Andy Barraclough and Betsy Shaak on Building with Empathy and Speed

Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:02)
Julian Castelli introduces the Growth Elevated Leadership Podcast and its focus on tech leadership and growth challenges.

Guest Introductions & Voxpopme Overview (00:00:27)
Julian introduces Andy Barraclough and Betsy Schack, and provides background on Voxpopme and their roles.

The Founding of Voxpopme & Early Insights (00:03:18)
Andy shares the founding story of Voxpopme, the shift from quantitative to qualitative research, and the early use of video.

Traditional Focus Groups: Challenges & Limitations (00:04:34)
Discussion on the outdated, costly, and slow process of traditional focus groups, including anecdotes and logistics.

Voxpopme’s Video-Driven Approach (00:07:54)
How Voxpopme uses video surveys to accelerate and scale qualitative research, leveraging mobile technology.

Evolution to AI Moderation (00:08:59)
Introduction of AI moderators in research, enabling asynchronous, scalable, and participant-friendly qualitative studies.

Automated Analysis & Insights at Scale (00:10:11)
How Voxpopme’s AI tools automate video analysis, generate reports, and create a lasting knowledge base.

Impact on Product Discovery & Customer Interviews (00:11:23)
Betsy describes how the platform changes customer interviews, improves note-taking, and enables better product discovery.

Self-Service Research & Audience Targeting (00:12:44)
Explanation of Voxpopme’s self-service capabilities, audience matching, and rapid feedback collection.

Customer Stories & Time-to-Value (00:15:22)
Examples of customer reactions, the value of hearing real customer voices, and internal use for strategic decisions.

Cost Comparison: Old vs. New Research Paradigms (00:18:53)
Comparison of traditional focus group costs with Voxpopme’s much lower, subscription-based pricing.

Product Team Structure & Culture at Voxpopme (00:22:04)
Betsy explains Voxpopme’s unique, collaborative product culture and the integration of R&D and product functions.

Product’s Mission: Customer Discovery & Prioritization (00:24:04)
Focus on product’s role in customer discovery, prioritizing what to build, and avoiding a feature factory mentality.

The Challenge of Product Management (00:25:57)
Andy discusses the complexity of the product role, cross-functional collaboration, and avoiding order-taking.

Prioritizing Feedback & The Founder’s Perspective (00:26:42)
How Voxpopme prioritizes feedback from multiple channels, balancing founder intuition with validation and trust.

Rapid Prototyping & AI-Driven Product Development (00:31:19)
Examples of rapid prototyping, leveraging AI to quickly test and launch new features like “signals.”

Executive Alignment & Managing the Idea Backlog (00:35:44)
The importance of executive alignment, transparent prioritization, and communicating decisions to internal teams.

Product as a “No” Role & Constructive Prioritization (00:36:53)
How Voxpopme’s product team reframes “no” into constructive prioritization and stakeholder engagement.

AI’s Impact on Product Velocity (00:38:41)
Discussion on how AI increases development speed, but the need for continued strategic focus and prioritization.

Rapid Fire: Favorite Products Outside Voxpopme (00:39:41)
Andy and Betsy share favorite tools (A10, Whisper Flow, Lovable) for rapid prototyping and product delivery.

Closing Remarks & Podcast Outro (00:43:05)
Julian wraps up, thanks the guests, and provides information on Growth Elevated resources and upcoming episodes.

Julian Castelli 00:00:02 Welcome to the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast with Julian Castelli. Each week, we talk with senior tech leaders to explore stories and insights about the challenges involved with growing technology companies. We hope that these stories can help you become a better leader and help you navigate your own growth journey.

Julian Castelli 00:00:27 Good morning. This is Julian Castelli. I’m the host of the Growth Elevated Leadership podcast, where each week I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders in the tech industry. Past guests have included CEOs and CXO of great companies like Work Front, CHG, Healthcare, Pathology Watch, enrollment, canopy, the San Francisco 40 Niners, and many more. This episode is brought to you by Growth Elevated. We are a community of tech founders, CEOs, and CSOs who are committed to working together to share best practices and learnings in an effort to make all of us better leaders. We do this through educational programs like this podcast, as well as our blog and of course, our annual Ski and Tech summit in beautiful Park City, Utah. So if you like tech and if you like working without getting together with other people and if you like skiing, this is a pretty unique one.

Julian Castelli 00:01:17 Check us out at Growth Elevated Comm. Today, I’m excited to welcome back to the podcast, Andy Barraclough, the CEO and founder of Vox Pop me, and Betsy Schack, who is the VP of product. So Andy’s been with us before and he’s told us the beginning part of his journey. And I’m excited about getting getting the second chapter here. about Vox pop me. Vox Pop me is an AI powered, qualitative insights platform that helps brands understand people through video. And he’s a technologist and an entrepreneur. And he started Vox Pop me to make research more human, using technology to capture real stories, analyze them faster, and turn everyday conversations into insights that drive better decisions. He continues to lead Vox Pop me’s mission to connect brands to real people at scale. Betsy is the VP of product at Vox Pop me, where she turns messy human feedback into sharp, AI powered insights. Betsy has worked her way up from product manager to now the VP of product, and she’s driven by a career long obsession with understanding customers, especially after seeing how hard real discovery can be in most organizations.

Julian Castelli 00:02:19 That challenge of understanding customers is what pulled her to Vox Pop me, where she’s building products that make it radically easier to hear, see and act on the voice of the customer. Welcome, Andy. Welcome, Betsy.

Andy Barraclough 00:02:30 Thanks for having us on, Julien. Looking forward.

Julian Castelli 00:02:32 You excited about learning more about product, Andy. You’ve been a great teacher and mentor to be teaching me about product, both by observing you and also what you’ve you’ve taught me. The neat thing about Vox pop, me and your passion with voice of the customer is the voice of the customer is a key theme for good product, but it’s also the core theme of your product and what it enables as a company. Right. So it’s kind of a loop within a loop here. And we’ve got a lot to talk about. So I’m excited about about digging into it. But let’s start Andy, with you. Why don’t you catch up the audience about, you know, about Vox pop? Me a little bit of the founding insights that made you start kind of the first chapter and what you did in terms of unlocking video for insights.

Julian Castelli 00:03:12 And then we’re really excited about, you know, moving on to this current chapter and all the exciting things that you guys are doing with AI. But let’s start with the foundation first.

