How To Use UX As A Competitive Advantage (with Jared Spool)

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Hannah Clark: Most people only really think about user experience in two situations—when it’s blow-your-hair-back great, or when it’s claw-your-eyes-out awful. Obviously, we all want our product to sit in the first camp, but most of the time it ends up somewhere in the middle—and that’s…fine. But that’s just it, it’s fine—it’s inoffensive, it gets the job done. But it’s also not something to write home about, or tell your friends about, or sign up for a referral program about. You see where I’m going with this?

My guest today is Jared Spool, who you might know as the Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre. But he’s an author, researcher, speaker, educator, and expert on software design, research, and usability. So if anyone is paying attention to the ‘just okay’ UX, it’s him. The good news is that if your product’s UX is just north of decent, it could be a lot worse. But you’ll want to stick around toward the latter half of the discussion when Jared outlines exactly what differentiates good UX from the exceptional. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back listeners. I’m Hannah Clark with The CPO Club. If you’re joining us for the first time, we’re a community of tenacious product leaders here to share the weight of scaling your product. Our members are SaaS-focused PMs who genuinely love their work and are driven to help others succeed. So if you want to hear more about that, head on over to theproductmanager.com/membership and let’s get on with the show.

Jared, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jared Spool: Oh, well, thank you for having me. It’s absolutely an honor and lovely to be here.

Hannah Clark: I would love if you could start off by telling us a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are today at Center Centre.

Jared Spool: I started Center Centre 35 years ago, after being in the industry for a decade of what we might refer to today as UX, but back then it went by many sort of obscure, weird sounding names. And most of my work for the last decade has been on what we would call strategic user experience, which is in essence, how do you bring all the capabilities, skills, people, knowledge, experience about delivering great user experiences and building great products and services?

How do you bring that to meet all of the key objectives of the organization from the top all the way down? So that’s my work and I spend a lot of time talking to leaders in products and service delivery including UX people and product managers and designers and folks and really help them understand how to think and work more strategically.

Hannah Clark: Fantastic. We’re going to be focusing today on UX as a competitive advantage.

So to kick us off, would you mind sharing an anecdote that you think really frames the impact of UX on business outcomes?

Jared Spool: Oh, well, there are lots of good ones, but the one that’s been, I’ve been using a lot lately only because it’s just sort of been headline grabbing, at least in my world, is for lack of a better term, the story of Sonos’ most recent release.

So if you’re not familiar with Sonos, they’re a company that makes speakers, high end, high quality audio speakers that are internet enabled. You can play music from any number of services or from any number of devices that you could have multiple speakers playing multiple things. So, you know, they’re great for your house and businesses.

And, and I should say that I have worked with the team at Sonos, but I haven’t worked with them on the thing I’m about to talk to you about. So everything that I’m telling you about is actually conjecture on my part, but I am pretty sure it happened the way I’m about to describe, or at least the things are public, I know happened.

But the things that happened behind the scenes at Sonos, I’m guessing on those things, but my guesses are informed by working with lots of companies like Sonos. And this is how it always works. So basically the idea is this, they recently came out with a whole new line of products and they make hardware, they make physical speakers.

So that’s what they were interested in talking about. Unfortunately, the rest of the world was not interested in talking about that. Their existing customers in particular, we’re really upset with this new release, because to make the new hardware, this next generation hardware, which people to some extent are all in agreement is pretty awesome.

But to make this new hardware, they had to change the app that they use to control the hardware, and they don’t think of themselves as a software company. Most companies that make software don’t think of themselves as a software company. I’m putting in a whole new HVAC system in my house. The company that makes the HVAC, you know, the heating and air conditioning system doesn’t think of themselves as a software company either.

But sure enough, they have an app. And that’s how I interact with my new air conditioning. But Sonos put out this new app that was designed to work with this new hardware and they broke all their old hardware, basically. They pretty much rendered it useless for a while. And as you might imagine, this upset all the people who’d spent thousands and thousands of dollars on their high end speakers, and they were vocal about it.

The social media lit up. Everybody was complaining about how this company had screwed up. They were like, I’m not even considering the new hardware. In fact, I’m thinking of switching to whole other brands. It got so bad that the Washington Post, the newspaper, it had picked up on this revolt of their customer base and decided to write a feature story about it and, of course, reached out to the company for comment.

For which, when the company saw that the Washington Post was reaching out, they decided that it would be the CEO who would be the best person to talk to about this. And the CEO basically spent the, at least the only thing they reported on from the CEO about this release, was that he’s on an apology tour.

