I love these lower‑back‑strengthening recommendations, especially for cross‑training for farming!

1. Pull-ups
2. Push-ups
3. Overhead press
4. Squats
5. Romanian deadlifts or Harrop curls

More specifically and beginner-minded:

1. Leg-assisted pull-ups using gymnastics rings.
2. Push-ups from your knees.
3. Standing military press, knee-bent pike push-ups, or handstand push-ups.
4. Bodyweight squats with a heel raise then reverse lunge.
5. Hinge at the hips to lower the weight to the floor and return to standing.

Equipment

• Gymnastic rings: https://kensuifitness.com/products/duo-rings
• Adjustable dumbbells: https://trulap.com/products/8592g4
• Pull-up grips: https://kensuifitness.com/products/swissies-v2
• Stand alone pull up bar: https://bullbarfit.com/bodyweightmuscle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw

2024-11-27

This short interview (under 15 minutes) with Kayla Eliaza from Notion, hosted by Tiffany from Enterpret, shared helpful advice on getting started with Voice of the Customer. It made me want to dive dive deeper into specifics: how to measure VoC effectiveness in ways that clearly influence planning decisions, move the needle on customer satisfaction, and impact revenue. It made me curious about concrete examples of early feature wins—what the feature was, how the insights were reported, and what resonated most with PMs and leadership. Now I want to continue the discussion!

Summary

• Start small with 1–2 teams.
• Focus on what’s useful for product teams.
• Find a senior advocate who can deliver an early feature win.
• Define goals—better feature reqs, happy users, high engagement.
• Track sources (plan level, ARR) to strengthen your case.
• Track metrics for location and language.
• Measure support response time, CSAT, back-and-forth volume.
• Gain buy-in by giving PMs actionable, problem-focused insights.
• Use AI to tag, track, surface trends over time—avoid recency bias.

People who are responsible for customer insights want to meet people who are doing the same thing. They want to exchange best practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=39s

Start with a conversation. Don’t try to capture every team’s feedback right away—start small with one or two teams and try to make sure people know what’s going on, including your audience. Look for what’s useful for the product teams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=3m18s

Find an advocate, preferably someone high up or someone who can build a feature that will get an early win. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=4m15s

There’s not a really cut and dry metric for voice of the customer—it depends on what your goals are. Examples: drive more feature requests, better feature requests, make users happier, drive more engagement. Know where the insights are coming from, i.e. free vs paid plans, annual recurring revenue (ARR). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=4m54s

Look for metrics that will help you build your case and watch them for increases or decreases. Look for where the requests are coming from, i.e. plan levels and annual recurring revenue (ARRs).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=6m16s

If your a company looking to expand, track metrics for location and language. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=7m12s

Track support metrics such as how long does a ticket take to respond to what are the customer satisfaction ratings, how many back and forth emails, how long is this phone call. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=7m21

How do you get buy-in? How do you show your worth? How do you get the product teams to build the features the customers are asking for? Get better information from users. What do your PMs want? What’s useful for them? What’s the problem they are trying to solve? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=8m17s

AI is changing everything including Voice of the Customer. Avoicd recency bias. Record and tags things as you go. AI can do some of those things even though its not perfect. Track things over time. AI allows you to take in so much more information and identify trends so much more easily. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=10m23s

What are the most helpful tools and resources? Enterpret and ZenDesk are two of her resources but she always wants more. Each company she has been at has used their own tools for reporting, Asana and Notion. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0RieEHEkjw&t=13m3s

Tools mentioned: Enterpret, Zendesk, Asana, Notion.

https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/91e239d4-8f09-4ce0-8f52-4288a7154d36

I really enjoyed this book—not just for how Will Guidara wove a lifetime of meaningful conversations with his dad throughout, but for how he emphasized prioritizing the people you work with above everything else. It made me want to surround myself with people who share those values. The kind of leadership he describes is exactly the kind I want to work under. Good leaders put their people first, and you can see it clearly in how they interact with them.

