How To Transform User Issues Into A Positive Experience

Transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.

all right time for the office still Monday um there's a TT someday it'll be back on the road um yeah so I had my on call shift sort of like a short one but overnight this weekend which is a pretty rare thing for us but uh I had mentioned in the previous video I like I'm beat so one thing that I have a bad habit is doing is when I'm in a situation like okay like I can tell I'm tired I got to you know I need to sleep uh I'll do like I said this morning I'm going to go into work a little bit later today cuz I'm not my head hurts that I'm so tired and uh then what would happen is like you know I would say okay I'm not going to go to work and then I would not sleep then

I would just go try to do something else I have a bad habit of doing that kind of thing where it's like oh did that just free up more time for something um and not being like honest with myself and how tired I am so I made sure when I got home I I basically messaged my my employee and said hey like by the way like if you need some extra time like by all means sorry really awkward turn there cuz there's a lane merging and someone was not understanding what's happening um and they still don't as I watch but yeah messaged them to say you know if you need some extra time like by all means that's cool um but let's move our one1 to tomorrow morning and then I actually went to sleep and I slept for a while um it was like

around 8 I think and I I slept another 2 hours um and like needed it because I woke up I think I slept like 8 to 9: and then like woke up and I was like nope like still not still not it so um yeah just got to I don't know be honest with myself for that kind of stuff and that's what I did today so I think that was a I'm proud of myself but the the problem ends up being like in my head I think about how much time is going past like if I have a week to get through a bunch of stuff and then one of the days okay how much how much time do I have in the day to go be effective on different things that as soon as it's like like oh you need to catch up on

sleep I'm going well if I'm sleeping I'm not doing right and I know that's not I'm not saying this is good I'm saying that's what kind of like subconsciously happens in my head as I'm trying to to prioritize things but I think uh I think after having a weekend that felt like it was completely ineffective that was a good indicator for me like it's not going to be effective today if you don't catch up on sleep so yeah so this weekend I'm I'm going to talk about some some brand Go stuff uh but in particular this weekend I set out to go do bunch of chor work and uh and get YouTube videos filmed and I didn't film any course work or YouTube videos but I did get through a bunch of the slides which I'm I'm happy about and part of that was like

in addition to the slides I didn't create yet like this mental framework for how I want to approach the different sections and uh that might not seem like such a big thing but I think it's really helpful for me so um just as an example to like the slide Decks that I did get put together I feel so good about those now that I'm not going to say I can do the videos in one single take but like like it's not going to take me if I don't know if the section's 10 minutes I'm not going to be recording for 45 minutes to try and get it right like it will probably take me 15 minutes to record a 10-minute section cuz I feel confident enough so that's good at least I'm not like I'm not happy about it because I wanted to be far

more productive but like I said like I I could not be so catching up on some sleep definitely needed just trying to be transparent about it right like I try to get a lot of stuff done but I I can't um I can't be going at like 110% all the time and this is just a perfect example of it and it was exhausting enough that like even for me being stubborn about like just trying to power through it like I'm like I can't do it so that's good um we got a lot more I want to switch over to some software development stuff and I wanted to talk about some like Team Dynamics and stuff too cuz I think that's important but um we getting more feedback for brand ghost again our I think the newsletter launch with the 50,000 um subscriber email list goes

out tomorrow um which is super exciting uh you know we were just trying to make sure that we had I've talked about onboarding and stuff a lot in these videos because it is so important but we got our onboarding completely done like the revamped version of it it's funny that we didn't even launch V1 of it because it was broken so it it never it never activated for people which is ironic so we never even got people through V1 we're on V2 of the onboarding uh we feel that it's it's really slick and to help with that because I talked about this before as well that some of the concepts are going to be kind of new for people right so we can't it's hard to have a seamless onboarding with new Concepts if people don't understand what the benefit is yet like we have

to do a couple of things we have to prove to them why it's going to be helpful right so they see the value prop immediately and they're like oh hell yeah like this is the thing I need so we need that but we also need them to like configure a couple of things so that we can help demonstrate that to them and it makes it kind of tricky to get right uh I'm sure this won't be the last of our onboarding I'm sure we will have many different iterations of it so oh man what's going on here sorry this truck is taking up a lot of space and one L um but we do have this new version we're really happy with it and we followed it up can't speak we followed it up with there we go um I can't remember what it's called

