Kareem Mayan

Episode 90
Brave UX

The Nomad’s Guide to Prioritising Product Feedback

In this episode of Brave UX, Kareem Mayan shares what he learned as digital nomad, discusses the focusing effect of personal loss, and how you can more effectively prioritise product feedback.

Highlights include:

What was it like being a digital nomad for two years?
How do you work out what customers need from onboarding?
How do you align stakeholders on what to build?
How do you know whether to build what customers are asking for?
What do you want people consider about their personal priorities?

September 13, 202201:14:01

Listen on:

Who is Kareem Mayan?

Kareem is the Co-Founder of Savio, a SaaS product that helps makers of SaaS products to centralise, organise and prioritise product feedback, delighting customers and reducing churn.

He is also the Founder and Principal Consultant of Trial to Paid, where he helps growing product-led B2B SaaS companies to increase trial to paid conversion.

Between 2002 and 2007, Kareem worked at ESPN.com, as a Technical Producer and then at Fox Interactive Media, as a Director of Product Development for the R&D division.

Kareem’s passion for product has seen him start three companies and acquire one - Codetree, a source management product that he and his partners grew and sold, after purchasing it from Derrick Reimer, the co-founder of Drip.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, the home of New Zealand's only specialist evaluative UX research practice and world-class UX lab, enabling brave teams across the globe to de-risk product design and equally brave leaders to shape and scale design culture. You can find out a little bit more about that at thespaceinbetween.co.nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings and expert advice of world-class UX, design and product management professionals. My guest today is Kareem Mayan. Kareem is the co-founder of Savio at SaaS product that helps makers of SaaS products to centralize, organize and prioritize product feedback, delighting customers and reducing churn. He is also the Founder and Principal Consultant of Trial to Paid where, perhaps somewhat unsurprisingly, he helps growing product led B2B SaaS companies to increase trial to paid conversion. Between 2002 and 2007,
Kareem worked at ESPN.com as a technical producer and then at Fox Interactive Media as a Director of Product Development for the R&D division. But he threw in his budding corporate career to heed the call to adventure, founding his first company, eduFire, in 2007. In what must have been a furious 16 months, Kareem helped to raise an angel investment round of half a million dollars, build a community of 80,000 teachers and students and set the company up for a $1.3 million seed round. However, Kareem's fire for eduFire faded and he left the company to travel the world as a digital nomad. A journey that took him across all seven continents. Definitely more on that soon. Since 2011, Kareem's passion for product has seen him start three companies, including Savio and Trial to Paid, and sell two. If you're wondering about the maths there, the sales include CodeTree, a company that he and his partners grew after purchasing it from Derek Reemer, the co-founder of Drip. Given Kareem's career path, I suspect we're in for a good set of stories today. So hold tight and Kareem, welcome to the show.
Kareem Mayan:
Thanks, Brendan, great to be here.
Brendan Jarvis:
Really good to have you here. And I've enjoyed actually looking into all the things that you've been up to in your career. In particular the nomad, which we'll come to soon. I just wanna touch on first though just your origin I suppose, and how you got involved in this wonderful field of product UX design, entrepreneurialism. Cuz I understand that you studied a computer science and psych at McGill University in Montreal and then you went on to actually start work as a programmer with a in internship and an enterprise software company where you were writing programs in sea. And I just wanna quote something you said about that experience, which is at the time I didn't understand how the sausage got made. Now one could forgive you for being a recent graduate for not quite understanding how the sausage was made straight away out of university. But what was it that helped you to figure that out?
Kareem Mayan:
It's interesting. I have been into computers since I was a We ad [affirmative], I got my Commodore 64 at age 12 after winning $300 from radio stations and having my dad put up the other half of the money to buy it, taught myself to program there. And so have always been into computers and always sort of projecting forward imagined that I would be in sort of this realm. That was 89 when I got my Commodore 64. And so in, I wanna say it was 98, 99, I ended up at this enterprise software company doing an internship, summer internship. It was called Back Web Technologies, it was in Toronto. And I understood that in order to make software you need programmers because without the chorus sausage makers, the sausage is not getting made. But I ended up working in the product management group and that exposed me.
I worked as a programmer in that group making little, actually the first tool I built was a feature request tool to help manage the incoming feature request from sales and cs, which is sort of ironic, ironic even what Savio does exactly full circle 20 plus years later. But I realized that, oh, okay, there's this function in companies called product management and it's their job to talk to customers to understand what customers need, to figure out what a high ROI solution looks like to build and then to work with the dev team to build it. So I had no idea that that even existed until that internship. And so that was my first exposure to the additional functions beyond Dev within side of software company.
Brendan Jarvis:
And you moved away from Dev, right? You moved away from programming and C I don't wanna hazard a guess here, but I'm assuming that programming and C was a special experience. What was it that made you put down the code? Put down the source editor in favor of that broader role, that different role of product manager.
Kareem Mayan:
So I majored in CS and then I started off majoring in CS and then I switched to psychology, my majored to psych and kept a minor in cs. And part of the reason there was because CS was very theoretical and so at that point I sort of looked around and said, what else is there? And I said, this sort of understanding how and why humans do what they do is super interesting to me. And so that was sort of the background. I went into my first job at a company called als.net which was a nonprofit biotech trying to find a cure for lugar's disease. And I found one day I was googling to find something and I ran across JUUL on software.com, which was Joel Spolski's blog who went on to found Trello and Stack Overflow and devoured it in a night. And he had written a book or was just about to write a book called Usability Testing for Developers.
And that made me realize, huh, it's not just about what it does, but it's the interf Basecamp, the 37 single guys later on popularized this notion of the interface is the software to people, to the end user. So that was always kicking around in the back of my head and influenced, I was doing full stack dev at the time, so influenced not just making sure it worked but making sure that it was easy to use as best I could. And then I moved on to E S P N and that role was what they called a technical producer. So you were doing some front end, some backend and some product really moved more towards a heavy sort of front end skew there. And then it just sort of took naturally, like I still code today and Rubion Rails and Python and Jengo, but I will still bias towards making things easy for users to do what they're, to get their desired outcome such that there's alignment between that and what the business is is trying to accomplish what the business goals
Brendan Jarvis:
Are. That's interesting cuz you also coach product managers as far as I could tell. And having that hands-on practice still of being in the code and writing the code and also being a founder and you've being quite close to, I would imagine, to the product feedback that comes in on Savio that would give you a unique perspective for adding value to product managers that may not be quite as connected or close to both the engineering and the customer.
Kareem Mayan:
It's a tricky mean, it's a great spot to be in if you have the technical background. A lot of folks don't, like when I coach, I don't do a lot of coaching anymore, but historically when I've coached PMs who are not technical, I say, you know what, that's fine. You have a compatriot on the dev side, you should have an engineering manager to work with to help you sort of shepherd and manage those folks. So your job should really be about deeply understanding the customer better than anybody else and the whole suite of things that go with that. Getting on the horn directly with them, watching Phil story, working with your UX and research departments, reading all the incoming support tickets and sales tickets and feedback from sales. So if you can't inhabit the nice ven overlap of technical and customer focused, then just the advice that I give is always just do what you do, what you can, do, what you're good at. And if you don't like talking to customers when you're in product management, you're probably in the wrong job. So you should be very good at talking to customers.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, I imagine that's a cold comfort to a few personalities. However, a product does tend to, from my exposure to PMs, they do tend to lean towards wanting to spend time with customers sometimes to the chagrin of the UX researchers who feel a bit of patch protection coming into that picture. I just wanna come back to something that you mentioned very briefly, which was your time at ALS Therapy Development Institute. Now that was your first job as far as I understand, after the internship that you did at Back Web, that's a very specific, and at least outwardly projects, quite a purpose-driven choice to work at a place such as that. Is that the case? Was that the case? Was there a reason for you wanting to work there?
