Scaling CS with Brittany Soinski of Loom

Speaker A: Welcome to the Gain Grow Retain podcast.

Speaker B: All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Gain Grow Retain, the podcast for customer success leaders. And today, uh, this is Jay, by the way. It's not always Jay, but today you have me. Um, and today I'm joined by Brittany Soinski. Did I say it right?

Speaker A: Sowinski.

Speaker B: Okay, I'm so sorry.

Speaker A: I should have clicked just. No, it's okay. You know, it's funny, people always come up to me and they say, oh, you know, you're Polish, I'm Polish. And they. They'll start talking in, um, Polish to me, and I'm like, no, it's just my married last name. So even I pronounce it wrong sometimes.

Speaker B: Well, it's great to have you on here. And Brittany and I met in person for the first time just a few weeks ago in Salt Lake, uh, at the CS100 conference. Uh, and Brittany's had a very exciting fall because she works for Loom, and Loom just got acquired by Atlassian for a few bucks, if I recall.

Speaker A: We did. Yes. Oh, my goodness. I woke up one morning. It was actually just a couple of days after the conference, and it was, you know, like, early morning, 6am and I saw my phone just, like, blowing up, and I rolled over, and it was all these news stories about the Atlassian acquisition, which, as you can imagine, it was just such a great feeling, and it's been such a celebration ever since. So really, really exciting time to be at Loom.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, to wake up and see, you're like, wait a minute, that's me. Yes. I work at Loom. My stock is vested.

Speaker A: Yeah. Like, sharing it. Sharing it with my parents and my. It's funny, my dad was texting me something a couple of months ago because, you know, he's, like, watching the stocks and watching the news, and he's like, this company, like, Lumen, got acquired. Like, does that impact you? I was like, no, those are different companies, similar letters, but no, dad.

Speaker B: Well, that's great. Well, congratulations. That's a huge milestone just to go through that. And obviously, I'm sure you're in the middle of a bunch of integration work now and that kind of thing, but tell us a little bit about what you do at Loom, and, uh, then I'll maybe tell people why I'm so excited to talk to you.

Speaker A: Sure. So my official title at Loom is Onboarding Lead. If you look on my LinkedIn or my signature block, um, it's unofficially Captain of Onboarding Awesomeness. It's kind of how I like to bring a little bit, bit of fun into the role. But really it's my job to work with our sales led customers for the first 60 or 90 days of their journey with Loom. And I'm here to be their cheerleader and inspire them to start changing the way that they are communicating kind of beyond just implementing a new tool because Loom's delightfully simple to use, which makes our job harder in onboarding because we have to find the places to add the value. It's kind of going a layer deeper and inspiring people to want to try this new way of communicating. Not so easy to get somebody to turn on a camera instead of send a quick email. You may find.

Speaker B: Yeah. So it's not like you're replacing some workflow solution where there's a process in place already and you have to go replace that process and they have to use it. This is teaching them how to do something that they probably have never done before.

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker B: Yeah. And it's intimidating to record yourself on video and then send that out is very intimidating. And I've gotten used to it over the years from doing stuff like we're doing right now. But the first few times I did it, it's like, oh, boy. Like, this is going to be tricky. I imagine your customers feel the same way.

Speaker A: It is for some. And it's so fascinating because you can tell pretty quickly when you're working, you know, with different champions, different Personas. Some people are like, oh, yes, I get this. I can do this right away. And then there's other people. I always tell the story of my husband every time I'm doing a webinar. He is an attorney and he's often getting inbound lead calls. And anytime I hear his phone ring and he's talking to a lead that found him on Google, I'm like running into the house because I'm in. I'm in a tiny house here in the backyard. I run into the house and I say, you got to follow up in an email with an embedded Loom. You have to show your face and smile and wave because you know this prospect is calling other attorneys on Google. How are you going to stand out? And the first couple of times he's like, I'm not going to do that. I'm just going to send a quick email as a follow up. But as he has been seeing, it's true that as the research has shown, that the first person that can actually connect the value that you are looking for, like, with your Pain point or your need the first person to, like, do that and do that well is who you hire. And so, uh, he's had 100% close rate. And so.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: I always like to tell that little story.

Speaker B: That is a great story. And you, you successfully changed the way your husband works, which is probably a, uh, feather in your cat, because that's a big deal. My wife's been trying to fix me for a long time on several fronts and hasn't happened yet.

