One Click Bug Reports Devs Love | Matt Rubright

Hey CX Nation,

In this week's episode of The CXChronicles Podcast #272, we welcomed Matt Rubright, Chief Customer Officer at Jam.dev based in Seattle, WA. 

Jam powers the complete software development lifecycle, with AI that eliminates 84% of bug reproduction tasks, so your engineers can ship clean code faster.

Jam AI adds the relevant logs and steps to make every bug report actionable. With integrations with best-in-class issue trackers & other product management tools, Jam fits right into EPD workflows.

In this episode, Matt and Adrian chat through the Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback. Plus share some of the ideas that his team think through on a daily basis to build world class customer experiences.

**Episode #272 Highlight Reel:**

1. 1-click bug reports devs love
2. Go from testing to production more efficiently
3. Implementing tech changes within an organization
4. Building playbooks to guide your team & create CX consistency
5. Leveraging feedback to build high-performing teams

Click here to learn more about Matt Rubright

Click here to learn more about Jam.dev

Huge thanks to Matt for coming on The CXChronicles Podcast and featuring his work and efforts in pushing the customer experience & contact center space into the future. 

For all of our Apple & Spotify podcast listener friends, make sure you are following CXC & please leave a 5 star review so we can find new members of the "CX Nation". 

You know what would be even better?

Go tell your friends or teammates about CXC's custom content, strategic partner solutions (Hubspot, Intercom, & Freshworks) & On-Demand services & invite them to join the CX Nation, a community of 15K+ customer focused business leaders!

Want to see how your customer experience compares to the world's top-performing customer focused companies? 

Check out the CXC Healthzone, an intelligence platform that shares benchmarks & insights for how companies across the world are tackling The Four CX Pillars: Team, Tools, Process & Feedback & how they are building an AI-powered foundation for the future. 

Thanks to all of you for being apart of the "CX Nation" and helping customer focused business leaders across the world make happiness a habit!

Transcript

speaker-0 (00:02.414)

All right, guys. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the CX Chronicles podcast. I'm your host, Adrian Brady Cezanne. Super pumped for today's show, guys. I know I say this every freaking episode, but this one's a cool one. Matt Rubight, CCO of Jamdev, has joined us. Matt and I have had over the last couple weeks just several incredible conversations. Matt is an awesome customer focused business leader, as you guys are about to hear. But he's a part of a really, really dope team at Jamdev that's really going to be a big part of changing the way that

companies think about customer experience, think about the ways that they're going to leverage AI to really kind of manage what future customer outcomes are going to come from and look like. So Matt, I'm pumped to have you on the show. Why don't you say hello to the CX Nation.

Yeah, thank you for having me. It's good to be here. Sure, we can get into a lot of what Jam does, but yeah, just excited to talk about customer experience and yeah, where I've been in my career.

I love it. So it's funny, like guys, it's every, like every now and then I get incredible people like Matt that just reach out. They're in our space. They want to be able to talk and they want to be able to storytell to the audience that we have here where we're people that are interested in customer experience, customer success, customer support, customer focused business leaders. And Matt, I was pumped man that you reached out because you guys are building an incredible company. You're targeting a space that from our last couple of chats, man, you've heard me salivating about.

even just the opportunities that you guys are about to go embark upon. why don't you, before we jump into the pillars, before we jump into the fun stuff, take a minute or two to set the stage, Matt. Give the Seek Station a sense for who we are and give a sense for some of the stepping stones. How did you get into this type of work and how did you find yourself in a position of helping to build Jamdev as a chief customer officer?

speaker-1 (01:46.252)

Yeah, I think there, when you look at your own career, I feel like there are all these like stepping stones where you can get into the weeds on it. And the more I reflect on it, I go back to like, I think my first job is really what set everything for me and the way I work and how I ended up here. Coming out of college, you know, went to University of Washington back in 2012, graduated. And at the time there wasn't like a huge startup scene here. If you were someone who was like considered, you know,

type A who wanted to solve problems, who was moving fast. was like, you could go into banking or consulting. And so I was going through these interviews on the consulting side, because I liked how businesses were built. And I was doing all of these consulting interviews and I had friends who were like, hey, man, did this last year. I'm, know, consultant number 100 on this ERP implementation. Sounded awful. And then I had a small regional firm called rebel consulting here and see, I was like, we're going to be honest with you, man.

never hired an undergrad. We don't really have a path here. But if you join, you're going to go ride along with maybe one or two other people on these new accounts and just figure stuff out. And you'll learn a lot along the way. And for me, that was kind of the magic words of like, no path. Figure it out. That really hit. And so that's immediately what I did. And it was such a

I'm go to the subway.

speaker-1 (03:11.896)

different type of experience that I could tell you about, but it was me and one other consultant, maybe two other consultants going into new accounts and thinking of not only like, do you like deliver work for companies like Premier, Blue Cross, Nordstrom, PayPal, like some of

Big, companies, tons of things going on, lots of moving parts, yeah.

