Jim Zarkadas (00:00)
Hey, I'm Jim, and this is the Love at First Try podcast, a podcast for SaaS CEOs and developers that truly want to learn more about design and care about it, but there are no designers that find it too complex. In every episode, we discuss how to design products that become sticky and unforgettable. We dive into the topics of taste, UX, growth, and conversions, and we share practical tips and frameworks you can add into your development process. Enough with the intro, so let's dive into today's episode.
Jim Zarkadas (00:27)
So yeah, welcome to the podcast and thank you for joining me. ⁓ As I mentioned before, we'll always start with the intro of who we are and what are we working on. So yeah, I'll pass the mic to you and ask, yeah, what are you working on these days? also what's the story? That's something I never asked you. We know each other for a few years, but I never asked you what's your story.
Georgiana Laudi (00:47)
Yeah. Huh.
Yeah. I wonder how far back I should go. ⁓ Well, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me. ⁓ Yeah. So what's my story and what am I working on right now? So I guess I'll start with like history and then go up till today. ⁓ I have been working with in marketing since about... ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (00:52)
You
Georgiana Laudi (01:11)
late 90s, early 2000s, very early 2000s, back when we were talking about Y2K. ⁓ And I've been in marketing for a long time. It turned into digital marketing in early 2000s, but I started working pretty well exclusively with B2B SaaS companies in about 2010, ⁓ or even just before that, right after the dawn of Twitter integrated me into the tech community locally.
Jim Zarkadas (01:16)
Thanks.
Georgiana Laudi (01:41)
started running tech events, started getting exposed to startups, fell in love with the SaaS business model because I'd been working in marketing for so long and I loved the recurring revenue model, ⁓ basically paving the way for marketing's role in generating revenue and the value that marketing could play even post-acquisition. And I was like, perfect, these are my people.
Jim Zarkadas (02:06)
Mm.
Georgiana Laudi (02:08)
⁓ I'm gonna hang out over here and I've never left. ⁓ And it is still a drum that I'm beating today that marketing should be ⁓ leveraged for post acquisition. But that was something that became very obvious to me and I just very much fell in love with the business model because it really depends on customer value being delivered over time. And you sort of live or die by your ability to do that. And so I just.
believe inherently obviously in delivering customer value and I philosophically want to put customers at the center of what we're doing, that's the business that we're in. And so, yeah, I just think SaaS businesses are the best to do that with. I went in-house ⁓ after a couple of years of working with tech companies and I was in-house for a little while and then I left ⁓ when I had my kids and I always knew I was gonna do something solo anyway and paired up with Claire Sellentrop.
and her and I very philosophically aligned and ⁓ we started a consultancy together, which is Forget the Funnel. And that's what I'm still doing today. It's been eight and a half years, almost nine years that we've been doing this. yeah, we are a, ⁓ now to like what I'm working on today, we are what you would describe potentially as like a product marketing consultancy. We have a prototype service that is obviously,
Jim Zarkadas (03:18)
well.
Georgiana Laudi (03:32)
obviously completely different depending on the company that we're working with, but we rely on a framework that we developed called customer-led growth, which we wrote a book about, ⁓ which is a pretty straightforward, no-nonsense approach to figuring out how do we resonate with our ideal customers, go to market really effectively, ⁓ help customers see value quickly, and how do we retain them and provide continued value over time.
And so it's our method for doing that. And we do that in projects, either four week or six week sprints. ⁓ And yeah, we have a great time doing it.
Jim Zarkadas (04:13)
Nice, love it. yeah, like what you said on the story and your perception around marketing and so on. This is like what made me actually get in touch in general and...
engage more with you and Claire and also join the community, private community you had back then was this customer-led and customer-centric mentality because as a designer myself, it's all about the user and understanding them more and not trying to force them to do something, but actually start from the motivation they have, the problems and take it from there. So yeah, with marketing, there are many people having the aggressive approach. It was really cool to see somebody that is fully, fully focused on the customer. And it's smart that you have the customer-led growth kind of as a term. And I also like the
they forget the final it's pretty catchy as well because it kind of goes against the status quo and I always love this mentality so yeah my quick compliments on the nice super thanks for the ⁓ for the intro and ⁓ yeah for the podcast what it's a product design podcast so ⁓ what I want to go deeper into is
Georgiana Laudi (05:01)
We'll make sure.
Jim Zarkadas (05:23)
like your expertise and your insights and knowledge and how these can be used in the product design and development kind of worlds and discuss.
some ways, like some practical ways to help teams ⁓ take action and improve the product itself, but also like the positioning and things on the marketing side ⁓ as well. So I'll start by asking actually, before we dive into the more practical things, ⁓ what is your unique perspective as a marketer at this moment about the industry? What are the things that you see that you're really against ⁓ or yeah, I'm just curious on the unique perspective you have.
Georgiana Laudi (06:02)
Yeah, I mean, my answer a few years ago to that question, ⁓ it honestly hasn't changed. I think it's actually gotten more acute lately because of AI. But the answer is always that we don't need to guess, ⁓ right? When in doubt about what to do and how to grow.
⁓ center yourself around your best customers and make sure you're as close to them as possible from an understanding perspective and just deliver on that and either meet or exceed expectations but meet them where they are. ⁓
And I guess maybe how that sort of started, just to reverse the story again, is like in 2016, 2017, when I left my in-house role, I was reached out to, I made like a, I posted on way back when I used to be on Facebook, I posted that I was like leaving my in-house role and that I didn't know what was next. And my inbox was just inundated with founders who were desperate for
⁓ somebody who had SAS experience and at the time.
There weren't that many people that could say that they had been working in SaaS for as many years as I had been. but it became really, really obvious to me as all these founders began to reach out to me just what a huge disconnect there was between founders understanding of what marketing and go to market meant and the teams understanding and, you know, efforts in that regard. And that's actually why that's how Forget the Funnel came to be. That's why there was a community at the beginning. It was very much about
Jim Zarkadas (07:46)
Mm.
