarters.

Myles Grote:

But feedback to any product leaders out there, any just company leaders out there, I think ... It's easy to panic when these types of situations occur. I mean, I was starting my career in the financial space when the whole financial crisis happened in 2008-2009. That was a completely different scenario than we're in right now. I think it's really important for people to understand that from just a really macroeconomic view. I think it's really important for people to be able to answer the question very succinctly in terms of if they're going to change their product roadmap they need to think about their market.

Myles Grote:

If they see their market going through a secular shift, so I'm talking about large movement of consumer behaviors, whoever their customers are, whether it be businesses or consumers, if they see a large shift in behavior that's happening that's either being kicked off by this ... Long-term, I'm talking multi-year potentially, or being exasperated, like kind of what I was talking with the more at-home fitness happening now in our industry, they need to make sure that they understand that difference between secular and cyclical. Because right now this virus, yeah, it's going to change consumers' behavior in certain ways, but, for example, in our industry, kids are not going to stop doing sports. There are going to be youth leagues. That is not going to change. Whereas in the fitness side of things, yeah, less people will probably be going to gyms after this because they found other alternatives that may be cheaper, and easier, and more convenient for them. That's cyclical versus secular right now.

Myles Grote:

No kids are playing U sports teams, but they will. That's just a cyclical change in the short term, so I just want to caution everyone before they go out there and start panic in assuming changing their roadmaps to understand, is your customer going through secular or cyclical change? I think most people listening it's probably cyclical and I don't think that they should be changing their strategy drastically at this point in time to cater to a cyclical black swan pandemic event. I think that's something really, really important that people ... I hope people will take away today from this conversation.

Amy Brown:

I think for us, while the product roadmap and kind of at the highest level the objectives are largely unchanged. I think what is important right now is to re-look at your forecast and look at what you think your client behavior is going to be and potentially re-prioritize certain components of your roadmap. We're in the process of doing that because with the shift in what our clients need there are certain components of our roadmap that have become more important to execute on now while there's others that we thought were important 60 days ago or 90 days ago and they probably are going to be less important for our clients until later when some of the smoke has cleared with the pandemic. It's been a really healthy process for us to look at our product strategy, look at our product roadmap and have a very intentional conversation amongst ourselves while looking at our forecast and what we think our client behavior's going to be and trying to harmonize those two things. That's been a healthy exercise we've gone through in the last week or so.

Andrew Clark:

For us, I mean, we just had a really incredible response to this thing that we've ... I mean, we had launched it three weeks ago. We've had over 1,000 sign-ups. We've had almost 14,000 employees run through the tool, and so that got our attention in a really big way. To the point where we're now rethinking, what is our go-to-market strategy look like with this new information? Is a product-led growth concept something that we could scale within Emplify as kind of a two-sided go-to-market strategy? Those things are real and would not have happened, at least not at this time, unless this event occurred and unless we launched this tool.

Andrew Clark:

We're continuing to make improvements on the tool as we kind of figure that out, but we were also in the middle of launching the biggest update ever to our core product. Insights 2.0 was meant to launch in early April and we had hundreds of customers on the sign-up list and waiting for that, and so we paused work on that to focus on the wellbeing tool. But we're back to work, so it's this combination of, okay, we had this period where everything was up in the air and we were pivoting and doing this cool thing, but now we're merging the two. Right? It's a back to work, let's get back to delivering what our customers expect, and also, how does this new thing that we've built and that has gotten so much traction fit into the broader strategy? That's what we're thinking about.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, that makes sense. It sounds like a mix of ... For Myles, it's what are the macro trends versus the micro-trends? What's going to expire and then what is something that has completely shifted what your market's going to do? Amy, it sounds like on your team you had priorities, but it's more about going back, re-visiting those priorities. Are they the ones that are at the top right now? We know as product people priorities never go away. They just may go to the bottom of the backlog for now. Then Andrew, on your team it sounds like focusing on this initial shift but then trying to tie that back to the big work and the big vision that your team is trying to accomplish. I think these are three different approaches but very, very similar all at the same time.

Anna Eaglin:

Okay, so I want to ask this one final question before we move into questions from the audience, the crowd, whatever you would call this in a Zoom webinar. The joinees, I suppose. [inaudible 00:29:14] article recently talking about strategies that companies can use to kind of ... It's almost like going through stages of grief. There's acknowledgment, grieving, depression, moving on. They talked about the idea that there is no ... It's not this new normal. It's kind of, what is our next normal that we're going to move into? I'm curious from a product perspective, what do you think that next normal looks like? How will all of this affect product going forward as a discipline and just the product philosophy itself? Andrew, why don't we start with you? I've never made you talk first in a question.