Chapter 1 – Welcome to the Hospitality Economy

I now believe the best interview technique is no technique at all. You simply have enough of a conversation that you get to know the person a little bit. Do they seem curious and passionate about what we’re trying to build? Do they have integrity? Are they someone I can respect? Is this someone I can imagine myself and my team happily spend a lot of time with? (12:02)

Chapter 2 – Making Magic in a World That Could Use More of It

People will forget what you do, they’ll forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel. (21:14)

Chapter 3 – Extraordinary Power of Intention

Enlightened hospitality which upended traditional hierarchies by prioritizing the people who worked there over everything else including the guests and investors. Danny’s big idea was to hire great people, treat them well, and invest deeply into their personal and professional growth and they would take care of the customers—which is exactly what they did. (48:13)

It’s easier to learn the right way to do things at the high end than it is to break bad habits—you can always take it down a notch later but it’s harder to go the other way. (49:36)

Chapter 4 – Lessons in Enlightened Hospitality

Two things happen when the best leaders walks into a room—the people who work for them straighten up a little bit, making sure everything’s perfect, and they smile too. (52:08)

Enthusiasm is contagious. (54:34)

Make the charitable assumption. A reminder to assume the best in people even when, especially when, they weren’t behaving especially well. Ask first, is everything okay? Maybe this person needs more love and more hospitality than anyone else in the room. (58:38)

This central concept of enlightened hospitality, the idea that taking care of one another would take precedence over everything, was real. He didn’t focus on the what, he focused on the why. Just being in the room felt like joining a movement or accepting a mission—a vibrant and exciting community more important than yourself. (1:00:46)

Cult is short for culture. (1:01:59)

Chapter 5 – Restaurant-Smart vs. Corporate-Smart

Manage 95% of your business down to the penny and the other 5% foolishly. (1:31:59)

Wherever we could we worked to minimize expensive turnover and the dreaded overtime. But then, a few times a year, I would spend a truly obnoxious amount of money on an experience for the team. (1:33:55)

Whether that meant closing the restaurant for the day so we could host a team building retreat or hiring a DJ and a couple cases of Dom Pérignon for the over the top staff parties we were famous for. I could afford these indulgences because I’d been so disciplined the rest of the year. (1:34:08)

Chapter 7 – Setting Expectations

The team needed to feel seen and appreciated. They needed expectations to be clearly laid out and explained. They needed disciplined to be consistent. (2:00:36)

We needed system so everybody would know what they were supposed to be doing and how they were supposed to be doing it. It was my hope that it would make feel safer and inspire them to come along on our mission. (2:01:33)

A leader’s responsibility is to identify the strengths of the people on their team no matter how buried those strengths might be. (2:08:15)

Keep emotions out of criticism. (2:10:46)

Every manager lives with the fantasy that their team can read their mind. In reality, you have to make your expectations clear. Your team can’t be excellent unless you hold them accountable to the standards you set. Make those corrections in private. (2:15:17)

It’s a leader’s job to give their team feedback all the time. , but every person on the team should be hearing more about what they did well then what they could do better or they’re going to feel deflated and unmotivated. (2:16:13)

Consistency is one of the most important and underrated aspects of being a leader. A person can’t feel safe at work if they’re apprehensive about what version of their manager. They’re going to encounter on any given day. (2:16:48)

You’re going to mess up. When you do, apologize, not for the feedback itself but the way you delivered it. (2:17:12)

Chapter 9 – Working with Purpose, on Purpose

The place needed a little more Miles Davis. (2:53:13)

Don’t try to be all things to all people. If you try to be all things to all people, it’s proof that you don’t have a point of view. (2:54:15)

If you want to make an impact, you need to have a point of view. (2:55:01)

The end game isn’t the point as much as the process. You grow when you engage with another perspective and decide to decide again. (2:55:28)

Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how. you create a culture. (2:58:28)

Cool, endless reinvention, inspired, forward-moving, fresh, collaborative, spontaneous, vibrant, adventurous, light, innovative. (2:59:18)

We wanted to hire people who were curious about things they didn’t know and generous with what they did. We wanted people who passionate about the mission—as fired up as we were about what we were trying to accomplish. (3:06:28)

If they’re living in constant fear of being caught in a mistake you’re not going to get their most realized, relaxed selves interacting with your guests. (3:07:27)

Chapter 10 – Creating a Culture of Collaboration

Tap into their passions then give them the keys. (3:18:51)

Find the win-win-win. (3:29:27)

It’s always been my belief that “it might not work” is a terrible reason not to try an idea, especially one that has the potential upside of making the people who work for you more engaged with your mission. (3:36:15)

My Dad says the best way to learn is to teach, and he taught me to study for tests as if I were going in to deliver a presentation. I found that if I studied the material is if I was going to have to turn around and teach it, I learned it much more thoroughly than I would have otherwise. (3:36:31)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s

2023-07-21

This interview with Michael Nguyen from Figma, hosted by Varun Sharma at Enterpret, is jam-packed with Voice of the Customer best practices. They are quantifying qualitative data! And they’re doing it without the friction of manual labeling or extra required fields. AI does the heavy lifting, automatically tagging and routing feedback to the right teams. Customer insights aren’t an afterthought; they’re built into early product planning, with a voting process that sparks real engagement. Closing the loop nurtures trust and connection, leading to longer retention and stronger upsell. At the foundation of it all: every strategy starts with insights.