Georgiana Laudi (07:48)
out enabling and supporting customer facing, like folks who are in-house in customer facing roles, help them to think more strategically, get out of the weeds of execution and start being able to like sort of advocate for their ideas. And one of the most effective ways to do that is customer research and leaning into, you know,
what customers know about you and sort of getting inside the heads of your best customers because if you can do that, you can relay that back to your stakeholders or your leadership and gain a lot more buy-in for your ideas. Not to mention, think more strategically even if you don't, you're not used to that or you don't have, didn't have as much experience, you could really think about your go-to-market in a really strategic way if you would put your customers at the center
and gain a lot more sort buy-in internally and advocate for yourself as somebody inside of a company. So the reason that we did that was because we just saw so many folks in-house.
suffering and sort of failing and having a very, very hard time gaining buy-in for their ideas. And there was just a massive disconnect. I remember how we launched, forget the funnel, I think it was a Medium article called like the product with the problem with SaaS marketing. And it was basically about this divide between what product founders
Jim Zarkadas (08:56)
you
Mm.
Georgiana Laudi (09:15)
you know, thought of as marketing and what marketers actually thought of as marketing, just the big divide between the two. And a lot of it was caused by marketers feeling like they had to know all the answers and have all the answers. When really, if they just leaned on customer research, all the answers would come, you know, their growth strategy would become so much more obvious. So this like idea of guessing and guesswork.
Jim Zarkadas (09:38)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (09:39)
and moving away from that is really what I've always thought of as like the problem with us as marketers. Like, why are we guessing? Why do we feel like we have to have all of the answers? We don't actually have to have all the answers. And it's very easy to get the answers. It's much easier to get the answers than a lot of us think. And nowadays, what I would say is that's still very much true. By the way, there's a lot of reasons why marketers would do that, Desperate to show results.
Jim Zarkadas (09:58)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (10:09)
lack of confidence in their strategic ability. there's, you know, founders doubting their value, lots behind that. I won't, that's a different episode. ⁓ But I think today the same problems exist. I think, and maybe even they're, they're, they're exacerbated and made worse by AI because of just the plethora of layoffs in tech, the fear of, you know, replacement, especially at like junior, mid-level.
Jim Zarkadas (10:13)
Yep, ⁓
Georgiana Laudi (10:38)
⁓ marketers just like.
desperate to show their value, right? ⁓ And so there's a lot of guesswork. There's a lot of spaghetti being thrown at the wall, even more so than there was 10, 15 years ago. And that's what I think is fundamentally one of the biggest problems happening today. And there's a lot of potential directions we could go in about why that's happening and what the implications of that are. But to answer your question, yeah, I think it's that. I think we're still spending way too much time.
Jim Zarkadas (10:47)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (11:09)
guessing what to do when the path is ahead of us.
Jim Zarkadas (11:09)
I love it. Yes, like
don't get, don't guess, don't try to guess, just look, listen and observe your users. It's, yeah, it's, I mean, I fully, fully relate to everything you've mentioned so far and I completely agree on this. Just a personal like ⁓ comment on this. I'll talk about my business, for example, as an example on this and some that I've been going through and...
And literally like letting doing myself marketing with a marketing team that we that I've hired as well ⁓ for the corner and everything. I realized how somehow when they asked me questions, I'm trying to find the answer instead of just looking at the customers. Like I was having a hard time to define what are the five reasons.
people hire us, like what is the impact we have? What are the KPIs I would talk about in the call? And literally all I had to do was to pay attention on the sales calls that I had and understand what I'm saying. So it was, for example, like in my case, was, we're gonna make your SaaS stand out with UX and with the branding side, right? With product branding, we're gonna make it intuitive and easy to use and we're gonna increase the retention with great UX. We're gonna improve the trial to paid conversion with amazing onboarding experience by deploying all the growth tactics.
Georgiana Laudi (12:11)
What were they saying?
Jim Zarkadas (12:29)
everything. And the other KPA that came up that I wouldn't understand, but the clients in the sales calls may assume there is a problem is the velocity of the product team. Like one problem they're facing is that it takes forever to see a new feature because we don't have a strategic designer to design the solution with the right scope. So that became part of my pitch. And it was really eye-opening, the whole idea of the whole mindset of, Jim, don't try to guess.
pay attention to what they're asking, like the questions they're asking, pay attention to the answers that you're giving and start from there. Like use these because you have a business that is making money, it has clients, it's not like an early stage startup that is trying to define who is the customer and what they're doing. ⁓ So it's really...
Yeah, it's a different way of thinking and working like another very eye-opening experience ⁓ was with Christopher, like the Chris that you also joined his podcast from Conversion Alchemy and one part, one practice that he taught me on the Metarig sessions was, Jim, just do surveys, collect voice of customer and that's how you write copy. Great copywriters are not magicians or like ⁓ super creative people. Of course, like they have to be creative and so on, but you need to start from the customer, understand how they articulate things.
what are the words that they're using and use this to write your copy. And it almost felt like a cheat code. Like, okay, then the customer is gonna write the copy. Not really me, that's the hack, the system. And yeah, again, super eye-opening. So I'm fully on the same page with you because I'm going right now as well through the transformation of.
⁓ of what you're describing. Stop trying to guess. Great marketing is about understanding better the customer and learning how to listen and incorporate it into your marketing strategy. Keep an eye on the signals if they engage with the content, whatever that could be, and kind of double down on that instead of trying to assume what's going to work. Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (14:21)
Yeah, I love that you said the word signal, because it's something that I've been thinking a lot about recently, is this like, so I mentioned guesswork being a huge problem and...
What I've been thinking about recently, more recently, my sort of thinking on how to address what's going on right now is this idea of understanding and that there are these competencies of understanding. And I think that signal is one of the first ones that you need to get right. And what I mean by that is knowing what to listen to and what to ignore, because not all...
Jim Zarkadas (15:02)
Yeah, true.
Georgiana Laudi (15:04)
customer feedback is created equally, not all customers should necessarily be. I often caution against like, when somebody advocates for customer research, they're not advocating for, we're not advocating for, you the customer is always right, and you should do everything that the customer says. No, you need to understand who do you even be listening to, right? Even identify.
Jim Zarkadas (15:09)
Hmm. Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (15:31)
group of customers to prioritize listening to and then understanding how to interpret their needs. In your situation, it's maybe a little bit different than like in a PLG SaaS where they've got, you know, customers coming to them. ⁓ And so you can listen to conversations. ⁓ But actually, PLG SaaS companies have a lot more opportunity. In fact, it's even more straightforward. But I think the
Jim Zarkadas (15:35)
Mm.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Exactly.
Mm.
Georgiana Laudi (16:00)
The cautionary tale that I would sort of bring to the forefront here is that I've seen a lot of SaaS companies.
targeting the wrong customer and prioritizing the wrong customer or thinking that they understand who their ideal customer is when they are totally off. And I've got so many examples of teams that we've worked with that they come to us saying, well, we need better messaging. Our website needs improvement or our trial to pay conversion rate isn't as high as it should be, or we're seeing churn signals and...