Andrew Clark:

No, that's good. I think on a macro level I don't know that it's going to change a lot about how most businesses are thinking about product strategy or if you think of just the industry, I'm not sure how much will change. But I do think that there's a really valuable lesson here and the best companies will pay attention to it. I think when many companies switch or kind of make the transition from startup to scale-up they lose a little bit of that magic that makes them successful. It's like if you were going on a road trip and you know the destination. Not only do you know the destination, but you know the route that you're going to take, and so the only decisions you're really making are like, "What stops do we make along the way? What little detours are we going to take before?" But we're going to the same place and we're kind of on this track that a lot of this feels pretty predetermined.

Andrew Clark:

Then you have this shakeup in the business and it's COVID-19 in this case, but there are many versions of this that I've seen play out where a shakeup in the business happens and it causes you to just re-think it all. You look at the route again. Are there side roads that you should take? Are we driving the right vehicle? Should we actually fly instead of drive? Probably not now, but in the future potentially that could be a good idea. I think usually if you're doing it right the destination often is not going to change, but so many of the other factors that feel predetermined when you're in it and you're just going about the day-to-day and kind of hitting your goals and doing what you intend to do, they all can feel really predetermined.

Andrew Clark:

I think the most successful product companies that I've seen have innovation and agility kind of built-in even as they grow, even as they scale up. I think this may be a time where more companies realized that kind of thinking is something that could actually pay off in a really big way. If you're constantly re-evaluating you don't want ... You want to have a clear vision. You want to know where you're going, but you're constantly re-evaluating all the opportunities available to you and making sure that you're picking the right one.

Amy Brown:

I really liked, Andrew, what you said and I might just add some commentary around product marketing. I think one thing that I'm seeing in the marketplace from ... We're B2B, so from businesses who are receiving a lot of inbound marketing traffic what I'm seeing is a lot of kind of bristling at a business as usual kind of marketing message. I think one of the key lessons that I've learned and I think our team has learned through this is authenticity really matters, especially in situations like this that are grappling with your clients and the world, and so being sensitive to that and adapting ... Companies that I think are going to be most successful are companies that can adapt their marketing messaging to reflect the reality of the times as a key takeaway that we've gotten out of this and I think something that ... a lesson that needs to be learned no matter what into the future, right? There's always going to be things going on in the world and in the marketplace, and marketing messages should be at least not tone-deaf to those influencers.

Myles Grote:

Honestly, I don't know if much is going to change with product teams at smaller more startup and scale-up type environments. I think anyone who really believes in agile principles and is pretty lean on the product side is going to continue to do so. I think they were set up pretty well for crazy environments like this, whereas I think larger companies it might be kind of a gut blow to wake them up to probably take on some of these more, I guess, new-age type product team principles and methodologies. I think that will definitely change at bigger ... I hope it does. I mean, I think it needs to. For a lot of bigger companies they're just a little bit more slower to adopt, but something like this will definitely wake them up.

Myles Grote:

I think just in general too, if I can add, just I think how just more from a psychology standpoint as a whole, as society as a whole, I think that probably everyone can attest to this by walking ... You walk through your neighborhood and you're just getting to know your neighbors more. You're talking to people more. You're probably FaceTiming and doing Zoom conferences with people that you usually don't even see that often. I'm having Zoom calls with friends from Texas that we kind of text with each other every once in a while, so I think this is kind of a wakeup call in general for society and it's kind of realigning priorities a little bit in terms of what's important to people.

Myles Grote:

While it's not specific to just product teams and how it's going to change, it's definitely going to change things. I don't know how long that stuff will stick around, obviously, but it's been kind of refreshing to see some of the silver linings that's come from this. It really excites me and I was talking to a neighbor recently. I was like, "I feel like out of this the next Apple's going to be born," because it's really forcing people to engage more on their creative sides, myself included. I mean, I've been finding more time to do stuff that I typically don't do like more deep-focused projects and more just purposefully thinking because typically, we're going so fast on a day-to-day basis we don't have the time to do that stuff.

Myles Grote:

Undoubtedly going to change things and I think there's going to be some really, really cool stuff born out of this unprecedented, literally into a halt of the world that we're witnessing right now. I just want to end on a positive note because I think there's been so much negative stuff that's always talked about in this. But I think there's going to be some really, really cool stuff that's born from this pandemic.

Anna Eaglin:

Yeah, I think that's a really great point. It's a great, I think, point to finish up these questions on. I love what you said that we're all getting used to connecting to each other and that's not going to go away. As people who are so connected to your customers, I think as your customers shift you will be able to sense that, and know that, and be aware of that, and then how that will lean back into your product will be very interesting to see. With that, I want to pass it over to Ellie and see if we have any questions from the joinees, as I call them.

