Designing conversations in product- Daniel Stillman on The Product Experience

Randy, should we pull the curtain back on how we prep for our conversations with all of these awesome guests?

Sure. Let’s see. So our crack research team does deep dives into everything our guests have ever written, spoken about or even thought, and then they put it all into our amazing AI to synthesise the best questions for us, the friendly faces of the pod, to ask about and sound smart.

Well, maybe we’ll get to that someday, but for now, actually, we do the prep ourselves. We do the research and plan out a series of questions that serves as a guide for the chats, but we usually do go off piece and ask other questions based on the conversation.

And we actually share the questions with our guests in advance to see if there’s anything great that we missed out on in our prep. But there’s a reason that we’re talking about all this today, and that’s because…

It’s all because we’re talking to Daniel Stillman, who, well, we’ll let him tell you about his journey, but he now designs conversations for a living. He’s got a book on the topic called Good Talk and his own podcast as well.

But for today, listen to what he has to say here and how it can be applied to the busy life of a product person. Let’s do it.

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Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast this week.

Thanks for having me, guys. Seriously, I really appreciate the opportunity to share these ideas. I think this stuff is important, so I’m glad for the opportunity.

Excellent. So for anyone who doesn’t already know your name and recognise you, can you just give us a quick introduction? How did you get into this product-related area and what do you do these days?

I think I do bear introducing because there are many people, it’s a big world, not everybody knows me. Hi everyone. My name is Daniel Stillman and I studied, well, I have a degree in physics, and then I got a master’s degree in industrial design and nobody told me in industrial design school that physical products design had its heyday in the ’50s with Charles and Ray Eames, and then it was sort of a little bit downhill from there. Sorry if there’s any industrial product designers out there who are hearing me condemn the entire field. When I came out of the school and I worked in my first studio, there was this whole other type of design that was in emergence. We were designing the physical things and somebody else was designing the screens of the things, like TVs. Panasonic was a big client and we’re like, “Oh, somebody’s designing the interface for this television now?” There’s a whole new world of things design and the physicality of products became more and more irrelevant. I mean still relevant but less relevant and part of a larger thing.

And so I just got thrown into this world of, well, what is interaction design? And from interaction design, it was like, well, what is experience design? And there were these sort of cascading narratives that I became part of. Oh, we’re doing design thinking, which wasn’t taught in design school. And then I heard a group call their facilitative practise conversation design. That was in 2015 and I was like, “What does conversation design even mean? How do you design a conversation? You’re not designers, and why is that important?”

And it made me step back and look at my whole career and be like, “Oh yeah, I’ve been designing conversations the whole time. Nobody taught us about stakeholder management and alignment conversations and workshoppery things in design school,” but those were such an important part of the process. It was like, the cat herding, the narrative, the selling, the storytelling, the gathering of all the people and getting that new word for conversation design sent me on this whole next recent phase of my journey where I started my own podcast and just started to work on my own book around, well, what is this thing that I think we’re all doing that’s important for us to know about, to be intentional about designing conversations? And that is why I coach leaders and teams on this thing because designing conversations intentionally is how we get what we want to get out of life.

And just to be really clear, the conversation design that you’re talking about, it’s not Alexa, it’s not chatbots. This is-

Yeah, when I started this process, voice design was barely nascent. And so I want to make sure people understand the distinction and thank you, Randy, for, A, correcting me, and also helping me clarify my value proposition. Human computer interaction is one type of design and voice interaction as a modality, as an interface for humans to interface with computers is a whole other type of design and is usually at the IC level. What I more weirdly talk about is how do we design all of the conversations in our work and our lives? And so you could think of it as management, leadership, stakeholder alignment, storytelling, facilitation, coaching, therapists design their conversations. I think to me it’s just the human/human interface, conversation design as human to human interaction design.