Jim Zarkadas (16:32)
Mm-hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (16:35)
when we actually dig in and learn from customers, what we figure out and learn is that actually they've been targeting the wrong customer all along. And so they've been listening to the wrong customers, they've been prioritizing the wrong things. I have a great example of this actually with social media. Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (16:52)
I was about to ask actually, yeah.
I know it's a bit confidential, like I don't want to expose like any company behind the scenes or anything, but if there is anything you could share, I would love so that I can understand it also like better, like through an example.
Georgiana Laudi (16:59)
Yeah.
Yes.
So I've got my sort of like, one of my favorite go-to examples of this ⁓ is a social media scheduling tool that we ⁓ worked with, because it's just such a crisp and clear story that I've told a couple of times because it instantly makes sense. I do have more recent examples as well, ⁓ which could be interesting to dig into, but I'll tell the first one first. the social media ⁓ tool had been investing heavily in marketing, relying a lot on content marketing. They were amazing at content.
marketing but revenue growth was stagnant and they couldn't figure out why and they were investing in paid and they doubled down on all the content things and when we dug in because they were like we clearly cannot figure this out on our own we need to bring in outside help and so we dug in and what we learned is that there were two primary groups of customers that were showing up those that were a little bit more sophisticated
in their needs, they were looking for like auto, like more business automation. And then there was another one that was actually looking for like audience growth and the audience growth group.
Jim Zarkadas (18:08)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (18:10)
actually were the most vocal. They would go on and on about how amazing their content was. They would contact support, so the support team heard from them all the time. They were the vocal majority. Meanwhile, this other group of customers was actually flying in under the radar, but converting at higher rates, never reached out to support, had higher retention, activated more quickly, but the team had indexed for the other.
Jim Zarkadas (18:13)
Hmm.
You
Georgiana Laudi (18:40)
group because they were the vocal majority and it was only when we actually dug in and said hey and we did jobs to be done research which is why we you know we got to that sort of like psychographic level of like why are people coming to the front door of this product and we identified these two different groups and when we brought them to the team the team was like we've been solving for both of those customer problems all along so it's not like they didn't know about that secondary group but what they didn't realize was that they were actually two different groups of
One was coming for audience building and the other one was coming for automating. But they had in their heads, they had conflated these two customers together as if everybody was coming in looking for those two things when that actually wasn't the result at all. That wasn't actually what was happening. They were legitimately two different groups of customers. And so that's the sort of cautionary tale that I would bring to this is that honestly, I want to say nine out of 10, but I think, yeah, about nine out 10 companies that we work with, teams that we work with.
Jim Zarkadas (19:28)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (19:39)
have this opportunity today to identify the customers within their customer base that actually genuinely represent their best customers, represent the group of customers that get a ton of value, have a high willingness to pay, implicitly understand the value that's being provided, have an urgent problem that they want to solve.
And also, really importantly right now, today, a lot of the teams that we're working with, we're also looking for durable problems. So problems that are not gonna be disrupted in six months or a year or two years from now. So a durable problem where this product actually has a really unique or differentiated advantage over...
Jim Zarkadas (20:09)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (20:20)
newcomers in the space or incumbents or ⁓ AI tools or AI even like AI or LLM core LLM like sort of disruption. So that's another thing too that we're doing. that's, know, so yes, listening to customers is important. It is, but it's probably even more important that you know who to be listening to.
Jim Zarkadas (20:40)
%
Georgiana Laudi (20:41)
And so
yeah, anyways, I just have to drill in there because it's just so critically important. And I think that that is what even teams who are like, we talk to our customers all the time. We do research, of course we do research. But actually what they're doing is more of a spray and pray type of research instead of a really targeted type of research that would actually carry them through the next couple of years, ⁓ especially important right now.
Jim Zarkadas (20:47)
Exactly.
Hmm.
I couldn't agree more on this. I also have personal experience on this. By personal experience, mean that as a designer, your thoughts, ⁓ like people teach you, the people that I taught me like in the past, they say, I don't want to generalize. That you should talk to the users. You should listen to the users. Like you're serving the users so much, which I'm totally up for. ⁓
But you start building this mentality, there is also this quote that I personally find stupid that the customer is always right. But I really like how Amar, the CEO of ZenMade, like a team we're working with, ⁓ has articulated this, that the customer is always right.
Georgiana Laudi (21:39)
Okay.
Jim Zarkadas (21:48)
is ⁓ yeah, he doesn't agree with that, let's say. What he agrees with is the customers are always right, which is the market. So it's like, you need to see patterns, you need to understand the market and not an individual customer. Because it's what he says, like sometimes there is a vocal group of people or standard, like just one person. So it could be a group of customers that can be very vocal, but not really represent the market that you're going after and so on. So yeah, it's a very interesting thing. And also for me as a designer, this whole idea of filter the feedback,
Georgiana Laudi (21:56)
Mm.
Jim Zarkadas (22:18)
and
don't take everything seriously. Like that's kind of the bottom.
kind of insight that I had from this, like don't take everybody seriously. There is also like, can, we've been experimenting with inviting customers to the design call, the weekly design call we do where we review the designs of the new things that we're building. And we've had feedback sessions with customers that were not really productive and customers that were also very productive. So even on the, the ability to give proper feedback, that's even also like a thing when you talk with people and yeah, learning what signals to pay attention to is
more critical than even listening I would say as well because if you focus on the wrong things you can just kind of go completely off and that's yeah that's not going to be good at all.
Georgiana Laudi (22:55)
Okay.
Yeah. It
is so funny to me that the customer is always right. So my career prior to this, so prior to, you know, prior to like 2010, let's say I was actually, I worked in retail and I did e-commerce and social media marketing and all this, but the customer is always right. It has nothing to do with like...
product design or product strategy. The customer's always right has to do with customer service. When you are literally standing face to face with the customer who's upset about something. I mean, I imagine people in their 50s and 60s might listen to me and say like, actually the customer's always right had this other origin even prior to that. no, customer is always right as a...
Jim Zarkadas (23:35)
That's also true.
