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[Un]churned is presented by UpdateAI.

Jon Johnson:

We’re capturing data on how our customers.

Josh Schachter:

Are interacting with us.

Jon Johnson:

And if we don’t have this function, it’s a cross functional process and department. And I think we silo ourselves so often from onboarding to enablement, to customer success, to renewal to sales, and we all have our own little tools and our own little kingdoms, and we all do our own little things. But once you get that renewal, to be able to do one of those retroactives and be like, these guys renewed, and they renewed with growth, they renewed healthy, let’s go back and validate that hypothesis over the last twelve months. But also we need to be okay with the fact that we don’t know and most of these SaaS companies, we don’t know what we’re doing. And the job is to figure it out.

Interlude:

Welcome to this edition of the unchurned CS Insider Mashup, a roundtable discussion that goes deep into the recent trends in customer success. Introducing your hosts christy Felterusso, John Johnson, Mickey Powell and Josh Schachter.

Josh Schachter:

Welcome everybody. Welcome all of our listeners to this episode of Csnbs. I’m Josh Schachter, founder and CEO of UpdateAI. We said we were going to introduce ourselves, so Kristi, you’re next.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Oh, okay, fine. Well, pleasure to be here again for another episode of CS & BS. My name is Kristi Faltorusso. I am currently the chief customer officer at Client Success. We are a customer success management software company, helping our customers manage from new to renew. I’ve been in the customer success space for nearly twelve years, helping companies build, scale, and transform their customer success teams.

Jon Johnson:

John she’s just so good.

Josh Schachter:

Well, you know what, she’s good, but she didn’t pay for that product placement there. But we’re giving where I work because she does hold the show up. I mean, in a good way.

Jon Johnson:

My name is John Johnson. I am a principal customer success Manager at user testing. I’ve been working in CS for twelve years now or so. It always goes up. That’s what time does. But yeah, thrilled to be here, Mickey.

Mickey Powell:

Mickey and I’m Mickey Powell, head of Go to market at Update AI, the world’s first and only customer success specific AI assistant.

Josh Schachter:

Mickey was reading cue cards as he said that, but I still appreciate him giving that a go. What does Update AI do?

Ramli John:

Mick I don’t know. Josh.

Mickey Powell:

What does Update AI do?

Kristi Faltorusso:

It makes my life better.

Josh Schachter:

Oh, yes.

Ramli John:

Thank you, Christy.

Josh Schachter:

Christy we always love so much.

Kristi Faltorusso:

It’s amazing.

Josh Schachter:

Special guest for today. I’m really excited, I actually am really excited about this. To introduce Romley. John, first of all, Romley, how often do people mix up your first and last name?

Ramli John:

Yeah, I’ve been called actually John’s not even my last name. It’s my middle name. I’ve used that as my brand, so ramley. John. But I have been called Mr. John and they think I’m related to one of the Damon. Oh, yeah, and I’m like, we’re not even the no, no.

Jon Johnson:

Just own it.

Mickey Powell:

Yeah, absolutely.

Jon Johnson:

Let me call him up.

Kristi Faltorusso:

What can that get means nothing. That means nothing.

Josh Schachter:

So Romley is the content programming director at Appcus, which and this is not intended to be a plug, but it’s a software that we started using at Update AI recently. It’s really great. It’s all about how to make education around your product that much easier. How to onboard people that much easier. So Romley owns the education that they do to their customers. And as part of that I don’t know if it’s part of that or separately, but Romley is also an author because Appcus is all about PLG, and so he has literally written the book on product led Onboarding, and he’s a YouTuber and a podcaster and all that other stuff. So I don’t know. I met Romley at a conference, a PLG conference, a few weeks ago. Thought he’d be a great person to work with. He’s not in CS per se, but everything he does relates to the customer success world. So, Romley, thank you so much for being on the show.

Ramli John:

Thank you for the invite. Super excited. And I do work with CS a lot at Appcus, so I feel like I am one of you, so to speak.

Jon Johnson:

Most people do view us as those people.