Andy Barraclough 00:03:18 Yeah. Perfect scheduling. so I think when we started Vox Pop, me, we saw, I mean, this is kind of 13 years back now. We saw huge opportunity to connect brands with consumers in a better way. So, you know, at that stage and people were just starting to get comfortable with using FaceTime, Facebook Live, having themselves on video in those kind of scenarios. And, you know, everyone had the device in their pockets. But traditionally research was done mainly through quantitative methods where we weren’t really digging into the why behind a lot of those results that we were getting through research or.

Julian Castelli 00:03:53 And by quantitative you mean surveys, right?

Andy Barraclough 00:03:55 Yep. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That’s the traditional.

Julian Castelli 00:03:57 Face. That was the that was the 1.0 surveys. Yeah. Yeah. So. Right.

Andy Barraclough 00:04:02 And so the way we looked at it is how do we inject video into that quicker process.

Andy Barraclough 00:04:07 Because the only other way people were connecting with consumers was traditionally focus groups and things like that as well. Or you know, so getting people in facilities costly long months and months to get to understand results. And, and you know, some of these areas still happen today with those kind of longer research projects. But brands are consistently kind of under siege to be making quicker decisions, understanding their consumers, moving at tremendous speed.

Julian Castelli 00:04:34 Let’s, let’s, let’s stop there just to make sure that the audience knows just how prevalent and what an antiquated process of focus group is. So I just want to clearly share. So, you know, you’re saying quantitative feedback is your typical survey? I think everybody has is used to that. And then, you know, you get a bunch of data, you get scores maybe one through ten. Your your your rating, your customer satisfaction, or your. How likely you are to recommend. So that’s easy. And that turns into quantitative data on spreadsheets. But you’re saying that qualitative.

Julian Castelli 00:05:02 The state of the art even today some places is still focus group just to share the audience how long a focus group typically takes and how expensive that is.

Andy Barraclough 00:05:10 Yeah, I mean they the biggest part I think with focus groups is so, you know, you you traditionally get in people in the room. You know we a lot of this has moved online now. So it’s you know utilizing maybe zoom or other technologies as well. But a lot of times the bigger part with things like focus groups and that larger scale qualitative research is the cost of getting those people involved, the cost of getting people in a room, especially if that’s in person, better. You can talk to maybe a.

Julian Castelli 00:05:38 And those are those, those, those rooms were the one way glass and people standing behind them and looking right as they Daryl and the Dorito.

Andy Barraclough 00:05:46 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Trying trying to trying to capture.

Julian Castelli 00:05:49 How that sounds like so 90.

Andy Barraclough 00:05:51 Yeah. How consumers really feel but not in their environments at all, where they feel completely uncomfortable.

Julian Castelli 00:05:56 Windowless room with a one way mirror.

Betsy Schack 00:05:58 Wait, wait, I have to jump in quick. My. My favorite story from a focus group is for alcohol brands. They’ll like pay for people to come in at like 10:00 in the morning to drink beer and like, tell them how they feel about drinking beer.

Julian Castelli 00:06:13 How much beer do they give them?

Betsy Schack 00:06:15 Well, it’s actually enough beer that they have to put them in a separate room to, like, sober up. And then they have to pay for, like a breathalyzer to breathalyzer them before they leave. So not only are.

Julian Castelli 00:06:26 You getting that sounds, that’s the typical process that just goes to the nth degree of ridiculousness.

Betsy Schack 00:06:31 Like, not only are you getting very sterile insights because you’re asking somebody to drink a beer at 10:00 on a Tuesday in a very sterile room, but you also have to, like, pay for their time, pay for them to come in, and then also make sure that they’re okay to drive home.

Julian Castelli 00:06:44 Yeah, yeah. Think about the logistics, the all the HR challenges.

Andy Barraclough 00:06:48 The companies are paying, you know, tens and tens of thousands to do these single studies. right? So because they’re spending so much the process to then plan for it. All right. If we’re going to spend 40 grand on this one focus group study or whatever it is, then they have to put all this planning work in to make sure it’s like we’ve got the right discussion going.

Julian Castelli 00:07:06 All the planning. You need a skilled moderator to capture that time. Yeah. And you only got, what, ten, 12 people?

Andy Barraclough 00:07:12 Yeah. And I mean, I mean.

Julian Castelli 00:07:14 You know, the better the end, the better the data. Right? And your tools. Now you can get 100 people in a quarter of the time or a fraction of the time. Right.

Andy Barraclough 00:07:23 So yeah. So your average focus group, someone’s only speaking for five minutes. So you’re not really getting that much content anyway. But it’s but because of the planning time and I think this is the thing, it’s that as, as you know, C-suite leadership are asking for decisions to be made quicker.

Andy Barraclough 00:07:35 If it’s taking you ten, ten, 12 weeks to turn around insights from something.

Julian Castelli 00:07:41 Like, yeah, so after you spend that all that time and all those people and all that synchronicity and all that logistics and breathalyzer, then beyond that, you saying it’s another 6 to 8 weeks just to get it out end product because you have to analyze all that, right?

Andy Barraclough 00:07:54 Yep. You got to understand it and everything else. And I mean so so for us there’s just better ways to do this. And so it doesn’t. One of the things that we’ve always said is our platform is really about. I mean, so we start off we start off injecting video into surveys. Right. So now you can go reach 100 people, 200 people across the world, globally, 24 hours late.

Julian Castelli 00:08:12 And that’s by using using the computer in our pocket which is a cell phone. Right.

Andy Barraclough 00:08:16 Yep. And those those videos can then come into our platform for analysis. But right away you’ve kind of cut that process down.

Andy Barraclough 00:08:22 But there’s still a lot of scope for 1 to 1 human interaction. So we we acquired another company a couple of years back. We started to look at how we make sure we’ve got the ability to have a platform that allows you to do the right research at the right time. So now if you want to do you know, the three of us in a room having a conversation with it and me interviewing you to about something like there is value for that, but now you can do that at scale much quicker. Connect with participants, have the systems help create the launching and running of those studies. But for us then that migrated into. Okay, so let’s now inject an AI moderator into this scenario.

Julian Castelli 00:08:59 So rather than this is the new product that’s just coming out pretty recently. That’s pretty exciting. Yeah.

Andy Barraclough 00:09:04 So I mean we’ve.