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (23:50)
I don't think that applies in this scenario because customers do not know.
what they want. They understand pain, they understand their current, they can describe their current situation, the context that they're in, you know, what leads them to want something new. They can, you know, talk about, you know, other tools that they can use, that they use. They can talk about what is great or painful or, you know, provides value or their motivations or what their, you know, what their life is demanding of them. But they cannot tell you how to design your product. They cannot tell you what your product strategy should be. There's so
Jim Zarkadas (24:01)
Hmm.
Mmm. Mmm.
Georgiana Laudi (24:26)
many
examples of that. I remember Bob Mesta, I don't remember the exact functionality. I think it was something to do with like...
Was it like a Gantt chart or there was some functionality that 37 signals customers were asking for that would have been a total pain in the ass for the team to build. I'm going to butcher this story. And I would definitely encourage people to go and actually check out the real story that I'm describing here. like customers, was so, there were so many, whatever the platform was that they were using for, like their product roadmap, like their public product roadmap and customer feedback where customers were asking for very specific functionality. And when they actually dug in.
and talk to these customers who were making this product request, what they learned was that they could actually design something really, really simple to solve that wasn't a Gantt chart or whatever the functionality was. I think it was a Gantt chart that they were looking for. So customers have no idea what they
Jim Zarkadas (25:20)
Yeah, maybe you're talking about the Basecamp
story with a calendar. Maybe. It kind of rings a bell like what you're describing. I think it's from Basecamp on the Seypup book. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (25:26)
Yeah, yeah, because we cannot expect
customers to know product, right? how and product design or product strategy, or even, you know, we cannot expect them to give us the answers. What we can do is understand.
Jim Zarkadas (25:33)
Yeah, exactly.
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (25:45)
their context, ⁓ we can understand ⁓ the circumstances that they're in and then solve for that in lots of creative ways and there's lots of room for...
Jim Zarkadas (25:52)
Yeah, exactly.
Georgiana Laudi (25:58)
⁓ you know strategy in there but really it's about understanding circumstance context motivation ⁓ what is the problem that it is that that they're trying to solve what led them to that situation what's the old what's the old way they're firing in order to hire yours like it's just a completely different way of thinking about things and i
Jim Zarkadas (25:59)
Hmm.
Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (26:18)
I would say that I don't obviously I don't work on the on the product side is certainly not the product design side. But that's a lot of our challenge when we talk with teams, they're like, oh, we do research all the time. We do UX research. But that's not the type of research. That's right. That's right. And I'm like, well, that's great.
Jim Zarkadas (26:32)
That's usability testing. That's not strategy in product marketing research.
Georgiana Laudi (26:39)
That's
great, but it's not actually the work that we're doing here. What we're doing here, especially for us, when we're doing positioning and messaging and ICP development for SaaS teams that we work with, go-to-market strategy, we need to understand what's happening out in the market, what's leading people to seek out a solution like yours, what convinces them to choose you, what is it about your solution that convinces them to keep going, and all of that. So very different style of, very different style.
Jim Zarkadas (26:48)
Exactly.
mentioned
a thing before, willingness to pay. That's also like super, since I got into entrepreneurship, like it's so fundamentally important because when you look at the roadmap, right? Like I'll bring the example of ZenMate. We have Kani, so Kani is a public product feedback board where people can request features and so on. You have things that people have been asking for.
But when you ask them, would you pay for this? The answer is not always yes, which is also interesting. Now I'm going a bit of topic like on the product strategy side and how that, like how to use signals and customer feedback and so on. But it's different to hear like the feedback and an idea from a customer and different to ask them, would you pay for that? it's many times the difference is kind of crazy. So it's a looking at willingness to pay and so on. It's so important. And what I said with the UX research is that, and I think that I wanted to add there is that
Georgiana Laudi (27:33)
green.
We're good.
Jim Zarkadas (27:58)
On the UX research, you test the UX experience, like the user experience, the usability, and you talk with users. When it to marketing research, we're talking about money related research. We're talking about people that will have to pay that they have problems, like the value of the problems that they have. What is the value to solve them? What are the trigger points? What made them look for a new solution? Why is this pain so high? Would they like, you know what, my project management software sucks. Now I'm going to look for a new one and transition my whole team there, which is going to take maybe months and a few thousands of dollars.
what made them like so angry to want to look for a new solution so it's an entirely different thing you look need to look into you need to look into the buying journey so yeah I'm totally totally aligned with this and what was the thing that I wanted to comment on this I forgot but yeah I pretty much agree personally also with with everything you mentioned this on this part
Georgiana Laudi (28:53)
Yeah,
there's the other example that I wanted to actually share earlier when I was telling you the example about the, basically that MarTech tool that realized that their customers are not this big homogenous group, but there's actually like distinct groups of people that show up at their front door. The other sort of,
side to that right now is actually that your customers' lives have changed. And the problems that you solved for customers six months ago or a year ago might actually be quite different right now. So we know that our lives have changed a lot, right? We can feel the difference as go-to-market, you know, I'll bucket you in the go-to-market.
Jim Zarkadas (29:31)
Mm-hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (29:40)
in As people who think about go-to-market strategy and positioning and messaging and product experience, our lives have been flipped upside down in the last two years. But our customer lives have also been flipped upside down. And what they compare you to is different than what it was six months ago, certainly a year ago. And so if you have not done this like...
Jim Zarkadas (29:54)
you
Georgiana Laudi (30:07)
you know, what I consider to be like first party customer research. the, and with recent customers, that's really, really important. If you have not done that in the last six or so months, you are, you are putting yourself at risk of just.
like death by a thousand paper cuts because slowly over time your messaging is going to start resonating less potentially, right? There's a high likelihood of that because the market is shifting and you're not keeping up. Your messaging isn't gonna resonate your product onboarding, your feature set, what you serve up and in what order, like that hierarchy of product sort of experience. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (30:31)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (30:50)
could potentially become less and less relevant over time. And it is, I say death by a thousand paper cuts because it is just going to be this slow decline. It's not gonna be super obvious. It's not gonna be all at once. It's just gonna be a slow.
Jim Zarkadas (30:59)
Slow death,
Georgiana Laudi (31:03)
like decline in conversion rate or activation rate, ⁓ know, or trial to paid conversion rate or free to pay conversion rates can slowly creep down because you're just not hitting as close. And the example that I wanted to give is actually a team that we are just wrapping up with right now, UserVoice. You might be familiar with them.