Kareem Mayan:
So it was sort of threefold. I had, after back web, I worked at a web dev shop in Montreal where McGill is for a summer. And then the guy who ran that had gone down to Boston to work for als T D I. And when I graduated he called me up and said, Hey, are you interested in coming down and working here? And so three things, there was one, it was in Boston, which I didn't have any particular love for Boston in general, but it was an adventure and it was in the US and sure why not. One was, it was working on with a guy that I had worked with before and that I worked fairly well with. I had a long leash. And Rick, he really encouraged learning, which is great. And then one was as you sort of alluded to the c e o of the company his name's Jamie Haywood or was we started with Jamie Haywood.
He started it because his brother Steven was diagnosed with als, his, I wanna say late twenties. And his doctor said, make a will get your affairs in order. You have three to five years to live and als, for those who don't know or otherwise knows, Lou Gere's disease is pretty horrific because your mind stays perfectly fine, but your body deteriorates. It's a neurodegenerative disorder. And big pharma doesn't spend, let's just say pharma doesn't spend big, pharma has a connotation. Pharma doesn't spend a lot of money on drug discovery and development because it's too small. It's called an orphan disease. It's too small to justify any kind of investment in it. And so Jamie started this nonprofit in order to find stuff to help his brother and other people like his brother. And so when I went down on the recruiting trip, Jamie and I went out to dinner and he said, I have [laugh] one line, I still remember 20 plus years later, he says something, have a good buddy who runs an air, an HVAC company installing air conditionings and air conditioners and heaters and he's worth millions and millions of dollars.
And he goes to parties, he says, people say, oh, what do you do? He says, I run an HVAC company. And they're like, their eyes glaze over. And he's like, when I go to company, when I go to parties, what do you do? I start this nonprofit to help save my brother's life and people like him and people're like, oh that's interesting. And so he said, Kareem, you've got a choice in life as you consider your professional journey. Do you wanna run an HVAC company or do you wanna do something more meaningful? And I gotta tell you Brendan, it was, it's the most meaningful job I I've had to this day. I would be, you're so disconnected sometimes typing on the keyboard, working with scientists, analyze data, writing code, and then somebody comes in who's in a wheelchair and their family comes in with 'em and they're literally in tears thanking you, a 25 year old, dumb dumb from Toronto in front of a computer saying, thank you for doing what you're doing. And I'm like, it just connected the fingers on the keyboard with the bigger picture that you're actually helping make somebody's life better, potentially extend it and hopefully one day find a cure for it.
Brendan Jarvis:
That feeling of meaning and that connection of what you're doing on the keyboard to having real world impact to a huge degree in someone's life, this is someone's health the health of their loved ones. Is that something that you miss?
Kareem Mayan:
Are you implying that the work that I'm doing doesn't have a larger meaning or a larger impact at that scale? You're right. I mean you're right. I'm just being snarky.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perhaps that direct thing was unfair.
Kareem Mayan:
No, no, it's a totally fair question. I actually think it's a great question. I think that the way that you get meaning or derive meaning from the things that your daily activities, your activities in life changes over time. I was 25, I didn't really know much at all. I still know not a lot, but I know a little bit more and I've lost a parent. I have two little girls who are wonderful. I have a wife who's fantastic. And so I think the way that I derive meaning, I really try not to derive meaning from work anymore because I feel like work is perilous and changes over time or to do that as perilous because work changes over time. I mean, in a perfect world it would be wonderful to have that kind of, to have those experiences and have people say things that so deeply resonate about the work that I'm doing. But I also get that meaning from other places as well. And it's a big piece of what I care about in life is making sure that there is a reason I'm doing the things, that I'm enjoying them for the right reasons. So I have that sort of bank account feels full, it feels overflowing. I'm grateful that I feel like I have good reasons to get up in the morning and that I'm contributing positively.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I was asking that question because I was listening to something the other day where the person that was speaking was recounting a time in their career where they were really busy at work building their career and they also had young children at home and they were telling the story of how when they went for walks, they needed to know how long they were going to be away for the walk and when they were going to be back because everything was planned out and focused around how efficiently they could get through things while they were on that climb up the mountain and the feeling of loss that they experienced as a result of not paying attention to their children growing up and smelling the roses along the way. And while that might seem like a strange segue from what you were recounting there with ALS and the feeling of reward that you got from that was, I suppose it was scratching an itch with me that I've been wondering lately about me and my career and just exactly that level of depth and maybe pressing so hard St I've started to miss out a little bit more than I would like on my son Teddy and his childhood.
And so I'm in this quite reflective mood at the moment of how do I reorganize what is valuable and what is meaningful and in what order do I need to really focus and put my attention in? And you strike me as someone that has managed to do this, at least from what I can see from the outside in. And it's something that seems to have been a focus for you over, well the last sort of 15, 20 years. And I remember reading about you in particular and you had read a book by Tim Ferris called The Four Hour Work Week, I think back in 2007. And you were at this interesting point in your career where you'd, you'd been working at Fox, you've got this director level role you just left that to start edgy fire. And I think I mentioned in your introduction that the sort of fire for edgy fire started to fade and you made a decision and it seemed to me at least to be quite a fundamental decision to leave that company and do what you did. What was the thing that wasn't quite sitting right for you in terms of how you were feeling about your effort and energy that you were putting into Edge Offi and where you wanted to be or where you wanted to go next?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, that's a great question. Nobody's asked me that before in sort of a professional context. So the real story is that my fiance and I broke up seven years. We were in LA together and my business partner at the Times, a fantastic guy actually just did he's starting another company and just did a reference call for one of the guys he's looking to work with yesterday. So we're still very much in touch. He asked me a few months after my fiance and I had broken up, I'm not sure that the company's getting sort of the level of energy that it needs from you, I think might be a good move for us to part ways. And I had just told a friend that morning who'd asked me, what would it feel like to leave the company? And I said, it honestly would probably feel like a relief.
And so three hours later I'm having this conversation, my co-founder says that to me and I'm like, how on earth could I say no to this? I mean this is a golden opportunity. It just felt right. And so after I left LA, I had always planned to, so after I left ESPN in Connecticut, I had always plan. I wanted to travel the world and then I got a great opportunity to work for Fox. I'd left Fox to start edgy fire. And so I'd made a promise to myself, after you leave LA it's time to travel. And this was independent of breaking up with of any breakups. And so it was a great opportunity because I had the means, I had no significant other, I had no professional responsibilities. And so it was a great opportunity to just go and be a digital nomad for a little while.
Brendan Jarvis:
I heard you being interviewed around about this time that I think you were a digital nomad at the time and you were challenged by the interviewer about your decision to leave and you didn't go into probably because it was still quite raw. I'm imagining you didn't disclose what you just disclosed there around breaking up with your fiance. But the interviewer challenged you about the decision to leave and whether or not that if you'd stayed, you could have pressed on through the time that wasn't fun and gotten to a different or a better outcome. And what you said was really quite remarkable. And I wanted to ask you about it and I'll quote you now. You said it depends on what the goal is, what you're trying to accomplish. The business that I'm working on, the businesses I'm working, working on aren't businesses that are going to be billion dollar companies. They may not even be million dollar companies. They probably won't, but that's okay for me right now. It depends on what your idea of success is. So thinking about success, and this is an archetypal view of a founder and money, you know are a founder, you're still a founder, you've founded several companies. If success isn't about the money, what is it about?