Joy Ride I think so Joy Ride I think is the name of it is a framework where you can have in your web interface you can kind of do a tour joy ride tour um and you can basically help teach users about what the different pieces of functionality are so that's also new so not only do we have this flow that's hopefully going to get people connected to things have them set up with Concepts um I'm going to move over Lanes here but beyond that we can kind of educate them a little bit so we're trying to build in a little bit more education into the onboarding itself right so like here's why we need you to connect this here's what it's going to enable here's why that's valuable to you blah blah blah get people introduced but beyond that like now that we've set

things up here's where you can find all of it and we had this really well I at least did had this really interesting experience over the weekend where someone had reached out on LinkedIn about like an AI tool and uh I'm like I don't like being pitched things on LinkedIn but they're like it's totally free like set up your account and stuff come on give me some space and uh so totally free we'll set up your account like no strings attached whatever um even then I'm kind of like man like don't bother me I got I'm busy but this happened to be something that seemed like I could use it I still haven't used it over the weekend but um they did set me up with an account which when I looked at what they did I was like very interesting like I know from

from different social media Integrations and stuff I'm like I know that's not automatic to do right so I know that you can't get access to that unless you're doing things like web scraping which maybe they are but I asked the person I said hey by the way how did you do that right like I'm curious um and they said we we did it manually which is interesting right because it's if you watch y combinator stuff or like other startup stuff you'll there's like a I think it's Paul Graham from why Dominator I think it was him that said it but like do things that don't scale and that is 100% an example of do things that don't scale you can't onboard every single customer like that right it would be ridiculous you'd have to hire a team of people constantly trying to get people onboarded

that way but the way they did it was like I didn't go to their page and sign up and then I had to wait it was like they reached out and said hey we're going to do this for you we'll let you know when it's ready and then they did it and they could do it at their Leisure so it kind of it was a personal touch um I don't think the goal was to be a personal touch I think the goal is to make it seem automatic which is great but I actually know it was a personal touch because I know they can't do it any other way which is kind of funny so there was that which I was like okay that that kind of resonates with some of the stuff we're doing for example some of the early people on boarding to

our platform we're extending to them like hey if you don't know how to get all of your content imported like we'll figure out ways to build that but let me do it for you like Point me at your post like let me go set it all up at least to start um so we've been offering that but the other thing that was interesting about their onboarding is that it's not the same product as ours but there are some similar Concepts and I talked about this in one of my Vlogs of last week I don't know don't lose track of time but this idea of like when we get people through the onboarding are they going to have something that they can use right away or is it just enough to kind of show them how to navigate and I gave the example of like if

you're a c developer in Visual Studio you go make a new ASP on a core web API and it makes you a sample weather application and it's highly unlikely that every developer in the world is trying to build a weather application right but at least gives you some code where you can look at it and go okay I see how this works here are the pieces I want to keep here are the pieces I don't and even these guys with their with their AI tool they kind of set it up that way it made something where I was like I'm not going to use that like it doesn't doesn't make sense for me to use it but they set it up and then I could edit it I could delete it I could understand how it would work if I wanted to I could go

use it so if I just wanted to try it I could absolutely just go use their initial thing so the barrier to getting started was so low because they onboarded all of my information there was still a couple of other questions like you know like high level like tell us about the type of content you want to work with your audience blah blah blah just like I'm sure it's to help seed some of the prompts for them just fine but again the barrier to get started was like once I typed a couple of things and press next I could literally just start their tool right there if I wanted to and like I said for me the initial thing they set up I wouldn't use it but if I just wanted to try it and see and understand like what they got going on that

was perfect so again just a bit of a kind of like this reminder that like I think we're on the right track with what we're trying to do because that was an experience that actually felt very good for me with some other product and you know I I don't know them at all there's no reason for me to like be like oh it's just my buddies or it's something I built so I'm proud of it it's just like a totally random thing and that was a good experience so if we could emulate something like that I feel like that would be good for our uh our customers as well okay so onboarding stuff out of the way cuz that was a really big task uh you know one of the engineers worked super hard on that and I know that he's worked on this kind