Ellie McCandless:

Yes, we do. This is great. I've loved everything you guys have shared. I'm going to start with some of the private messages that I've gotten because I think we've got some really great questions. Just so you guys know, panelists, I'm going to open it up and you can just ... whoever wants to answer can jump to it. I'd love to hear how ... This question is, I'd love to hear how product leaders are tracking and adjusting their target markets if who they were targeting is expected to have big budget cuts. How do you really weather this potential recession that we're going into, but really just, how are you adjusting your target markets if your target market is struggling during this time?

Andrew Clark:

That's a great question. I think we're doing a few different things on the Emplify front. One is really obvious, which is we built this thing that is walkup. It was designed with a different user and therefore, eventually a different buyer. Right? It is the manager, not the HR leader because our thinking is a manager that's really motivated to help their team can probably spend $99 a month and not worry about it, but a company that's trying to make financial decisions in a new economic reality may not want to spend $20,000 to do a full engagement effort for their entire company. It's kind of, what is the bottom-up version of what we do?

Andrew Clark:

Then the other thing that we're doing is just paying really close attention to the industries that we're reaching out to. The other interesting thing with our customers is many of them are going through the same struggles that we are and are trying to figure out how their new economic reality's going to work. Some of them are absolutely thriving, hiring like crazy, losing their minds with just because they're so busy and it's all about the industry that they're in and the people that they're serving or the product that they offer. From our top-down traditional outbound sales approach, we are focusing on industries that seem to need our help the most right now and seem to have the most appetite for buying what we're selling basically.

Ellie McCandless:

Well, I'll move onto another one. How have you guys navigated a shortened customer acquisition timeline? As companies and teams need to use your products now, what have you had to adapt as you've had fewer contact points from the sales team?

Amy Brown:

Yeah, we've been working on a really short scale ramp-up type initiative that allows clients or prospects to say yes easily by reducing the barriers to engage from a contracting perspective, from a technology perspective. A little bit similar to what Andrew was saying. While it's not a walkup product we really did take a look at, how do we make it super easy and frictionless for prospects who needs us now who are firefighting as we speak to get our help without having to go through a long procurement situation or a long vetting analysis? That's been key to our ability to take on some new clients here in the midst a really, really chaotic time for our clients.

Myles Grote:

Yeah, for us on the software side, that has, unfortunately, not been a problem because people's doors are closed. But on APEX, on the video analysis side, it's definitely been a challenge that our team has welcomed and really tackled pretty well so far. The accounts team, props to them for stepping up to help one of our largest customers get onboarding and using APEX throughout the country. They did some video training tools that they put out to them, so basically, one of the many type training tactics, I think, have helped well for situations like this.

Myles Grote:

But aside from that, I mean, the product was already kind of setup for self-onboarding. We have a free trial where you can never talk to anyone, go start using the product, but we definitely have beefed up just the one to many training tools, as well as our knowledge base. In our guides, we use [Pindo 00:40:19], so we've been rolling that out to APEX not only on the training side of things, the guide side of things, but also just on the data analytic side to better see where people might be getting tripped up when they first come into our software. Definitely taking advantage of some of the downtime on the product side to do stuff like that I think has helped and then the accounts team stepping up to do some better training materials for our customers.

Andrew Clark:

Yeah, and for us, when we did launch that walkup product we also realized that we needed to do chat support for the first time, and so that was part of it too. Part of it was so that we could learn. Right? We were hearing the struggles that customers were having with this brand new thing that we built, but also with the situations that we were trying to help with, so that was actually a really good way to connect with users immediately and get learn-ins really fast from them. But it was the first time that we had ever done it, so it was like, "Okay. Who's manning chat today?" and what kind of system do we have in place to actually take those learn-ins and kind of systemize them so that we can actually make changes based on them? That was ours.

Ellie McCandless:

That's great. I wish we had time to go through all of these questions. I've loved learning from you guys, but since we are, unfortunately, running low on time, I wanted to ... One last plug for everyone that attended. So happy you guys could come. Panelists, again, thank you so much for taking the time to share your insights.

Ellie McCandless:

Before you go if you're interested in joining the Better Product Community that I mentioned earlier, that link is right here and I will also share them in the chat. If you want to check out our panelists' wonderful products, I will also be sharing their sites, and then if you want to hear more of Anna on the podcast you can tune in to the Better Product Podcast at this link as well. Thank you, guys, again, and we really appreciate you taking the time.