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Event Replay: Context First: Beyond Secondhand Insights: The Customer Conversation Compass Framework with Jake McKee
Posted Jun 11, 2026 | Views 39
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Speakers
Jake McKee
Principal, Customer Engagement & Product Insight @ Jake McKee Consulting
Jake McKee works with product teams to improve how they talk to customers, how they listen to what customers are really saying, and how they translate those conversations into clear product decisions. His work helps teams move beyond surface-level feedback and build real capability around customer conversations as a core part of product development.
Over nearly three decades, Jake has built customer engagement and community programs for organizations including LEGO, Apple, EA Games, Southwest Airlines, Canon, and H&R Block. His work today focuses on helping teams create better insight, stronger alignment, and products that make sense to the people using them, especially as intelligent systems become part of everyday work.
Learn more at: jakemckee.com
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Joshua Zerkel
Head of Marketing & Community @ Gradual
Josh Zerkel is Head of Marketing & Community-Led Growth at Gradual. A recognized leader in community strategy, he has built and scaled programs at Asana, Evernote, HeyGen, and CBS News that have driven millions in pipeline, global engagement, and cross-functional impact. He’s the author of The Community Code, and a trusted advisor to startups and enterprise teams building community-powered growth engines.
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SUMMARY
In this session, Jake McKee introduces the Customer Conversation Compass, a practical framework designed to help product teams improve how they talk with customers, how they listen, and how they turn conversations into better product decisions.
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CONTENT & TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00:10 - 00:00:29:07 Joshua Zerkel Hello everyone, and welcome to context first with gradual and today's topic, the Customer Conversation Compass. Turning feedback into understanding. I'm Josh circle head of Marketing and community here at gradual. In case you are new to gradual, it's the all in one engagement and community platform. Strong connection into lasting business impact and grow engagement beyond your product. Before I introduce our guest expert, a quick note please drop your questions in the Q&A and we'll get to as many as we can.
00:00:29:10 - 00:00:50:02 Joshua Zerkel After our session ends, you'll still be able to ask questions and share your thoughts in the forum. AMA. All right, now I'd like to introduce you to our speaker. Jake McKee works with product teams to improve how they talk to customers, how they listen to what customers are really saying, and how they translate those conversations into clear product decisions.
00:00:50:04 - 00:01:24:10 Joshua Zerkel His work helps teams move beyond surface level feedback and build real capability around customer conversations as a core part of product development. Over nearly three decades, Jake has built customer engagement and community programs for organizations including Lego, Apple, EA games, Southwest Airlines, canon, and Block. His work today focuses on helping teams create better insight, stronger alignment, and products that make sense to the people using them, especially as intelligent systems become part of our everyday work.
00:01:24:16 - 00:01:26:23 Joshua Zerkel Welcome, Jake.
00:01:26:25 - 00:01:28:21 Jake McKee Thank you. Thanks for having me.
00:01:28:25 - 00:01:46:00 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. You bet. Great to have you here. So behind the scenes, folks, Jake's and Jake and I have known each other for quite a while now. I've actually been a part of a number of his conversation compass and conversation lab sessions, and so I'm intimately familiar with the work that Jake has done and the impact that it has.
00:01:46:02 - 00:01:57:29 Joshua Zerkel So I'm really excited to have Jake here with us today. So, Jake, maybe you could start by just sharing what got you started on the Conversation Compass framework in the first place?
00:01:58:01 - 00:02:25:02 Jake McKee Yeah, that's a it's a great place to start. And I'll, I'll back up quite a ways, but I won't spend a lot of time on it. Don't worry. My work for 20 something years now has really been fundamentally about community building, community platforms, programs, helping companies understand how to have more direct and more emotionally satisfying relationships with their their customer base.
00:02:25:03 - 00:02:47:27 Jake McKee Right, their most passionate customers, fans, members, users, whatever the right word is for that business. And a couple of years ago, I, I kind of took a step back from, from that work to figure out where is this all going? You know, we're starting to see the rise of AI. We're starting to see some amount of.