Speaker A: Yeah. So he's my little proof of concept story on all of our Loom 101 webinars.

Speaker B: I love it.

Speaker C: That's great.

Speaker B: And I mean, even more so, like, you think about people like attorneys or finance people. Like, they usually don't think that way. So how did you, how did you convince him? Let's dig into that. How did you convince him to change, uh, other than being his wife? And you probably gave him a mandate to some degree on this. Right?

Speaker A: I think there are definitely some, um, change management strategies and tactics. Right. And it helps when you know your audience really well and kind of what's going to motivate that behavior change. But as even in onboarding or customer success, you're starting to work with a lot of the same Personas and types of people and starting to feel out, bucket out what motivates different types of behaviors. So you have to kind of go there directly. And for him, I knew that if I was able to say, you know, you're spending a lot of money putting advertisements out there, how can you make sure that when you get that call, you retain it? And the way to do that is to attach a human face to it. I do this also with prospects or customers and onboarding who are what I will call ghosting me if they're not answering me. And I'm like, why are you talking to me? I have all this value to provide you. You just need to answer me. What I found works is pulling up their LinkedIn photos on the background of my screen. I pull up my loom, I put my camera bubble in the middle, and I smile and wave and I embed this video with their faces on it in an email. And it will say video 4J. You open it and it's the smile and a wave and your face right there. Some might say a little creepy, but you know what, those customers are always going to open that email. And that's the hardest thing to do is just getting people to engage that first time. But kind of once you hook them, then you're good.

Speaker B: That's a great tip right there alone. Like anybody listening to this podcast should do that in their office immediately because everybody like you just signed a contract and you probably paid up front for that. Why are you talking to us like we need to get this going? That is a really cool technique. Well, and the other thing is what, uh, about what you just said, especially about your husband. One of the things that we often talk about in customer success is understanding how our customers make money. Because then you can hit them in the wallet, right, and say, hey, look, like if you want to make an impact on your business, like we understand your business, here's a great way to do. What you did with your husband is a really cool example of that. And I imagine that hit home for him. And that's why.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's like you already paid for the click on Google, so you may as well make sure it converts into a case.

Speaker B: Those, those clicks aren't cheap.

Speaker A: They're not, no.

Speaker B: So the reason that, uh, so we, we've got, we're starting to, we could probably do a whole uh, series of, of podcasts with people from Loom now because we had Tessa on a few weeks ago and I had met with her in Denver and I was like, we've got to have Tessa on. And then lo and behold, it was like the next week or two weeks later, I met you at CS100 and you were speaking on onboarding and how you've done some things to scale it. And I was immediately riveted by that because it's a big thing that we've been thinking about scaling customer success this year. And I think onboarding is one of the trickiest areas of the customer journey. To really scale, use one to many techniques, um, do all the things that we talk about so much when it comes to community. You and I were talking about that before we kicked off. So talk to me a little bit about the things that you've started to do at Loom to help you scale to these. You have millions of users, right? I mean, how do you handle that in the onboarding?

Speaker A: So I want to understand from you first, Jay, why is it that you think onboarding is the hardest piece to scale?

Speaker B: Well, my, my experience with new customers is they, it's all about the change curve. It's less about the implementation of the technology and more about what you just described, which is we have to actually change the way you're thinking in some cases. And a lot of times it's easier to do in a one to one way where you Have a very high touch relationship from the start. You're walking through problems, very detailed, deep. Um, so I guess my bias, you know, having come up in more of the enterprise B2B SaaS world, is that that's just part of the, is part of the motion. And so. And I've just not seen a ton of examples out there of people that have done outside of product led onboarding. Right. Which is its own thing. Um, I've just not seen a lot of great examples of it being done at scale really well. People have talked about cohorts and um, you know, webinars for training and that type of thing. Um, but I just never seen a really solid plan through, all the way through for, for scaling it. So that's where my bias why I keep saying that. But you could prove me wrong.