He just apologized for all the failures. So he didn’t get a chance to talk about the, or at least the Washington Post didn’t get a chance to have him talk about the new hardware. It was all about what they’re doing to get the old software or the new software to do what the old software did as effectively as it did the week before.

And that to me is what happens when you don’t take strategic UX into account. You have a really bad user experience that then the company has to go into damage control. And just today, about an hour ago, I got a link to an article that had nothing to do with this. But it was in a, a sort of technology review article, reviewing a completely different piece of technology, but at the bottom was, you know, when you’re done reading this, you might be interested in section and the top thing was what we think of the new Sonos products.

And it was all about one of the new products is a set of headphones. It’s their first set of headphones. And so they’re comparing these to their competitors headphones. This was a reviewer talking about, are these headphones any good or not? And he starts out his review with how pissed off everybody was about the software.

That was the first thing he talked about. You, you know, it was like, I got the new headphones and they’re pretty good. But let me tell you, this release, oh my gosh, and then he starts putting on the video screen little soundbites of people’s complaining on Reddit and Twitter and all the social media about this thing.

So this thing, even though they have pretty much fixed the app at this point, they’ve been doing this damage control now for a month. They’ve sort of recovered. This is still the thing that people are talking about. So you put out, if you invest millions of dollars in a brand new product and nobody’s talking about the brand new product, they’re talking about the software that you don’t consider a product, this is what happens when you have not done your work.

Hannah Clark: It’s costly on so many different levels.

Jared Spool: Exactly.

Hannah Clark: I’d love to analyze this a little bit more. This is so interesting.

So, and I realize that you, you know, mentioned that anything that happened behind closed doors, it’s, you know, it’s conjecture on your part. But it sounds like you’re familiar with this kind of a situation and kind of how, so if you were to kind of place these events that would be leading up to this kind of a horrible outcome for Sonos on a timeline, what would you say are some of the critical decisions along the way that could have led to a totally different outcome?

Jared Spool: So this company thinks of themselves as a hardware company. You can go see that. You go to sonos.com and you look at products and it’s just hardware. That’s all it is. There are no software products in the product list. Their mental state is they’re a hardware company. And like I said, they’re not the only ones.

People who make cars, people who make ovens, all these companies think they’re hardware companies. And that’s what they believe. And so of course they’re investing in the best and brightest people. So they’re hiring the best and brightest hardware engineers and hardware designers. And that’s who they’re getting.

Now, I’m not trying to say that their software people are not best and brightest, but I’m saying that that’s where they think they make their money. So the first mistake is probably, I’m guessing on this, they undervalue their software, right? So that’s one piece of it. But another piece of it is that because they’re a hardware company and the software is used to control the hardware, the hardware has to come first.

They have to design that first. And then the software always has to trail. Plus, if they make all their money from hardware, any deadline that they pick is when the hardware will be ready. Maybe they give a little bit of grace for the software, but they’re thinking, Hey, we have to have this done in time for this trade show or in time for this market opportunity.

That’s when the hardware has to be done, but the software always lags. So because the software always lags. They’re given a shorter window to do things that they probably don’t understand at the time that the window has been determined. Because they actually don’t know what’s in the new hardware when that is designed and how hard it’s going to be.

Hannah Clark: Ah, so it’s kind of a, a rush situation.

Jared Spool: Exactly. And it’s a second order rush situation in that that’s an enabling technology. So the hardware people have carte blanche to do whatever they want, but the software people don’t. And so whatever the hardware people come up with, they have to respond to because these new features, those are the bullet points that are going to be in every marketing capability.

If the software can’t control the new features, then they are, you know, as the kids say, SOL. And so the problem there is that the software people are sort of finding things out and then having to accomplish miracles in a fixed timeline when they weren’t given any ability to, and again, I don’t know if this is what happened at Sonos, but it happens everywhere else.

They’re not given any opportunity to say, wait a second, that’s going to take us twice as long. We should push the deadline out. It’s like, no, the hardware has to be ready on this date and we can’t use the hardware or show the hardware without the software. So, you don’t get a choice. You are just told. In product management there’s this mythology of you can be cheaper, you can be faster, you can be good. And you only are allowed to pick two. In this case, the company picked all three.

Hannah Clark: So they failed at all three.

Jared Spool: Right? And this happens all the time. We can say to where blue in the face, you’re only allowed to pick two and say, okay, we’re picking these two plus that other one.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. Try to sneak one in.