So Daniel, when I think of conversations, what springs to mind is the amount of time I spend in meetings and kind of one thing you said there was designing conversations with intent. So is this something in terms of conversations, do we design conversations in our heads almost without intent at the moment? Is this something we’re doing subconsciously right now which, if we became conscious about, we could then practise better? Or is it a case of it’s a brand new discipline that you are advocating for?

So yes, and maybe. Everything in the world is already designed pretty much in our world as human beings, like our roads, our computers, the things in our pockets, the clothes we put our things in. Everything’s been designed and I think we are already designing our conversations. Usually it’s with habitual outmoded approaches. One of the classic conversation designs is the conference room, the long table with a screen at one end that we used to, if people can remember back that far, that we used to gather in to have a conversation about what to do, and where we sat on that table dictated a lot. Who is by the screen? Who is at the front of the table? Who is next to that person? Who is in the middle? That space shaped our conversations.

And for anybody who’s ever tried to host an interactive workshop in a long room where one of the walls was brick and the other one was felt and the other one was glass knows and that they’ve tried to put sticky notes on them, you know that that space was not designed for the kind of conversations you wanted to have. And anybody who’s been in a workshop where the person hadn’t thought it all the way through knows that’s not great. And anybody who’s been in a one-on-one with their manager who said, “So, what’s on your mind?” knows that a poorly designed or a habitually designed or a sub-designed conversation is not going to get you what you want out of it.

So I think, yeah, turning on the intentionality knob can get you goodness because you are already designing your conversations and you can just leave it at the low end of the knob, or improv is a form of design, right? Yeah, let’s leave this undesigned, let’s be improvisational about it. But even improv is designed because yes/and is a design for conversations, believe you me. So we are already super designing our conversations. I just think generally you’re speaking, we’re not checking are we getting what we want out of them?

So for people like us, we’re in meetings all day long. Our job is mostly having conversations. Let’s ground this the right way. What are the basic elements? What are the basic materials when you’re trying to design a conversation?

Yeah. Well, I mean, that is one of the fundamental questions everyone has to answer for themselves. So everybody, Randy, you have to decide for yourself, “What do I think I can actually shape to make this conversation better?” And I used to run these workshops and everyone can do this for themselves. “What do I believe a conversation is made out of? And of those things, what are the things that I think I can actually shape?” So when you ask people to do a sticky cloud of what are conversations made out of, you’ll hear things like, oh, speaking and listening and vibes and emotions and intentionality. And if we look at that whole wall and we say, “Well, what can we actually shape?” It’s actually really hard to shape our emotions. I don’t know if you’ve had this experience. If I’m feeling one way, it’s really hard for me to get myself to feel another way. If I’m angry at someone, it’s very hard for me to be patient.

And so I’m not saying emotions are not a part of the conversations that we can design. They are part of the conversation. I just ask ourselves, “Well, how do we feel differently if we want to feel differently?” Time is something we can shape. Do we have enough time for this conversation? How big is the question that we’re addressing? This is just a classic. If it’s a big question, do we need a big amount of time or do we need to be asking a smaller question with also a large amount of time? Because there’s a lot of rabbit hole in that question. How many people need to be part of this conversation? Are the right number of people in the conversation, or are too many people in the conversation? You can just do a quick back of the napkin calculation on number of people and amount of time, and you can get a number, like air time per person. And if the airtime per person is nuts, we know 30 minutes with 30 people, well, why are all 30 people there? Now for some people we say, “Well, I can’t design the number of people in the conversation. I have to include all of these people”.

Then we have another element of the conversation that a lot of people have a hard time with, which is power. Do I have the power to dis-invite or to invite someone to this conversation? Do I have the power to say I don’t want to be in this conversation? There’s so many memes about early in our careers where we’re like, “Oh man, I can’t wait to get invited to all these amazing meetings.” And now you’re like, “Oh my God, I have so many meetings I’m going to…” And the real flex is, “Hey, you can totally have that meeting without me. I do not need to be there.” That’s power to say, “You all need to come to this meeting,” or to be able to say, “You three can and you three shouldn’t, and this is why,” or “I won’t be in that meeting and this is why.” So power shapes conversations for sure.