00:02:48:00 - 00:03:11:24 Jake McKee Standardizing the conceptual, at least behind community at the same time that a lot of the really interesting things about community programs and super fan programs and offline events. You know, with with Covid, of course, that that took a big hit in some ways. It accelerated in other ways. You know, obviously offline events, you know, that kind of went down the down the drain.
00:03:11:24 - 00:03:29:23 Jake McKee But for for quite a while. But the online activity grew dramatically. And so now that we were out of Covid, we're starting to understand as an industry like what do we do next? What do we bring back? What are we not bring back? What are people interested in? What are they not interested in? And even for myself, I was thinking, okay, well what's what's next?
00:03:29:23 - 00:03:55:14 Jake McKee And I started really thinking about what the community work was for me at its core and, and what kind of my superpower was personally in that work. And honestly, it was helping disparate groups talk to each other, right? Whether that's customer and community, sorry, company and community, whether that's creative teams and engineering teams, whether that's these days, AI and humans.
00:03:55:16 - 00:04:24:22 Jake McKee That's always been the work that I've done in some form is how do we how do we how do I sit between these two very different groups with very different needs and make my everybody goes home happy mantra come true? Right. And as I started breaking that down a little bit more, one of the realities I realized was that so much of my work for 20 something years has been these conversational skills, right?
00:04:24:23 - 00:04:48:06 Jake McKee In order to make disparate groups talk to each other effectively. You have to understand a lot about how that conversation itself, which the conversation is the bridge between those two people, right? If you have an engineering team working on product and you have a creative team trying to design the product and they're speaking two different languages, it's not enough to just say, hey, guys, you're speaking two different languages.
00:04:48:06 - 00:05:15:25 Jake McKee You really have to have an approach to slowing down the conversation, getting people to let down their guard, to warm up the connection, to build a longer term and sort of more in depth relationship. Those are all conversational skills at its core. And so that's really in over the years, you know, as you said in my bio, I've worked with a lot of companies and a lot of industries doing a lot of different things, and they all fundamentally had this in common.
00:05:15:26 - 00:05:44:29 Jake McKee And yet every time I talk to a product team, they're there. The summary I've used is it's hard to build great products with secondhand insight, because so much of the insight these days for product teams in particular, is just being handed to them. Right? There's the voice of the customer report that comes from an external market research team, or there's marketing personas that come from the marketing team, or the support team is giving you a dashboard of the latest tech issues that are coming into the call center that that month.
00:05:45:01 - 00:06:07:18 Jake McKee The community team has their insights. Everybody has their own insights. But what was happening was that in our risk averse culture, more and more and more product teams were kind of being shoved into the corner and saying, build what we tell you, don't experience it yourself, don't have those relationships yourself. It's too dangerous for you to talk to customers directly.
00:06:07:20 - 00:06:33:21 Jake McKee All that noise, that's just not true. And and so part of this was realized. It was sort of this, this collision of, of two understandings. One was that, you know, I went to school for product design products. Always been in my in my, in my wheelhouse and my in my joy center. Right. Like, I'd love working with product teams and hearing them say over and over again, you know, I'm so burned out I never get to see what I build.
00:06:33:21 - 00:06:56:27 Jake McKee I never get to participate in the process. I'm just given documentation or given demands for an agile stand up. The next sprint for what we need to build. I never really get to participate, and it's exhausting. And I don't like it. Combined with the fact that we have more and more opportunities, especially in the AI world, some of them good, some of them bad, to get more input and more feedback.
00:06:56:27 - 00:07:27:08 Jake McKee But we're not sort of really finding a good system to make those those first hand insights, those first hand conversations and relationships work. And so, you know, I sat down and looked at the multi years of work that I've done and said, okay, how do I distill that down into what I call the conversation compass that's made up of sort of five core pillars, starting with Conversation Dead, which is just, you know, how you think about where you're coming up short and how do you start to map that, just like you would technical debt if you were an engineer?
00:07:27:10 - 00:07:33:17 Joshua Zerkel That's amazing. What are the other four pillars? So you mentioned one. Let's go through the five pillars so that we have a full understanding.