Speaker A: No, Well, I, I totally agree with you on that concept, but I wanted to hear kind of why it is you think it's that way. And this is exciting to talk about today because we've been really focused on trying to crack this for the past year and a half at Loom. I know Tessa mentioned to you when you guys had your podcast that we are a really experiment heavy culture, which is great because we learn a lot of things that work. We learn even more things that don't work. And all of those examples you were just giving of, uh, cohorting and then doing kind of broader groups of like ask an expert type sessions or office hours, those don't really move the needle. And one of my biggest learnings for scaling onboarding this year because my team does manage all of scaled onboarding as well. Well as all of, um, dedicated onboarding is that scaled does not equal Async. And this is a big shift we had to make here at Loom. Our onboarding tracks literally used to be called Async versus Live. And we would treat smaller customers, you know, as if, uh, they were going to self serve their whole onboarding. So we'd give them and we're like, hey, we've got looms. You can self serve all of this. You're good to go. If you need help, reach out to support. So you can imagine where that goes, right? A really heavy support funnel and then come renewal. That's a whole cluster because things weren't set up properly in the beginning. And then we would do live onboarding or a bunch of live calls for these larger ARR customers. And we've kind of broken that away from this concept of scale versus Live. And we had three key takeaways from running our new onboarding program for the last six months. So we started doing this, um, back at the beginning of, uh, Q2, and we started having a dedicated onboarding team previously, you know, like, like CS teams, do structures change? Sometimes you have customer success owning onboarding. Sometimes you have an implementation team. Sometimes you know, you're charging for it. There's a lot of different ways you can do it. But starting in Q2, we said, let's have a dedicated onboarding team, own onboarding. And I think the first thing, you know, you need to do in order to crack scaling onboarding is have a seriously templated onboarding program, Whether or not it's scalable yet. Let's just start by really, really templating it so we can very clearly see how it's going to what's working and what's not going. So we get this kind of baseline going. And we did this with a series of accounts, um, that we owned during onboarding. And we got a really good baseline for this is how many accounts get to the success criteria. This is their time to value. Now we can start experimenting with implementing different things at different touch points, and we can actually very easily measure the amount of time and effort it takes for us to run those things versus the impact. And we can look at those that require the least effort but have the largest impact. And those are things we want to lean into for scaling onboarding. So you go ahead and ask you

Speaker B: a question about the template. So can you elaborate just a little bit on what template means in this context? Because I think that'll be a really, like, what did you do? Did you say, like, look, these are the seven steps of the process, and we should be doing these 90% of the time, even if they're heavy lift right now, uh, you at least laid out a roadmap or a lifecycle definition of what it should be every time. Is that what you meant by template?

Speaker A: Yes. So I came from Mural previously, so I love a good visual customer journey map. So we started out by just adding sticky notes of, like, here's the close of sale, here's the renewal. What happens in the middle? And you might find, you know, you don't have those, like, nailed out very well. So we said, well, let's just start with onboarding. We looked at some historical context from our historical data, um, when customer success was owning onboarding. So nobody was really focusing on, like, the first 60 days. It was all focused on NRR. Let's, like, renew and expand when that matters. So we said, let's look at the first 60 days and where our customers kind of tracking in terms of seat allocation and activation or percent recorders utilization at the 60 day mark. And what we found was only about 30% of our customers were achieving these levels of success. Um, that through our, through our own research, we know if customers kind of don't get onto this uh, particular um, like trend line by the 60 day mark, they're not going to renew. And only 30% of our customers were getting there. So we started by saying, all right, we're going to focus real heavily on these 60 days and we're going to try to double that number within one quarter. Pulled up a mural board, jotted down a bunch of sticky notes, and we started, you know, writing out all of the pieces, um, that we were going to template and do. What I mean by template mostly is doing the same repeatable activities and motions, um, with each of your customers for a quarter so that there's no kind of variables.

Speaker B: Scientific experimentation.

Speaker A: Very scientific. Yes, yes.

Speaker B: Love it. Yeah, that's.

Speaker A: So we, we did this for a quarter and we had three key takeaways and we're actually using the three key takeaways that we had from onboarding and applying it to the rest of customer success. Now what we found, and this is going to play into the fact that onboarding is the hardest thing to scale. One of our biggest learnings was the importance of having a dedicated resource for the first part of the customer journey. Okay, so now you might, this is, that was learning number one. So you might say, well, how is that scalable? To make that scalable, you make that time shorter, you give a shorter duration of onboarding and you step on the gas harder for a shorter period of time with that customer, you're giving them live. Live. A live call, at least a live kickoff call was one of the things we found was absolutely instrumental. On this call. You're eliminating, you're making sure, um, that kind of some foundational things are understood. How to add your users, um, how your build for true ups, how people can request a license to the tool, like all of these things that will cause issues down the line and block them from expanding. We want to unblock up front, but we just have these live calls like right in the very beginning. What's also really nice about making it a short duration and kind of pushing harder but shorter is there's this time box to essence and the customers are going to be much more willing to, uh, provide the right people and resources and motivated to get this Tool up and running because they know they only have you, their invaluable onboarding resource for a very short amount of time.