Mickey Powell:

I view us as those people.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah, it’s true. Well, no, especially when we’re talking a lot about everybody’s talking about scale. Everybody’s talking about how do we multiply our offerings, right. With getting people onboarded. I mean, this is the start of everything, and I was kind of digging through we used tools similar to App queues for kind of guidance. But I would love to hear, number one, how do you view the power of Onboarding into the ongoing success of a customer? Give me that. When you’re driving engagement, obviously, this is content, right? So you’re like onboarding the Onboarding, right? You’re bringing people into this world. I’d really love to kind of hear let’s get into your brain a little bit. What made you write the book, other than, obviously the cash grab? That book authorship is, these days, the fame and fortune of writing tech based.

Ramli John:

That’s true. Fame and fortune. I think just you mentioned already the reality that we talk about success for customers, but it starts at the very beginning. I like to think of it like, I have a one year old baby right now. And there are studies that show that the first few years of a child sets them up for how much they’ll achieve in the future. If you set them for success, you engage with them very early when they’re young, then they’re more likely to succeed when they’re in grade school, when they’re in high school, when they’re in college. And it’s the same thing for our customers if we engage with them sooner rather than later. It’s almost like a snowball effect that impacts throughout their whole life cycle. And it needs to start from the beginning or else it’s setting that first impression as it’s like a first date or a first impression during a networking event. It’s really hard to let go of that first impression. And the reason why the book was put together was like, I just went on Amazon, looked up the word Onboarding. There wasn’t a lot of books about know, there’s guides, there’s blogs about it. I know there’s another book that I really enjoyed by Simon Ewick is, you know, the elements of user Onboarding. There’s one other one that I look up to. It’s like the guide to Onboarding that’s not available on Amazon. But I wanted something accessible that can impact one of the most important parts of the customer lifecycle, which is around really, the first early cycle of onboarding, where they see the value of the product and then they adopt it, and then they go set them for success, for what’s next. And what’s next could really depend on a lot of things.

Josh Schachter:

I love that the book is very literally titled. It’s called product led onboarding. I have not read the book Romley, because I picked up a copy of the book and then I headed down to Argentina to be with our developers and designer. And my designer was so into it that he stole my copy. So our head of UX and design is reading your book right now because it is something that’s really important to our product. Tell us a little bit about the book, Product Onboarding. I know folks can pick it up on Amazon, right? But remember, your audience is our customer success managers and leaders. So in what ways does it relate to that function?

Ramli John:

Yeah, I think it’s specific for that. The book applies, I think, right from the beginning, it’s really understanding that usually when we think about Onboarding, the team that owns it is usually the product team. But onboarding is like this cross functional area that success, sales and marketing every team. And I feel like customer success team has so much value to add because they really have the voice of the customer. They’ve seen the challenges that people have. And this is where I think it really starts from the get go where I actually had to fight. The founder of Product Led wanted to call it Product Led onboarding. I wanted to call it something else. I actually wanted to call it Eureka because that’s the framework that the book is based on. And when I think of Eureka, I’m like the archimedes not in the pool, in the bathtub. And Eureka like this moment of insight. And Eureka is like this acronym that stands for the Steps to Improve your Onboarding. And the very first one is establish an Onboarding Team. There needs to be a team that’s established there from the get go to understand what the next step, which is really understand what the user’s desired outcome is and really deeply knowing what is success. If we don’t know what success is for the person, the user, the customer from the beginning, what is the first level of success? The second level almost like a video game. What is level one, level two, level three for them? And once we have that map out, the next part of it is to refine that metric and really establishing the path and then keeping the new users engaged and then applying those changes. And I just quickly went through that. But each of those steps spell the word Eureka, establish, understand, refine, evaluate, keep, and apply. That’s really what the book is all about. It’s like providing this process and examples to really help people. And the book is meant to be a cross functional thing. One thing I suggest in the book itself is like, this is not a product book. This is not a marketing book. This is not a CS book. This is like a team, cross functional, team approach that needs to happen and it needs to start from the beginning.