Kareem Mayan:
I think if you look at people who are successful financially, and I've had conversations with many, there's sort of a period for many of them, not all of them, where they go and enjoy life, they buy a boat, buy a nice car, buy a vacation house, travel first class, et cetera, et cetera. But after that they gotta still do something with their life. And you could live a life of leisure, but they've sort of earned their freedom to control their time, their energy and their attention, where they deploy that, where they spend that to me that's what that's about. I don't want to have to hit a home run or win the lottery or the entrepreneurial lottery in order to do that. And so in our pre-interview Brendan, we were talking about how I went to the sauna today because I was really sore from playing tennis in the last couple days and it relaxes me and scrape gives me time to check out and be away from a screen.
And so to be able to do that, which is such a tiny luxury, anybody could do that pretty much who's got a white collar job. To me I consider that to be the goal. How do I spend my time? Who do people do I have to ask for permission about how I'm going to choose to spend the 24 hours a day, seven days a week that I've got. Life is so short and I think back to your example about being efficient on your walks to get all of the stuff you want to get done. My dad passed away a few years ago and you take nothing with you [laugh], like all you leave behind are the memories of you in the people's heads who are still alive. We're still around after you go that to me, that event obviously was impactful, losing a parent, but it sort of makes you reconsider what is the goal, what am I trying to accomplish here? And sort of financially it's to earn your time. But I think that sort of Tim Ferris model, you can earn your time and freedom and energy without hitting a home run. If you like the work that you do, which I very much do, you can make a good living and make a good life, have happy customers, happy clients, and still be able to go to the sauna for an hour on a Tuesday afternoon.
Brendan Jarvis:
This notion of, I suppose it's a lifestyle design, but it's actually more than that. I mean we're reaching into the depths of psyche here in terms of how we see ourselves and what constitutes being a success. And of course we're bombarded with messages in mainstream media and also on social media as to what that looks like for other people. Supposedly something that I've thought about a lot as well recently. And I remember watching a talk, and I'll have to put the reference in the show notes cause I can't quite remember, but this question of how much is enough came up and I'm not sure I'd be interested to see if this has come up for you as well, but this question is not a question that very many people appear to ask themselves. So if you never put enough a bounds on what enough is, then you'll, you'll always continue to strive for more. And that sort of feeds into that workaholism that is sort of inherent in busy founders and work for people that work in the spaces of which we occupy. Is that a question? How much is enough that you have purposefully sat down and thought about or if you framed your freedom in terms of going to the sauna and what it takes for you to get to that point in a different way?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, I don't really think about how much is enough. I mean, I know that what I have is enough, my dad, so my dad, so a little more context. My dad grew up in India, he came to Canada in the late sixties when he was, I don't know, mid thirties probably. And we grew up my sister and I hearing about don't waste things. There's kids in India who have nothing and I feel like this is probably a common trope, but he had the firsthand experience to back it up. And when you travel you realize how much you have. If you are earning $50,000 a year in the west, you actually are wealthier than some ungodly percentage of people around the world. You're in the 95th percentile of earners, something insane. Don't quote me on that, but it's something insane. And I really try and staff social media because we're comparison human beings or comparison machines and social media is where people generally post the best version of themselves.
And so you compare all your crappy days and with the best polished version of other people's selves. And so that just doesn't do good for me or really most people. And so I don't really focus on how much is enough. I just focus on enjoying each day, enjoying the time that I've got here, trying to make customers and clients happy, doing my best as a dad and a husband and a friend and a son and a brother. But yeah, it's interesting. I probably should ask myself that question. I think it's probably a good exercise to do so, but my dad really sorta rammed at home that there are kids and families who really don't have anything. And I've been to India a couple of times and it's unfortunately true there and in other places closer to home.
Brendan Jarvis:
You mentioned your dad passing and you also mentioned just how short life is. What have you changed in your life since your dad passed?
Kareem Mayan:
That's a great question. I definitely have more of an appreciation for the, so my daughters are eight and five now. When he passed they were four and one, four and four and one and a half. So I definitely have more of an appreciation for as great as it can be and as challenging as it can be, the early stage parenting and really knowing that my business partner said this to me, he's got a couple of kids who are older and he said, my son is, I think he's 13 or 14 now. He said he's not a kid anymore, he's not a baby baby, he's not going to be that cute little boy that he once was and that's never coming back. He's only going one direction that's older and wiser. And so that really stuck with me to really try and enjoy the time with my kids.
I think financially or financial goals, financial intentions is probably the right term. I really wanted us to be comfortable as a family and we are there now and barring any egregious health concerns, we will continue to be there. And so when my dad passed, it sort of shifted my focus from earning more to let's make sure we're comfortable and set up and you can spend some of that time on what it is you want to do. If you've earned your freedom so to speak, you can choose not to earn and you can choose to spend time with your young children while they still wanna spend time with you. So I mean, I said those are sort of two things that I've changed since 2018 when my dad passed.
Brendan Jarvis:
The impermanence of it all really does bring into focus what matters most. And you know, talking about your friend and his son being 13 and you wanting to invest more into your girls growing up and trading off that time you could spend earning extra to the time you could spend experience in the world with people that are going to grow and change and leave and travel and not be there. That's something also that I've been keenly aware of with Teddy and I can't help but who's my son. I can't help but wonder when the day will come when he doesn't want me to cuddle and kiss him. And it's quite a day that I know will come cuz we all have to fly the coop and get outside of our parents' sort of domain. But that for me is that focus. That's the thing that I keep coming back to and why I'm actively like you making decisions now more around optimizing for time spent with loved ones as opposed to time spent working. So thank you for sharing about your dad. It's really,
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, for sure. Brendan, how old is Teddy?
Brendan Jarvis:
He is four, just turned four, so Oh, got a few years yet.
Kareem Mayan:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Brendan Jarvis:
I just wanna come to this go deeper into actually this notion of how we spend our time and something that you said know coming on 12 years ago now you in a second, which I feel is interesting still to go into and potentially still relevant. And I'm interesting to see how your perspective at if at all has shifted. And that is the thing that you said was, I don't subscribe to the notion that you need to work 60 or 70 hour weeks a week over week over week. I think you burn out. I don't think it's productive, I don't think it's sustainable. I think it's actually a pretty ridiculous way to live your life. So like I said, that was 12 years ago. So this is a younger version of Kareem and now we're in 2022. So this was back in 2010 or thereabouts. How successful, given how addictive work can be, how successful have you been at maintaining that boundary and avoiding burnout in the 12 years since you said
Kareem Mayan:
That? I'd say vary if the definition of success is not working 60 or 70 hour weeks, I really try and max out at 35 to 40. I mean find, I'm 45 and so I definitely had more horsepower, more bandwidth when I was younger, but I'm not sure that the work was as productive. It's sort of that apocryphal story about the foreman who retires from the factory after 25 years and the factory stops working and they call him in desperation and he walks around and puts a marks an X with a piece of chalk by hole and says, put a bolt there and he sends him an invoice for a million dollars and the two line items were bolt $1 knowing where to put the bolt, $999,000, you know, mature. You sort of know where to spend effort. So anyways, I digress. Really try and focus on, I have less horsepower as somebody who's 45, I feel like I'm more efficient at getting stuff done, getting the right stuff done, getting the important stuff done that's going to move the ball forward and whatever business task I'm trying to accomplish.