of stuff in the past like about about guiding people because I've mentioned on this on this Vlog before that when we've worked together previously we've done a lot of work with trying to take really complicated things and make them so simple that like you could have zero experience doing it in the domain and still at least understand how to get through and be productive like that's our goal and this individual has a lot of experience doing that so um he worked really hard on this I think it's uh I think it's great and we have to wait to see the results as they come in with data right so when this email blast goes out tomorrow we'll see like we have no idea maybe no one even clicks on it from the email which should suck but um that's okay you know these are all

different learning opportunities so onboarding out of the way we also had more uh user feedback over the weekend and it's good like we have a couple people that are very vocal about feedback and it's it's interesting cuz like I don't know for whoever's watching this some people might like literally never be exposed to this kind of thing in their entire career so especially if you're working at a really big company you might be working on Services you might be working on even if you're working on user facing features you might be so sheltered from from like customer or user engagement that you never have these types of interactions and the closest thing might be like feedback in a in a poll request or a code review right where basically you have to you have to understand or at least assume that your peers doing a

pull request or code of you they they want you to succeed it's it's pretty rare honestly even though sometimes it doesn't feel like it it's pretty rare that people on a team are just malicious I and want you to crash and burn you might feel that way sometimes you might have invented a lot of stuff in your head about it it's a pretty rare thing if you're watching this and you're like no I disagree it happens everywhere sorry I just completely disagree with you you're probably just in bad situations and happen to keep getting into them most people don't want other people to crash and burn okay so if you're finding that's happening maybe it's worth a conversation with your manager about navigating some of these uh scenarios but if we can lean into that we still know that on pull requests and code reviews

when you get feedback sometimes that can be hard where you're like man like I work so hard on this and now these people are like nah we can't do it this way like this isn't going to work or um you know you just start to feel like all of your effort was for nothing and you maybe deep down you know it's not for nothing but it kind of feels that way right it's a totally normal thing it takes time to overcome this uh even if you're just working in new teams like that might reset for you where you're like oh man like I used to have this good thing going with my team like I felt like I understood what everyone wanted now this team's different it's totally normal right so not to beat yourself up but be aware of it try to improve but

this same type of thing can happen if you are making software and you have a direct connection with end users and customers right so you'll have someone go use your thing and it's no longer the code they're not criticizing your code they can't see your code they they they don't even know if it's you getting a server a request on the server and manually going to enter the data into a database or something right they have no idea but their experience is really what you need to be listening to so um like I was saying we have a a handful of uh of users that are giving us like really good like like direct feedback and we need it because it can be hard to hear and I want I'm going to walk through a couple of examples but it can be hard to hear

but at the same time it's like I think it's hard to hear because we're so proud of it and it's the same thing if you're if you haven't experienced this for your for your code reviews at least maybe you have where you're like I worked hard on that code and like to hear someone be like no it's not going to work or we don't use this design pattern or whatever else it sucks you're like man like I'm proud of that and I worked hard on it what's what's the deal here so you get this same type of thing when someone's giving you really critical feedback right so they're talking about the usability of something they're like it's either it's just broken uh it's not working how I expect I don't like it it's not obvious whatever it is right what you need to be able

to do is I have to cough again sorry I feel like my throat was just like getting drer and drier but um you need to be in this position where again these people are early adopter uh in some cases we're like extending trials and stuff for them so like like we're we're doing them favors and they're doing us a lot of favor just by giving us feedback right the the the one month of like fee that they're not paying is like that doesn't compare to the feedback that they're giving us the feedback is really what's going to matter and I mentioned this before right it's not like getting our first paying customer is going to mean like finally we can like we can buy groceries this week like we're none of us are in that position we're very fortunate for that so that's not what

it's about it's about proving the value of like this business opportunity so when these people are giving us feedback we need to remember they want us to succeed if they didn't they would totally screw off they would say like why am I bothering with this bull crap I got other stuff to do like not worth my time get out of here right so they're not doing that you keep this in mind like they're giving you the feedback cuz they want it to be better oh this person I just watched three people kind of like pull out really fast that's maybe poor phrasing on my part I watch three people pull around a car very fast and it's because he's going quite slow in the fast lanane there you go good job buddy um not phased by it right um so again we get this critical