Jim Zarkadas (31:21)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (31:22)
User voice has been around for a long, time and we recently worked with them and we conducted 11 customer interviews, just 11. took us just, you know, like two weeks to do this research. And what we learned is that like they came to us saying, Hey, something's not working. The conversion rate on our website is not great. ⁓ We're not really sure how to change that. the sales process, sales can still do their job, but just like getting people to convert on the website.
is not performing as well as it used to. And we're like, great, tell us about your customers. And they're like, okay, we serve product managers who are looking to gather, organize, and prioritize customer feedback for product teams. So close, right? We can all sort of somewhat understand that situation. But when we ⁓ dug in and actually had...
just 11 30 minute conversations with their customers. What we learned was that there was a significant portion of their recent customers. We talked to recent signups, recent, I'll say signups, recent new customers, right? That had signed up in the last six months. ⁓ When we talked to them, there was a group of them that actually came to UserVoice specifically because they were looking to regain customer trust. So something had happened in the relationship.
Jim Zarkadas (32:26)
Yeah.
Mmm.
Georgiana Laudi (32:41)
where like a product launch didn't go well or something happened at the brand level and they were looking to regain customer, ⁓ regain trust with their customer base. And it wasn't product managers anymore, it was product ops people.
So not only had the role of the individual changed in their target market, but the problem that they were solving also changed. Now it's not to say the product manager is trying to capture, organize, and prioritize customer feedback, and we're showing up to the front door, they are, but that is a massively saturated market. That user voice has been around a long time, they can still win those deals, but customers that are looking to regain customer trust of product ops people,
Jim Zarkadas (33:12)
Yeah, true.
Georgiana Laudi (33:22)
User voice is actually uniquely positioned to help with that job to be done because they have all kinds of functionality around customer comms.
and all kinds of functionality about how to ⁓ communicate back to customers at scale with AI, but also in the capturing and the communicating back when updates happen and stuff like that. It's way more featured out than most of the competition in the market. So we were able to of redirect and reposition and remessage UserVoice under that banner. It hasn't rolled out yet, so if you go to the website, you won't see it. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (33:54)
Mm-hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (33:55)
That's basically the learning from recent customers was that actually the role of the person has changed. And also in order to meet this moment in this very crowded space, really leaning into the job to be done that UserVoice is uniquely positioned to serve is just a massive advantage for them. So that's the other thing that I would say. Yeah, it's a great example of like if you have not done this recently.
Jim Zarkadas (34:13)
That's a beautiful example.
Georgiana Laudi (34:21)
let this be the reminder that like your life has changed. That means your customer's lives have changed too. And I don't care how complex or you can sell into the enterprise, their lives have still changed. They're still fearful for their jobs. They're still desperate to prove value. They're still operating with all of the same sort of...
Jim Zarkadas (34:27)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (34:44)
issues but within completely different workflows, use cases, dynamics of their job, their job description may have changed, ⁓ their org structures are being flipped on their heads, like tech stacks are being completely flipped over, know, 5,000 even $10,000 SaaS products have to go to the CFO now, like the environment in which your customer is making decisions is so different than it was a year ago.
Jim Zarkadas (35:09)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (35:13)
I'm telling everybody that I can, like, really, if you want to future-proof your business, if you want to see the next 18 months, do yourself a favor and do this type of research now with recent customers.
Jim Zarkadas (35:25)
Hmm. Yeah, that's a good one. And like the importance of being like recent customers, because the other things like many times when it comes to talking to customers, like, okay, but we have like 1000 customers, who should we prioritize? Like what are the filters there? Yeah, yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (35:37)
Yes. Yeah.
That's a really,
we actually spend quite a bit of time talking about that with the teams that we work with, right? Like how do you narrow down who to talk to? Recency is important, but the other thing too is that they're actually, they signed up recently, but they're also experiencing recurring value with your product. So they've used your product in a way where they've reached full value realization and they have continued to pay. So they're using a core feature of your product that implies that they're getting recurring value and also in a way that basically
indicates that they would be like a life for a customer. So there's a real sweet spot there. And for some companies that is going to be a small list and that's totally fine, but still your list.
Jim Zarkadas (36:20)
Yeah, Great points. ⁓ On this, okay. I love how we already started getting into the practical stuff. That's an action item, for example, for anybody who's listening is actually go and find...
good customers in terms of like how sticky they are, like how much they're paying, the value that getting out of your size and so on and gonna have like 10 interviews and see what changed in their world and their life and drive conclusions from that. So I love how example this tip is actually. And I wanted to ask briefly on the customer lead growth because something you've been talking a lot about, you have a book even on that. ⁓
And you've been saying that the funnels is a bad kind of mentality mindset to follow. So I wanted to ask, how do you define customer lead growth in simple words and what is the alternative to funnels and what's wrong with them?
Georgiana Laudi (37:13)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a formal definition on our website of the term, ⁓ but do not go there. I think of customer-led growth as basically a way of operating where all teams and all efforts are basically operationalized and... ⁓
sort of centered around delivering customer value around that customer. And whether or not you are sales led, product led, marketing led, community led, engineering led, I mean, there's all kinds of, you know, go to market motions that exist. I don't care about any of those go to market motions unless I know about what is the most appropriate motion to use for your ideal customers. So we tend to work with a lot of PLG companies ⁓ because we like to be able to help teams
who are trying to really resonate at scale.
We work with sales led teams as well that are trying to leverage their product a little bit more to aid with acquisition. ⁓ But mostly what I mean by customer led growth when we say that is like centering how you operate, how you go to market, how you make product decisions, how you make marketing and messaging decisions around what is the most appropriate experience for your customer, regardless of like growth model. And then
Jim Zarkadas (38:34)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (38:37)
That's the sort of antithesis of a funnel, right? So a funnel is problematic for lots of reasons. One of them is that it's just gross to think about putting your customers through a funnel. ⁓ Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (38:48)
I hope to agree on that.
Georgiana Laudi (38:51)
It's
generic, right? It's meant, it's like every customer is created equally. Every product is created equally. It just assumes that every customer is at the top of the, either at the top of the funnel, middle of the funnel or bottom of funnel, which is super, super generic, not specific enough to your unique product or customer's needs. Another problem with the funnel obviously is that it ends at acquisition, which we're in the recurring revenue business and funnels, the acquisition
is the beginning of the story. It's just
Jim Zarkadas (39:21)
It's the surface.
Georgiana Laudi (39:24)
the start of your relationship with them. It is certainly not the end goal. And it's just super antiquated and generic and just not helpful for making really strategic customer-led decisions.