Jared Spool: Exactly. That’s what happens. So, I am willing to bet my new heating air conditioning unit, which is worth a substantial amount of money, unfortunately, on the idea that what probably happened was they were surprised by how much stuff they had to do. Oh, and the other thing they decided to do, because of course they decided to do this, the old app hadn’t been refreshed in forever. And the last few times they added new functionality, there were hiccups.

It really wasn’t. So it needed to be rearchitected from the top down. So this is the time we’re doing that kids. We have this opportunity. We have this next generation system we’re putting out. We’re going to rearchitect it from the top down, which means we have to rebuild all the features that we built before just to get to the same place we were, and then we’re going to add the new stuff. But of course, adding the new stuff is what every executive is focused on the organization. They’re not interested in whether we rebuild all the stuff we had before, because that’s not what they’re selling. They’re not selling, by the way, it works with everything you had before.

At least they’re not selling up till now. They are definitely going to sell that in the future. But they didn’t sell this time. This app did everything. So they had to control the scope. So what did they do? They started to de-scope things and they de-scoped things that were not the things they thought were most important to their users and more importantly, most important to get this new hardware where it needs to go.

So it’s like, well, we’ll put out another release. We’ll get it out. Nobody’s going to notice. It’ll be fine. And of course it wasn’t fine.

Hannah Clark: And it’s interesting to think about, I’m not sure how much research is invested in, you know, we have this deprecated technology that people are obviously still using.

And there is sort of a timeframe, a grace period that a lot of companies will give users of the more of the older stuff before it’s kind of out of service. Apple, for example, they have kind of their vintage designation for machines older than six years. And so there’s kind of that grace period that within that time, they, I guess they found some way to discover that that’s a reasonable timeframe for people to acquire and access service.

Jared Spool: So there’s more to the Sono story. So a few years ago, they went from what they called their S1 architecture to their S2 architecture. And in the process, they bricked all the S1 systems. And there was a complete uproar because people were doing things like taking their speakers and building it into the walls of their house because they wanted the sound to just be there.

So, it’s like you buy a car and the manufacturer decides that they no longer want to support the control panel in your car because they’ve moved on to better technology. So one day your car just stops working because they bricked it, because they didn’t want to support the software anymore. And the car is still a perfectly fine running car.

The speakers of the S1 series were working just fine up until the day they bricked it. They just didn’t want to support two versions of the software. And they ended up retroactively bringing the old version back, again, because of the same line of thinking that happened.

Hannah Clark: I can understand this line of thinking and yet it’s surprising to me still that we see this pattern repeating frequently and there seems to be a pretty clear learning that people do, especially for purchases like that, they do tend to integrated into the how many USB 3 ports exist in people’s homes as an outlet now. So that’s something to think about.

Well, anyway, we’ll move on a little bit because I do want to think about things in a little bit of a broader context and kind of step away from the Sono situation specifically and kind of bring it back to other common UX mistakes and kind of misses that tech companies tend to make early on that end up costing them dearly as we’ve seen in the long term.

So can you think of any other examples that you kind of see frequently in your day to day work?

Jared Spool: So these days, most organizations do what we call tactical UX and tactical UX is making sure that the UI is a good UI, making sure that you can control the product to do what you need it to do, that it meets the needs of both the users and the business at a very low level.

And that type of UX work is very reactive. And by that, I mean, someone who isn’t on the UX team decides what the functionality is that we’re now going to work on. Hey, we’re building a new feature to do a thing. We’re building a new feature to support this hardware. And they decide when it has to be shipped.

So the UX people basically have to squeeze as much work as possible to get it out the door, to make it the least terrible thing they can do. And there’s always this promise we’ll fix it in the future, but for some reason that promise is rarely kept. And so there’s this almost this sort of what the term that’s become popular is feature factory.

There’s this sort of production mindset of we work on a feature, we ship it, we work on a feature, ship it. In olden days, there was a television show called I Love Lucy, and one of the most famous episodes of I Love Lucy took place in a chocolate factory, where Lucy and her best friend Ethel are trying to get jobs, and they find a job in the chocolate factory. And they have this one job at one point in the episode where there are chocolates that come down a conveyor belt, and their job is to pick up the chocolate and wrap it in a piece of paper, I guess because, you know, back then chocolates came in boxes and pieces of paper, and then put it back on the conveyor belt, and it disappeared through a hole in the wall.