• • •

Some great starting points for building a VoC program:

1. Find the teams that champion customer feedback, help them succeed, showcase their results.
2. Collect feedback with context into a single source of truth.
3. Automate routing of feedback to the right team.
4. Avoid adding friction such as manual labeling.
5. Create a self-serve platform where insights can be found easily.
6. Let everyone vote on the top customer needs.
7. Require product plans to list the insights motivating the work.
8. Ask people to respond to customer feedback and give them the data they need to do it.

• • •

Key Challenges with Managing Customer Feedback

1. Don’t know where to find things.
2. No single source of truth.
3. Feedback is missing context.
4. Closing the loop isn’t great.

“Sales people would confess they don’t log feedback any more saying, ‘I don’t know where it goes so I just stopped doing it.’ But when I ask do you think the product team is focused on the right stuff they say 100%. So they’re listening to your feedback they just didn’t let you know they were listening to your feedback.” https://youtu.be/xmU7sjdvU_s?si=LILWObeK8210eIOz&t=3m23s

“There was this catalyzing moment behind the pandemic and trying to launch a new product that was a tipping point when they knew managing feedback and listening to customers was critical to how we’re going to be successful. There were champions on both the business and product teams to say we need to invest in this.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=6m24s

“The key thing is really understanding that cross-functional community and grassroots movement of people who want to grow these Voice of the Customer programs and really having the product leadership side to advocate for it. People want to grow these programs on the support or success side but without that partnership and relationship on the product side it becomes really hard to really get the momentum going.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=6m49s

Outside-In Building Blocks of the VoC Program

1. Listen
2. Understand
3. Act
4. Respond

“The core VoC loop: how do you put customers at the center, how do you setup mechanism to listen and understand what their needs are, take action, prioritize, build features, build solutions, and close the loop so they feel heard and valued. Then you get all of the amazing unit economic benefits like longer retention, higher up-sell, all of that good stuff.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=8m50s

Inside-Out Core Capabilities of the VoC Program

1. Alignment. Cross-functional voting on the top customer needs.
2. Awareness. Closed-loop feedback routing and triage process.
3. Analysis. Feedback is aggregated and accessible for analysis.

“Twice a year, we do a stack ranking process with all of our needs and top priorities—a moment of alignment before roadmapping to say the top things we should focus on. Next we build closed-loop feedback processes to route and triage feedback real-time between customer-facing teams and product builders. Then we take all of our feedback into a place that is accessible for analysis and quantification to use all of this rich data to inform decisions and actions.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=9m38s

Mission: Scale how customer feedback is integrated into how Figma builds products.

“What’s the customer facing strategy for VoC? What’s our strategy in how we’re going to scale it up? What capabilities does the organization needs?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=10m58s

“It was really important to strengthen the feedback loop between customer-facing teams and product builders because if we didn’t solve for that we would erode trust and connection and fall into this Us Versus Them mindset that I think you see at a lot of big organizations.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=12m19s

We standardized the feedback loop between customer facing teams and product builders to foster trust and increase awareness. “Standardizing the core loop process: here’s the single place you submit feedback, it goes into a form just like bug tracking with the user need, the user email, and the product area and then we have automation route it to the right product team.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=12m50s

“The best CSMs are intrinsically motivated to advocate for their customer right and if you don’t provide an avenue to do that or a way for people to get benefit and build connection around that then it’s a huge missed opportunity” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=15m9s

“At Figma, there’s a product philosophy that all strategy starts with insights. Insights from VoC, research teams, market analysis—that is the grounding in which leadership and product teams start thinking about plans.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=16m20s

“I think there’s something beautiful about letting people feel like they can really vote, because normally people are too busy and they’re not going to submit every little piece of feedback, but when you give them a chance to vote and explain why they’re voting for things then there’s really rich insights into their point of view and context.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=16m53s