00:07:33:18 - 00:07:33:23 Jake McKee Yeah.
00:07:33:24 - 00:07:34:12 Joshua Zerkel Yeah.
00:07:34:19 - 00:07:57:18 Jake McKee So conversation that's the the these don't happen in order per se. But I'll give them to you in kind of the traditional how we work through them. The first one is conversation that I just mentioned, you know, understanding where your gaps in conversation are, why those gaps exist, that sort of thing. The second one is conversation architecture. So how do you actually build systems for this sort of engagement?
00:07:57:21 - 00:08:20:05 Jake McKee Right. When when I hear from a salesperson at a SaaS company, for instance, and I don't want to bring the engineers to product developers into the into my sales call because they might get in the way of my sales call. That, to me, says, you need a better architecture for how you're getting people from your company in front of customers in a more effective way.
00:08:20:05 - 00:08:51:01 Jake McKee Does that mean there's training? Does that mean there's program? Does that mean that there's assessment processes? What is that structure that we're going to actually build here. Right. You can't have agile if you don't know what the agile architecture is. Right. The the third one is is conversation traction sorry traction not traction amplification. So how do we think about what we hear, how that gets promoted back into the company.
00:08:51:03 - 00:09:11:24 Jake McKee Because it's one thing to learn to know it for me, but I really need to be turning that into some sort of broad spectrum. Right? How do I take what I learned and and push it back out to the, to the company so that other people can understand it? It doesn't just die in my notebook. Right. The fourth one is conversation tuning.
00:09:11:27 - 00:09:39:04 Jake McKee So just the basic practices of, you know, how do we how do we improve our conversations, you know, how do I understand better how to engage somebody in, in marketing or in my customer base or in their industry because so many, so much of what we've done, not just with product but across the industry board, is we've in our risk averse culture, we've said, well, I'm afraid to talk to customers because I might say something wrong.
00:09:39:04 - 00:09:52:20 Jake McKee So I'm going to put that off in the market research team. And then they learn how to do interviews really well, which is great. And we want them doing that. We want them to continue doing that. But what about when I get in front of somebody? Do I have the just the core basic set of skills for myself?
00:09:52:22 - 00:10:13:23 Jake McKee And then the last one is traction. What do we do with all this stuff? It's one thing to learn those insights, and it's one thing to tell other people in the company about it. It's one thing to have a system that we're doing that on a regular basis to understand where our debt is, but if we're not doing anything with it, it doesn't go anywhere inside the company, and it doesn't impact our decision making in any way.
00:10:13:26 - 00:10:38:06 Jake McKee What's the point? It's just another sort of needless, you know, HR activity or training program that nobody ever uses. But it's there anyway, right? We need to actually make decisions differently, to make choices differently, to build teams differently based on what we hear, based on what we've learned and what we feel, what we want to research ourselves, how we want to task our our research team right?
00:10:38:09 - 00:10:50:16 Jake McKee When we learn something or see something new and interesting, you know, what happens to that, to that insight. So that not not only does it not die in my notebook, but it gets acted on and the product that comes out the other end is better.
00:10:50:18 - 00:11:10:29 Joshua Zerkel Amazing. Yeah, it's funny that that we're talking through this because I'm just reflecting. You have this structure for like the four pillars. And to me, I'm thinking all of us have conversations all day long. It's like what we as humans do, but not all of us are equally good at having quality conversations. And so in your work, you have the five pillars.
00:11:10:29 - 00:11:18:05 Joshua Zerkel What is the one pillar that teams seems to struggle with the most and why? Why do you think that might be?
00:11:18:07 - 00:11:37:02 Jake McKee Well, there's a couple of different ways to answer that. I think that I don't think it's unique to the compass. I think it's the traction piece that that all of us struggle with. Right. Whether we get an executive directive that says, hey, this year we have this new executive focus, and so how are you going to apply it?
00:11:37:08 - 00:12:03:01 Jake McKee That's hard work to figure out not just what to do, but how to go make it effective. And so there's, you know, from from that standpoint, I think traction is hard. I think that that getting people to understand that, that I have conversations all day is not the same when it comes to conversation tuning as how do I have a good conversation relative to my work around product development or product innovation?