Julian Castelli 00:09:05 Launched.

Andy Barraclough 00:09:05 And and the example of the beer drinking. So now you have the AI moderator, then.

Julian Castelli 00:09:10 You make the AI moderator drink the beer with you.

Andy Barraclough 00:09:12 Well yeah that would be nice.

Andy Barraclough 00:09:13 I think they I think they might struggle but that. Yeah, a moderator can follow a discussion guide probe. Have you know that human voice into it but do that on the timescale of the participant. So now if someone wants to drink their beer at 5:34 p.m. in the evening, sat on their sofa in their own time, they do it when they’re ready, not trying to coordinate moderators and individuals.

Julian Castelli 00:09:34 So go in the holding tank.

Andy Barraclough 00:09:36 And all of those things become very difficult and very costly then to to be able to support. So for us, the what we’ve developed is a platform that allows you to do that research in any way. Through video surveys, you can do your 1 to 1 focus group type interviews if you want to. You can do your AI moderated interviews. You can import video that you’ve already captured. And essentially then it comes into how you can utilize our AI tools for that analysis as well, which generates automated reporting, understands all those videos at scale and gets you to those insights extremely quickly so you can get to those answers and and understand.

Julian Castelli 00:10:11 Yeah, ultimately that’s the goal. You’re trying to get the insights. You want to create an environment where you can have qualitative follow up questions and really understand the why. That’s what you said, right? Because the the quantitative gives you the what. But then the why. And this allows you to do it at scale. Broader population, more targeted population, faster and less expensive. Correct. And probably even better qualitative insights based on the technology and analyzing every word and every interaction. Right?

Andy Barraclough 00:10:37 Yeah. Because the stuff that as humans we miss even when we’re going for analysis.

Julian Castelli 00:10:40 Yeah. Even the best moderator, you know, even the best note taker, you know, I remember us talking about these studies, just, you know, being turned into PowerPoints that go into into files somewhere. Right. And so, you know, with with a digital you can you can query them at any time. Right. And they kind of live on as kind of a corpus of knowledge for, for the organization.

Julian Castelli 00:11:01 Right.

Andy Barraclough 00:11:01 Yeah. Which is huge because the amount you’re paying for those insights and gather them those insights, but often never using them again. And when you speak to someone over a 20 minute interview, you pull out those three, four little nuggets to do with the answer that you needed at that time. But there’s so much more that they spoke about. There’s relevant to.

Julian Castelli 00:11:17 You’re capturing maybe two of the 50 pages, you know, so there’s this huge value unlock here.

Betsy Schack 00:11:23 It also frees up and kind of changes how you do interviews as well. So as the VP product at Box Bobby, I’m doing a lot of customer interviews. I’m doing discovery calls. I’m like checking in with our clients. I’m sitting on with sales. The way that I ask questions now has changed, because I don’t need to frantically scribble notes on the side, and I actually can be more present. I can listen more because I know that everything is getting recorded. It’s getting deposited into the platform. I have that repository that I can query.

Betsy Schack 00:11:50 I have a place where I can go and help write my follow up emails. Like, I can look at all of the customer interviews that happened in the last year. What are the top themes and what are the top features that people are asking for? You know, how are they feeling about this new AI moderator tool? Yeah, that we just released. Why do they like it? What are they not like? Where do they see the value? Like that’s all stuff that’s incredibly possible.

Julian Castelli 00:12:13 So are you using the Voxpopme tools to conduct some of your interviews?

Betsy Schack 00:12:16 Oh, it’s incredibly meta. But yes, I every single day. And then our platform to either conduct.

Julian Castelli 00:12:22 It well, there’s nothing better than eating the dog. Eating the dog food in the old, old phrase. Right. So you’re in there using the insights platform. Okay. Drink your own champagne. Yeah. There we go. Yeah, yeah yeah. Qualitative insights platform to talk to customers about product feedback on and on a tool to get product feedback for customers.

Julian Castelli 00:12:42 Yes. This is this is the the wonderful loop.

Betsy Schack 00:12:44 And I would like to say like it sounds incredibly complicated when we’re talking about it. We have all these different products and stuff, but like it is very straightforward. So anybody even listening could go to Mi.com and launch a free study. Just asking people whatever question you’ve had. So I’ve heard product managers ask questions like, yeah, why do customers hate buy now, pay later? Or what could we do to better understand Gen Z’s opinions about downloading an app or data privacy or something like we talk about this in very, you know, complicated, lots of products, lots of things to do terms. It can start out as an incredibly simple use case.

Julian Castelli 00:13:19 It can just go self-service. Now you can just go and ask a question like that.

Andy Barraclough 00:13:23 Absolutely.

Julian Castelli 00:13:24 Yeah. Oh that’s that’s pretty impressive. So instead of scheduling, you know, having meetings to to schedule meetings says schedule focus groups. You can literally go on there and ask a question. I understand how technology allows you to ask a question, but how do you actually match that with customers? What goes on in the back end? So if I, you know, maybe I’m an entrepreneur and I want to test an idea out and I go to its Voxpopme.

Julian Castelli 00:13:46 Is that the place to go?

Betsy Schack 00:13:47 Question one. Single question. Question. Should have made a question because you can ask multiple.

Julian Castelli 00:13:51 You should get them both. You should get them both. Question. But if I go there and I want to just do some market research, you know, in the age of AI startups, I can just go there. But but who who does it ask? It’s not asking you, me and Andy. Who’s going to ask?

Betsy Schack 00:14:05 It’s going to ask people relevant to your question.

Julian Castelli 00:14:08 Yeah. So we have a large part of the magic, right?

Andy Barraclough 00:14:11 Yeah. We have our own proprietary consumer panels. And and we also integrate with others worldwide. So support tens and tens of different markets. So for this one, if you wanted to go ask people in the US Gen Z why they’re buying habits have changed, you know for certain products or something else. You’ve just put in that that top level research idea. The AI will then understand who you’re trying to target so it knows what age groups.

Julian Castelli 00:14:34 So it helps you choose your audience. It doesn’t help you create your discussion guide. So you have a discussion with your moderator and say, these are the kinds of questions I’m trying to solve and it can help you. You can help you.