And they were told that if they don’t do this job right, they’re going to get fired. And that right means that every single piece of chocolate has to be wrapped by the time it disappears in the hole in the wall. So the chocolate’s coming out a hole in the other wall, and it goes down the conveyor belt, and they pick it up.

And at first they have no trouble doing this. There there’s just a handful of chocolate pieces and they’re wrapping it up. And they’re like, Oh, this is not that bad. And they push it down. And then the belt starts to speed up and more chocolate starts to appear and they are so afraid of anything getting through that hole without being wrapped that they start taking it off the belt, but there’s no place to put it.

So they put it in their pockets, they take off their chef’s hat, they put it in their hat and they start eating some of it because they don’t want any to go through the wall without being wrapped. And they’re doing that instead of wrapping chocolate. And that’s what the work starts to feel like in a feature factory is you’ve got work coming down the conveyor belt.

At first, it feels a little manageable, but then more work starts to come down, the deadlines get shorter, and you’re doing your best to make things be the least terrible. And this is a decision that the organization has made. They have chosen to create the factory setting and that is a UX error. That’s a mistake strategically because you’re just making the product worse.

Hannah Clark: We did an episode not too long ago about surviving in a feature factory. I think we could probably do a whole other one about the realities of what causes them and kind of the impact on user experience.

Jared Spool: Yeah. I mean, they are a choice that organizations make. Possibly, well, in many cases without understanding the ramifications and it’s actually, I blame the, the sort of modern product management thinking of triads and the PM is the CEO, which is not correct.

The PM is a person who has all the responsibility, but none of the authority. And the fact that they are given ultimatums from executives who don’t understand the implications of those ultimatums and told to make them true. And then they have to translate them into things for which they don’t have the information they need to be thinking about things.

That’s really the issue. And then the other big sort of error that I see is that we have unintentionally become product-focused, which on the surface sounds right, but we shouldn’t be product-focused, we should be experience-focused. The problem that Sonos had was that they didn’t understand the experiences of their existing users, or if they did, they ignored them and they focused on their product, on getting this new technology out the door, which is important.

But delivery is not an outcome. An outcome is a change in the world because we delivered something. And what every good organization should be thinking there, their success criteria is, is that the change in the world should be that we make people’s lives better. And in the case of Sonos and all the other companies that make the same mistakes, it needs to be our existing customers and our new customers.

And sometimes we get so focused on making the lives of new customers better that we forget that the number one thing that sells our products is the word of mouth of our existing customers.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. And it’s the existing customers that tend to be the most vocal as we saw in the Sonos example.

Jared Spool: Exactly.

Hannah Clark: Yeah.

Jared Spool: And then paint every other conversation about the new products. I mean, that’s the thing that is so interesting to me is just how much Sonos has lost control of the conversation because of choices they made months, years ago.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, wild. Hey, it’s a financial loss. It’s a loss in brand reputation.

Jared Spool: I mean, here, we’ve spent 20 minutes using them as an example. So now anybody who’s never heard of them is like, do I really want to buy one of these things? I love my Sonos systems, but it is absolutely amazing what kind of effect these have.

Hannah Clark: Let’s lighten the mood a little bit. So we’ve kind of talked about, you know, the difference between a poor UX and what we should be aiming for when we’re thinking about UX kind of tactically. And I’m interested in awesome UX though because a lot of the time we talk about solving user pain points and trying to get to a level of good, you know, a standard that helps to prevent, you know, a PR nightmare.

But let’s talk about what makes the user experience exceptional. So in your view, what differentiates a good UX from excellent, standout UX?

Jared Spool: Okay, I’m going to need to jump into a little theory here, if you don’t mind. So, we can measure user experience on a scale, and at the bottom of the scale is extreme frustration.

So, someone using the product is ready to throw it out the window. At the top of the scale is extreme delight. They just want to hug and cuddle this thing. They want to shout from the mountaintops how amazing this thing is. If you ever met someone who ate at a restaurant that they absolutely loved, or they saw a band that they absolutely loved, or they went to a theme park that they absolutely loved, and they can’t shut up about it, that’s the extreme delight thing.

Well, assuming they’re only saying good things. And I’m absolutely sure that you’ve met someone at the bottom who is not shutting up about how miserable the experience they just had with the product or service was. So there’s a scale and the bottom half of the scale is all the frustrating stuff.