00:12:03:03 - 00:12:30:13 Jake McKee That is based on how I'm having a conversation, right? Why do I need to have a relationship with the person across the table? Right? What is that? That doesn't mean much, especially if you talk to engineers that have a very binary sort of thinking that that can be hard to get across. I think in a lot of ways, though, the sort of the pivotal piece of all of this work is that architecture.
00:12:30:15 - 00:13:04:05 Jake McKee How do we make sure that not only do we have a good game plan, but that everybody understands why we're even investing in that? Why are they hiring me to help them train or assess or build program around this in the first place? Why is that worthwhile? What's the outcomes of that? How do we you know, everybody's always so interested in what's the ROI of whatever the thing is we're talking about that they they skip the fundamental need for it, or they skipped the reason why I'm even going to be able to talk about ROI, because we've we've looked at what we need to be changing and doing and things like, you know, I talked
00:13:04:05 - 00:13:20:16 Jake McKee to a lot of product leaders whose first reaction when I talk about this is, well, we already talked to customers. We do that every day. So why would we? You know, we're clearly good at it. I'm not sure that really good at it and we do it all day long are the same thing. Yeah. Often almost always they're not.
00:13:20:16 - 00:13:45:04 Jake McKee But you know that's the the fundamental piece is really getting people to understand that, that there's a need for learning this kind of thing, even though we do it all day long. And the example I give regularly is it is it is almost never a place that couples start where they, you know, they don't get married to say, great, we need couples counseling, right?
00:13:45:05 - 00:14:04:10 Jake McKee There's a there's a fracture, there's a fissure, there's a problem, there's an interruption, there's some problem that then causes them to say, let's go to counseling. But honestly, imagine how much better relationships would be in the long term if they did have some of that, that counseling upfront to train you on how to be in a marriage in an effective way.
00:14:04:12 - 00:14:29:07 Jake McKee But sometimes until you see that that real challenge, that real, there's some sort of fault, you know, some sort of collapse of something that then causes you to say, I need to fix this. But it's very often if you if you think about marriage counseling, it's really easy, right? Because it's been sort of the broad concept of marriage counseling with the broad concept of relational problems.
00:14:29:10 - 00:14:45:08 Jake McKee Cool. We also understand that. And so if I have a problem or I'm upset about something or, you know, my, my spouse and I are going over the same territory over and over again, I have a natural place to go to that says, let's go to marriage counseling. What we don't have in business right now is a natural place.
00:14:45:08 - 00:15:04:18 Jake McKee When things keep coming up short, when our engineers are getting burned out, when we just don't feel good about where the team is at to go, oh, we need to immediately work on this issue. Right. And so I think that's to answer your question, it's kind of this idea of the compass in general. That's more the challenge because once people go, you know what?
00:15:04:19 - 00:15:24:18 Jake McKee Now that you put it into this context. Yeah. None of our engineers talk to anybody outside of our own organization because they're getting all this second hand insights. I could see how that burns somebody out, you know? But it's getting to that point in the first place where you're willing to have that thought about what are these emotional and relational drivers that are having the impact on our team?
00:15:24:20 - 00:15:42:16 Joshua Zerkel Yeah, it's so interesting because to me, one of the things that's always fascinating to me about the world of work is that all of us are in it, but none of us are taught how to do it. So, right. Somehow it's assumed that all of us just know how to work. We know how to show up. We know how to relate to our coworkers effectively.
00:15:42:18 - 00:15:59:24 Joshua Zerkel We know how to be in meetings and have them be good. We know how to do our work. Actually, no one is taught how to do any of those things. Those are all skills that you pick up along the way, usually by being in an environment or watching other people, or having coworkers that you emulate or try to not emulate.
00:15:59:24 - 00:16:19:07 Joshua Zerkel Depending on how you perceive the effectiveness of how they show up. And to me, I think the type of thing that we're talking about here, having a structured way to think about conversations, have a way to develop skills around it. We should have this for all of the ways that we work, all the ways that we interact with our coworkers and with our customers so that we can do things more effectively.