But it's funny, I haven't listened to those interviews I think ever the mixer G ones and it's funny to hear that as you're quoting me. To me I'm like it's still actually pretty on point. I do think it's a ridiculous way to live. You can live well if you're strategic and smart about implementation, you can live quite well on. I've seen people do very well on 15 to 20 hours a week and do what they wanna do with the rest of the time, whether that's work more or whether that's fish or travel or spend out with kids or whatever. So long-winded way of saying, yeah, I think I've been pretty successful at that approach and whether other people consider it successful, sort of a different question, but for me, yeah, it's worked out.
Brendan Jarvis:
So let's talk about digital nomad being a digital nomad. You traveled the world and I think I mentioned in your intro you ended up going to all seven continents, so it was quite a wide ranging journey that you went on. How old were you when you left to do that and how long were you away for?
Kareem Mayan:
So I left in oh eight, so I was 31 and I was back in 2010. So 33, so a good two years.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I think I recall reading that you did the entire trip on less than 30,000 US dollars.
Kareem Mayan:
That's certainly possible. It was a long time ago. I mean I had the advantage of earning U S D and I chose on purpose countries that were not expensive to live in at the time, but had decently high qualities of life. So Argentina was great. I was in Budapest for four months and Budapest wasn't on the year, it was on the Foreign, so your dollars went very, very far. And it's still an eastern European country that was fairly westernized. So yeah, I don't recall the exact number, but it's definitely doable. I think probably even more so these days with airline travel awards and such. I think you could really, that that's a big that in housing were the two big costs. And so if you can reduce one of those pretty low, you can I think go pretty far even in 2022.
Brendan Jarvis:
And is it true that you only set out with a backpack and a laptop?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, yeah, I, I'm a big fan of experimenting with real life changes before committing. And so I did a three month trip to Buenos areas to visit my buddy Noah and I had a big bag and I then decided to ditch that big bag and bring just a carryon bag and reduce everything to, if it didn't fit in there it went. And so I ditched my 12 books and bought a Kindle because Kindle's a research transport, I dunno, I think three boxers and two t-shirts and I just shower and wash one of 'em every day [laugh] in the shower with me. Yeah, I mean it was very actually nice minimalist lifestyles. It was very refreshing. Yeah, I look back on that fondly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you went to, as far as I understand, Antarctica, what was that the most wild place you went to? What stands out from your travelers, the most wild, wild experience that you had?
Kareem Mayan:
It was a great question. Mean definitely from a nature perspective it was incredibly rugged. I mean one of the reasons on the expedition down there, it's about a day and a half to cross the water from, it's called the Drake passage from Argentina to Antarctica, having some chats with the other 80 guests on the boat. And we were like, there's probably been less than a million people who've ever set foot on the place that we are going to set foot. That's pretty insane. So yeah, I mean pen, excuse me, penguins everywhere, seals crazy Arctic wildlife, nothing mane except for leopard seals and then only really by accident. So generally pretty safe, no polar bears or wolves or anything like that. But nobody around, I mean we visited the bases and they were very happy to see us. We were one of the first boats of the season, so it was November when we went down, which is Arctic or Antarctic summer, just late spring, early summer. And some of these people hadn't seen anybody except for the we visited a British base outpost. There were three people in a generously two room cabin and one of the rooms was a gift shop and their job was to count penguins. That's what they did all Antarctic winter. And so when a boat of 90 people and 30 or 40 Russian crews show up, they're like, hooray, [laugh] real people. So it was nice place to visit, but I wouldn't wanna live there.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, you said there were three of them, there were probably seven of them when they first started the season
Kareem Mayan:
That they had to eat the other four.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, yeah, I can imagine. What stood out from you from their reactions? Just how excited were they to see you? How did that show up?
Kareem Mayan:
We visited another base that was I wanna say it was a Russian research base and they had a bar where they home brewed vodka. And after the brief tour in stilted English, understandably stilted English, they were like, let's go have a drink. And so it was just, let's just socialize with the other Russian crew and the 80 guests, most of whom I don't think spoke any Russian at all. But it was just this sort of, hallelujah, there's other humans here, there's human connection, there's mar boats coming, some of us can go to their boat and take a proper shower and provision up. And so it was just an need for human connection and variety that they were exhibiting very understandably so. It was just fun. I mean it's a fun, really interesting, unusual experience. Never experienced anything like that before.
Brendan Jarvis:
Now you mentioned being somewhere where fewer than a million people have likely been, and from what I gather, mainly from David Edinburgh documentaries, Antarctica is fairly barren and fairly remote. There's some wildlife, but other than that, not a lot going on apart from maybe some bad weather. What stands out to you? What's the lasting impression or memory that you have of Antarctica aside from that need? From human connection, from the people that have been there for so long without seeing new friendly faces?
Kareem Mayan:
There's a small group of us that opted into kayaking. So the way that the trip was structured was you'd make land and you, you'd be moored off of land and you'd hop into a huge zodiac and go to land. Instead of doing that, if you were in the kayaking group, you could opt to kayak. So we kayaked with our tour guides to the middle of nowhere. I don't know, it's probably a dozen of us. And one of the, we were, gosh, I want to say three kilometers, two kilometers away from a huge, huge glacier that you could hear the creaking and cracking across the water. And he said one of the guys said, you know what, I've only, I've done this before, but it rarely works but we should try it if we all yell. I don't know if this is actually true what he was feeding us, but he said, if we all yell on occasion, that will cause the piece of ice to fall off the glacier and it's really kind of cool to see and you're far enough away for it to be safe.
We tried it out and sure enough, a huge, I mean what looked like a huge, from that far away piece of ice falls off the glacier and crashes into the water and he's like, now we wait. And you could feel the wake, I guess it's wake, I don't know what you'd call it, you feel the sort of wave that came from the ice and he's like, if we had been under that, we would be done [laugh], we would be squashed and drowned and probably leopard sealed dinner. But that always stands out to me because it was a beautiful sunny day, which is extremely rare. There it was about zero degrees Celsius so it wasn't too cold at all and you're off in the middle of frigging nowhere on this planet and experiencing this really unusual sort of nature event where you're still sort of participating in it, potentially causing it. But it was just, you're so remote, you're so far from everything on this beautiful day in a boat on the water or in the water. Yeah, it's one of my lasting memories of the trip for sure.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds like a magnificent thing to partake in and also just to see, and you mentioned the sound and how you could hear the cracking of the glacier now, the sound in places, remote Antarctica care is something that I have heard of just how alone you are with the environment. I remember someone who'd been to Antarctica telling me that when you are sleeping and cuz doesn't get dark there all the time, you can hear every step on the snow outside and it's like, it's right there in your head so loud. And just that sense of, I suppose magnificence of the environment of being somewhere where so few humans have been and all the noise that we have in our cities and all the other things, our devices just doesn't seem to follow you to that kind of place.
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, it gives you some perspective because I is, oh, I think it's oh eight or oh nine, devices weren't as ubiquitous as they are today. The iPhone was out, but I'm not sure the app store had been launched yet. I had an old Nokia tiny little phone. Or actually I think at that point I had the windows phone is also, it just gives you a sense of perspective. There's just so few people here. The planet is so big and so raw and so rugged in certain places that it puts you in your place. If everybody were to disappear and the boat was to disappear and you're left there by yourself, it wouldn't last very long. We build up these artifices to protect ourselves from the outside world, which I think is good and healthy, but truly, if you're man or person versus nature, you're probably going to end up on the wrong side of it more often than you'd like.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sounds like you've developed a healthy respect for nature as a result of this travel [laugh]. True. There's some sort of romantic notion of this isn't there, of being a digital nomad of throwing caution to the wind and setting off on an adventure like this. And you've said something about this, which I'll quote you again now, you said it's the ability to say where do I want to live and if a better opportunity comes up, there's nothing holding me down to a specific location. So that's the romantic nature of this type of adventure that you went on. What were some of the less romantic aspects of living this life?