But I’m usually just going to look at it as a physics problem. It’s like, time, energy, people and the size of the problem and whether or not people feel like they want to be there. Those are some basic elements. There’s a conversation operating system that I architected my book, Good Talk, around where I was just trying to decide for myself what are the smallest number of things that I could invite people to think about to shift how they are thinking about and what they are seeing in conversation. But I think honestly, Randy, everyone has to decide for themselves, “What do I think I can shape here?” And I also would invite people to ask themselves, “What do I think I can’t change that maybe I can if I’m willing to bend the rules instead of breaking them?” That would be a shift.

As product managers, we train our brains to measure the success of the work that we do. And so when I listen to you talking about how we can design our conversations with intention and plan the time and think about the power dynamics and all of that, if we’re going to try and measure how successful we are at conversations and understand are we improving, are we moving in the right direction, how would you support someone in assessing how well they’re doing right now and how well their intentional design is performing?

It’s a great question, and I think there’s at least two ways, two lenses on it. One is the success of the conversation itself. If you were to ask everyone, “How did it go?” which is a question every leader needs to ask themselves, we’re building the culture of the company meeting by meeting and also our reputations as leaders meeting by meeting. And so if you said to people, “How did that conversation go?” and they go, “Oh, that was effective,” that’s a very subjective thing. Everybody has their own subjective score and that might be determined by whether or not they felt included, whether or not you gave them time to think.

One of the things I didn’t mention in the materiality question, Randy, is there’s some physical aspects of conversations in our human psychology. We can think at 4,000 words per minute, but we can only speak at 125. So nobody in the meeting is actually capable in a finite amount of time to be able to tell you everything that they’re thinking about. But if you want to make people feel heard and you actually want to hear everyone, you’re going to have to be very, very clever and intentional about how you design things. People can only listen to one person speaking at a time. Our attention span is 60 bits per second. One person talking is 30 bits, listening to one person talk is 30 bits per second. Two people talking at the same time can overload one brain. And we have these conversations that make our brains go, “Ah,” so what’s a successful meeting, Lily? One that was neurologically fair. One that worked with our human psychology and physiology that actually didn’t break our brain and make us want to cry.

So that’s one form of success, not a cluster-fuck, if I’m allowed to curse. But the other question of success is what is the outcome that I wanted to design for? Well, that’s something that, is that driven by me or is that driven by all of the people? Success for whom? And I think this goes to one of the other questions you’re going to ask me, I think, is like, “Are we going too slow? Is this conversation moving too slowly? Are we getting what we need to get out of this conversation?”

Are you trying to design this conversation on the fly?

So I mean, success ostensibly means are we moving forward? But the question of forward to whom and value creation how, because did I get everyone to say, “Hey, that was a good presentation?” Did I get everyone to say, “Those features look nice?” Did I get them to say, “We should make that?” Or did I get people to say, “We made it and it worked?” Are we looking backwards or are we looking forwards in the conversation? Are you looking at the problem space or the solution space? Did I bring everyone with me to my solution or did I find a new solution that everyone’s excited about that I didn’t expect? I think that’s more than success. That’s transformational magic.

So I mean, there’s conventional success, and then I designed a conversation that got me more than anybody could have expected in the time that we had. I call that B prime. We want to go A to B, like, oh, so we’re here and everyone’s like, the cats are all in the different directions. And B is like, oh, the cats are herded and now we’re all moving in one direction. B prime, that’s B. That’s a very conventional result. B prime is wow, we came up with something that nobody would’ve thought of by themselves or we’ve unlocked incredible energy in the team. That’s B prime. I think whether we’re designing a conventional conversation where we just want to get unaligned to aligned, unclear to clear or untransformed to deeply transformed, those are very different approaches to designing a conversation. And not all conversations, to your earlier question, require that level. I mean, of course there’s conventional conversations. There’s like, “Hey, what do you want for lunch today?” “Well, let’s get out our conversation design toolkit and have a transformational workshop about lunch.” That’s not what this is about.