Andy Barraclough 00:14:47 It’ll. Yeah. Design your entire project plan. So it’s going to come up with the the the a bunch of questions. So you can then slice and dice your data in different ways and understand cohorts. But it will decide based on your input who it needs to reach. And you launch that. And within, you know, within the first 5 to 10 minutes there’ll be videos popping up into the platform and you can see real concerns.

Julian Castelli 00:15:06 Within 5 to 10 minutes. You’re getting feedback really. Yeah. That’s incredible. What’s the reaction? How are people loving that? I mean, that that sounds like a powerful, you know, just complete paradigm shift. Do you have some stories of some customers who played around with this and just found some really cool things that you can share?

Andy Barraclough 00:15:22 Yeah, I’ll let Betsy, Betsy smart.

Andy Barraclough 00:15:24 And I know there’s a bunch of stories here, but like, first off, for me, like, this is the, you know, when we’re coming at this from a product standpoint, it all comes back to time to value and creating that time to value. And I think.

Julian Castelli 00:15:34 Yeah, this.

Andy Barraclough 00:15:34 Is for us like our customer base is primarily enterprise, you know, large customers. And a lot of times within that there’s a lot of hurdles to jump through. you know, going through sales, demos, everything else as well. But we know the power of. If you can ask a question in five minutes later, hear a consumer talking about your brand.

Julian Castelli 00:15:51 Yeah, just just the ability to to match and execute and have feedback and have it digitized and presented. In what way? All these different ways within five minutes. That even surprises me. And I know where we were going because we’ve talked before, but that’s that’s incredible. Tell us the stories, Betsy.

Betsy Schack 00:16:07 Oh my gosh. I mean, there’s there’s quite a few, but I will say that the, the common thread that I hear when I’m talking to, to Voxpopme customers and also people who don’t use us, is that having somebody else say something is so much more valuable than you going to your boss and saying something yourself, right? Like I say, we really need to invest in this area.

Betsy Schack 00:16:26 You could say it til you’re blue in the face. But if Joanna from Iowa says, I really wish you guys would do X, all of a sudden that customer voice is there. All of a sudden that that research is there. It’s a real person saying a real thing about a decision that you’re making. And all that we’re doing in that process is making it as easy as possible to get get that video into your hands, right? So whether it’s like you’re doing a question.com or you’re doing an interview, that that’s what it boils down to. And, and we we use this internally. Right. We collaborate on the roadmap that we create ourselves. Priorities. You know when we’re making strategic decisions, we’re going into this repository of our consumer data and saying, okay, what are our clients think? You know, almost almost every board meeting we have a we have a showreel of our clients talking that that’s fantastic. You know.

Julian Castelli 00:17:18 You got to show me one of those. I want to I want to I want to see that.

Julian Castelli 00:17:20 That sounds fantastic. I want to see one of those.

Betsy Schack 00:17:23 They’re really great. They’re really great. So it’s like, yes, we’re talking about consumers like regular CPG brands, but there’s also a way that product collaborates here too.

Andy Barraclough 00:17:31 Yeah, I think so.

Julian Castelli 00:17:32 So you’re using it to get feedback on the Voxpopme product and you’re sharing that with your board just the way, you know, those moments are happening at your CPG customers.

Andy Barraclough 00:17:40 Yeah, absolutely. And all of this comes down to that building of empathy with, you know, with, again, with your customers, with your consumers. You know, that’s the thing that we’re always trying to understand. And the difference that you get between a score that or, you know, 17 people voted.

Julian Castelli 00:17:54 Number black and white. Yeah.

Andy Barraclough 00:17:56 People prefer blue rather than red. Actually, when you hear someone speak about something, often you find out you can see the thought process and the the gray area that sits between that a lot of times. And that actually helps you interpret the real needs.

Andy Barraclough 00:18:10 And so when it comes down to us from a product side of things, you know, with we’re always putting the kind of the customer at the, at the center of things. They might be asking for certain features. And we know this trap for a lot of companies, you end up becoming, you know, feature factory building things out actually.

Julian Castelli 00:18:25 Yeah, yeah. We’re going to have to talk about that. How do you how do you filter the feedback and make it into an effective product? I need to get us back on again, back on on schedule here because those are the topics we have to talk about. But I’m so excited about the product that I, you know, I’ve got to let me wrap it up with one question. okay. So. So you can do this. I’m amazed that you can do this and start actually seeing videos within 5 or 10 minutes. And let’s say you, you want like 100 videos of people. Clearly that’s faster. It’s better quality, all the different things.

Julian Castelli 00:18:53 But how much is something like this cost now?

Andy Barraclough 00:18:55 I mean, it’s so I’m.

Julian Castelli 00:18:56 Just saying for one study like that.

Andy Barraclough 00:18:58 Yeah. So I mean, one quest like this, this element like, still feeds into a lot of our, like, enterprise plans with customers. So right now it’s a it’s a self-serve tool that gets you into the platform. Yeah. It’s not a kind of pay as you go tool for that.

Julian Castelli 00:19:12 Right. Okay. So you can’t just go and it’s not quite operated. But if you’re on a subscription you could theoretically do an almost unlimited amount of these. So the cost is cost per per question or cost per mini. Studying must be a tiny fraction of what we discarded. This discussed upfront of the old.

Andy Barraclough 00:19:27 Yeah. So our customers are saying, you know, it’s it’s costing them maybe sub a thousand bucks or 1000 to 1000 and a half dollars per, per study that they’re running when they.

Julian Castelli 00:19:36 Kind of sub a thousand versus the previous paradigm was 20 to $40,000.

Andy Barraclough 00:19:40 Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And we’re seeing, like, some of our customers are running, you know, upwards of 1500 research projects within an annual period on platform across their users, everything they want an answer to. It’s like now I can get a quick.

Julian Castelli 00:19:54 They can. You know, in the old day, someone’s gonna give you the analysis like artillery, right? You fire and then you wait, and then you look and you see where it lands. And then you move you. You adjust the gun and you do it again. And you have like, you know, one shot every three minutes. Right now you can basically you can fire unlimited rounds and you can adjust so quickly that you can you can get such, such, such, such better precision and accuracy based on the, the, the lower cost and the higher volume. That’s pretty exciting.

Betsy Schack 00:20:21 Yeah, I’ll be honest.

Andy Barraclough 00:20:22 It becomes addictive. The customers get from that for sure.

Betsy Schack 00:20:25 Yeah. It becomes it becomes a little addictive because why why wouldn’t you.