Kareem Mayan:
I mean paying the bills, I wasn't traveling on savings. I traveled on, I had a consulting gig and the edgy fire, which we started in oh seven was remote from day one. So I've always, and always for the last 14, 14, 15 years now I've operated that way. And so having a gig that a long time ago was comfortable with its team working that way was super important. But you've got the daily realities of living, I need to do my laundry and I'm living in a place where I don't speak the language and it's possible the laundromat, cuz I don't have laundry in my building will, they'll speak Hungarian and we'll have to figure it out how it's going to cost, when am I going to pick it up? Don't muck up these wool shirts, don't put them in the dryer cuz they'll come out dull size. But it sort of depends on what you envision as digital nomad. To me it was always about working while I was living elsewhere and it wasn't so much hopping around five days here, five days there it was finding a home base for four or five months, six months, and then maybe taking weekend trips. But your day-to-day was normal, you're just living in a different city and experiencing a different city culture, language, people, food, et cetera.
Brendan Jarvis:
Why did you come home?
Kareem Mayan:
I came home for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. I went to the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, which were amazing and I wanted to experience that in my home country. So I was actually in New Zealand and ended up coming back to Vancouver for that. Did a couple more, Vancouver became home base. My girlfriend who became my wife was from there. We did a couple of other trips. We were in New York for four or five months, we did a couple of other extended tripped as well. But since then, since late 2009, early 2010, Vancouver was the home base and then kids get into the picture and things just become more complicated. And frankly, my desire to travel right now, even pre Covid is getting back up there post covid. But even pre Covid I was like, ah, I've got two kids there, five and three traveling right now is just not fun. So this is just a phase and the next step will be showing them the world and showing them places that I like and cities that I like and experiencing things that I take for granted through their eyes. So that will be the next thing when they get of edge
Brendan Jarvis:
And what a fun time that will be. When you think back about your travels and you think back about who you were before you left and who you were when you came home, how would you describe that shift if there was any?
Kareem Mayan:
Boy, that's a tough one man, because it was so long ago. There was definitely a sense of doing things that I thought were difficult, putting myself out there. So here's example. So I never used to, I always thought eating alone or going to movies alone was not weird, but I was like, Ugh, that just feels really uncomfortable. No,
Brendan Jarvis:
You were not an only child then. I've done a plan of that being an only child.
Kareem Mayan:
Well, you learned the lesson much earlier than I did, much younger than I did, but I remember, you know, have to eat alone. I was in India and I remember walking to a restaurant and bringing my Kindle along and chatting with some random kid who just came up to me and started chatting and wanted to practice English and it was great. But I remember coming back to Vancouver the next morning going out for breakfast by myself to a diner and sitting there and being like, huh, I wouldn't have done this two years ago. And it's such a small, silly thing and I really enjoy it now. But that's was being more comfortable with things that were once uncomfortable and now in the grand scheme of things were so trivial. So I mean that was definitely, I just think you challenge yourself and to when you travel, if you want this experience, for me it was important to create that. Part of the experience was to just do things that made myself uncomfortable, participate more in life and be less of an observer. That was something that I always sort of tend to stand back and watch things and learn things, learn the system and then jump in. But I did a little more jumping in earlier on, which made myself uncomfortable, but was great. Yeah, I don't know. It's a really good question. I may think back on that one, reflect on that one a little bit more. Never really asked myself that one
Brendan Jarvis:
Before. You described it at the time while you were traveling as a need to challenge the assumptions that you'd grown up with as a person growing up in North America. And what were the assumptions you felt the need to challenge?
Kareem Mayan:
A lot of it was around work. So we just come off of Edge Fire and the expectation was you're going to work super hard and 60, 70 hour weeks which we did to run through walls. But sort of stepping back, you have to ask yourself, why were you doing that? Well, you had a limited runway for the money you'd raised and then you had to raise more and had to raise more and had to raise more. There's sort of this treadmill and if you look around at a lot of businesses that are not software based, there's a much more stable, sustainable path to growth and success that isn't always turbocharged by needing more VC money or more investment. And so also just I'd run or started one company and got some degree of moderate success. And so it was like, well, do I really need a job?
When I left Fox to go to Edgy Fire, we had raised, I wanna say two 50 of 500. We weren't guaranteed that we were going to raise the 500. I was making 137 grand at Fox and at Edgy Fire if we raised the subsequent two 50 to get ourselves up to 500, I think we paid ourselves 54 grand. And I was like, man, this seems like a crazy financial decision, but if [inaudible] completely blows up and I wanna go back to Fox in a year, will I be able to? And I was like, yeah, of course I'll be way more valuable. Having had a year of really trying to make it work as a founder and the money is just an investment in accelerating that learning curve. So well,
Brendan Jarvis:
Let's shift gears now and talk about your consulting pr. What I'm framing is your consulting practice trial to paid. It focuses specifically on helping growing product led SAS startups to increase their trial to pay conversion. So it's about the dollars. How do we get more of our people that have taken out trials to become paying customers? So how do we do that? Why did you decide to focus on such a specific thing?
Kareem Mayan:
Early in my career, I ran across a company called Adaptive Path. They were an early design firm based outta San Francisco. I was at ESPN at the time and I ended up hiring an analog of theirs called Creative Good. They're on the east coast and ESPN was on the east coast to do some workforce us and they threw the power of effectively usability tests. They sort of uncovered some insanely profitable insights around conversion. I was working on ESPN's fantasy football product. People would sign up, they'd get to a conversion page and the conversion page gave them no reason, no good reason to convert. The reason was something like if you convert, you'll have a paid league. Well what does a paid league get me? Is do I want that? How much does it cost? So always, this was 2000, 2003, I did a little bit of work for Creative Good and learned their methodology and ran a bunch of tests and saw how powerful it was.
And sort of fast forward to when I really honed in on trial to paid the middle of last year, I try to decide what to focus on. I sort of made a list. I had 13 different services people had paid me for product coaching, being a line pm product strategy, executive coaching around building good software, building MVPs, trial to pay conversion. And I knew that I wanted to work with product led SaaS cause I know it, I've been in it for over a decade and there's really five levers, right? There's acquisition. I wouldn't say that's a weakness, but it's not a strength. There's activation which is getting people to sign up for a trial. There's conversion, which is getting people to pay, then there's retention, getting people to stay, and then revenue, getting people to pay or pay more. I think there's referral in there too.
I'm probably screwing up the pirate metrics. Apologies Dave McClure. But the conversion piece was really, I wanted something that's directly correct directly tied to revenue, something that had a lot of experience in something I enjoyed and something that I was good at. And I'd done a lot of UX work around improving onboarding, improving customer experience, and I'd developed a little framework that I had used with good success on companies of my own and with a few clients before. And so just all the pieces. And I ended up [laugh] great validation. I was working with a coach named Kai Davis who's awesome. And we rewrote the website, this is a quick and dirty version put it up within a week. I had a cold inbound lead who found me via Google and a week later he'd paid my entire fee upfront. And I was like, that is amazing validation, amazing positive reinforcement for taking this risk around nicheing down your consulting practice. And so from there it was off to the races. So it worked on a lot of levels beforehand. And then that real positive reinforcement and a happy, my first sort of happy client after I'd niche down was just kept me going, gave me the feedback that I was going in the right direction.