00:16:19:07 - 00:16:20:28 Joshua Zerkel But that just doesn't.
00:16:21:01 - 00:16:57:11 Jake McKee Yeah. And what's funny about that is that we do have some areas in business that we think, yeah, we need to have that. How many books on leadership generic sort of overarching leadership are there? Thousands of books on leadership. How many books are there on aspects of leadership? A whole lot fewer. Right. The idea that that a manager is now being put into a new role as a manager instead of a individual contributor, for instance, there's a there's a at least in a lot of companies, not all, but many of them.
00:16:57:12 - 00:17:21:18 Jake McKee There's an understanding that if I'm going to move you from an icy into a managerial role, I might have to provide you some support. And all too often, you know, that's shoved off on the HR team to run them through some sort of training course. Or the boss says, here's a book or whatever. The boss doesn't sit down and say, here's the expectations, here's the dynamics, here's where we go.
00:17:21:21 - 00:17:43:15 Jake McKee And really what you just talked about is, you know, both of our community brains would would recognize is what you talked about is that these decisions really are what creates culture is a really great culture that's very warm and embracing, has more connection to those sort of soft skills. Right. It has more acceptance that not everybody has them.
00:17:43:17 - 00:18:06:07 Jake McKee Not everybody should have them. But the people who do may need some help to learn them. And but we're going to be here that, you know, that modeled behaviors, you know, that comes if you're in a company that nobody talks to each other and everybody's very protective of their own silo. That's a certain type of culture, not a very good one, but that's a certain type of culture, the ones that are much more open.
00:18:06:08 - 00:18:29:23 Jake McKee There's not a bunch of doors, there's not a bunch of silos, there's not a bunch of roadblocks in how people collaborate. All of a sudden that there's a lot easier way to model those behaviors, to learn from the people around you to to have a culture that is very warm and and connecting. But that's really in some ways, what we're talking about is what kind of culture you presented with and what kind of culture do you want to have.
00:18:29:25 - 00:18:37:11 Jake McKee And the only way to get to a really great culture is to think about your soft skills, not just the sort of the structural hard skills. Right?
00:18:37:17 - 00:19:08:10 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. Because at the end of the day, the the culture is built by people who are actual real life humans who function within an organization with the dynamics that that entails, and recognizing that is the only way that you can effectively build something that that is useful, meaningful, and that people want to return to. I'm really curious. Like one of the things that I, I've often talked about in my own work is the difference between a marketing persona and a person, and in marketing and in go to market in general.
00:19:08:10 - 00:19:29:14 Joshua Zerkel We love the idea of the persona, this like person who's like a clip art photo of a person with like the bullet points of their attributes and the things that they like and the things that they don't and the things that they need versus, you know, I work in community, I talk with real life people. They are messy as hell, and they don't often say neatly into all of these little boxes.
00:19:29:14 - 00:19:50:05 Joshua Zerkel And this is, I think, a parallel to some of the things that you talk about, which is the difference between collecting customer feedback versus actually having a conversation with the customer. Oftentimes those are treated as if they're the same thing. Maybe you can talk about that a little bit, that concept of the customer feedback collection process versus just having conversations with customers.
00:19:50:08 - 00:20:11:14 Jake McKee Yeah. And and I'm going to say a couple of sort of broad points. And then I'll get into the specific response. Number one is I think one of the most corrosive things in modern business, Western business culture is the is the risk aversion that we're all dealing with. Why do we go to a third party market research firm?
00:20:11:14 - 00:20:33:10 Jake McKee Because it's risky to make choices on our own data. It's theoretically, and I'm going to use my fingers. It's safer to go to an expert and have them just tell us what the answer is. It's safer because we can trust that they have all this expertise, but also safer because if it's wrong, I have somebody to point out instead of point at me.
00:20:33:12 - 00:20:34:27 Joshua Zerkel Safer, right.