Let’s actually dig into that a little bit, not about what should we have for lunch. But putting this into practise, is this something that you recommend that people do for every meeting, for every conversation? And how long does it take to prepare for one, or does it become second nature? I realise I’m asking a lot of stuff at once, but does it become second nature after a while or is it something you always have to be intentional about?

So I mean, that kind of goes to an earlier question around do we have to do this all the time? How much do we have to do? And I think a simpler way to ask it is when we’re lost in the woods, what do we do? Do you grab hold of a tree? And by the way, if you’re a kid, if you have kids, you should tell them if they get lost in the woods, they’re just supposed to grab a tree, they’re supposed to stay in one place because if they wander and you’re looking for the kids in the woods, if they keep wandering and you’re looking for them, you’ll never find them because they just keep moving. So the kids should stay in one spot. If we’re lost, we should move but we should move slowly and we should pay very, very close attention. We need to have a compass. We need to have something to anchor us to. And so I think yes, we do get better over time if we have a basic compass.

And I think there are durable ways of designing conversations that just work. One, if people aren’t aware of appreciative inquiry, for example, it’s like a brother from another mother or a sister from another mister of design thinking. But instead of starting from problems, it starts from appreciating the living core of a thing. So if anybody’s ever practised Rose, Thorn, Bud on a retrospective, they were unintentionally practising appreciative inquiry. They were starting with roses. “Hey, what’s working?” Starting with, “Hey, what’s working?” is an amazing design for a conversation because it anchors us in what’s working, right? It anchors us in positivity. We’re designing our conversations to focus on positivity and then saying, “What can we do to get more of this good stuff?”

And we never talk about things in terms of being broken or faulty. We just look at what’s working and then how to unlock more goodness. That’s a pretty durable modality for conversation design. And if people aren’t familiar with appreciative inquiry, they can totally just Google that, those two words together, and they can hear the Disney song A Whole New World echoing in their ears, as long as they don’t dare close their eyes.

Thinking in big arcs and little arcs. It doesn’t take a long time to say, “What’s the big arc of this conversation? What’s the big A to B? And then what are all the little As and Bs that kind of fit into that?” It doesn’t take a lot of time to just draw a big arc. Another compass that people can use when they’re lost is, “Well, do I need to be asking more or do I need to be telling more?” That’s a really, I think as people grow in their careers, I saw you nod, Lily, so I’m going to assume that this resonates with your own mental model of how a person grows as a participant in change. Asking more questions and asking better questions is a great way to unlock people and yourself versus telling people.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with telling people. If you look at the two by two matrix of asking and telling and focusing on problems versus focusing on solutions. I actually just recently discovered that some people describe this as the TAPS model, which I think is really weird because it starts with the telling instead of the asking, and I think to me, I put asking at the top and telling at the bottom, and if you look at that two by two space, everyone has to decide for themselves, “Do I need to ask more about the problem or do I need to tell people more about the solution?” And I think a lot of us, Randy, go into conversations assuming we’re in the lower right-hand quadrant of I need to tell people more about my solution rather than ask more about what problem we’re really solving. And I think as we grow as conversation designers, we get more comfortable in switching around in those quadrants depending on what we think really needs to happen to transform and unlock the people in the room. I don’t know if I answered your question. You tell me. What didn’t I answer in your question, because I think it’s an important one?

I think the one short answer I’d ask is practically, how long does it take for someone to sit and do this? Do we need to put 15-minute gaps between meetings to sit and have a reflective period?

Oh wow.

Or is this something that you need hours to do?