feedback and the first gut reaction is like man like there's a list of 10 things here you got 10 things you hated about this like come on like uh but remember like it feels bad right away and then you got to remember like he's he's he or she in whatever case like they're telling me because they want it to be better they want to use it they want it to be good they're telling you so you have to like kind of reframe it for yourself and that takes practice for sure cuz I know if I wake up in the morning even and I open Slack and I'm like even in bed looking through slack and I see like hey this doesn't work or I don't like this my immediate thing is like man it's too early for this it's too early like I just let

me I just woke up I want to have a good day and it's already not a good day but it is a good day and it's a good day because we're getting feedback and we're going to be able to improve the experiences now the thing I wanted to talk about and I'm already like close to work so you can see I ramble a lot but um if it wasn't obvious I think the one of the takeaways I wanted to kind of talk about here was like this feeling of like yeah man like that sucks like it sucks to have that response right it's I don't know a good way to explain it but I I'm not proud of myself when I get frustrated when I hear feedback like I don't like that being my first response it still takes me a moment to go hey

Nick remember like imagine not having anyone use it and no one giving you feedback and I'm like yeah okay and then I have to talk myself into it and then it feels good but the the next problem ends up being okay all the stuff we want to go build we're not getting any closer that's how it feels okay so we're not getting any closer because now we got to go fix all this stuff or improve all this other stuff and it's like uh like is it really that important and someday it might not be that important we're not there yet though so if we're being honest with ourselves and looking at this feedback it's all really important because it's all like hey man I can't even use this thing so all of that work you did to try and make this thing like you know

a feature that you can sell to people it's unusable so that is a good opportunity for us to improve so I'm not proud of my initial response and I've been like at Microsoft I don't deal with n users but before Microsoft it was like 8 years of of getting not exactly like a direct line to customers but pretty close and it was frustrating but at least we're getting the feedback so what I wanted to say was that I was really proud of and I don't think I don't think any of the team watches these videos and I wouldn't expect them to but I I had this like kind of uh it wasn't even a moment it was like a period of this morning where in my head I'm going like okay I have to go I'm feeling like I have to go fix all this

stuff I have to go make it right and the team's already aware cuz they can see the same feedback coming in and it's just like I know I'm working with the right people when they were just like already on top of it it was like I felt like I'm going to have to go fix all this it's going to be my responsibility um and when I started talking with the team about it it was like I've already fixed two of those 10 things the they're already fixed and I'm talking about like I'm reading these things in bed I'm just getting up we're in different time zones I'm just getting up they're already fixed by the time I get to my computer incredible and already working on the next things already able to explain why it's happening already coming up with the plan and it was

just like this feeling of like I don't I don't have a good way to explain it but like I I know I'm working with the right people because that balance of like everyone everyone sharing the pride everyone is so proud of what we're putting together that they don't go and they're like yeah man that does suck like can't wait for Jimmy to have to go fix that like not my problem or like oh I don't care what the user has to say they all care about the feedback and there's they all have enough like Pride about what we're building that they're like yeah how do I get in and fix this right and you know if that individual who did fix things this morning if he was unavailable cuz we've had this kind of thing come up where someone's like hey look I'm not going

to be online until tonight then people are chiming in being like what do you need me to try and do in the meantime or is it something I can look at for you so you don't have to like worry when you come back from whatever the in the evening like maybe I can just do it it might take me longer but maybe I can just do it for you or at least got things started right so it was just like this it's a bit of a roller coaster ride having to go through this kind of stuff but again uh I didn't have I should should add this in I didn't like have doubts that I was working with the right people it's not like this is the the thing that like made me go oh yes like I'm so glad I made that decision for