00:20:34:28 - 00:21:13:16 Jake McKee And and I think so much of what modern business culture in the Western world is these days is fundamentally the foundational starting point is risk avoidance. And what do we do to ensure that we're avoiding risk? And that's where that's that's where Dole comes from, right? I'm not saying you have to risk everything always all day long, but but I once had a conversation with with one of our Lego lawyers who I loved and I loved working with about trying to explain that, you know, your job as a lawyer is to reduce risk to zero.
00:21:13:18 - 00:21:40:01 Jake McKee Can I never get there? Absolutely not. That's not how human nature works. As you said, humans are missing. But your goal, how you're incented, how you're how you're trained, how you think is every risk I want to remove. And till we get to zero. And then I'll be successful. If we're at zero, if we're getting close to zero, then I'm, I'm graded as being successful, but I'm not really reaching the goal of zero on the business side.
00:21:40:03 - 00:22:09:08 Jake McKee The truth is it's our goal is not the same. Our goal is not to reduce risk to zero. It's to reduce risk as much as possible with reward as high as possible in a ratio we can defend. And sometimes those are very low risk and acceptance of a very low return. Sometimes that's what we got to do. Other times we say we're going to take on a risk, but we're making an active choice because the reward could be phenomenal and I can defend it.
00:22:09:08 - 00:22:41:19 Jake McKee I can go in front of the executives and say, this is why we're spending this amount of money or this amount of risk, or we're doing this amount of change because we can defend that as a, as a, as a choice. And so, so much of what what happens is this idea of risk avoidance. And so I think when we get to this, this, this question of how are we building our insights, I'll call them insights, not just research, because research is sort of a subset of the insights concept.
00:22:41:21 - 00:23:02:22 Jake McKee How are we doing it in a way that that we are we are getting past that risk avoidance, because it is risky to put an engineer in front of a potential customer. It is it is risky to ask five of your customers in a roundtable, how do you feel about our product? It's risky as hell. So how do we remove some of that risk?
00:23:02:25 - 00:23:25:16 Jake McKee Well, right now we're kind of just not doing it right because that's the safest theoretically way to do it. But it's also the least rewarding, right? If we stop doing the thing, we can't get the thing to earn the money that we wanted to do. Right. So then you fall back on the relational piece. The difference between creating a persona is that you're doing it effectively on your own.
00:23:25:17 - 00:23:42:20 Jake McKee You may have conversations, you may get the research, you may get the voice, the customer reports, you may get whatever, but you're bringing it into your own team and your own four walls, and you're creating something that may or may not exist. I'm not saying that that's not worthwhile. I'm not taking anything away from the other parts of the business.
00:23:42:20 - 00:24:05:16 Jake McKee They all deserve to be there. They all need to be there. They all should be there. The question is, how are we using them? Because so many teams, as I'm sure you have seen, they build that persona. And maybe they got there honestly, right. They've done great research, they've done great interviews, they've got really good at personas, and then they build them and then that becomes fact and they're done right.
00:24:05:17 - 00:24:25:04 Jake McKee And I've seen this 100 times. I'm sure you have to where we're now five years later and we're still working off those same personas. And nobody's had a conversation with the customer in the last two years, because why would we got a clear persona? We know what we're working for, and we're also wondering why our revenues down. Right?
00:24:25:06 - 00:25:03:23 Jake McKee The the way that you solve that isn't just to go have more conversations, right, to to have more interviews with customers. That's part of the mix. But really what you're trying to do is the relational piece. And that's the second big thing that I'll say before we get into the how you actually go about this. But when you build that relationship, you're inherently de-risking because instead of it being a business, talking to a research subject, it's Jake talking to Josh about what they're both working on and when you get and that's that's my fundamental community training at play, as I'm sure you can recognize when you get that relationship in place.
00:25:03:23 - 00:25:39:09 Jake McKee When I make a mistake, when I ask a dumb question, when I when I dig in on something that may be a little painful for one or both of us, it's it's it's inherently adding value to the relationship. It's not taking anything away. And if we put it only in this very risk averse business culture mindset, if I go out and I ask somebody to be part of my my research project and I interview them about something and I'm asking my list of questions in order to build this formal persona that gives me the safety of knowledge that I can then work off of and blah, blah, blah.