Jon Johnson:

I’m a sucker for a framework, so I love that. I love the introduction of these types of frameworks. So one of the things that I think, obviously this is product Led growth, right? Which it’s a segment within a segment within a segment. I think a lot of times when we talk about PLG, especially when it comes to CSMS, there’s a lot of conversations about, like, when does the human get involved, right? At what point do we engage the actual CSM or CS leaders? Whether it’s like a one to one approach or when a CSM is kind of managing that communication itself, I’d love to just kind of hear, your know, we’re talking about product Led growth within the onboarding cycle, maybe give us a little bit of indicator on how this kind of fits within the App use world too. How do you think about this? Like I said, I know you’re in the content world, but that’s a big sales pitch, is like, how do you control these things and how do you have kind of the direction or how does it feed kind of backflow into what folks are using when it comes to the tool?

Ramli John:

Totally. I mean, this is something that it’s a hard problem. I’m just being straight up. Even us at Appkee’s are trying to figure this out. When is that perfect moment to reach out? I have two hypothesis that I approach. That when the quote unquote ideal moments in the user journey or the customer journey is I call it like the highs and low, the emotional highs and low of a person. The first one, let’s talk about the high. One of the greatest moments to reach out to somebody is when they just achieved something really successfully. It’s a great way to celebrate something. An example is they’ve achieved set up something for the first time for app use, let’s give something that’s more non biased, so to speak. Let’s talk about, let’s say, calendly calendar is like, an easy way. Or we can talk about a company that does this really well. Is Canva when canva is this easy way to create designs. And when you create five designs, they actually give you a badge and be like, hey, Ramley, here’s a badge. Share to the world. You’re like, one of our great users I know cloud App or that’s what they’re formerly known, or Zeit, where you take screenshots, they also do something similar where you take your first screenshot and you share it with somebody. They ask you, hey, congrats, you’ve shared taking your first screenshot. Now share it with a colleague. And if you need any help, reach out to us. I think that’s another really great high to reach out to. So anytime you can celebrate. I haven’t found enough apps use that moment, that moment of delight or moment of high to really be an opportunity for an outreach. The second moment that I find is the moment of emotional low. That’s when somebody’s frustrated and there are signals that somebody’s already frustrated even before they’ve verbally said it to your team. There could be, like, rage clicks on hot jar where you can find when they’re double clicking something. Or they keep going back to the same page back and forth, or they’ve gotten an error.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah. Can we get, like, a pressure sensing mouse? Like, he hit this button really hard, right?

Ramli John:

Yeah, totally. They smash it really hard. Those are moments when you’re proactively reaching out. Hey, we noticed you had an error. That’s such a great way to turn a frustration into, like, whoa, I didn’t even have to reach out. Is there a way we can help you? I think that’s another great opportunity for a potential TS or human interaction or human touch approach when there so, yeah, that’s a hypothesis. We’re having that’s in theory, in application, we’re still figuring out Appcus. I think that’s something like finding that exact moment. One thing that I would add is that we found at Appcus that actually waiting a few days actually helps the response rate of our sales team outreach, where we found, like, if they sign up within the hour or send an email, they get annoyed. But if we waited, like, a day, their response rate was a lot higher because they’ve gotten a chance to poke around. That’s just an early hypothesis. We have not fully proven that out, but there is value to letting people play around. If your users are like that before reaching out, I think that there is a timing involved as well.

Kristi Faltorusso:

So you talk about these emotional highs and lows that are happening in this relationship, right. And anchoring on that, and it sounds like the highs that you’re describing feel more like these milestones as opposed to results. How do you distinguish between the two, right? Because I don’t know that every action that a customer takes is the action that says that this customer is on track to get value from your solution versus they’re doing something right. Like Slack had that magic slack number that said if somebody sent x amount of slack that they were a slacker, right? Like that was their magic number. And there’s so many companies that are that dialed in, but for every company that’s that dialed in, you’ve got a hundred thousand other companies that are not. So how are you distinguishing or how would you recommend folks to think about distinguishing between milestones and path to results?