So that's the reason why I pick on funnels and that hopefully is clear on the customer led growth. And can talk about like the steps of customer led growth, because it might sound complex, but it's actually really, really simple. Jim, I know you're familiar with it, but maybe it would be helpful to talk about like ⁓ the steps there, because it sounds a lot more complicated than it is.
Jim Zarkadas (39:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
Actually, that will be my next question is I'm a SaaS CEO. I have no idea what all these things are like. I love the mentality. I love the mindset and the values and everything. What are like, let's say three, five, two, like as many as you want items that I could implement tomorrow to put these things in practice. How does it look in reality with simple action items?
Georgiana Laudi (40:23)
Yeah, so the.
Jim Zarkadas (40:23)
few of them.
Georgiana Laudi (40:26)
So customer-led growth, we describe it as being sort of three steps. The first one is get inside the heads of your best customers, which we've talked about quite a bit. ⁓ There's a lot more to talk about, like how do you do that? How do you identify them? You what are the methods that you should use? You know, there's all kinds of stuff to get into there. The next one is map and measure their experience. So that just means ⁓ once you identify, like once you have that psychographic documentary, like understanding of your
Jim Zarkadas (40:34)
Mm-hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (40:56)
customers because you've done jobs to be done research, which is the research method that we definitely advocate for here because you get this sort of documentary like understanding of your customers life before why they chose you, what they can do now that they weren't able to do before. Once you've got that, then you are able to map the customer experience and identify the major sort of milestones in your customer's relationship with you. So where they make their major sort of leaps of faith and where they need to experience value in order to keep going. So you can think about that as like
discovering that you exist, signing up on your website, trying your product for the first time, reaching value realization, deciding that you're gonna solve their problem, they're gonna fire the old way, continued value, expanded value, and value growth, right, that whole way. So you identify those milestones. ⁓ And then for each of those milestones, you want a KPI that demonstrates to you and your team has helped customers get from one milestone to the next. Generally, we're advocating for product usage that actually indicates
Jim Zarkadas (41:39)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (41:56)
value has been experienced. That's what I mean by map and measure the customer experience. And then the third step is to basically identify your levers for growth, which all that means is like do the secret shopper thing with that job to be done in your mind's eye. Go through your customer experience end to end. Look at your marketing, look at your website, onboard into your product, use your product, use it, you know, wearing the hat or the glasses or in the shoes or whatever of your customer with that job to be done and identify
Jim Zarkadas (41:58)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (42:26)
all of the ways that your current customer experience is out of alignment with that ideal customer experience, with that job to be done experience, and you're going to have a long list of opportunities of things to improve.
Jim Zarkadas (42:32)
Hmm.
Love it, love it. the first step, go deep into your customer's head, I think, was how you describe it. That's something that a small comment from my side, from my personal experience, which is like, it's not into the... I mean, I can serve an example from the SaaS industry, as a designer for ⁓ designing the SaaS product, but also for building a service business, like the Nova First Ride, the business that I'm building.
Georgiana Laudi (42:48)
Yeah, get inside the heads of your best customers.
Jim Zarkadas (43:09)
One thing that I have, for example, is because what we provide, we, by the way, we repositioned the company recently from we're not a studio agency anymore. We don't want to be called like this. We're an in-house design team as a service. So we're trying to find a new term because we realized, for example, you said, pay attention to your customers. And what I saw is that
Georgiana Laudi (43:21)
Yeah, okay.
Jim Zarkadas (43:29)
they didn't want to hire an agency. They always looked for a freelancer. They came to me from a referral and then I have sold them into the idea, hey, don't get a freelancer. I have a team, multidisciplinary that does brand, motion and product. And you're gonna, that's the way you do work class design. You cannot just have a freelancer like, oh cool, sign me up for that. So if you call though yourself an agency, they start comparing you to an agency and doesn't feel in-house. So like we went through the repositioning and how that came is just by getting deeper into the.
Georgiana Laudi (43:33)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (43:56)
the brain into the head of the people that I would have the call with, which in this case are CEOs, and trying to understand what they're actually looking for and how are we positioned even on how we call ourselves as a business. And in terms of like SaaS businesses,
Georgiana Laudi (44:09)
Yep. Yep.
Jim Zarkadas (44:13)
I've been thinking about like systems, I've been flirting a lot and I've actually, I'm in love with the whole idea of like build systems because systems create habits and habits create results. And one of the systems, we have two systems that I wanted to share for Zenmedia have worked so far. The first one is we have Stephanie that, by the way, made a
podcast steps and I'm going to send it to you. I think you're going to enjoy it to our weekly design calls. So she's one of the ideal customers and she's also coaching other cleaning business owners because they're scheduling software for cleaning businesses. So she's in touch a lot with all the different growth stages of a cleaning business, like beginners, people that are struggling to scale the company as well. And she brings all the insights. So she's the customer and also the customer ambassador in the company. And we meet with her every week on the design call and she's going to share her feedback from her point of view on everything.
Georgiana Laudi (44:50)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (45:03)
we're building and ideas on the product strategy. That's one of the ways we kind of have a recurring way to go deeper into their. ⁓
into their head, let's say. And the other one is, it's not so much about the customers, it's on the how do we improve the activation. We have a weekly workshop with Amar. So we, teams we're working with, we have a weekly workshop where we meet for one hour and we try to identify quick wins on the onboarding. And also we audit the onboarding experience because the other thing with onboarding is, sure, you go and fix it once, but you need to constantly keep an eye on it. Like observe what people do, stay in touch with them, what's recordings of new users and so on. we
build a system just one hour per week to meet together and focus and ask ourselves how is the first time user experience does it look the way it should be who is the customer did anything change there and so on so yeah it's a it's always interesting like how can you make it practical and identify systems that can cooperate in the company
Georgiana Laudi (45:54)
Yeah. ⁓
Yeah, it's funny because similarly what we learned ⁓ through our own sort of internal ⁓ research is that same as you, founders and teams are not looking for an agency ⁓ and they're also not looking for training, right? A lot of times, right? So there's a lot of... ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (46:22)
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (46:24)
There's a lot of folks in the less sort of product growth space, I'll call it, that are doing a lot of more advisory, sidelines, coaching, and training. And what we actually found was that like actually teams just like, they just want it done right, and they want it done for them, right?
Jim Zarkadas (46:34)
Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly.