Speaker B: Yep.

Speaker A: So that was learning number one.

Speaker B: That's great. Love it. I'm taking notes furiously over here by the way.

Speaker A: Oh good.

Speaker B: All right, what was learning number two?

Speaker A: All right, learning number two is live training. Now we've done a lot of experimentation around this and you know, we get pushback on this at Loom. We do get pushback on this at Loom and I understand it, which is people are like, why do we need to have a live training session? When you're loom, you're an async video tool, can't you just send us a pre recorded loom? And we know that the longer the loom the lower the engagement. So async video is a very effective method for um, communicating and for training to a point when it gets longer, especially if you're doing something an hour long, it's going to fall flat. I always push for that live training. This can be in the form of a webinar. If your webinar is really well done, you need to make sure the webinar is focused on customers and not a selling tool because customers can smell if this is a selling, a selling tool tool. Um, and it should be, you know, crafted with an enablement mindset. In what order do people need to know things? I'm taking all of the FAQs that I've heard from customers from the past year and a half and I weave them into the webinar training. So you walk away from that training be like, I, I can't think of anything else I would ask. And that webinar we run, our loom 101 has like a 97% out of 100, um, rating for people who attend it. And it's like a really impactful tool. So yes, webinars you can do at scale, but they have to be done really well.

Speaker B: That is um, a really good point and something, it's a point that I often make when we talk about scale cs because one of the things we're trying to get teams to do is think about pivoting the way they work with customers. Instead of doing a one off call for every single training that you have to do. Because it's not only new customers, it's new users at old customers that you have to cater to, the quality begins to suffer of those repetitive tasks. Because the CSM, they're just getting it done right. They might do six, eight of these a week, maybe 10 of these a week. And they're just slogging through 10 phone calls. They're tired. They're not on script. They're doing whatever is right for them. But when you have somebody, when you centralize an enablement resource like this, you can actually get really, really good at delivering it. There was a, uh, you would. Might be interested in this. Um, I forget the name of the podcast. Um, I think it's called the Art of New Newsletters. I, I believe it's the, uh, convert kit, folks. I don't know if you know that company or not. They have a person. They had a person on their, um, on their podcast that talked about her enablement and onboarding program. Very similar. She was like, you can get really, really good at driving very specific webinars. And then you could have a script for that and you could train somebody

Speaker D: else to do it.

Speaker B: So it's not just one person that's doing it. And the quality goes way up and the customer gets a lot more out of it. And so it just corroborates. You said to me about, about how to do that. I love that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Not all webinars are created equal. You know, it makes a huge difference. And if somebody is dedicating their time to register for your session, you have to make sure you capture that attention and make it, like, really a good use of somebody's time. Otherwise they're going to start multitasking. Then it's a waste of all of your times.

Speaker B: It's all about engagement at the end of the day. Like, just because somebody's your customer doesn't mean you're not still fighting for their attention, just like you were when you were trying to market and sell to them. Like, a very real thing that we have to overcome in customer success. Right.

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Speaker A: yep, exactly.

Speaker B: Okay, I keep distracting you, so that's all right.

Speaker A: Third learning.

Speaker D: Third learning.

Speaker A: My. Our third learning from this quarter. Um, and this isn't necessarily like guild or Customer Success specific, but I'll tell you why it is for us is what Gets measured, gets managed. And in onboarding specifically, we have to have somebody maniacally focused on the first 30 or 60 days of the customer journey and making sure customers are getting on to this adoption curve. Spend some time at your organization figuring out what kind of the aha moment is or what the habit moment is. We know at loom, um, it's not when somebody just records a loom, it's when somebody records a loom and then somebody else watches their loom, that's when the light bulb moment goes off. So we know we need to get people to do that within their first seven days of getting a loom license called a video first view. Otherwise they are much more likely to, to churn and no longer use the tool. So we have to measure and maniacally focus on getting people to record that first loom and share that first loom. So all of our enablement and training, the way we work with admins, the resources we provide asynchronous in our webinar, it's all focused on getting this first thing done. And we look at a dashboard of this. It's the first thing I look at every morning, sadly, when I like open my phone, it's like, check the dashboard. Okay, now check like Instagram, it's not important.