the first time but it's more like um just a reminder not that I need reminders but it's a nice reminder to have that when you got the right people like you have this kind of thing happening so but yeah it's it's funny like it's not a surprise to me but at the same time that reminder is nice like it's cuz it's a Feelgood thing like it's kind of like getting stuck on a problem and then being able to come up with the solution finally and you're like yes I've overcome this it's a similar type of feeling where you're like man like this is going to be so challenging there's a lot of lot of stress on me for this and then you're like no like you're working with the right people and it's like the sense of relief like it's just cool so I wanted

to share that because like I said I think there's a lot of people that go through their software engineering careers and they don't they don't have that maybe some people like this is the only thing they do is they're trying to build like startups and stuff like that and that's been their whole experience but for me it's like I had a little bit of this sorry my voice better yeah for now uh early early on in my professional career when I was working at small companies had a sense of this I I also worked at companies on my internship where like I didn't feel this at all um no one's fault just like it's just didn't feel it and when I worked at Magnet forensics like when I started there when I had graduated from Unity like I had this feeling basically instantly which is

really cool to be like oh like this isn't even my software like I didn't build the first version of the thing and like I feel proud of it um I'm working with people that feel proud of it it's just really cool um but I don't think a lot of people get that kind of experience I know even on my team right now there's uh a handful of individuals and I'm not I'm not saying the other ones don't do this but there's some that stick out to me where I can I can almost feel like how much uh Pride they have in some of the things that they've built and that they sort of have a subject matter expertise over because if there's ever anything wrong at all they go so far out of their way to like to try and make things right like even

if there's an incident related to a change they had um it doesn't matter the scope of the incident right but incident related to a change they had and in an area that they like have responsibility over even though there's on call Engineers 24/7 they're like nope like I stay up super late like you know it's like midnight to 2: in the morning they're like working on fixes they're flighting them out like even though there's on call Engineers to help with that they're like no this is my responsibility to go make right uh they might own the code fix no matter what because if it was their bug or something but even to go say like I'm going to monitor this flight and like it's something that they probably could hand off to the on calls to say hey could you just check to make sure

signals look okay and if not ping me but they're like nope like I'm on top of it so it's just it's I don't know like I I want to say I don't necessarily expect that at that degree but it's really cool to see people be like very passionate about the things they built um to the point where it's like showing up in all of these different areas so one of the things that I'm hoping especially our like especially as early adopters I want people to see like we literally are listening and anything you got going on for feedback we're going to try and address as quick as possible and that's impossible to scale okay and I want to say this pretty clearly it's impossible to scale because if you imagine that you have like right now if we have X number of users if we

10x 100x 1,000x 10,000x that number of users how can we possibly be trying to respond to all of the requests and all of the the things like at the same velocity right um if we turn into a company and we hire employees like it's like these types of things don't scale but I want to make sure as long as possible for as far as this thing goes that that's something that people feel like when they aren't satisfied that we're able to to kind of turn things around and have people go like look it's nothing's going to be perfect but like I know that this team of people is going to do literally anything they can to make this a good experience like that's that's what I want to have when I'm building software so anyway I'm at work I'll do another one of these on

the way back but yeah I hope that hope that makes sense I know it's not directly like I'm not talking about code and architecture but these are just things like in software engineering that I don't think a lot of people are talking about and I realize it's kind of like the intersection of like entrepreneurship and and sort of just building software in general that's why I'm trying to bridge some of these things together because if you're like hey man like I'm just working for a company and like I don't care about the entrepreneurship kind of things like it's not that you have to have your own business or your own project that you're working on to do this I'm trying to relate it to your your day job if this is not a thing you're doing because I think that like I think it's a

different perspective to have when you have different types of ownership and trying to think about like I know if there's stuff that I've worked on and I didn't feel like some sort of sense of ownership I'm kind of like like why do I care like give me a reason to care kind of thing and it's kind of like it's almost like the wrong I shouldn't say wrong it's not a great way to look at things like someone give me a reason to care like I don't know man like motivate yourself find a reason for you to care if you totally nail this project if you demonstrate that you are so passionate about building it you really care for it you're going to go through Great Lengths for it don't you think that's going to look good for maybe promotion conversations instead of being like yeah

I built this thing and it broke half the time and I just kind of pwned it off on people like I don't know some of these things seem relevant to me but that's that I'll see you guys after work take take care