And the top half of the scale is all the delightful stuff and building up to more and more delightful over time, right? So it’s a relative scale. We don’t talk about absolute delight or absolute frustration. We just talk about that was more frustrating than that, or that was more delightful than this. So even things like doing your taxes can be as much as we hate paying our taxes, could be more delightful if we take some, a process that used to take three days and we get it down to 15 minutes. Or we find refunds that you didn’t know you were eligible for. And therefore you now get money back much more money back than you expected from your taxes. Those are things that would make doing your taxes more delightful.

So we can look at this relative scale. So everything in the bottom half is frustrating. So we call that area region poor UX. And poor UX typically is caused by two things, either you missed expectations that the user or customer had. Like, I expect that the new software is going to run my existing stuff. Or, you have unmet needs. I need this to work a certain way, and it’s just not working that way, and it turns out it was never designed to work that way. And so those are the two things that tend to create frustration, and we know that. Now, the center line in this scale is actually called the satisfaction point.

And the reason it’s called the satisfaction point is that the word satisfaction does not mean delighted. It just means, I’m satisfied. It’s not a very good endorsement. If we were talking about a restaurant, the equivalent word would be edible, right? Everything below the line is unedible, and everything above the line is delightful, right?

I expect it to be edible. So when you ask me, was I satisfied, I’m talking about that middle point. This is why satisfaction surveys are not really good. So everything below that is unsatisfactory, but just at that point, it’s satisfactory. It’s not a good endorsement. If somebody says, you know, are you satisfied with your marriage?

And you go, yeah, I guess so. You are satisfied with your marriage, but that is not a ringing endorsement. And so that’s what we’re talking about. Just above the line is what we call good UX. And good UX happens when we’ve met expectations. So that means the product does exactly what I need it to do. And we have met all the, what we call active needs of the customer and active need is a need that they can express.

You can say, well, what do you need our product to do? They can make a list and you’ve done all those things, right? So that’s what we’re talking about. I have a toilet in my house and it works just fine. It does everything I expect it to do. It meets all the needs I have established for it. I don’t go around telling people about this thing.

Well, I think I just did. Normally I don’t go around telling, if it didn’t meet my needs, if it didn’t meet my expectations, I’d be grumpy about it. But I actually don’t give it much thought at all because it does what it’s supposed to do. And that’s good UX.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, you’re not shopping around for a new one anytime soon.

Jared Spool: Exactly. But at the top of this scale, above good UX, is where we get the opportunity to exceed people’s expectations, to do more than what they expected it to do, in a way that’s meaningful to them. So that doesn’t mean we just give them more features that they don’t care about. It has to exceed their expectations.

Wow, that was better than I thought. And we anticipate their needs. By anticipating their needs, it’s like, I didn’t even know I needed this thing and now I have it. So an example of that is, this past year, I bought a car. I’ve bought lots of cars in my life and I live up in New England where it gets really cold in the winter.

And this winter I discovered that there’s a button on the dashboard that will turn on a heater that’s in the steering wheel. Now I’ve been driving for 45 years and I’ve never had a heated steering wheel. I didn’t know I needed a heated steering wheel. If you asked me, what are the important features of my car?

I would have never said a heated steering wheel. However, I now have a heated steering wheel. I will never buy another car without one. It’s amazing.

Hannah Clark: As a Canadian, I fully endorse. I used a few rental cars this winter and it’s hard to leave behind once you’ve experienced it.

Jared Spool: Exactly. Because driving in gloves or mittens is really hard. And a heated steering wheel just makes it so you don’t have to do that anymore. I did not know this thing even existed until I got this car. And now I will make sure I get every car I get will have this. And that’s great UX. That is the region of great UX is we are exceeding expectations. Who knew? And we’re anticipating needs that they didn’t know about, what are called latent needs.

Latent needs are needs that the user can’t express, but once you give it to them, they go, Oh my gosh, where have you been all my life? And so that’s great UX.

Hannah Clark: How can we use research or leverage research in order to eke out those anticipatory ways to delight people? I feel like a lot of the UX research areas that I’ve talked to, a lot of it has kind of been about figuring out what the pain points are, but I very rarely hear people talk about these kinds of anticipatory, delightful, you know, how do we kind of find those things so we can deliver those kinds of experiences proactively.

Jared Spool: I was talking to somebody the other day and they used the phrase pain point, and my immediate reaction is, I would like to put that phrase in the swear jar, that every time somebody uses pain point, you have to put a dollar in the jar. The reason that I think that is because it has the word point in it.