Ramli John:

To be honest, we’re still figuring this out.

Kristi Faltorusso:

We all are.

Ramli John:

I think that’s true. This is something that one of our senior product manager that I chat with regularly, jeff, shout out to Jeff here, he’s like, you know, everybody who thinks they figure out the magic number from slack, he calls it like they’re just making it up. They just made that number and then they just stuck with it. Because it’s easy to even like the Facebook thing with like, oh, add seven friends, even like, what’s his name, mark Zuckerberg. Admitted, that was just like a rally call rather than it’s based on science. But I think going back to your question, the way that we’re thinking about it is more of the second one. We’re like, let’s have a hypothesis on what does that ideal path look like? So I think those, I guess not necessarily micro steps that lead to the milestone needs to happen before we can have the milestone. So for a lot of companies that are struggling with activation, I would look at that. I would look at the path, the ideal path, and having a hypothesis around.

Jon Johnson:

That and measuring you’re saying so many wonderful words here. One of the things that I think folks may maybe miss in customer success, just to kind of tie it into this, is that we should start with a hypothesis and then we should prove it with data. And I think a lot of times people, they kind of like, frown. I was like, well, I’m just going to throw something against the wall and maybe it’s bullshit, maybe it’s 10,000 slack messages in twelve months. But this idea like, what I love about tools like yours, and we do this with us, Christy, you guys have it with yours. Really, this is all data. We’re capturing data on how our customers are interacting with us. And if we don’t have this function, like, you said this a couple of times, where it’s a cross functional process and department. And I think we silo ourselves so often from onboarding to enablement, to customer success, to renewal, to sales, and we all have our own little tools and our own little kingdoms, and we all do our own little things. But once you get that renewal to be able to do one of those retroactives and be like, these guys renewed and they renewed with growth or they renewed healthy. Let’s go back and validate that hypothesis over the last twelve months to say, hey, I think that signing up within ten days or 15 days, we’ve got some of those things too, right, where if you launch a study within a certain number of days, you’re more likely to be successful. But it’s all hypothesis. Right. We actually aren’t tying it back to, hey, they renewed. Now let’s take this hypothesis and look at kind of these micro steps, right? I think that’s something that kind of jumped out to me in the last two things that you’ve said about how it is collaborative and it needs to be across all of these cross functionals. But also we need to be okay with the fact that we don’t know and most of these SaaS companies, we don’t know what we’re doing. And the job is to figure it out. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. Like it’s really okay to say, you know what, we’re figuring this out. If you came in as like, we got it nailed, I would probably poke holes in your right. But coming with this humility of looking for we’re just looking for the journey, we’re trying to figure out what is and what isn’t working. Mickey, you haven’t said anything. Talk, ask a question.

Josh Schachter:

You also don’t have to blow up my spot.

Jon Johnson:

Give him the cue cards, Josh.

Mickey Powell:

Well, Josh was telling me what I should ask Mickey.

Kristi Faltorusso:

You don’t have to listen to him. This is a safe space. This is a safe don’t.

Mickey Powell:

I definitely don’t. I don’t always listen to Josh.

Josh Schachter:

One day we will do a podcast session where it’s just going to be Mickey and I doing a one on one and you guys can be like flies on the wall and it will be so entertaining.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Josh, that sounds like something you should take to your one on one meeting with Mickey. Okay.

Ramli John:

That’s right.

Josh Schachter:

It’s like celebrity Death Match.

Jon Johnson:

Oh.

Kristi Faltorusso:

It might be really hard to not jump in and say something, so maybe you’ll have to control the mute on your end for me. But I would love to watch a live one on one between Josh and Mickey. It’s kind of like a UFC fight.

Mickey Powell:

Sounds great.

Ramli John:

Live on Twitch.