Speaker B: So you're looking at basically all the customers and it's like every single customer has a clock ticking, right? If they signed up, then it's not every customer, it's actually every user, is that right?

Speaker A: I look at it at a, on a customer basis, not user by user. And I look at it at a percentage base of the customer. So if it's two people, you know, at a small company, you know, but it's two people at a huge company, those are very different. So I look at getting customers to a percentage of this number by a point in time and then we're able to really clearly predict how they're going to do. This is also great when handing a customer off to customer success because there can definitely be a bit of hot potatoing that goes on from sales to onboarding to success. You get an account from sales where it's like, it's single threaded and you know, here you go. And that's fine. We're like, you close the deal. That's, that's awesome. But it's going to be hard to make this customer successful. So now we're stuck with it in onboarding. Last thing we want to do is pass something over to success and then they're having to deal with It So we're measuring very closely where they come into the onboarding funnel, where their metrics are sitting and where they exit that funnel. And we have a clear paper trail of this. So when a customer success manager is having issues renewing this customer later on we can look back to this cut in time of onboarding and see that, you know, we don't pass a customer out of onboarding unless we know we've tried all the different tricks we have in our hat. And then if they're not successful the chances are like they're not going to be moving forward. But it creates a nice, you know, CYA flow.

Speaker B: That's cool. So you don't look at it as a time bound um, thing necessarily. You look at it, we're going to let them move out of the onboarding phase, quote unquote when their metrics show that they have actually adopted the software.

Speaker A: Um, no, it is time, it is time boxed. So they do have to hit it within a certain ah, time period they're getting passed out of onboarding kind of no matter what. Um, but we, you know, we push really hard to do that within the time period and we know if they don't within that time period, um, it's unlikely that it will happen later.

Speaker B: Interesting. So what do the CSMs do with those accounts once they get them?

Speaker A: At least they know with those accounts a lot of things that don't work. Right. Um, and we have you know, really thorough notes on like everything that's been tried. And this is all scalable by the way because we're doing this through campaigns and sequences and each of our sequences is aimed at like we have like a yellow accounts process. If an account in onboarding, you know, is having these certain data points that are informing us that they are not going to be on track to hit their numbers. Um, we deploy a sequence that has different programs and resources aimed at that. So at that point with an account like this, um, they're able to in a way deprioritize it and we won't necessarily have like a one on one CSM on it. It will go into a larger scaled book and we're, we're not going to spend a lot of time trying to nurture that account. Um, because we've already learned within the first 30 or 60 days, um, that unless something's changes, it's just perhaps not the best long term fit.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting thing because I think a lot of leadership teams um, would be very nervous about that. It's almost like, well, if as long as we're working at it, you know, then there's hope that these customers are going to stay. But in reality, what you're doing is really smart because you're prioritizing where, you know, you can have a bigger impact. And so I would say kudos to your, to your leadership team for, uh, well, for, for you all for coming up with that approach and building it out and operationalizing it, most importantly. But then also for your leadership team to be understanding, to say, well, yeah, if they're like, the data shows us that they're not going to be successful, if they haven't hit certain milestones. And so we're going to cut our losses and we're going to move on to the people we know we can make successful on our platform. Was it a hurdle to get there with the, with the leadership team?

Speaker A: Everything's still in flux and everything is still in learning mode. But what our leadership team is so amazing at is allowing our team the ability to fill and learn and pivot. And if we're able to show with data, and we do use kind of like the experimental flow, we'll literally, literally type up docs like you would in sixth grade with like, here's the experiment brief and the hypothesis and the ways we're going to measure it. And if we're able to show with data, you know, this customer is not going to be successful because of xyz. We've tried all these things. Xyz that tells us we either need to spend some of our time building some other new programs, which is an exciting opportunity, and it just helps us to not only, like, prioritize our time supporting accounts, but also prioritize what it is we need to build. Um, and so that we can implement that moving forward and help different types of, you know, Personas and different types of accounts.