Georgiana Laudi (46:45)
Not all teams want it done for them, but many of them, especially now because urgency, right? There's like a big urgency to get things right. And there always has been in tech, but it's even more so right now. So they want like experts to come in, do it right the first time, you know, get it done, get it done right. ⁓ And not be this like, you know, the subscription service or long retainers, which is why we actually ⁓ moved to a sprint model a few years ago, actually, we moved to a sprint model.
Jim Zarkadas (46:53)
Yeah.
Hmm
Georgiana Laudi (47:14)
⁓ We were originally, it took us like 12 weeks to do it and then we got it down to eight weeks. Now we've got it down to six weeks where we can do end to end. We can basically install a, like, you you can think of it as like a go-to-market operating model.
⁓ We install that basically for the team in a workshop format that involves your major sort of decision makers inside of six weeks. And we find that that resonates really well because founders are like, yup, needed this yesterday. It cannot take longer than this. Like we need both speed and rigor. ⁓ And those have been for us rigor is really important. Right? It's got to be done the right way the first time. And also we need to do it quickly. and because we've got this sort of
Jim Zarkadas (47:43)
Mm.
That's a example.
Georgiana Laudi (47:58)
this prototype service and this framework that we lean into, teams can think of it as like an operating model.
And a lot of teams will come back to us too. That's happened as well where we've worked with teams and then like a year later, they're like, you know what, it's time, our market has changed or a product has changed. And so we need to do it again. And we, we come out with a, it's a workshop format at the end where it's collaborative. So all the major, you know, stakeholders are there, CEO, CTO, head of sales, head of marketing, head of product, ⁓ head of CS, depending on how big the company is. And we're all making decisions together about what these
of means or pillars are and those opportunities to dive into. With some teams we stay on to support implementation, but our goal is to be like a liberating force, not an occupying force. Because we have found with the folks that reach out to us, it's like they want to go to market strategy, they want better positioning and messaging, and they want a go-to-market that they can like take a more systematic approach to their go-to-market that their team can then run with. So that's how we ended up at our
Jim Zarkadas (49:07)
Exactly.
Georgiana Laudi (49:08)
sort of format. Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (49:09)
It's yeah, I love it. It's like, and that's an also beautiful example of like, understand the customer, the problem, the urgency, what they want to pay for, what they want to invest, what is the problem, what is the type of solution they're looking for, and then start from there. Like in your case, you decided to do it as a sprint in this case. And
⁓ Also, like you said, operating system. the way that you describe that you install something in the company, so you do the research, you find the right solution, and then you install it through training. ⁓ you could call this also consultancy that we kind of, yeah, we're just going to train you on how to understand your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. But all the terms you found and how you present in the package, so the person, the customer on the other side can visualize and understand really comes from going deep into the ⁓
Georgiana Laudi (49:47)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (49:57)
you're serving. I like to say that as a designer entrepreneur myself as well that I'm doing marketing also like it's part of building my business.
I've gotten into therapy the last few years as well, experiencing this part as well in my personal life. really feel that as a designer entrepreneur, I have to be a therapist for the people that I'm serving. So that could be users or the SaaS COs, in this case, the teams. And then, we're another heart, which is the creative. So therapy is to ask the right questions and go deep and understand, and then creative to come up with great solutions to solve these problems. But I love the therapy because
Georgiana Laudi (50:35)
Mm-hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (50:36)
the therapist is always curious, they don't judge and they always ask why and go deeper and deeper and deeper and this is pretty much the first step of why you save custom electrodes. So that's an analogy that I personally kind of always love to make on this part.
Georgiana Laudi (50:48)
Yeah, that
definitely resonates with me right now too, because what I have found is that, especially lately, there's a widening disconnect between what teams want to hear and what they need to hear. And right now we are providing some, you know,
We're brought on to tell you what you need to hear or not. You're not paying us to tell you what you want to hear. ⁓ We need to give you actually candid feedback and advice on what we think you should do next. And that's not always easy feedback to provide, particularly to founders and to product teams. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (51:17)
Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (51:32)
everybody's doing their best and doing what they can, but sometimes we learn things about the market or the customers that has a slight disconnect from how the team has operated so far, especially if the company's been around for a few years, right? There's just a way of operating. ⁓ And that has been harder lately, especially with... ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (51:45)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (51:56)
I don't want say traditional SaaS, because like, what is that? But SaaS companies that have been around for a couple of years, really, there is a wake up call. There's a reckoning coming to SaaS. ⁓ And not every founder is ready to hear it. I think more and more are. ⁓ But we are finding ourselves lately.
Jim Zarkadas (52:01)
More old school, yeah. Yeah, old school minded.
Georgiana Laudi (52:17)
⁓ needing to sort of like package our feedback and our recommendations in kid gloves because sometimes it's a pretty major departure from where the team actually wants to go and what they were expecting to hear and the recommendations we're actually making that like actually you've got to like kill some darlings and make some tough decisions about what you're going to do for the next 12 months because what you're doing right now
you're not gonna see the other side of this. Because there's so much change happening right now. And that has been really tough for us as a team ⁓ because the departure between the two, again, between what teams expect us to say and what they want to hear us say versus what they actually need to hear is widening. And that has been something that we've been sort of, you know.
reckoning with ourselves over the past, over this year, certainly we're like, sometimes we're giving pretty tough advice. But I mean, it is what it is. We have to, we have to, yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (53:14)
Yeah, I know.
So we've got
a few minutes left. And ⁓ so I had the mind to ask the last question because I don't want to go over time. But yeah, the way that you described it is like, I'm like, I don't have time, but I really need to ask. I'm curious. Either is like a short answer. You said that we're going through it like we wake up cold and I've been.
Georgiana Laudi (53:28)
Okay.
I
Jim Zarkadas (53:39)
reading also about AI and everything like online all the time. I'm not saying that you said it's because of AI or something, but I'm just curious, like, what is this wake up call that you're seeing like with the more old school SAS so on is if you can answer it in a short way. If not, we can just keep it and keep it for another time. But yeah, I'm just curious.
Georgiana Laudi (53:54)
Yeah, I mean,
look, it's been something that has been an issue for a long time. teams that come to us.
They're like, we know we can be doing a better job. And they've always said that. They've always come to say, we know our trial to pay conversion rate could be better. We know our product onboarding could be better. Our website is not good enough. Our messaging is not good enough. Every team comes to us with those, saying those words, acknowledging that what they're doing today isn't good enough. So that has always been true and still true today. The thing is, is that like the...