Betsy Schack 00:20:29 Like what’s the reason not to. Yeah. What’s the reason to not talk to your customers about it. You want to make the decision, why wouldn’t you?

Julian Castelli 00:20:36 It’s almost like AI or ChatGPT, but you’re actually talking to your customers instead of whatever, you know, model that’s there, right? Because we’re all getting now used to talking to Gemini or GPT or Claude and, you know, creating our little agents. But, you know, sometimes those could be echo factories, but now you’re actually talking to your customer. That’s pretty neat.

Andy Barraclough 00:20:54 Yep. Absolutely. Doing that with a platform that sets all the guardrails and all the making sure that you get the right stuff through reducing hallucinations, all of those things. So you’ve got confidence in that that AI tool that’s that’s able to deliver it on it. So I’ll let you get back on track Gillian. Anyway.

Julian Castelli 00:21:08 Yeah. We we yeah, we we delve deep into there. But this is exciting. I’m really, really excited for you guys. All right.

Julian Castelli 00:21:13 Let’s let’s so clearly you’ve made some great strides in the product. It sounds like the customers are super excited about it I could see how excited you guys are but but that doesn’t come easy right? You had to you’ve had to evolve your product over over time. AI came along. You were early in that and you’re an early adopter, putting it into a product in a really compelling way. But how does that happen? Let’s talk about product. Maybe Betsy try to define product so not everybody understands how product works. You’ve got your executive level. And Andy you know used to run product. Now he’s the CEO. But let’s just in an org structure you’ve got R&D. And those are the people that write the code and build build the product. You know if it’s a software product, but then product sits kind of between R&D and the executive suite and your sales and marketing group. Right. Because they’re define what the product group does.

Betsy Schack 00:22:04 Yeah. No, that’s that’s a really good question. And I’ll say that every organization is going to have a different answer to this.

Betsy Schack 00:22:10 And the way that product runs at box. About me, I genuinely think is is very unique compared to other places that I, that I’ve worked before, which is that we have engineering group, an R&D group that is very product minded. So the way that the way that you described it of like engineers over in this room and then like product is the hallway to the rest of the business. That’s how I’ve seen it work in other places.

Julian Castelli 00:22:33 And I’m just thinking if we had an org chart, right, it kind of sits there and it’s an adjacent. But I think you’re going to tell me that, you know, the, the, the cooperation is so critical. And I think that’s where having a product oriented CEO like like Andy’s going to be helpful. But I suspect it’s not always the case.

Betsy Schack 00:22:49 Yeah it is. It is absolutely not always the case that you have a R&D group that is so product minded, and also that you have systems in place within your organization that breaks down barriers for product to do things like discovery and customer calls.

Betsy Schack 00:23:03 And sitting on sales calls like that is incredibly unique. So product at Voxpopme is not a function. It is a section of a lot of different functions because it.

Julian Castelli 00:23:14 Is kind of an overlay.

Betsy Schack 00:23:15 Collaborative. Yeah, I mean, I would say like I have engineers that like props to Andy for, for hiring an engineer, an engineering team that can get on calls with customers and like, and I’m not afraid because there are some product managers that rather die.

Julian Castelli 00:23:31 The engineers are not the most product, are customer friendly. That’s not that’s something they enjoy. and it’s not their strength. Right?

Betsy Schack 00:23:37 That is. Absolutely. That is absolutely a culture, that that has been created about me, that is that is unique. So if you’re a product manager, listen to this and you’re like, oh my God, no, I understand. I have, I have been there. We’ve been incredibly, product minded R&D team. We have a, I would say, a really strong product team that gets involved in other areas of the business and can help in other areas of the business.

Julian Castelli 00:24:00 The product team’s mission is what they do. Finish my question.

Betsy Schack 00:24:04 Yeah. So if you look at it from like a super high organizational level, the product team is not a delivery machine like it is in some places, right? A lot of people push product into like delivering the features at Voxpopme. I would say it is very focused on customer discovery. It is very focused on bringing the customer voice into the room, as meta as that sounds.

Julian Castelli 00:24:26 Yes.

Betsy Schack 00:24:27 And it is very focused in making sure we’re building the right things at the right time.

Julian Castelli 00:24:31 Okay. So that last piece, you know, I think you made a distinction. The last piece is, you know, what should we build and what should we build? First, second, third and and and create bringing perspective to the organization through interaction with customers. I think that’s where you’re anchoring. And I think you referenced and also, you know, critical part of product in some companies. But but it sounds like it could become too mechanical and too just focused on production, which is, hey, what are the steps that you take to build what we already decided to build? And that’s the, the roadmaps and the and what did you describe it as? The as the how or the process.

Betsy Schack 00:25:04 Yeah. Because if you if you have a product minded R&D team with like really with really strong engineers that can think about the customer mindset, then I’m not going to tell a senior engineer how to do their job, I trust them. And this is where we go back to like trust and empathy. I trust them to say, hey, here’s the customer problem. Here’s like a couple videos that the customer’s talking about this customer problem. I think this is how we could solve it. What do you think? And then you go from there.

Julian Castelli 00:25:30 Yeah. That’s very different than creating product requirement docs and and basically reporting on it. Here we got this many sprints done. And here’s what we’re going to do next. And we’re going to move this one up and that one back. Right. So that’s a very command and control or just kind of a process oriented. And it’s you know many companies still function there. But you’re really diving into the the voice of the customer, bringing it into it and understanding what problems to solve.

Julian Castelli 00:25:52 And that, that, that that to me sounds like a lot more fun to. Yeah.

Betsy Schack 00:25:56 Way more fun.

Andy Barraclough 00:25:57 I’m just going to touch on this as well because I know like Betsy may or may not, but that like for me, the the product role is a ridiculously hard one in any organization because of the amount of touch points that there are. Right? Betsy is having to speak with engineers, with executive teams, with support teams, with customer success, with customers, with sales, with, you know, every area of the business, with finance, there is a need to kind of understand all of those areas. And I think a lot of times, as you said, you you end up with products being order takers from the idea that it’s coming from whoever’s shouting loudest, right?

Julian Castelli 00:26:30 Yeah, right. When everyone’s trying to shout and say, hey, this is what the customer wants and you know it’s not untrue. Right. You have many different touchpoints, but but coordinating that all in a way that allows you to be productive, I guess, I guess.