Brendan Jarvis:
You talked about there being a perceived risk around kneeing, down right, around not doing the dozen other things that people have paid you to do over time. And that validation of that first paying customer paying you upfront, that must have felt like what must have felt really good, right? Like you said, it was really nice validation for it. Has it paved the way for you to go deeper into the specialization, realizing that you're not necessarily, you're giving up some things, but you are also gaining others. How has this changed your perspective on what it is that you do in a consulting capacity?
Kareem Mayan:
I was terrified of saying no to paying clients. And so the reinforcement really, really helped. There's a guy named Jonathan Stark who helps, his whole thing is hourly billing his nuts. And so I joined, read a couple of his eBooks and he has a great Slack community with other sort of boutique freelancers and he has some sort of ideas and approaches on Nicheing down and why it's profitable. And I, I'd seen it before with friends and with other businesses that I had run. And so I was like, what am I really risking here? It's just changing a website and if it goes nowhere, it goes nowhere. I can always zoom out to something else or dive into something else. But my initial approach after meshing down was get a handful of good case studies, testimonials under my belt. If the gigs go well talk to them about who else they were evaluating and what they're pricing, what those other options pricing was like.
And so just getting feedback, candid feedback from the market is super useful. How did you find me? Who else were you considering? What did they charge? Why'd you pick me over them? And so that information is super valuable when it comes to sort of polishing the website, polishing the service offerings, polishing the pricing and packaging, polishing the positioning, how you talk about it. So hasn't necessarily allowed me to go deeper, but it's definitely allowed me to, I think, be more credible and frankly be provide better service to my clients. Cause I understand them a lot better now that I've had dozens of conversations and probably half a dozen of a dozen clients to do this specific work on over the last year, year and change
Brendan Jarvis:
You've, you've chosen the specific area of product helping people, which it seems to me to have quite a large role in terms of their onboarding, how they're structuring that journey and supporting people through that journey to become then a paying customer given that we're in 2022. And you've been doing this, you said now for over a decade, right? You've got some significant experience in this space. Are you surprised that there's still a market opportunity for you to provide services to solve this specific problem?
Kareem Mayan:
I mean, yes and no. So yes, because creative good steeped me in sort of this customer first thinking for two decades, and I've seen how powerful it can be. And it's blindingly obvious to me that when you're solving a business problem, start with a customer. No, because onboarding specifically is usually cross-disciplinary and spans could be marketing, there's an element of product marketing, it's definitely product. There's some customer success in there. And so it's hard to get everybody on the set. A lot of what I do is just getting the teams on the same page in a room and talking about who is your customer? What is their desired outcome? What is an experience in your product look like for that segment of customers? How many segments of customers do you have? Which ones are most important to the business? So getting all that information on the same page, and so having a consultant do that really helps carve time out of people's busy schedules to get in the same room and talk about that.
And then there's an element of UX specialty or that you need to know product, it helps to be technically minded because you can think in, when you're sketching out wire frames, you can think in terms of implementation cost, rough implementation cost. And so if you have two versions, you'd probably pick the cheap one if you're going to get where you need to be. And so it's a bit tricky in that you and a lot of teams just don't have the time bandwidth or skill in one person or in people who are going to work on this problem. So I was frankly surprised just doing Googling for sass, onboarding consultant, SaaS onboarding audit. There are very few options out there is when I decide to niche down hard last year and I was like, this is weird because every SaaS company needs this. And if there's no, when I see competitors, I think opportunity, oh, the market is big enough to sustain a bunch of people who are doing this. But I didn't see any or didn't see many and I was like, gosh, this is not good. This makes it riskier.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, but I'm either onto big here or I'm onto nothing at all.
Kareem Mayan:
Exactly, exactly right. Exactly right. But I also reminded myself that I've been doing product-led SaaS for over a decade, and so this has been this way of seeing the world is normal. I think this is maybe not normal for a lot of folks too. So
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about the need to get people on the same page to achieve that clarity across the different divisions or aspects of the company that are working on delivering the product and serving the customer. Now, something that you've said, and I'll paraphrase now that you found has helped companies to do this, is to treat onboarding. It's a feature so they can align the experience that customers expect today and not what they wanted six months ago so they can figure out what it is that the customer needs in the current moment. So how do you find out what that is? How do you find out what the outcomes are that the customer is actually seeking from the product at that very specific stage of their relationship with the company or the product that they're using?
Kareem Mayan:
You ask them. It's very simple. So I like getting very tactical Brendan. So literally the first thing when you sign up for my SaaS Savio, we ask you why did you sign up today? And right now we're just collecting that information. So we're trying to better understand who our customers are and what their desired outcome looks like. Tomorrow we can customize your onboarding. If you're looking to set up a voting board, you go down the voting board path. If you're looking to track product feedback that gets sent to you in Zendesk, you go down the Connect Zendesk path. So asking them is in the app is the easiest way to do it if you're product led we also endeavor to get into as many conversations via email or ideally via Zoom as we can. I mean, those are really the two big things. And there's a lot of tea leaf reading that comes once you get all of this qualitative feedback.
The tricky part in my experience is the analysis, but most folks don't ask that I work with, and it's sort of counterintuitive. We only sort of stumbled on this idea in the last year or two At Savio. We like, why don't we just ask [laugh] like what is it you want right now? And then can we give you that? Yeah, it it's step one. Obviously there's more to it, but the step one is just getting that qualitative feedback, getting into conversations, parsing, analyzing, sitting and thinking about all the responses. And then once you understand who your customer is and what they want, then you can construct a flow in your app to give them what they're looking for. Ostensibly, and this is why I say treat it like a feature, it's because you're going to launch it and you're going to have to iterate on it. It's not going to be right or it will be wrong, or the market will change or your customers will change. You'll go up market their needs will change. You'll support a new integration. So treating it like a feature to me means launching it and then paying attention to it and then iterating on it.
Brendan Jarvis:
So let's speak to that then. Let's speak about things change over time and that's, this isn't just a one-off situation where you get some feedback, you design a flow and you're good to go forever and ever. How do you know, and it could be as you might just say, it's as simple as looking at your conversion rate, but how do you know whether or not you're actually meeting those needs or those outcomes that you've discovered by asking customers what it is that they're here to achieve?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, I mean, so there's two numbers that I recommend looking at. So one is conversion rate of the a hundred people who sign up, how many actually end up paying you. The second is, it depends on the business, but I'd say two or three month churn. So after two months, how many of those 15 people that have converted end up staying past that point? Because a lot of folks will throw down a credit card to ensure that they can throw down their company's credit card. It's not even their money to ensure that they can tease out the promise that your app provides them and verify that it will in fact give them their desired outcome. But it will probably take more than 14 days. So after a month or two, they may have realized, oh, this actually won't, and they will turn and go elsewhere. So those are the two numbers that I look at. I mean, I would also say depending on your volume, I would also look at full story or some sort of screen recording tool to understand where people stumble. I'd recommend using a site like user testing to run user tests to see where people stumble. I mean the whole other variety of ways, but they're unfortunately that are leading indicators. But those lagging indicators are churn, sorry, our conversion and say two or three month churn.