“I’ll just be honest—I didn’t think it was possible [to use AI for analysis] because it’s so much work, it’s so hard to get resourcing and engineering resources and manual labeling that I just don’t think like it’s worth it but after the pilot and and seeing how Enterpret can aggregate and automatically label our feedback it unlocked all of these use cases and some were what we wanted but some we were surprised by. Things that seemed hard now are easy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=17m50s

“The best sales people and best CSMs want to give feedback—they want to influence the product roadmap. The best product marketers want to engage with users and include them along the way. The best product managers want to sit in on customer calls and they want to see people using their product in real-time. The biggest challenge as you grow is you have to make trade-offs with time. Those things are just so hard and so easy to de-prioritize.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=21m32s

“Identify behaviors that you’re seeing in really good product builders. How do you find that? How do you enable them to do it easier and faster and tell their friends about it? Leaning in to really tailor your VoC program to the product building culture that you have was a really big lesson for me.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=22m40s

“They now have evidence and credibility to their strategies for their roadmaps and it’s not just “well I said so” or “I think this”. People are actually able to share their product intuition and it’s not just some genius in a room saying like this is what customers want.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=24m3s

“Coming up with who should we showcase in a customer story used to be really hard. It used to be ‘oh I know this person who knows this person and maybe I can get a meeting’ and now you can look up who asked for this feedback reach out to them, set up a call, and include them in the beta. We have in-depth real understanding of how they use the product before the feature, after the feature, and now these rich stories come to life where product marketers and product builders are connecting with real people that they’re building for.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=25m30s

This is a good example of how VoC helped inform pricing and packaging strategy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=27m4s

“All strategy starts with insights and you should defend your strategies and plans with the insights that are motivating those strategies and plans. When we go into planning, there’s a FigJam file and whoever’s driving that part of planning gets to decide the workshop part of it but there’s always a section in there with the insights motivating your strategy.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=33m10s

“Anything that added friction didn’t work. There were people saying, ‘we want to capture more data.’ Asking sales people to add even one more field for context-switching could be a deal breaker.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=35m6s

“The first question I ask when I talk to other VoC practitioners is ‘how are PMs incentivized at your organization and how are they accountable to solving customer needs?’ I’d say the answer here at Figma is the accountability lever is cultural. It’s through product philosophy. It’s through behaviors and values that existing product managers exhibit. It’s values we look for in hiring product managers and designers. So I don’t have to really worry about the accountability piece because it’s built into the DNA of how we build product. All strategy starts with insights.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=36m50s

“The feedback process is a pretty manageable volume. I think we get 150 to 200 tickets a month and the the way we handle the volume of it is through automatic routing. It just gets dispersed to the right product team automatically and those product teams have their own rituals. Some will do it async, some will do it distributed across different PMs and designers in their weekly stand-ups. I don’t prescribe how they should do it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmU7sjdvU_s&t=38m10s

Tools mentioned: Enterpret, Zapier, Salesforce, RevMap, Snowflake, Slack, Zendesk, Discourse, Discord, Redshift.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc

2024-05-06

“Thinking about customer feedback used to be a chore and now it feels like a competitive advantage. You have to do it. How do you build the insights infrastructure to really fuel product development, customer intuition, and customer empathy?” https://youtu.be/-Ps2DJ5Bgxc?si=-bkT8RVvIZHqfwlu&t=5m35s

“Figma wants faster feedback loops to know what customers are talking about every day—they want ambient awareness because that fuels customer empathy and customer intuition and the evidence for product managers, designers, and engineers to know what to prioritize now rather than wait 6 months to ask what should we do next?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=15m47s

“Closing the loop is key. To me its an obligation to close the loop because it’s delivering on that need for them to feel heard, to feel involved, in a co-creative process. I’ve intentionally designed the feedback loops to capture the user who asked for that feature as often as we can.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=17m18s

“By capturing the user ID or email with the feature request throughout different channels, you can export a list of everyone that has over time asked for this feature. Now you can send a CSV over to the marketing team and ask them to include those people in the launch email or send a personal email saying thank you we’ve built the thing you asked for. You can also enrich it with Salesforce data and go the sales rep to say here’s an opportunity to re-engage with customers because we have something to offer them now.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=18m32s

Rawr! This is a pattern I’d like to break!!!