Julian Castelli 00:26:42 You know, you do get a lot of feedback. How do you prioritize? How do you determine which of the what of the feedback is the most important to make decisions?

Betsy Schack 00:26:49 Yeah. I mean, I’ll start this off, but I think one thing that I would definitely want to mention here is it’s not just internal teams shouting loud loudest, because when you’re a product person, you have these fantastic relationships with the people who are using the platform that you have. It’s my favorite job. Like I, Andy knows I’ve done these like customer closeness sprints where I’ve had like 30 customer calls in two weeks because I’m really focused on one area or something. They shout too, because they have things that they want to get done.

Julian Castelli 00:27:14 The internal shout outs is just the repeating of the external shouts and and there’s passion because they when you hear the customer, you want to, you want to share that with your team.

Betsy Schack 00:27:22 But there’s also things that like, Andy, I’d love you to speak to this a little bit.

Betsy Schack 00:27:26 There are things that a founder just knows versus things that a product person knows versus things that a customer wants.

Julian Castelli 00:27:33 Yeah, yeah. And there’s different motivations if it’s coming from a sales person or a customer success person, but you have lots of channels, you’re the product channel, but you’re also getting feedback from customer success. You’ve got salespeople and then you’ve got executives. But yes Andy. Go ahead.

Andy Barraclough 00:27:46 So I think one of the things that we do well is kind of, you know, we’re looking at everything we have to kind of take back to kind of strategically what we’re looking to do within the business and where we’re seeing the opportunities. Right. And from there, you can start to then see how product plays a part in those different areas, which helps with that prioritization. I think the bit that Betsy spoke to you there about the kind of the, you know, sometimes the founder knows best. I think that like, there is that I think for a lot of founders frustration where they just want to move very quickly and get decisions made.

Andy Barraclough 00:28:17 And when you don’t have a good, trusting relationship with products, what happens there is product wants to validate and test every idea that you have. And sometimes the founder just knows, like I’ve already been this has been in my brain, going round and round for weeks and weeks and weeks, and I’ve already connected these different areas in my head, and we just need to move forward with this and just move quickly. And there’s other times where things need to be validated, tested and everything else. And I think that trust and relationship allows you to build out kind of knowing the needs of each area. And when those things come along and I’m like, hey, I’ve seen this. We just like, let’s focus on this for a little bit and build this thing out and like, yeah, let’s see. We’ll know when that is versus like.

Julian Castelli 00:28:56 That’s the founder override or founder veto, right. And that’s and that’s that’s because you have such perspective that, you know, as unique. It’s kind of a superpower.

Betsy Schack 00:29:05 Yeah. I’m going to disagree with you. Julian is not the founder veto. and I say this with much respect to Eddie. We used to make the joke that it was it’s the founder. Grenade.

Julian Castelli 00:29:15 Grenade. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Betsy Schack 00:29:16 It’s not a it’s not a veto.

Julian Castelli 00:29:17 The veto can feel like sometimes. Right?

Betsy Schack 00:29:19 It’s not a veto in that, like what you’re doing is not good. And we’re gonna say no to it. It’s the grenade of like it’s an opportunity grenade okay.

Julian Castelli 00:29:29 And how is that an opportunity?

Betsy Schack 00:29:31 Yes it is. Sometimes this will happen in the form of like just a message, like, hey, what if we did this? And then you start to think about it and everything that you were thinking about that day, you’re like, oh no, I really this is the opportunity grenade. This is what’s more important. This is like maybe at a different altitude than I was at. So I was at 1000ft. Right. And he’s at like 6000ft is like, hey, if we did.

Julian Castelli 00:29:53 This, you’re locked in to whatever you’re working on, right? And that’s the superpower that your founder has is they’ve talked to your customers. They’ve been in the evolution. They just have so much more context that that sometimes they can change, change, change.

Betsy Schack 00:30:06 One of my favorite things is when I call Andy and I’ll be like, I have this really cool idea, I want to do this thing, yada yada. And he’s like, okay, so we did that seven years ago and this is what happened. Just you can do it. Just I’ll let you know what happened. And I’m like, cool. And like, maybe you do do that thing, but you do it differently. Or like you have different contexts going in and you got to respect that. Like that part is very important.

Julian Castelli 00:30:29 How is that for you, Andy? Are you kind of, you know, when you when you when you get, when you see the excitement of a great product leader like Betsy come and say, I’ve got this great idea and you’re like, oh man, we tried that a long time ago.

Julian Castelli 00:30:38 But, you know, I guess sometimes it didn’t work, sometimes it did work. Sometimes the whole landscape has changed like it has now with AI and what’s possible. Right. So so how do you how do you react when you hear something like that?

Andy Barraclough 00:30:49 Yeah, I think you’ve got to you’ve got to come back to it is the, the, the idea and the, the kind of core outcome that you’re driving to. And then look at it like is there, is it a different landscape. Have things changed? Are we able to do this in a different way? I mean, you talked about AI like the the things that we can do now and build out in, you know, a couple of weeks in order to test an idea before we’d never get done because we’d need, you know, maybe two engineers to focus on it, and they’d have to drop what they’re doing for four weeks and work towards stuff like, me and Betsy can jump on a call. And I’m like, we did this.

Andy Barraclough 00:31:19 So questions started off from like, hey, we should launch this thing. And Betsy was like, well, we need to do this. And I was like, let’s get on a call and we’re going to build it. And we spent an hour putting together a proof of concept together. Build something out in an hour. I went off and did some bits. Betsy did some bits. We kind of we launched that, you know, initially the, the, the kind of first version of that, like just between the two of us having those conversations and building that out. And I think that’s an advantage that I’ve got, knowing how the ins and outs of the product side work and the engineering side and things like that, sometimes that can get very dangerous because a half build something and then just throw it over to the engineers to make it work properly. But it does allow us to kind of.

Julian Castelli 00:31:55 That’s rapid prototyping, right?

Andy Barraclough 00:31:56 Yeah. It allows us to test and not and sometimes the, the, the ability to not disturb a team who are focused on something that is very important is key, because you could easily interrupt other people’s time and lose focus on stuff that is very important within that, that allows us to kind of work together and kind of test something out.