So basically everyone needs to give themselves, the simple algorithm is, is the juice worth the squeeze? So that’s the first algorithm. It’s however much time I spend, does it matter? The second question is, can I wing it? Will I get what I need out of it if I have just a basic idea of, well, what are my goals and what are my key questions? The back of the napkin of when we used to be planning workshops of do I need to spend an hour for an hour long workshop? Sometimes. I think the back-to-back meeting culture that we have right now for a lot of people is not particularly functional, partly because what winds up happening is everyone’s doing their processing at the end of the day while things are not fresh. So yes, if you can have a 15-minute gap between your meetings, that would be awesome, but you should probably use that for figuring out what that last conversation was about-

I think you had-

… rather than what you’re going to do to the next one. Sorry, go ahead, Lily.

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I think you had some other kind of tools or techniques that help with thinking about how you want the meeting to go. So the Listening Triangle and the Talking-Thinking Gap, I hadn’t heard of either of those things. So tell us about those and how we can use them.

Yeah, totally. So that’s what we do once we’re in the conversation and how we redesign the conversation in the moment. The Listening Triangle I actually heard referenced as a subtopic in a Harvard Business Review article around how to deal with divisive issues in the workplace, which of course has to happen more and more. And they were not talking about what is this product for and do we disagree about who the real persona is, the real customer for this product. They were talking about what happens when you’re at work and you and your coworkers think differently about abortion and whether or not Black lives matter, that kind of shit, like real stuff.

The Listening Triangle is what I would call varsity level design thinking for your conversations. It requires you to really go past active listening. Active listening is sort of a reflexive thing that you can do. I use active listening all the time as when I’m partially listening to someone or if I’m slightly distracted. It’s actually very easy to use just one animal part of your brain to spit back to something. “So you’re saying this, this, and this?” And they go, “Yes.” And then you go, “Okay, well then here’s this other thing I’m thinking about,” and you go straight to your next thing. So you don’t just paraphrase what somebody’s saying, you ask them a question that allows them another opportunity to rephrase, to re-say, to go deeper into their position.

And this goes to the 4,000 word, 125 word gap. That’s the Talking-Thinking Gap. We can think really fast. Even so, generally speaking in most cultures, and this actually is true for sign language as well, when one person is done talking, the gap that is deemed too much dead air is really small before the next person speaks. If you finish speaking, Lily, and I wait more than 400 milliseconds to say something and respond, it feels unnerving to all of us. It feels like a shocking and embarrassing amount of dead air.

Unfortunately, it takes me about 600 milliseconds to formulate a reasonable reply to anything, and so usually what happens is one of two things. One, we start to think about what we’re going to say while someone is kind of in the back half of their phrase. We’re kind of anticipating where they’re going to go and come up with options. And this is a survival mechanism. It is how we exist as human beings. It’s how we’re made. Is mommy going to be mad? What does daddy really want? Is my friend going to undercut me? We’re tracking like NORAD tracks nuclear warheads. We are tracking where the conversation is going to go. And so the Listening Triangle is a way, it’s like if you just have this mindset of I’m going to slow this conversation down instead of trying to speed it up, I’m going to take what they’re saying and I’m going to say it back to them, check that they heard, that I heard them, and then I’m going to ask them another question about their point of view and in such a way that they say it again until they feel really, really heard.

Now when I say it’s varsity level listening, it’s hard to do because it’s not easy to listen to people that we don’t like, whose point of views we find abhorrent or disagree with, and it is extremely effective because the best way to change someone’s mind is not through force. I mean, show of hands anybody in radio land if you’ve ever convinced anyone by yelling at them with your talking points against their talking points, or by sending them an article that shows them why they’re wrong. We really believe the things we want to believe because we have to believe them and it actually turns out that the more deeply we can listen to someone, the more they relax, the more they feel safe, the more they feel open, and the more eventually, one day, we might be able to communicate them in such a way as they may hear us and we can co-create a new reality together.

I think using the same level of empathy and deep listening can transform stakeholders in difficult conversations. Randy, I saw you were opening your mouth, so I’m going to assume that you have a follow-up question.