Interlude:

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Mickey Powell:

No, no. Actually, one of the things that Romley you said a while back that I was kind of pondering is this concept of positive versus negative reinforcement. I like to study a lot of different things and long ago I looked really deeply into positive and negative reinforcement and the work that B. S. Skinner did in psychology. And I found it really fascinating because my early days in customer success, it was all negative reinforcement. You aren’t doing something you need to do better. We would just constantly bring up the negatives of what to avoid. And I started trying to change my mindset of, wait, when can I go find the positives and how can I reinforce those? That of course, led me to talk to product and marketing and try to figure out how to do that. One of the things we ended up doing was creating a weekly email out to every single customer and reporting on the things that have went well that week for them. And we saw a significant impact on Churn because this was going out to thousands of customers every single week. So I love your take on kind of the positive versus negative, and I would love to double click on that and help the rest of our community hear that as well because I think it’s a really powerful thing we miss because we’re so distracted by the negative.

Ramli John:

And you’re right. I think the negative side, on the low end, you’re like, oh, you haven’t done this. You should do it. Here’s why. And I think that nudge sometimes is the challenge, especially if it’s not communicated well as to why you should do it where. I think that’s a challenge. Often when I chat with CS, we’re like, hey, if we’re going to tell them, hey, do X, but why should you care for us? Why should you care to add a goal to a flow in your product tour? Well, so then you can see the results and see the impact and you can share it to your boss, to your team, what the changes you’ve made. I think that’s the important part to the negative side would be making sure that they are understanding the reason why. But I totally lean. More. So on the positive, if we can celebrate good behavior, then that means that they will repeat that more and more. I think there’s also the challenge. I thought you were going to go here, Mikey. Around extrinsic versus intrinsic rewards, we’re like, hey, do this, and I’ve seen company do this where complete our onboarding steps and we’ll give you a free shirt. So I’m like, I want a free shirt. So I completed all the steps and they shipped me a shirt. And then I left right away because I just wanted the shirt. I really just wanted the shirt. And I think that’s a challenge with extrinsic rewards, especially with like, hey, do X and we’ll give you a swag or do X and we’ll give you like a $25 gift card or $100 gift card. It’s like if we do it too much, the danger to that is that it loses its impact and its effectiveness because then they start expecting the reward. The extrinsic reward for them to do more and more and for us to just, hey, here’s why you should do this. Because it will make you a better CS or marketer or whoever. We’re talking to our audience, a better product manager. And you’ll get a race, and you’ll become I don’t know if you want to be a CEO or CMO or Bpscx. This is the path to getting better results, better at your job, and being celebrated by your team hitting that up rather than the extrinsic reward. I think that’s the important part to that is making sure we’re reinforcing it with the right kind of know.

Jon Johnson:

That’s actually something that I was going to yeah, you jump in. Do you want to jump in or.

Josh Schachter:

Do you want me to jump know age?

Kristi Faltorusso:

No, josh never talks. Josh. Josh, please. The floor is yours. Josh, what would you like to contribute?

Josh Schachter:

Was that sarcasm? I mean, I do talk less.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I’m here to honor you. You are the host of this podcast. You are the one who facilitates and brings us all together for these amazing discussions. I would like to hear your contributions. What was your question?

Josh Schachter:

I forget.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I don’t forget, Josh. So now you can actually ask your question. John, go ahead.

Josh Schachter:

No, I have a good question. So, actually, one of my favorite books of all time for everybody out there after they’ve read onboarding is Lord of I can’t read that definitely. By the way, I picked the books that I read based on the font size, and that’s definitely a small font. Does anybody else do that? Is that just me?

Jon Johnson:

No, just old people.

Ramli John:

Lord of the Flies?

Josh Schachter:

No, it comes from summer reading, like, when my mom wouldn’t let me go to the pool until I finished reading 50 pages of the book. And it’s like, well, then pick a book.

Mickey Powell:

Look how smart I am.