Speaker B: It's amazing. It's a really good way to do it. I want to go back to something else you said too, when you were talking about, um, I think you're on pillar number one still, but you were talking about doubling the percent of recorders within the first 60 days. And, and how you had a very specific goal for. You said that percentage was at 30%. You said, let's see if we can double it within the next quarter. Um, and the reason I want to pick on that a little bit in a good way is because I've been preaching about this book called Good Strategy, Bad Strategy for probably the better part of a year. Have you heard of this one yet?

Speaker A: No, I haven't. Tell me about it.

Speaker B: It's a great book. Um, but what it does is try to. It boils down this whole idea of strategy being this like, pie in the sky thing. It's not, um, he's got, by the way, like, every book could probably be a blog post. Every blog post could probably be a tweet. So go, go read the summary of it online. Somebody, I'm sure has posted one. But there's three components to a strategy. Number one is a diagnosis of a problem, a very specific diagnosis. And what you did was said that 30% is not good enough. That's the problem we have to solve because it's impacting our renewals down the line. So, yeah, good, good news number one. The second piece of it is, um, have a guiding policy for how you think you want to go solve the problem. It really maps your hypothesis. Right. Of your experiments. So you said, you know, we need to have dedicated onboarding, uh, at least for the short phase duration of the implementation. And we need to do live training sessions, like we're going to do those things. And then the third piece of it, which is actually what makes a strategy work, is the execution. Like, what are you actually going to go do? Well, we're going to define a script for the training webinars. We're going to go, um, figure out how to measure, uh, the life cycle of. We're going to go map out the template. Right. And we're going to measure all the stages in between. So you've done all, all, all of the work in that framework, which is the good strategy, bad strategy framework, and you've built a great strategy. So it just, it just brought that up for me and I, I hope people will listen, listen and get curious about that book because I found it very helpful whether you're.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Big go to market problems for your, for your company or your team, or you're solving very focused problems on getting, you know, onboarding to convert to adoption and usage. Like, the strategy applies to everybody and how you go do that is really important. So kudos to you. It's, it's.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you. I, I'm really excited to check out that book now. I love it. Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, well, like I said, you probably read a blog post, but it's a good book and there's some really great examples in there of, uh, how to spot, like, bad strategies where you might have set a goal, but never put a plan in place to actually go right. And execution part of it.

Speaker A: So and you know, to circle back on our third learning about, um, measuring things, every plan that you put in place, you might have, you know, here are the pieces we're going to execute. But do you have a real time updated automated dashboard you can look at that shows you uh, like my dashboard literally shows like levers with like green, red, yellow or that's the wrong order. What is red, yellow, green?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And every morning as customers are, you know, recording more or allocating more seats or getting to those video first views, I watch those, that lever tick and it moves up and down every day. And that's why it's so motivating because, you know, I'll do a call with an account or I'll try a new experiment with an account and I am so excited to log in a week later and look at their account and see how that lever has moved. And without that like really, um, clear visibility, it's hard, you know, to, to, to action quickly.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's really, it's really a good point because um, it, well it, it's uh, I, I think characterizing it as an experimentation culture, it really helps too because you don't get over committed to any one approach that you're going to take. And if you have the ability to see the results of your actions and in real time, so powerful, it's almost like a dopamine hit when it works, right? Or at least you see one way or the other knowing whether what you're doing is working. A lot of customer success teams don't have that luxury. They haven't been able to connect the work that they do to the outcome that they're looking for in as a way as you have. How would you recommend people define that if they don't know where to start?

Speaker A: We honestly started with just a uh, notion page and we created. You know, first you need a place for people to just share ideas and your leadership has to invite people to share their ideas. So we say, hey everybody, we're going to put this experiment tracker in place and this quarter we want everybody to share all of the great ideas that you have and we're going to actually formalize them. And we gave the team a place to put these. And it was just a simple notion table where you'd insert your idea where what you thought, you know, the impact was going to be. And then in order to make rate it successful or not, it was just like, let's just do a gut check to, to start scale of 1 to 10. It had a template in there much like you'd find in an experimental design. Here's your hypothesis, here's who you're going to measure, here's the time, and then we say, great, go run it. And our team was so excited to run their own experiments and come to the team meeting each week and share their findings and what worked and their failures. And, and then you just, you know, put, put a number on it. My gut check was this was a, you know, two out of ten. The things that we felt were working, we said, great, now we're going to actually work a little more cross functionally and we're going to ask the data team to support us in this and get some data fields and automation to measure this. So that's the approach we took to quickly kind of figure out which ones had to meet and were worth formalizing. The team loved it.