Sorry, there was a good 200 milliseconds there and I thought it was my turn.

I know.

Sorry. I did want to follow up on something you said there about negotiation and you told me earlier that you spent a week at the Harvard Negotiation Institute and learned some interesting things. I think there’s some really practical stuff that we can glean from you on that.

Well, thank you for letting me take an opportunity to brag about having paid to go to Harvard for a week because I do get to have it on my LinkedIn. I’ll get a LinkedIn request, and they’re like, so-and-so, and you both went to Harvard. I’m like, “Sure we did.” But it was a really fun intellectual vacation, and I’ll just do as a sub plug. Anytime you go and try to really learn something that’s kind of outside of your core thing is so powerful. So going and hanging out with lawyers and losing was so humbling, and negotiation is something we all do. And we are, I mean, look, you can think of conversations as negotiations, as a completely fair mental model, but generally speaking, we think of negotiation as oppositional.

The Harvard Negotiation Institute’s Model, and if people want to read Getting to Yes, that’s one of the classics, really actually does have a very empathetic co-creative perspective on things. One of the best models, I think, if we’re talking about, I love visual diagrams that change how we think about conversations. The Listening Triangle is one because it’s just like, let’s go deeper into the conversation. The Harvard Negotiation Project, one of the big models is the Circle of Value, and the idea of the Circle of Value is, instead of the old fight club, like, two men enter, one man leaves sort of model of a negotiation, it’s like we go into the Circle of Value and we explore interests, options and legitimacy, our criteria by which we will judge legitimacy of a decision.

And I think for people in product, in terms of an everyday perspective of suspending disbelief and saying, “Well, what do you want out of this? Well, how will you judge the quality of this decision? How will we know if this is working?” Those are very, very basic questions that, if you look at most of the sort of thought leadership on product and innovation literature, it’s not actually that different. How do we design a durable decision that both parties are going to feel really good about? That’s what we want, and that’s what negotiation theory asks us to do. And so if people don’t know the very basics of negotiation, like what a BATNA is, your best alternative to a negotiated solution, do you know what your BATNA is? Do you know what your zone of possible agreement is? The zone of what somebody really wants, what they’re hoping to get, what they’re willing to accept, what you’re willing to accept, what you’re really hoping to get, and is there any overlap, or as we say in the business, is there a there there?

For all of you who can’t see this video, right, because there isn’t one, everyone nodded. The is there a there there, but then if there isn’t a there there, well, how do we get to there? This is what the Harvard Negotiation Project really asks us to do is to assume that we can create more value than we expect we can, and that if we step into the Circle of Value and really get curious, we might be able to, instead of dividing up the pie, grow the pie, which is a very, very different mental model. Or as I would, in another way of putting it, it’s a different design for the conversation, right? Because the design people have for negotiation is, protect yourself and go for the neck, right? And what the Harvard Negotiation Project asks us to do is to redesign the negotiation conversation to say, “Let’s be maximally curious and maximally empathetic, but make no commitments.”

When we’re fighting about a number, what we’re doing is we’re haggling, and that’s very energy inefficient. It’s actually a very poor design for a conversation to say, “All right, I want 100.” “Well, 25 is my final offer.” “All right, 50.” “No, I won’t take a dollar under 75.” That is inefficient haggling. We never haggle. We say, “Wow, so you want 100. Tell me more about 100. Where’d you get it from?” And it’s not like, “Where’d you get it from, dumbass?” It’s like, “Tell me about 100. Tell me what your theory is, why you deserve 100. Give me your narrative,” and you bring your Listening Triangle and you say, “So you deserve 100. Let’s just assume it’s true. Tell me everything about it, and what would you do with 100? And why does 100 matter to you?”