It reduces everything to the idea that there’s this one moment that is painful. And if we just solve that one painful moment, we’re done. But most experiences, frustration builds over time, and it accumulates. In most things, it’s the death of a thousand cuts, and there is no pain point. The experience is just rotten.

And in fact, most of the time when the person is frustrated, it’s because of something that happened a few minutes ago, that if that was the only thing that happened, they would have just moved on, but it’s just gotten worse and worse and worse and worse. And that’s because we’re focused on the product.

And we think of the product as just a series of functional transactions and not the whole experience. One of the things that Sonos left out of the app were alarms, the ability to set an alarm with the app. Now I can see how they got to that point, right? They were reconstructing the app from scratch. And I am betting that there was functionality that had been built into the old app years ago by people who are no longer with the company.

And nobody actually knows how it got there or what it did. And the thing is, if they even looked at whatever digital statistics they had, whatever analytics they had about the app use, alarms would have been probably very low. Because you set an alarm and then you never use it again because you’ve set it up to go off every morning at six o’clock.

Why do you need to change it? It’s just your wake up time. Suddenly people are not getting woken up at six o’clock by the music that they had set just wake them up. They’re getting woken up by whatever, or they’re not getting any alarm whatsoever. And they’re pissed because this has created a real problem.

It’s a missed expectation. And they expect yesterday that it went off, today it doesn’t, especially if they have their app set up to automatically update so they didn’t even know they got a new update. And they didn’t know that alarms were disabled and didn’t exist in the functionality anymore. And so this creates all sorts of problems.

And it’s because they didn’t do the research they needed into the experiences of people. If they had spent time really studying how people use the thing, not just asking them, how do you use it? Because I set an alarm four years ago. I haven’t touched it since. How likely am I to leave it out of an interview?

Or leave it off of a survey? That’s why those instruments are not very good research instruments. What you really need to do is you need to hang out with me. You need to do what we call deep hanging out. And you need to notice that at six o’clock in the morning, my Sonos kicks in. And you need to say, Oh, they’re using the alarm function.

And then you can say, I wonder how many other people use the alarm function. Let me instrument my app to tell me how often does someone have an alarm that they set years ago that goes off on a regular basis. And I’m sure they can tell that if they know to instrument it, but they don’t know the instrument it because they didn’t study it.

They didn’t discover it. We often talk about discovery in product management processes. But discovery rarely discovers what’s really important because we don’t do the necessary research to actually discover what people’s experiences are like. We just ask them a bunch of questions like, tell me what you do with your Sonos every day.

Only to find out that they leave a bunch of things out because it doesn’t occur to them that this is something they do every day, even though the Sonos does this every day.

Hannah Clark: This really connects to the jobs to be done theory and that kind of framework of thinking of putting in context where that product fits into someone’s life at large, rather than just kind of, you know, like, like you said, like those little transactions.

Jared Spool: And the problem with most jobs to be done executions, particularly the ones that the consultants push, is that it only identifies active needs. It identifies the needs I can describe. Tell you what I need my toilet to do. I would have never told you that I needed a hand warmer for my car. And nobody would tell you that the alarm that they set four years ago is one of the most important features of their product.

Hannah Clark: Fascinating. So thank you so much for coming on the show, Jared. Where can folks follow your work online?

Jared Spool: We have a website called centercentre.com. That describes us in general, but the biggest thing that we have is that we have 50,000 UX strategic UX professionals involved in is something called the Leaders of Awesomeness community and this is a free community that anybody can join. You can find it at leaders.centercentre.com, or uxleaders.cc, either one of those works.

Once you sign up, we have weekly sessions where we talk about strategic UX. We have resources that we publish. We offer workshops and something we call intensives, which are these very jam packed, intense little learning experiences and all of those things. So that’s where you can find out about us.

Hannah Clark: Well, that sounds great. Sounds like a good place to do some deep hanging out in a different context.

Jared Spool: It absolutely is. Love everybody to come and deeply hang out with us. And if you join, say hi and say that you heard about this on Hannah’s podcast and, and I will be extra nice to you.

Hannah Clark: But, yes, please be very nice to my listeners. Alright, thank you so much for joining us, Jared.

Jared Spool: Oh, thank you for having me and thank you very much for encouraging my behavior.

Hannah Clark: Thanks for listening in. For more great insights, how-to guides, and tool reviews, subscribe to our newsletter at theproductmanager.com/subscribe. You can hear more conversations like this by subscribing to The CPO Club wherever you get your podcasts.