Speaker B: Super cool. I mean, the. It's, it's a, uh, it really is a shining example for how we should all be working because so much changes in our world. We have new competitors that come in, we release new product. Um, yeah, all the time. Right. There are new features and capabilities. Um, there's consolidation that's happening in all of these markets that we serve. Like, there's, there's just. No, there's no such thing as set it and Forget it in SaaS. I don't think so. Like, that's a cultural thing, as it is anything else. I define culture as how you work, not necessarily the perks that you get. And so it's cool that you've been able to have that experimentation. Culture. Where did that come from at Loom?

Speaker A: Like, who did that come from at Loom?

Speaker B: Who can't be in that, uh, that mindset? Is it your CEO or your product leader or your team? Like, is it And Tesla that do that? Like, where did it come from?

Speaker A: Because it's, you know, that's a great question. I really just think it's a culmination of the culture that we do have at Loom, stemming from the top. Um, the phase that we are at in our journey as a company where we, you know, still have the ability to be a bit scrappy and learn and experiment, but we also have resources now to formalize things. So it really does come from the top. Um, however, you know, we do have several people who have joined ah, Loom, including myself, who came from Mural, where we leaned very heavily into human centered design methods, which are all about designing for humans. Um, and I did bring a lot of that methodology with me, um, into my work when I Set out at Loom to build onboarding from the beginning. And it was, you know, I was just tasked with, all right, build onboarding, make it better. And I was like, where do I even start? I had to lean on an experimental framework like that. I chose human centered design to do that. Um, so I do think that that's had some of an influence, um, as

Speaker B: well for those who are not initiated on human centered design. What does that even mean?

Speaker A: So it's a design framework. Um, most people are probably more familiar with frameworks such as, like the Agile framework or the waterfall approach to building something. Um, this is all about design designing for humans. And it has a couple of different concepts. It starts with ideating. And this kind of concept of no idea is a bad idea. Come to me with all of your ideas, anything far and wide. And that's kind of, you know, if you, if you think about how we were just talking about this experimental, uh, flow, we were putting a notion kind of exactly what we did. So ideate and empathize. You're always empathizing, and with the audience, you're designing it for this really human element. And then there's this concept of you test and then you iterate. And that is where this fail fast and learn comes from. When I worked at wrike, we had this mantra which was, uh, fail gloriously. And each week somebody would win an award for having failed the most gloriously. It was celebrated. And what's nice about it is you're now celebrating each failure in an experiment, um, as something to learn from and iterate from. And it's this, you know, cycle. Now you go back to empathize, ideate, apply, and just keeps going. Yeah, that's human centered design in a nutshell.

Speaker B: That's very cool. Well, I haven't, I haven't studied it in detail, but I feel like, um, I feel like it's a very natural way to work, uh, for people who move m quickly and want to, want to, want to try things out before you go all in on something too. It's another way to do that. Right. Because sometimes making a big investment in a big thing that you don't know how it's going to turn out, it's risky. It's just as risky as not doing anything at all.