Josh Schachter:

This font is this explains a lot, Mickey. Yes, I do get it. I can’t wait for that one on one session podcast for me and Mickey. This explains a lot. Now I’ve actually lost my train of thought. The Power of Habit is an amazing book, and it’s all about how to create habits. And I think so often people forget positive reinforcement of, like, you do something good and you want to not only give people critiques of, like, oh, it should be done this way, but you’ve done a great job. Let me reinforce that. Positive behavior. Behavior and make that a habit out of that. So I thought I’d share that. The other thing is, this is a question for all you guys. Does anybody know what the highest converting advertisement used to be? I mean, when this company was relevant on@yahoo.com.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Wait, hold on. They advertised?

Ramli John:

Absolutely.

Kristi Faltorusso:

What was the question?

Josh Schachter:

Yeah, it was like Google. There was a search engine thing called Yahoo.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Yes, thank you.

Mickey Powell:

Yes, of course.

Ramli John:

We all do.

Mickey Powell:

Case smart ass.

Jon Johnson:

Because nobody’s going to get it.

Josh Schachter:

So after you sent an email successfully and it was like email successfully sent or whatever, they would put up an advertisement and that had the highest click through rate. Because there’s some dopamine hit you get from successfully accomplishing from completing a task and therefore you’re more likely to click on it in that little split second where you’ve got that positive energy. Yeah, see, it was interesting. I don’t know exactly how it’s relevant, but it was interesting.

Jon Johnson:

That’s good. Can I ask my question now, Josh?

Kristi Faltorusso:

John, what were you going to ask?

Jon Johnson:

No, but this is that yeah, go ahead, Romley.

Ramli John:

Oh, I was just going to say that’s interesting because it doubles down on getting people on a high and sending that email. Yeah. They’re more likely to jump on a call. Could be like the result of this. Maybe not even send an email. Maybe it’s like share like an inapp message. Like, oh, congrats, book a call.

Jon Johnson:

No, but this actually does kind of line up with what I was kind of thinking about. Right. So we get to the point where product led growth is kind of in its like I don’t like their middling youth of junior high and high. It’s it’s becoming a theme. And it hasn’t necessarily graduated. We’re not like the Kanye West yet. But at the same, like, if every fucking tool is PLG and every tool has a gamification, and every tool has an automated onboarding, we get to the point where you said this earlier, it becomes noise, right. So what I love what you said, and I think especially coming from a marketing side, like a content side, is understanding your impact, but also understanding the impact of the ecosystem that they’re in. Right. You see these big maps of if you’re in marketing, like Martech, these are all the tools that you can use. And you think every single one of them has a CSM, every single one of them has an onboarding. Every single one of them has a nurture track and a campaign. Right. I think this kind of feeds into your hypothesis about don’t inundate them with messages on day one. Give them time. Because you’re not the most important thing in their life yet. You may never be. You may not be the most important thing in their career, but you can help them facilitate this. And you said something that was really intelligent about if your goal is to get this T shirt and I win that goal, it’s great, but then I get that dopamine because the T shirt is there. And then I’m like, oh, wait, I’d have to log back into this thing. Like, I forget what I was doing. But if your goal from the dopamine is man, I actually learned something. Like I had this AHA moment. You called it eureka. We call it like the AHA moment, right? Of just like, I figured out how to do. Something Better. And I think you’re talking about this in a way that is really aligned with, I think, a healthy model in PLG that is less. Let’s just drive everything by automation and there’s actually a patience that you need to have it with these triggers and these ideas. And how do you find these moments where, like, the highs and lows we call them sparkles and farcles? You guys ever use those?

Ramli John:

No.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Sparkles and sparkles.

Jon Johnson:

Sparkles and farkles. That’s the name of my other podcast. But no rocks and roses. None of you guys went to youth group growing up. No. Okay. I just outed myself. Me and third day and jars of clay.

Kristi Faltorusso:

It wasn’t a real big thing in the Northeast.

Jon Johnson:

Gotcha.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Sorry.