Andy Barraclough 00:32:14 And then if we’re like, hey, this has got legs, we can then go off and move from that. The other product we did similar with was one that we’ve recently launched called signals, which basically does a load of proprietary, kind of like deep research in the background against an organizational context and our understanding of the brand that we’re working with, looks at trends in the market and uncovers those and then automatically runs consumer research to either validate or, you know, or say, hey, this is a trend, but actually consumers are saying something different, so it brings all that together. We had the idea, we built our proof of concept. And, you know, days from that, we went to launch within a six week from idea to full launch of the products within six weeks of.

Julian Castelli 00:32:59 Man, that is so enlightening and encouraging to hear because I, you know, I’ve been in so many of those conversations like, oh, oh, that’s 6 or 12 months of roadmap and we can only do one thing and, you know, all the constraints that you’ve historically had.

Julian Castelli 00:33:13 So to be able to do something so impactful that’s going to gather so much information so quickly, that’s really a step change in capability.

Betsy Schack 00:33:19 But you can you can only just a quick jump in. You can only do that if you have one. Trust between your product, product role and your founding role, and also only if you have a situation where you can quickly prototype that and then go and talk to customers. It’s not like a in that case, it’s not like a testing, should we do this thing? It’s, hey, we’ve already done this thing. What were you going to do with it? Those conversations are a lot more interesting than like.

Julian Castelli 00:33:45 Yeah, there’s so much.

Betsy Schack 00:33:46 More filling this thing.

Julian Castelli 00:33:47 Yeah, that’s so hard. Like, which would you like more? Right. It’s so difficult.

Betsy Schack 00:33:51 And then when.

Julian Castelli 00:33:52 You get some of the insights you’re getting, what are the customers saying when you ask that question?

Betsy Schack 00:33:55 Yeah. Well you can even get a layer deeper because they can actually see it.

Betsy Schack 00:34:00 Right. Yeah. It’s been it’s been prototyping.

Julian Castelli 00:34:02 What is what is the answer. What are they what are they using it for that they didn’t imagine before.

Betsy Schack 00:34:06 Yeah. So for for signals obviously like we built this first version of it, we went out to customers and everyone was like, this is great. I want to do it on a certain product, or I want to do it on a certain topic, or I wanted to like, of course, like everything you go to market and people have feature requests, but it was so much easier for us to go from going to market to immediately fulfilling those feature requests because we want to market early, we could prototype things. We could say, okay, you know, if you had this, but you could do it for a specific brand that’s in your portfolio, what would the value be? And all of a sudden, that conversation turns into a value based conversation. Sometimes even like pricing based conversation, it’s no longer a what if we did this thing because it’s already there?

Andy Barraclough 00:34:48 Yeah.

Andy Barraclough 00:34:48 And then hearing that if you can go out to customers and understand the value for them and again understand what like, oh, we’re already using a product like this and we’re paying like 80 grand a year to get a report that we get like, you know, once a year that takes weeks and weeks and then tries to tell us the trends for the next two years. And it’s like, you know, like you can see the the pain points and things within that and then the opportunity and then that allows us to make, again, strategic decisions around, hey, we think there’s a good opportunity here. We think there’s a great area for us to be able to grow and generate revenue from this. And here’s what we’ve heard customers say about it and how they’d use it. That is a lot easier than those coming back to the roadmap conversation. What Betsy does really well is brings those kind of key areas of focus that we have to the exact team, along with, like the things that we’re not going to be focused on, because here’s the stuff we have time for within a period, and here’s what we’re going to focus on within that area.

Andy Barraclough 00:35:44 But here’s the, you know, the reasoning, the value, the the, you know, the customer conversations that we’ve had to back that up. And that really allows us to then kind of lock in those priorities. And then the important thing for me is that exec alignment then leads into someone else having products back within the room that they live in. So what I’m talking about here is often salespeople are hearing something. Customer success. People are hearing something and they’re always asking for things. Right. And we’ve got a list of like ideas like that goes on forever. Yes. And so if you.

Julian Castelli 00:36:18 Are the idea backlog.

Andy Barraclough 00:36:19 Yeah. If you if you have like complete alignment with that executive group. We know that Braden on Customer success understands what we are building, why we’re building it, why it’s the priority and what we’re not doing, but how it’s kind of like coming soon, but we know it’s a focus, but we’ve decided not to do it because of something else. So when one of his team says that, it’s like it’s not a no, we’re not doing it.

Andy Barraclough 00:36:39 We can’t do this. It’s like, hey, this is there. But here’s the reason why.

Julian Castelli 00:36:42 We’re making sure that your team knows it’s on the list and they’ve been heard. It’s critical. Right? Because then then you can at least say, okay, I’ve shared the feedback and it’s been validated and it’s on the list. Yep.

Betsy Schack 00:36:53 So this is comes back to one of my main gripes with the product roll in general is that it’s often seen as like the no person, right? Like I’ve literally.

Julian Castelli 00:37:03 Worked with you’re managing scarce resources.

Betsy Schack 00:37:06 Yep. And I’ve literally worked with product managers that had a black tee shirt that just said no, that would point to it. And calls like, I’ve worked with that person and I get why they did it, because they got asked a thousand things.

Julian Castelli 00:37:17 Yeah, but that becomes a little, little constructive in terms of being a product feedback led organization. Right.

Betsy Schack 00:37:23 Yes. So the way that we kind of flip that is like, yes, absolutely. I want to build that too.

Betsy Schack 00:37:30 Like, yes, I see the value there. Oh I could see how this.

Julian Castelli 00:37:33 Puts you on the list.

Betsy Schack 00:37:34 What Mr. stakeholder sir, who is very adamant about this thing being built, what would you like me to not build instead? Because like all. Yeah, if you really see the value of it and we it’s a really good like. Absolutely. If we build this thing, we’re going to make $2 million today. Cool. What would you like to put down. And when you have an exec group that understands the reason why they do that on your behalf? Yeah, right.

Julian Castelli 00:37:56 No.

Betsy Schack 00:37:56 That’s good. Oh, yeah. You should talk to Betsy about that. I know it’s not in Q in Q4, because in Q4, we’re we’re really focusing on this area, but like, you should talk to Betsy about it. And then that person comes to that conversation in a completely different mindset.

Julian Castelli 00:38:07 That’s awesome. Yeah. That is one of the hardest things is prioritizing that. But, you know, it obviously sounds like with AI today you could do you could do more faster.