00:25:39:12 - 00:26:00:17 Jake McKee What I'm not doing is creating a relationship that over time, grows better and more deeper, and then creates more vulnerability for me to get to the insights any good market research person will tell you, you get somebody vulnerable enough to share. Honestly, the data doesn't really matter, and the best way to get to that vulnerability is to create a relationship with them.
00:26:00:17 - 00:26:04:05 Jake McKee The best way to create a relationship is to start with a great conversation.
00:26:04:08 - 00:26:30:04 Joshua Zerkel 100%. Having spent so much of my career in the building relationships at scale world of community, what I can say for certain is when you spend time to let customers get to know you, and you spend time actually getting to know them, the insights you gain, the depth of knowledge, their level of honesty, and the the rewards you get as a business as a result are unmatched.
00:26:30:05 - 00:26:52:18 Joshua Zerkel And when you're trying to gloss over with like, oh, we did the market research, we did the persona building that those are important things. Those are one piece of the puzzle and that can be paired with the what are real people saying, using their own words in conversations that we've had with them? The combination together is, I think, what's truly powerful, Jacob noticing presenting.
00:26:52:21 - 00:26:53:04 Joshua Zerkel Go ahead.
00:26:53:05 - 00:27:22:22 Jake McKee I'll tell you one last story. I was at a I was giving a presentation to a market research group about this, this topic. And at the end, when the question started flowing in, somebody raised their hand and they said, all this sounds really great, but how can you how can you ensure statistical validity? Basically was this question. And I said, for my work, I don't care for your work, you do.
00:27:22:22 - 00:27:48:02 Jake McKee And so I rely on you for the statistical validity. I rely on me to sort of to be challenged, to come up with interesting insights that because humans are messy, that we're able to get to in a way that statistical validity driven projects would never get to. I want to go through the messy parts so that I can bring you something and say, I don't know what's going on, but there is something here and I can't figure out what it is.
00:27:48:02 - 00:28:12:27 Jake McKee Can you help me figure out what it is? Right. And that qualitative and quantitative working together is extremely powerful in a way that that not having the two of them both, not having both of them is not right. When we get those two work together, they are they are wonderful. But when we try to pick one or the other, when we say, oh, well, if you talk to you, if you have relationships, then you're giving away your market research.
00:28:12:27 - 00:28:21:12 Jake McKee Or the only way we can get insights is to do it statistically valid wise. You're missing something dramatic.
00:28:21:19 - 00:28:42:21 Joshua Zerkel Yeah. It's the pairing of the two is what's most powerful. In my experience, just looking at one or the other doesn't get you the information that you need. Right? All right, Jake, I realize we are just about a time. If you could briefly give one small step to people who want to get started with using the compass, where do you suggest they start?
00:28:42:24 - 00:29:15:25 Jake McKee So I have built a ton of resources on my website. Jake McKee I'm sure we'll put that up somewhere next to the next to the session. I have a conversation debt analysis tool that's a very brief set of questions that kind of walks you through some of the things that I might ask you. If we sat down in person for that first conversation about where your team is at, but that's really where I suggest is run through that conversation, debt assessment and kind of see what what it makes you start thinking about.
00:29:15:27 - 00:29:30:27 Jake McKee Also on the site, though, is a ton of other tools for all the five pillars. There's a lot of content there. And of course my email address. If you want to reach out and have a have a face to face conversation, that's of course something you can imagine I would enjoy.
00:29:30:29 - 00:29:49:12 Joshua Zerkel I'll bet. All right. So Jake Mikita com is where everything can be found. Everyone I enjoy, I invite you to join me and Jake also in the gradual community where we have an AMA where Jake answer more of your questions. I just want to say, Jake, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us today.
00:29:49:15 - 00:30:07:14 Joshua Zerkel Everyone, check out the playbooks, resources, conversations with us in Jake and all of our upcoming events, of which there are many at community. Thanks again, Jake. Thank you for watching this recording or joining us live. And we'll see everyone in the gradual community. Thank you so much.
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