Jon Johnson:

Sweet. Awesome. Cool. But no, I think Romney I just kind of want to echo, like, I haven’t read the book, but I’m really excited to read it now, especially after meeting you. Because I think I’d also like to hear when you come to your content marketing strategy, like how you get these fuckers into the funnel, right? To make these decisions. How do you onboard those that need to be onboarded? What do you find most appealing or what’s most appealing to your users? And how you incorporate those into the onboarding of bringing these people into this funnel that you’re building. Right. So you get them interested. What are the tags? And then what’s kind of the outcome? Like you’ve had these hypotheses. That was a hard word for me to say. And then how do you validate that?

Ramli John:

I think in terms of other than.

Jon Johnson:

Having a rad YouTube setup in your studio.

Ramli John:

Thank you. I think content wise, we’ve been talking a lot about it a little bit already around. Totally understanding what the reason, why they sign up for it in the first place and serving up exactly what they want to accomplish as soon as possible in the guide itself. Examples that I can think of is when people sign up for, let’s say, calendar, and you know exactly that they’re signing up because they’re a salesperson and they’re trying to book as many calls as possible with their team in a round robin format. You want to serve that information up as quickly as possible, rather than somebody who is a teacher who wants to schedule time with their students and I think knowing as early as possible who is this person and what do they want to accomplish within the product but within the content itself? What is like for some product folks who are familiar with the jobs to be done from the early on that can apply both the product and content, then let’s get it to them. Let’s go play a spot.

Jon Johnson:

I just bought that book.

Ramli John:

That’s a good book.

Jon Johnson:

Romley.

Ramli John:

Which book are you talking about?

Josh Schachter:

Yeah.

Jon Johnson:

I literally just bought it. I was talking to a guy. It’s called jobs to be done. The Jobs To Be done framework and oh, my gosh, it is blown away.

Mickey Powell:

Somebody explain jobs to be done.

Jon Johnson:

I just started reading it, so Romley, please. But Dr. Mike Lee introduced me to the ahead.

Ramli John:

Mike, you want to answer this?

Jon Johnson:

Not Mikey.

Ramli John:

Oh, Mike Lee. Oh, sorry. My bad.

Jon Johnson:

No, you’re good.

Ramli John:

Yeah. It’s this idea that people hire products, and I would even say further, people hire content to accomplish a certain thing in their life. The classic example by the person who coined the term, it’s just missing my mind right now.

Mickey Powell:

You don’t buy a drill. You don’t buy a drill bit.

Jon Johnson:

You buy a hole.

Ramli John:

Yeah. Yes, that’s true. The drill and drill bit. Also, people hire a milkshake to feel full. I think that’s the other example I’ve seen where you’re hiring this product to help you accomplish a job in your life. And I think that’s essentially what the.

Jon Johnson:

Theory of this the milkshake one is. My favorite is that basically, like, McDonald’s figured out that, why are people buying milkshakes in the morning? And it was because they were using a milkshake to keep themselves full fuller than anything else, like, before they got to their lunch break, basically, which is really interesting. I’m going to throw the book in the link.

Ramli John:

And that was Clayton Christensen, by the way. I apologize. I just.

Mickey Powell:

Know it’s funny you bring that up, because that’s something that we do at Update a lot. And I give Josh credit and his background in product for this, is we spend a lot of time saying, like, okay, if we’re going to build something, what is the actual job it’s doing for that person? Because if we can’t describe it, then why would we build it?

Ramli John:

Cool.

Josh Schachter:

Thanks for the plug.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah, I love that.

Ramli John:

And it also applies to CS, so well, I think we’re like, if we know that this is their job, how can we help them do that even better, further, using other features, advanced features that we have, or it’s another way to say how can we make our customers even more successful? Would be another way to put it. And knowing what success looks like for them is going to make it easier for us to understand and build and make them even more successful.

Josh Schachter:

Romley, I want to close us out here on one last topic, which is your job must be pretty rad. Looks like you’re a cool guy. Looking rad.

Mickey Powell:

Judging by your by the amount of neon in your background, you’re rad.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah, you’re pretty rad is a word.

Josh Schachter:

I can use in your presence.

Mickey Powell:

You’re super dank. Also, for anybody that remembers Dank.