Speaker A: You know what's interesting while we're on that topic is, um, I did apply a lot of human centered design to our scaled onboarding program. And starting with this, like, empathizing and putting yourself in a customer's shoes, um, in what order Does a customer need to know things and learn things and kind of in this, like building upon nature, now this is where you can start making more async resources actually more valuable. You have to make sure they're receiving them in the right order and at the right time. Because if you receive resources about just how to record in Loom on your first day and you don't understand some of the foundational pieces first, it's not going to stick. And the chances that you're going to take that new behavior change and start recording without understanding some other things first is not going to get you there. One really, really practical thing, um, that people can start doing when you're enabling your customers, that I wish every custom, every tool that I bought would do for me too, is framing what your tool is in the context of all the other tools you already use. So I say this on every single webinar. First I'm going to teach you how Loom fits into your existing day to day and into your existing tech stack. You already know emails, you already know Slack, you already know Zoom. Let's put them on a quadrant and here's where Loom is. Now let's talk about how you might use all these tools together. So we're putting it into words that they understand, tools that they understand and know how to use. And you want to make sure you're not framing your tool. You know, there are some edge cases where you're buying this new tool for this one very specific thing, but often it's uh, going to fit into a broader ecosystem in your toolkit. How can you use that tool to maximize the other tools that you do have? So we talk about how to use Loom, make a more impactful email. And we talk about analyzing the way you're sending emails today, when to use Loom versus a, you know, a, uh, zoom meeting. Try saying Loom and Zoom all day long together. Could we have thought of maybe a little bit of a slightly different name and then what's great for these kind of, um, scaled resources? Infographics. Infographic of like, I am an engineer and I'm getting ready to uh, do a code review. What tool might I use? And here you've got an infographic and it's like if this, then this tool, if this, then this tool. I give people three, three questions for Loom. Does the tone matter? If it does, record a loom. Don't try to put that in a text. Um, do you need visuals? Record a Loom. If not, great. Send a Slack message. Is it less than one to two sentences. Perfect. Put it in a chat app. Anything longer, put it in a loom. So, so simple in a visual. Um, now people are like, oh, okay, Now I feel like I could see why I would record and when I would record. So when you get that email that says record your first loom, you're like, got it.

Speaker B: Simple heuristics. You got to make things simple for people, whether they're employees or your customers. Doesn't matter. Um, this is amazing. And man, just one thing that you said there just struck something for me. Uh, how do you maximize the value of the tools that sit around? Your tool is a really powerful concept that I've not really thought a lot about before. You just said that. But what if your product is so valuable in and of itself and the way that you deploy it and enable it is so valuable to the customer that it actually makes the other tools in their stack more valuable? That's a great source of additional value that we could all be looking for in our own products to say, hey, look, not only are you getting value from our product, we're actually making everything else you use more valuable too. Yeah, that's, that's part because we invest a lot in software in these companies. And, um.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: You know, if we can get more out of them, we talk about it every day, especially during budgeting season. So.

Speaker A: Yeah. And you know, you don't want people to get into this like, oh, well, it's your tool or this other tool. Because unless the tools are truly competitors, you don't want people looking to your tool to do all the things and then getting frustrated when it doesn't do all the things. Things or trying to use it in ways that it's not designed for. So let's make sure people understand how and when to use it that also complements their other suite of tools. And then it should be easy for people when you, when you tie that in, like integrations aside. Right. Tie it into the workflow in the day to day. Now it's easy for people to see comm renewal time. Which tools don't go into that flow and which they can get rid of, but not yours.

Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. Exactly. Well, Brittany, I, uh, could probably talk to you for another two hours on this topic. It's been a lot of fun. We have to do another one at some point. But I will be respectful of your time. Um, where can people go to connect with you and follow you if they want to follow along with your journey? Because it's Pretty cool what you're doing.

Speaker A: Oh, thank you. Absolutely. I am very active on LinkedIn, so please feel free to connect with me on there.

Speaker B: Okay. Well, it's awesome. So thank you for your time and sharing your deep, deep knowledge on so many things, your learnings, on how you use the experimentation process to, uh, really supercharge your onboarding program.

Speaker C: Alum.

Speaker B: No doubt that's part of the reason you all got bought, uh, by Atlassian. Yeah, all this information and knowledge on human centered design, so valuable to our audience. So, um, I can't wait to go back and listen to this one again on my walk, probably in a couple of weeks when we publish it and, uh, pick up everything that I missed while you were talking. So, been an awesome conversation. Thanks for doing it.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Jay. And thanks everyone for listening.

Speaker D: Hey everybody, Jay here. Thanks for tuning into the podcast. You know, this started as a labor of love for Jeff and I a couple of years ago and it's really turned into a movement around customer success and community and we couldn't be more thrilled to be a part of it. Um, we grow this by word of mouth, so we, we'd love it. If you're willing and you find value in what you hear on this podcast, leave us a rating or a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It'll help us grow and provide value to more customer success professionals. Also, if you haven't yet, please sign up for Gain Grow Retain the online community. It's gain grow retain.com you can meet other people, make one on one connections, share ideas, get ideas, grow your career. Ultimately. Um, be on the lookout also for live events, both in person and virtual this year. We're excited to get back to that and thanks for being part of the community. We look forward to talking to you soon.