“In support, keeping people in support is directly counter to what we’re trying to achieve. If we have a ticket where someone has reported an issue and we know it’s going to be fixed in a couple of months, I don’t want to leave that ticket open for 2 months, for one it’s not a good experience because they’re checking back and getting ‘no, not yet’, ‘soon’, ‘not yet’ and it bombs our metrics as well and that’s really the big challenge.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=22m5s

The problem with that statement is that they are assuming the metric is about when the ticket is closed when it should really be about moving toward a solution for the customer’s problem. Support cannot solve every problem, and not every problem reported can be solved. Support, however, can get credit for closing a ticket as “customer feedback captured” for problems they are unable to solve themselves. Instead, in this case, they are ignoring the customer and contributing to a dead-end for customer feedback because they are failing to realize or communicate that they don’t want to be measured on something that isn’t even their job! Assuming the actual goal is to solve problems for users, closing a ticket with an intent to re-open if/when that specific problem is solved is a win-win-win because support gets kudos for communicating well with customers and product gets kudos for communicating clearly back to support, product gets the info they need to make better products that customers love, and customers get better communication from support. It also puts customer insights data into the hands of the people who can actually use it. And in all of this, you don’t have to keep the ticket open! ??

“The biggest challenge we’re facing right now is the traceability of feedback from question, complaint, feature request, idea, something on the road map feature and tracing through and trying to connect the dots, i.e. this request is now a feature and it’s going on the roadmap, how do we find all those people that asked for that. That’s a coordination problem we have with our product and marketing teams that is very solvable and doable.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=22m35s

“I would highly encourage you to try a campaign one time where you do a personalized email to customers to close the loop. You will be blown away with the responses you get from people.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=22m35s

“We use AI to review, summarize, and repackage the feedback. Re-write this as a user story. Follow this user need statement in one sentence. That makes it bite-sized and digestible and we can push it into Slack to get ambient awareness where people feel they’ve heard it a millions times. We use Enterpret to setup smart searches as automated alerts, i.e. here’s your weekly top feedback summary for Figma for the week. Then you have the deeper AI-powered synthesis and analysis where you pull all of the data, break it up into themes, give specific examples, organize by product team, infer what team this should get routed to. Finally qualitative data, support ticket data, customer feedback is finally getting attention that all the data scientists have had for years and years.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=31m15s

“At the end of the day, nothing hits harder than the raw customer feedback whether it’s the audio clip or the actual text. You just can’t replace it. There’s no trend line that can replace the raw customer quote as they said it as it is because it’s a very visceral feeling.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=34m25s

I love Varun’s answer to this question!

“How do you push back on the mentality that if Henry Ford had asked his customers what to build he would have said to build a faster horse?” “You want to understand the underlying unmet need, or the pain that they have, so you can know the problem of the customer but the solution is up to you. The underlying need is that the users want to travel faster—the current horses aren’t fast enough. Company A may decide to invent automobiles. Company B might decide to invest in horse supplements to make them go faster. The underlying problem remains the same—it’s that the users want to travel faster. How you do it is up to you but the underlying problem remains the same.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=37m56s

“To do this effectively, you essentially need at least one person, or maybe a couple of people, who are inside creators whose job is to convert the raw stream of customer feedback and package it in a way that the product team can absorb it in a more natural manner. Investing in that kind of a functional role will dramatically help solve the underlying problem that the data is not useful because there’s someone dedicated who can help package it in a way that can easily be absorbed.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Ps2DJ5Bgxc&t=37m13s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8

2023-06-04

“I am optimistic about closing the loop in a personalized way at scale. If you’re able to capture some metadata, and you have the tooling to support it, it’s actually pretty easy to integrate user information back into campaigns.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=34m32s

“Every year Figma does a Big Little Things release with a bundle of quality of life things and tie it back to the users and feedback they mentioned.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=34m32s

“How do you drive success for and measure a VoC program?” “Take inventory all of the feedback channels. Communicate what those are, where they are, what type of biases they may have, what some of the limitations are and expose that across the company. Take time to understand how product development works in your company. Understand those moments of when feedback is most useful, which teams are using it, how to champion and elevate those teams to model that behavior.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=36m2s

“Constantly think about win-win opportunities. How do you make it easier for sales people to capture feedback? How do you make it easier for that feedback to get routed back to the product team? How do you make it easier for marketing to close the loop?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=36m56s

“Define your success criteria from the outset. Do you want to see numbers move? Which numbers? Are you looking to gain more users, drive greater adoption of certain features? The ultimate success of a Voice of the Customer program is when you see change in action as a result of the feedback and data that you have access to. Success is seeing a change in the product, user behavior, or the numbers that are important to us.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=37m50s