Julian Castelli 00:38:15 So I think the velocity is starting to improve and that should help that tension. But then I think just the transparency of of making sure that the feedback is honored and it’s been. It’s on the list. And, and then you have some sort of process where you call and prioritize and make those tough decisions. And if you have visibility onto that, then someone can say, okay, I know I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m fourth on the list and I’m going to keep monitoring that and, and keep getting more information to share with you if it’s becoming more important or less important.

Andy Barraclough 00:38:41 Yeah. And I think the, the interesting thing for me around the kind of AI velocity piece is like it’s a blessing as much as a curse because before, as I said, like if you knew that there was a great idea that you wanted to test, like you couldn’t test it because you just wouldn’t be able to find the time to do it? Now I’ve got the time. Like I can set things running off and do way too much.

Andy Barraclough 00:39:00 So actually now you have like all of these that and then again it comes back down to okay, putting the customer first, what are we building? What are we strategically focused on. Why are we doing that. What’s the outcome for it. Like because otherwise you can get into this trap of like I can now do more quicker and you’re just building more and more and adding, yeah.

Julian Castelli 00:39:17 I can’t just build more stuff. Yeah. You still have to prioritize. And you still got. Getting back to where we started. You still have to align your product to the voice of the customer, you know, through feedback, which is the beauty of the voxpopme product. So that’s that’s been an awesome discussion. Guys, thank you so much. let’s finish with a couple rapid fire questions. So you guys are product experts. You have passion. What are some products outside of Voxpopme that you admire?

Andy Barraclough 00:39:41 I can jump in. So there’s a couple for me. So one of the ones initially on kind of the when we started to be able to do a lot more with AI tools was was A10.

Andy Barraclough 00:39:50 So this is a that’s.

Julian Castelli 00:39:52 Like an agent builder, right? You can just kind of create little.

Andy Barraclough 00:39:55 Link things together like that for us, for building out prototypes or where we’ve got workflows and things that we want to test. Like we’ve always had the mindset of until we know the true value, it’s like we put a small amount of effort into something and we might be able to then, you know, piece a process together and then then you can start to scale it, because building the end thing might take too long and you’ve built the wrong thing by that time. Like, we can now build a workflow out to automate all of these for us or Tesla.

Julian Castelli 00:40:21 But anyone seems like the perfect tool for rapid prototyping.

Andy Barraclough 00:40:24 Yeah, and it’s great. And anyone like. So we’ve got people all over the organization utilizing this tool in a way that they can kind of build out and test something out without being like, okay, we need an engineer for like three days to put these things.

Julian Castelli 00:40:37 Exactly.

Andy Barraclough 00:40:38 No, more like that one has been has been.

Julian Castelli 00:40:40 It’s a super, super cool use of AI within the product iteration and testing. Yeah. Example. How about you, Betsy?

Andy Barraclough 00:40:47 The other one. I’ll just say the other one for me.

Julian Castelli 00:40:49 You got this.

Andy Barraclough 00:40:49 Okay. Whisper flow. If people have not used that, as is my favorite. So that’s just a it’s a.

Julian Castelli 00:40:54 Whisper flow do. Is that is that one of the voice recording?

Andy Barraclough 00:40:57 Yeah. And it’s nothing like technology wise. There’s nothing particularly different. It’s the it’s again, this is a great like example of product. It’s how seamless it fits into everything that you do. So whether I’m in slack on my mobile or I hit a hotkey on my keyboard and whatever app I’m in, I dictate and it drops it into that application. Like, that is a great example of taking King speech to text, which is something we’ve had for a long time, and then creating a seamless, frictionless journey within the way that you utilize that and all the tools.

Andy Barraclough 00:41:24 So like that’s been a yeah, a big one for me.

Betsy Schack 00:41:26 And for any product, people listening. Whisper flow is fantastic for product demos. If you ever have to put in stuff into a text box while you’re demoing it, you could say something like, oh yeah, and for for these objectives, I’m going to hit that hotkey. I want to understand da da da da da da da da da. And it types it for you on the product demo. So it also has a very good application for, for for demoing things. So because I knew Andy was going to say on and because we spent so much time in it, I was thinking about a little bit about what it means to take things to market, because Andy and I can go off and build a million things, but if nobody finds out about them or nobody can test them easily, it doesn’t really mean much. So one that’s kind of changed our ability to deliver that way has been a has just been lovable. I think from a product perspective, they did a fantastic job of seeing a pain point and and really focusing on solving that pain point.

Betsy Schack 00:42:17 But we we use lovable for creating these like quick websites that, you know, people can sign up for something or they can they can experience something in our product a little bit earlier. And I think it’s a great way to bridge the gap between product and marketing. In some cases, I will create something unlovable and be like, this is absolutely not going to be used. But here, marketing team, this is what I’m thinking about for this go to market, take it. Use it how you see fit. And that rapid prototyping extends to other areas of the business. It’s not just product owning now.

Julian Castelli 00:42:45 Well thank you guys. That is that is awesome. Those are great examples. I’m going to follow up with you and get some tips. But most importantly I think what we’re seeing here is a great partnership between product and the key. And it’s been proven by the rapid product delivery that you’re doing at Voxpopme. And that’s helping other companies do the same with their customers. So what a great virtue loop there.

Julian Castelli 00:43:05 I’m excited about what you guys are doing. Thank you for sharing it with us today, and best of luck rolling these great products out with your customers.

Andy Barraclough 00:43:13 Appreciate you and appreciate everything you’re doing with growth elevated. And, yeah, for anyone who hasn’t checked out more of the events and everything else I highly recommend. It’s just, I said, from our perspective, being able to connect with others and peers within the different industries and different areas who have the same challenges and looking to solve problems, it’s, it’s absolutely massive. So, yeah, appreciate everything you’re doing for that community. And thank you very much.

Julian Castelli 00:43:36 Well thank you. We look forward to seeing you guys in January at our at our summit. And thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

Andy Barraclough 00:43:41 Appreciate it. Thanks, Jim.

Julian Castelli 00:43:42 All right. Thank you guys.

Julian Castelli 00:43:47 Thank you for listening to the Growth Elevated Leadership Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, would you please follow us and subscribe on your favorite podcast player and we’d be grateful if you recommend it to a friend.

Julian Castelli 00:43:57 If you’d like more resources on how to become a better leader in business, we invite you to visit us at Growth Elevated Comm. We’ll be back next week with more insight from another great tech leader. Thank you.