Jon Johnson:

Yeah, dank. It’s giving vibes.

Ramli John:

Yeah.

Mickey Powell:

You’re bordering on diggity dank.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I think you could just say it’s giving. Like, you don’t even have to say it’s anything else.

Jon Johnson:

We’ve totally derailed Josh because we don’t.

Ramli John:

Want to talk about self actualism.

Josh Schachter:

We’re actually going to change this podcast to let’s Derail Josh.

Kristi Faltorusso:

I was like, derail him for four more minutes.

Ramli John:

Go.

Josh Schachter:

But your job is cool. It seems like you’re producing content. You’re having fun with that, and then at the same time, you have this podcasting, and YouTubing on the side, and there’s so many people in our world that are looking for I mean, Christy has so much content production that she’s running. John plays in a musical band.

Jon Johnson:

A musical band.

Josh Schachter:

Mickey. He plays with lego. Lego.

Ramli John:

Mickey’s basically a child.

Jon Johnson:

Everybody else is cool but Mickey.

Josh Schachter:

So by the way, before I forget, happy birthday. Logan. When this episode airs, it’ll be Mickey’s daughter’s fifth birthday. What’s your suggestion for this? How can folks out there in CS, whatever, do all this like you’re doing it just having fun, bringing their personal stuff into their work world.

Ramli John:

This is like oh, man. This is a hard question. This is very philosophical.

Jon Johnson:

You got four minutes.

Ramli John:

I would say, oh, man, four minutes.

Jon Johnson:

You’re fine.

Ramli John:

Yeah. I think it’s finding stuff outside. You’re giving examples of what it’s something I have a podcast around marketing, because it’s outside of what I do with Appcus, per se, where I get to chat with other marketers, where at Appcus, I get a chat with mainly product folks. I think finding that outlet is super important. One of our CSM, actually our director of customer support, Ricky, he twitches, so he livestream himself gaming, which is, like, that’s super cool. I’ve watched some of his streams, and I think another one of our enterprise CS, Courtney, she volunteers at theater productions, where she’s an actress. I think that finding those certain kind of outlets is important, and I guess that helps you connect different things where things outside of your work, you bring it back into your world, where you see something in theater or in video game or even in Lego, we’re like, hey, I can do something similar for that at work. And maybe that’s an opportunity that we can.

Josh Schachter:

It wasn’t a good question.

Mickey Powell:

I’m glad we used it to close out.

Jon Johnson:

Can you use that as the intro? Josh, it wasn’t a good question. Please. But, Romley, honestly, this was so much fun. You’re a great guest. I signed up for your newsletter. Where can people find you? What can people do to continue to absorb what’s happening here? We’ll link things in the show notes, but give us kind of, like, the little outro of where to find you.

Ramli John:

Yeah. Find me on LinkedIn. Ramley. John. I have a newsletter. Marketing powerups.com. I’m also writing a new book. It’s around Churn. So I think that’s something that I’ve been working on. So I think people can find me, probably on LinkedIn first.

Josh Schachter:

So we went through this entire conversation about CS, talking about your last book, and then at the very last second, you tell us that you’re writing a book on Churn.

Jon Johnson:

Talk about burying the lead.

Ramli John:

It’s a very early, so I think it’s probably coming out 2024.

Jon Johnson:

Well, thank you so much, Josh. We’re actually going to not just edit and cut it right now, so can we all say goodbye? Thank you so much, listeners. This has been a great episode and we’ll see you again.

Kristi Faltorusso:

Bye, everyone.

Josh Schachter:

Hey, guys, it’s Josh. Don’t hang up. If you enjoyed this episode, you know what, even if you didn’t, I’d love for you to give us a rating in itunes or Spotify. And after you do, email me, Josh, at Update AI with the name of your favorite charity and my company. Update AI will make a donation on your behalf. I’d love to connect with each of our listeners. Send me a LinkedIn request and I’ll accept it immediately. Just go to www. Update AI slash LinkedIn and it’ll redirect to my profile. Thanks.