Brendan Jarvis:
What can you learn from your churn?
Kareem Mayan:
The most important thing to learn is why are people churning? So people churn after two or three months that the initial conversion experience is good, you're promising something, but somewhere between them paying you and them canceling two, three months later, the experience is falling over, they're not getting to their desired outcome or they don't believe they will get to their desired outcome if they keep putting in the time. So I mean, the biggest thing to figure out is why are people churning? Are they not turning on or using part of the app that would solve their problem? They don't know about it. Does your app lack something that they need you just to invest in building it? So the first thing would be, the first scenario would be we need to invest in support and success. This thing exists, but people don't know about it or they can't use it, can't figure it out. The second scenario, we need to invest in product and dev because they need to do this thing and we don't have it. So really all this stuff is so qualitative and I think the world has fallen in love with quant, but there's so much insight in the qual and the conversations that you can use to improve your product. And I really encourage folks to just get down and dirty with customers, get into conversations, do the unscalable stuff even at later stages because it, there's gold in those insights.
Brendan Jarvis:
You spoke about the challenge of synthesizing qualitative feedback and making sense of it. All right, well we've been capturing all these reasons why people sign off and the reasons why they're leaving, but what does it all mean and how do we use it to focus our efforts on the product and change the things that we need to change? Now, Savio, your current company, that's seems to me to be scratching at that at itch, how to help companies deal with the volume of that inbound feedback and then use that to prioritize the features or the changes that they're going to make to their products. And I heard you listen, I listened, sorry. I listened to you speak to Chad McAllister on the Product Mastery Now podcast. And we're going to get into, now we'll get into some territory around just the tricky parts of working in a collaborative environment where there's more than just a couple of founders putting something together.
You said one of the places where I see teams struggle when I embed is that people aren't clear on what the company is actually trying to accomplish. Once leadership identifies what the business goal is, it becomes a lot easier to narrow down the candidates of what your features may be. Or in this case, it could be what you're going to change in your onboarding flow to increase conversion. It is incredibly frustrating for people to operate without a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve. So what's your advice for people on those teams who are currently sailing in a sea of ambiguity? Should they mutiny and join forces and get rid of the leadership and try and sort this out on their own? How do they actually grapple with what to do and what to change? If leadership isn't being clear about what the goal is?
Kareem Mayan:
I mean, my cynical advice is leave and find a place that where you get clear direction. It's tough when you're not piloting or captaining the ship, so to speak. It's tough to get direction if that person doesn't want to give it to you. And so lean on your boss. One thing we've seen a couple of folks at Savio do. So Savio typically we sell to customer success or support or product managers. And so we organize up your product feedback and product ultimately consumes it and uses it to decide what to build. But we have CS folks who will as sort of a Skunk Works project, sign up for Savio and say, when we get them on the phone or over email, they say things like we say to product all the time that we need features X, Y, and Z. Cuz we hear from customers all the time and product says, well give us data or we don't believe you, or these other strategic features are more important.
And so they use Savio as a way to basically build up the evidence to show to product to convince product that what they're saying is true. You don't have to do that in a product feedback scenario. You can do that in any scenario. If you believe, if you wanna stay in fight and you have the, I would say build a theory as to what you should be doing and then go gather the evidence and then go present it to somebody who can either make the decision to back your case or not, or to somebody who can influence the decision to back your case or not. And that would be the sort of stay in fight scenario. Advice that I would give to somebody is don't just sit there, just sit there, do something, use your brain that you're paid well to use and go formulate a theory and build a case. Make a decision, take some control over what it is, you're over your situation.
Brendan Jarvis:
I like that. Rather than just running straight for the door, put some effort in first and then see if you can change the status quo. And if you can't, then you can step back and reevaluate where you go to next. Exactly. We're touching on your framework here for prioritizing product feedback. The first part of it is actually just to get clear on what the goal is because that's super helpful in working out what you should and shouldn't be doing. The second step in the framework is to prioritize the product feedback based on the features that have been requested by your most important customers. Now hopefully I've done that justice and feel free to correct me if I haven't, but what makes a customer a most important customer? Is this simply based on their a r r or is there another way that you can evaluate importance in this respect? Yeah,
Kareem Mayan:
So it's really contextual because depending on what the business goal is, so if your business goal is win more deals, you may wanna look at reasons, feature reasons, product reasons why you are losing deals, and your most important customers would be actually not even customers. They would be lost deals. If you want to reduce churn, go look at product related reasons why customers churn. If you want to grow revenue, you know may or you're changing strategic direction and focusing on a new customer set, you may wanna look at your, I'll give you a concrete example. At Savio we sold to customer success initially cuz they had the most pressing pain, but ultimately product managers and product teams were the teams who they increasingly started coming to us and we solved a whole set of problems for cs, but there were a bunch of things we didn't do for product that were mainline scenarios for them.
So then when we strategically shifted direction and shifted our r and d efforts to focus on building for product, we said, who are our smart product customers today and what have they asked for? So it wasn't even about a R, but it was like, we want more of those kinds of customers, more of those kinds of product managers using Savio. So let's go build features that they've asked for. It could also be as simple as looking for the look at the most requested features or looking at your highest a r customers, or it really depends on the context of what happens in step one, what's the business goal?
Brendan Jarvis:
I wanna do this part of the conversation justice. And I can hear some people probably in the UX research community groaning about building what customers have asked for, but I know that there's more subtlety to what we are talking about here than we've currently gone into. The reason why they'll be groaning is the whole notion of just building what a customer's asked for seems very reactive and not very proactive in terms of understanding what it is that underlies the request itself. So how do you know what customers are asking you to build based on what you've been collecting is actually what you should be building for them, that it's actually going to solve the underlying needs that they're trying to address.
Kareem Mayan:
So I'm being a bit glib when I say build what customers are asking for, what I really mean is deeply understand the problem that underlies the request. That's your job in product or in research is to understand the problem before you hop to the solution space. And some scenarios customers know exactly what they want and it's right, that's the thing you should build, but in some scenarios they don't know it's your job to understand the problem. There's also a bit of a split that I've seen sophisticated organizations work on. They make this explicit, how much of our r and d budget do I want to invest in? One of three buckets, technical debt, strategic features that customers have not asked for and customer requested features. And so at any time during a prioritization cycle, it might be 50, 50 0, 33, 33, 33, a hundred zero zero, but really sort of digging into or making that explicit is quite helpful because from a prioritization perspective, it helps you really decide should we focus any of our budget at all on building customer across the futures or not.
Brendan Jarvis:
So those buckets, those categories, is this touching on what you're getting at in the third step of your framework, which is to prioritize further based on attributes that matter or is this something different? Is this more about what tier of customer, are they enterprise or are they on the s m E end of the scale or are there other attributes that you can further prioritize on?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, it's, it's mostly on that piece. So at the enterprise plan or by geography or by number of seats or really any other sort of deep dive into the customer attributes that you care about. Yeah, that's really more what I'm talking about in that third step.