“We love to see CSAT improve. Also growth, revenue, reduction in churn, and NPS. The customer happiness, adoption, revenue growth are most important to me.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=39m2s

“How do you identify what the blockers could be and take action on that?” “It’s really around trust. I’ve worked in some pretty large organizations, and there was a lot of us versus them mentality between support and sales or sales and the product team and they’re working in different places. Understanding the level of trust between your insight generators and your insight consumers is super important. It’s key to understand that culture, how to repair it, and how enrich it. ” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=40m20s

“At what elevation level is it most important for the organization? For example, Some programs focus more on the roll-ups. For example, the Head of Product said, ‘I will not start planning until Michael gives me the VoC rankings.’ At Figma, it’s very down in the details where they want to see the feedback in real time and reach out to users and the roll-outs are a little less important. Understanding how decisions are made in the organization and what type of decisions people want user insights for is really key.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=41m6s

“Another ingredient for making VoC programs successful is visibility from leadership to follow through on by making sure there is ownership of VoC at scale and make sure people know who that is. Part of the product requirements are to include qualitative data (when it’s applicable, i.e. iterating or fixing something). They should answer, ‘what are people saying and do you really understand it?’ which is a bottom-up way to match the leadership emphasis on it.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=42m3s

“Historically there’s no way to drive shared alignment or understanding of the importance of one piece of feedback.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=44m27s

“My wishlist for future VoC is that it’s automated, human-curated, and as self-serve as possible with rich, accurate, robust data and metadata.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=47m12s

“A successful outcome of a collective maturity of VoC as a discipline is when people understand how the best products are being built and customer insights plays a critical role in that approach. There’s so much literature and thought leadership around product development, methodology, and process and in 2-5 years VoC has a chapter in that book including scaling insights, managing the feedback loop, why you need a team, how you build a VoC team, what type of talent, and how that integrates with product management, design, and engineering is a world-class aspiration for VoC programs.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mea4_q-oUy8&t=48m29s

I meet the most creative and interesting people every single time I go to CreativeMornings. I love them so much! Portland was perfect. Intisar & Amenta Abioto talked about rhythm and art. Amenta is the curator of the Black Artists of Oregon exhibit at the Portland Art Museum. Compassion filled her up. Beautiful quotes poured out of her. She talked about waves of time, how we can layer on to the different beats and rhythms in our lives, and that it’s possible to create a soft landing space for your consciousnesses in these dark times.

I met the organizer, the volunteers, the photographer, the videographer—they are all completely wonderful! I went to see the exhibit Amenta curated, and it was delightful to hear her voice again in the audio excerpts. I met up with a good friend for dinner and it felt like old times, waves of time.

The Drive Interview with Peter Attia

I think of life as a handful of direction changes that some of them you look back in the past and say wow that was a meaningful insight that came to me. (19:05)

We’re telling ourselves a story all day long, and we’re not aware of it. (19:50)

What you discover when you learn to meditate is that what pleases us most in those moments when you are fully captured by experience is the state of complete attention to the present. If you can muster that on your own, if you can actually guide attention irrespective of the object you’re attending to, then anything, any arbitrary object—the feeling of wind on your hand as you walk—can be an exquisitely pleasurable thing to notice. (25:44)

Anything that you can pay attention to, to the exclusion of anything else, can suddenly disclose what it’s like to have a very concentrated mind. Concentration is intrinsically pleasurable. You can get addicted to the changes in state that you experience in meditation. (26:45)

Unlike mindfulness where you’re letting go of any agenda you have for what you’re experience should be and you’re just reconciling yourself to noticing however it is […] you’re trying to change you’re experience and that’s different than simply being mindful of it. You’re trying to feel this feeling of love and kindness as intensely as you can feel it and as durably as you can feel it. (1:26:08) #wellwishing #goodvibes

It’s really the caliber quality of thoughts that determine the quality of our life. (1:41:49)

[On honesty.] They know you’re never going to lie to them. They know that you’re being truthful. When you have said that you didn’t like something in a spot where most other people would have told someone a white lie so as not to have to communicate that, then your praise means that much more. (2:21:20)

Nobody wants to suffer. It takes many of us decades to even come to the realization of how much of our suffering is self-imposed. The power of framing and the power of expectation are important. The mismatch between the negative expectation for how something is going to be and how it was… that time spent suffering was wasted. (2:33:20)

A good question was raised in this episode, “am I living an examined life?”