Socrates was one of those philosophers who said that the more you ask and peel away the layers of the onion on somebody’s argument, the less there is there. And so it actually turns out that deep listening can be a great way of finding out that there’s no there there for them in terms of the foundation of their argument. And that’s okay. That’s not when you go for their neck. You say, “Oh, that’s so interesting. So it seems like you want 100, but there’s not, we don’t necessarily have an objective standard that would say that 100 is what you deserve. We definitely say you want it, and I think you deserve everything you want, but let’s talk about all the other options.”

And having that level of patience and curiosity in a negotiation is hard, especially when the amount of sweat that comes up and the amount of heart rate stuff that happens in a negotiation happen, and that’s where I think the conversation with ourself and how much designing do we need to go into a conversation comes in. I think a lot of the negotiation theory is dialoguing with yourself to say, “Okay, well, what’s the worst that could happen? What’s my best alternative to a negotiated agreement? If this goes terribly, what do I walk away with? What do I really want? Why do I deserve it? How will I comport myself if things go badly? How will I ask for more time to manage myself?” That is the dialogue with ourself that is so productive of powerful results.

And that’s why having 15 minutes before your next meeting can be valuable to say, “Well, what do I want? What’s the arc? Where do I want to start? Where do I hope to get things to? Where do I think this other person is? Where do they hope to get things to? Where do I think we might be able to agree? How might I slow things down and find out what’s really going on?” So I think the negotiation theory for me provided a whole set of lenses for me to slow myself down and ask better, which are two great ways of redesigning any conversation, slowing yourself down and asking better. Always good ways of redesigning a conversation. Because we think so fast.

Daniel, this has been fantastic. We could keep going and going and going, but that would be a poorly designed conversation, although a really entertaining one. So we’re going to ask you one last question tonight, which is, we’ve been doing this for four years. You’re a podcast host yourself. We’re curious, how could we have designed this conversation even better?

Well, I actually really appreciate that you… Look, there’s pluses and minuses of sharing the questions ahead of time. In one hand, you could get someone to over-prepare and be stilted, which you don’t want. And I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you guys. Probably not. I had an experience recently with someone where we were meeting for, imagine, Randy, when you and I met for our pre-conversation, right? And I just said so much good stuff, and you’re like, “God, I wish I had caught that,” and it’s so much fresher, and then when I went back on a conversation with them after I had shared some of the things I wanted to talk about with them, and they were so much tighter, but in a bad way, not tight in a good way. And I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you guys where people can tighten up a little bit when they know they’re on.

So I don’t think you guys could have done, I mean, I don’t think I tightened up too much. I did reflect on your questions last night, and so I appreciated that opportunity to reflect. I think there’s, I don’t know if you’ve ever had the risk reward ratio fall on the risk side for giving people the questions ahead of time, and this is me flipping the conversation, the question back on you guys.

We always like to blindside our guests by giving them questions in advance and then asking other questions that aren’t on the list.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, I mean, that’s a thing. Yeah. So this is designing for safety and also improvisation. You guys are doing great. What are you talking about? You’re pros. I would ask you the same question. How could I have designed my responses to be maximally more useful to your audience? I feel like [inaudible 00:40:01]-

We’ll put the question out to our audience and we’ll let you know.

Yeah, really. Yeah, please do, Randy. I appreciate that.

Fantastic. Daniel, this has been wonderful. Thank you very much for joining us.

I really appreciate the opportunity to share some of my work with your folks.

The Product Experience is the first-

And the best-

… podcast from Mind the Product. Our hosts are me, Lily Smith-

And me, Randy Silver.

Louron Pratt is our producer and Luke Smith is our editor.

Our theme music is from Hamburg based band, Pau. That’s P-A-U. Thanks to Arne Kittler who curates both ProductTank and MTP Engage in Hamburg, and who also plays bass in the band, for letting us use their music. You can connect with your local product community via ProductTank, regular free meetups in over 200 cities worldwide.

If there’s not one near you, maybe you should think about starting one. To find out more, go to mindtheproduct.com/producttank.