Brendan Jarvis:
And step four is you've gotta determine your development budget and you've spoken about the need to make trade offs with engineering here about what gets done and also to what degree. So what does done look like, and you've summed this up as, and I'll quote you now, spend your devs wisely. This maybe is a bit of a juice question to follow up from that, but where does research and design feature at all in this picture? Yeah,
Kareem Mayan:
It's a great question. So it depends on the stage of the business. If you have research and design, then I prefer having them onboard earlier on in the process. I find them, anybody who's customer facing will have insights that are useful when it comes to prioritization. And at that point, I want the most brain power on the problem so that product can take all the inputs and make some decisions. But obviously when it comes down to the trade off process, hopefully at that point we've sketched out what the feature would look like at a high level if we don't have high-fi mocks. And so you're then making trade-offs around very specific things. If we build this feature this way, will it be more expensive than if we build it that way? Or better yet, hey Dev, you're a smart person, tell me how we can make this implementation this high-fi. Tell me how we can make this cheaper so we can get it out the door faster and learn sooner.
Brendan Jarvis:
And at this point of the five step framework, we're actually still in the theory space from my way of looking at it. And your fifth step is quite a critical one, which is for teams to actually choose to actually decide on what it is that they're going to build and then confirm what that is with other stakeholders who are impacted by those decisions. And basically you've gotta go out and consult with the other departments, the other leaders in the other departments that have an interest in what it is that you're doing. Is this where you get everyone together in the same room and just hash it out?
Kareem Mayan:
If you take that approach, my experience suggests that you'll be unsuccessful. The more successful approach that I have learned the hard way, unfortunately, is going and having one-on-ones with the head of sales, the head of cs, the head of any execs that need to be on board so that the in-person meeting is in a best case scenario, a rubber stamp from everybody because you've already had the difficult conversations, made the trade-offs, explained your trade-offs, possibly done some horse trading because there's reality and there's, there's practice. And the reality is that you've gotta, sometimes you have to horse trade and make decisions you don't wanna make because or build things you don't wanna build because you're not in charge in some situations. So the stakeholder piece is always tricky. Anything that involves people is messy, and this is the ultimate, how are we going to, we're sausage makers collectively. Some sell the sausage, some support the sausage, some make it, and every has an opinion on what kind of sausage and should it be rosemary timey or apple raspberry.
Brendan Jarvis:
So definitely rosemary time.
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, I I'm with you on that. So yeah, no, it's a tricky part of the process for sure.
Brendan Jarvis:
It sounds less product and more like politics, but more closely aligned to reality. Yeah, yeah,
Kareem Mayan:
I mean it really is. Anytime you have more than one person in a meeting, there's some degree of politics involved, unfortunately. But it doesn't have to be negative. It can also be positive.
Brendan Jarvis:
You talked about the meeting when you do get everyone together after you've done the one-on-ones should be a best case scenario where you just get the rubber stamp, you've made your trades, everyone's ed, their grievances, supposedly everyone's happy with the compromise before you get in the room. What do you do if someone throws a spanner in the works when you think you've got it all sewn up?
Kareem Mayan:
It's a great question. I think the answer really depends on what the nature of the spanner is and how much support it has in the room. The thing that I tend to fall back to is the customer evidence. You've got a list of product feedback from customers that support the business goal you're trying to accomplish, and you just show it. You say, look, we're building these five features because here's the feedback and here's the sort of high level stats on the feedback and that's going to support our business goals in this way. And if somebody disagrees, that's great. The discussion is good, but where's the feedback? Or sorry, where's the evidence? Here's the evidence that I've gathered. And it's great that you feel like we should be building X, Y, Z. It'd be great if you could show and explain, help us understand why that's a better course of action.
Not that this is necessarily the best, but if you wanna bring a new perspective to the table, let's have that discussion based on evidence rather than feeling. So, you know, gotta be a good politician to say that in a productive way that's not going to get you kicked out of the meeting or the company. But I find that it's very compelling, right? I've been in rooms where CEOs have said, look, I'm the ceo, we're going to build it that way. And I see the sort of disgruntlement on behalf of the team who have gathered the evidence and the CEO O saying, I'm using my c e o silver bullet to veto this. And you can do that as a C E O B. You can only do it so many times before your people are like, well, what am I doing here anyways? What's the point of all these activities? Hundred percent the evidence, it just doesn't make sense. So
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's a good way to kill your company culture and make everyone feel like they're just drones if you override people like that. So Kareem, we've spoken a lot today about what you do in terms of helping teams to prioritize what it is that they should be working on in their product. And the first half of our conversation, we were speaking about how we prioritize our lives and where we spend our finite amount of time, just that appreciation that through loss and some of the less comfortable and less happy sides of life can bring into focus. So thinking about this notion of prioritizing and focusing and just the beautiful shortness of this life that we have, what is one thing that you want the audience, and I know we're talking to product managers and UX designers, UX researchers, but we're all people, we're all human. What is one thing, whether it be personal or professional, that you want people to consider or contemplate to go and take a walk and think about as a result of your career and your experience and the stories that you've told today?
Kareem Mayan:
I think it's figure out what you want in life and why there's a default setting. I think for a lot of hard chargers, get the next promotion, get more money, get a bigger title, and that's great if that's what you want, but it's not great if that's what you're defaulting to without being considerate, without taking those actions. When you can figure out what it is you want out of life and what you wanna give back. There's a phrase, I dunno who said it, but show me your calendar and I'll tell you your priorities. And so when you've figured out what you want and why and it resonates, you can do your best to structure your life in a way so that you're going to be able to get that and give that by deploying your time and tension energy in ways to get there. So I say go take a long go do some forest bathing and think about what it is you want outta life and why is that important to you?
Brendan Jarvis:
Such an important couple of questions for people to think about and to answer, Kareem, this has been a hugely enjoyable conversation, especially for two sleep deprived people like we are [laugh]. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights and for putting up with a couple of rough starts there on some questions that we will no doubt edit out so people won't hear any of those. Thank you for doing that with me today.
Kareem Mayan:
Thanks Brendan. It's been a true pleasure and please keep up the great work.
Brendan Jarvis:
I really appreciate it and it's been a pleasure for me. Also, Kareem, if people want to keep up with the great things that you're doing, follow your journey at Savio and all the other things that you've been doing, what's the best way for them to do that?
Kareem Mayan:
Yeah, they can visit me trialtopaid.com if they need help with trial to paid conversion. If they're looking to overwhelmed by the product feedback that they're getting they can hit me up or visit Savio at savio.io or email me directly [email protected] and they can also just track me down on LinkedIn. The name's Kareem Mayan.
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. Thanks Kareem. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Kareem and all the great things that we've spoken about. If you enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great stories like this with world class leaders in UX, design and product management, don't forget to leave a review on the podcast. Those are very helpful, subscribe and also pass it along. If there's one person, just one person that you think would get some value from hearing these kind of conversations at depth, please share the podcast with them. If you wanna reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's also a link to my profile, my LinkedIn profile at the bottom of the show notes. Or you can head on over to thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.

Kareem Mayan

The Nomad’s Guide to Prioritising Product Feedback

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Who is Kareem Mayan?

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