The willingness to change, the willingness to implement and execute, there has to be an urgency there. And we don't always see enough urgency around making some of these changes, particularly with ⁓ SaaS companies that have been around for more than a couple of years. ⁓ Again, there just has to be a willingness to change the way that you operate in some of the belief systems. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (54:37)
I yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (54:54)
you if I use the examples of
Here's an easy one from a couple of years ago. It would have been, Oh, our product onboarding. Oh, we're not sending product onboarding emails. And a couple of years ago, what do mean you're not sending product onboarding emails? Oh, well, with the system, it's too complicated. The systems, you know, I can't, we can't get it set up or there's too much like legacy sort of, there's technical debt there or whatever. And this was a couple of years ago where like, of course you send onboarding emails. 70 % of people who log into your product will never log in again. The only way to recapture them is email. You have to send emails. This was the conversation.
Jim Zarkadas (55:08)
Okay.
Georgiana Laudi (55:26)
that we were having a couple years ago. Now it's like, well, our onboarding process actually requires, you know, this, that customers do this, this, this, and this, and they list off five things that their customers need to do in order to experience first value. We're like, nope, you can't get away with that anymore. Like, your product experience, your customer's experience has to be so much better than what it needed to be even only a couple of years ago.
And that like willingness to make product changes, like don't make them upload a CSV. You know, like I can come up with a couple of like sort of old school ways that we would help our customers onboard into our product that like, that is not high. Products, customers expectations are so much higher than they used to be what they are comparing you to.
Jim Zarkadas (56:03)
I see, yeah, I see, I see.
I see what you mean,
Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (56:17)
is completely different than it was a couple of years ago. You have to be willing to dedicate some product resources and some engineering to fixing this. And those are hard decisions for teams to make because, well, I mean, for very obvious reasons, I don't need to explain why, but there's just a lot of shortcomings we're identifying in product experiences right now where we're like, this is just not good enough and this is a huge problem and we hope you understand that like, you need to fix this.
Jim Zarkadas (56:32)
I say.
Georgiana Laudi (56:47)
⁓ Obviously, I can't give a specific example because it's different with every team that we work with. Anyway, that's what I meant.
Jim Zarkadas (56:51)
Yeah.
okay okay clear okay and look at the time ⁓
Georgiana Laudi (56:58)
Yeah, or giving up on a customer
group. That's the other one too, like giving up on group of customers that you're not uniquely qualified to serve anymore or that are being massively disrupted and zeroing in on one customer group. That's another conversation that is harder to have these days because there's a lot of loss happening. So focusing is hard.
Jim Zarkadas (57:17)
Yeah,
focusing and also like just a very quick comment from my personal side. I started working with a business coach in April with Chris and it's a been life transform like it's a transformation for me and I'm like, wow, that's so cool. And like so many things that I didn't expect and the cool things like he's a business and performance coach is
You really cannot achieve growth if you don't change core stuff. Like beliefs is one thing. It's also like very personal. Like for me, for example, I was building a course and then at some point like we like it was clear from Greece, hey, you're just burning money here. This makes zero sense what you're doing and how to face the truth and be like, yep, it makes no money. It doesn't make any sense what I'm doing as to do something else. I used to believe that building a team is a hassle and it's going to be a nightmare. I had to change my beliefs and now I've fallen in love with the idea of like
Georgiana Laudi (57:48)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Jim Zarkadas (58:09)
growing a team, but I can really relate to what you're describing that if you're not up for changing core beliefs you have as a person, you cannot actually grow because it many or not many times always starts from the leadership. Like once beliefs change on the leadership side, then they go into the company and they ⁓ have a big impact. So I've seen also with clients and also with myself being a founder of a service based business as well. yeah, I'm fully fully on the same page in that. Yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (58:28)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, I see more of the willingness on the founder side to change and there's on the product leadership side.
I see actually bigger issues where like the product manager, the product owner needs convincing of like this new direction that we need to go in. It's funny, ⁓ I'm coming full circle here back to what I was saying at the beginning of this episode, which is like, know, marketers trying to get buy-in for their ideas and leveraging data, customer data and actual like proof from the customer base that like actually something needs to change. And like, here's our strategy. It's the same with this situation
Jim Zarkadas (58:47)
Yeah.
Hmm. Hmm.
Georgiana Laudi (59:15)
where a lot of, ⁓ I'll say like, you know, C-suite or, you know, product manager, product owner ⁓ needing proof and validation to move a product in a direction rightfully. Obviously they would not want to make decisions without a validated, you know, proof and evidence that they should move in that direction. But I find that founders are bringing us in.
Jim Zarkadas (59:32)
Yeah, yeah.
Georgiana Laudi (59:39)
to make a case, like find a clear path forward and make a case to the rest of the team that like, actually this is the path that we should pursue. And these are the hard choices that we need to make right now in order to not just, you know.
Jim Zarkadas (59:44)
Hmm.
you
Georgiana Laudi (59:55)
survive all the disruption and the competitive landscape, but also exceed through it and come out the other side ⁓ with a total differentiated advantage over competition.
Jim Zarkadas (1:00:04)
Hmm.
interesting stuff.
Georgiana Laudi (1:00:11)
Yeah, it's a big topic. ⁓
Jim Zarkadas (1:00:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And
it's like part of what we do. Like we serve teams, we're there to get them unstuck, to unblock them and so on. And like this kind of a, yeah, not therapy, but like I'm talking when I say therapy kind of a part is a big thing because essentially we're serving people and we're like, sure, it's like the customer research we're going to do, the product positioning, so on, but it comes down to people that are going to have to do many things. So yeah, it's a very interesting part. I know we're...
Georgiana Laudi (1:00:25)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jim Zarkadas (1:00:40)
over time and you've got other calls. I'll ask to keep the last question. I think we can kind of wrap it up here. Yeah, it's been really cool. And I really like how we came up with actually practical stuff that somebody could implement. That's really useful. So yeah, thanks a lot for joining me. I hope you had a great time.
Georgiana Laudi (1:01:01)
Yeah, I mean, this
was a topic I mean, that I could, you know, I'm sure we could go on and on for another hour about this. It's super interesting. There's a lot of change happening right now. It's a it's a really interesting time to be working in tech. That's for sure.
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:08)
Mm.
Yeah, 100%. Yeah, it's kind of a wild time as well. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
Georgiana Laudi (1:01:18)
It's wild. Yeah.
Yeah. But thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation and we'll do it again.
Jim Zarkadas (1:01:24)
Thank you. Yeah, yeah, for sure.