Yeah, so it's like, how do you do the job really well and deliver the project you're there for? But then how are you problem seeking? How do you just build relationships and understand the business and figure out like, how do we grow as a consulting firm with this client? And so it was just this really interesting experience that again, no playbook, but learning from the people I was with on like, how do you stay curious? How do you understand all the moving pieces of the business? And then ultimately, like, how does that translate to what you execute? So it's formative experience.

You know what I say all the time, like when we have guests that have had, say, I literally say the blessing or the fortune of doing consulting work before whatever they get into, there's something that a lot of our friends who have been career men and women who never had the luxury or the opportunity of working at a bunch of different organizations, meaning, and nothing's wrong with this, don't get me wrong, we both have awesome friends that are incredible folks and incredible contributors and they are, know, some of them.

rise to leading their companies, but consulting and having the ability to bounce across a bunch of different companies, a bunch of different teams, a bunch of different tech stacks. And then as I got older and a little bit wiser, a little more gray in my beard, Matt, you start to see different executive leadership team styles, preferences, appetites, prioritization paths. Dude, I call it now at this stage of the game. I think it's a fucking superpower. Like I think that like

speaker-0 (04:56.472)

people that are able to bounce through all these things. Number one, it becomes just like any other exercise where like get a little bit faster at doing auditing, investigation, identification, road mapping, for example. get like, you have to, you have to get really good and quick at being able to very quickly learn all these different caveats. But then the other thing too is over time, you start to see the trends, you start to see the themes, you start to smell things that before you even get deep enough into an audit or into.

into some type of an SOW, you start to see these things that you already start to know are going to become top priorities in different areas of business. And I think like, I don't know, just, love that that's kind of where you got started because I just think that is a game changer. And I think that a lot of our friends that have never had that opportunity and then maybe they have salty opinions about consultants, right? What the fuck do these people do? They're so expensive and this and that, but it really is an incredible experience to be able to do that. And then I do think that for the, people like us,

especially customer focused business leaders, you start to see a bunch of different customer journeys. You see a bunch of different voice of customer reports, whether they're sound or not. You just get to see a bunch of voice of employee reports, whether they're sound or not. Then it becomes a superpower. I don't know how to say it. It becomes way easier to walk into any business downstream and start to just light things up. And regardless, depending on what the executive appetite is or what the mandates are. But I think that's such a great way for...

like up in commerce, if they ever have an opportunity or if they're trying to figure out what the hell they want to do, it's just such a good way to learn, such a good way to learn and to experience all the different things that are happening in different businesses.

Yeah, you if you would have talked to me five years ago, I probably would have referred myself as a reformed consultant. I had this kind of like less loving opinion of like of the industry of just like having removed myself from it and like, hey, you know, how do I feel about that experience? And the more time that's passed and the more work that I've done, the more I realized like the things that I think I'm good at are really a lot of what I learned, especially from the people I've worked with. It might have been a unique experience, but like first week at I'll give you an example.

speaker-1 (07:01.486)

We were at Primera, there was two of us, and my manager was like every single time before we go into a meeting, we do the same thing. He'd be like, no field do. What do you want people to know? How do want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Like, who's going to be in this meeting? Let's actually plan this. And he forced this exercise every single time. And it became this habit of now, like, as I was going into meetings, I had like a really, really good understanding of like, what are outcomes we're driving and who, and who are the, what are people coming into this meeting from different teams and how do they feel and what are their goals?

And when you start there and build that as habit to your point of getting into customer facing roles, now you start to like connect different parts of the puzzle much more and how you.

100 % man, %

So yeah, so from there, spent about seven years in consulting and loved the problem solving nature of it, but wanted to get closer to like building things. And so found my way to startups. I thought the only way to do this kind of role where you're wearing all the hats, like had to be the first one in the door. So I've been first hire a couple of times over and I would say taking some lumps in that process.

Brave man, brave man. For the men and women that are the first hires, man. Woo, that's hard. It's tough.

speaker-1 (08:18.414)

I keep coming back, it's the really challenging environment. Some days are good, some days are hard. You learn to get pretty even keel about the good and the bad. Soak up so much and learn so much and the impact you can have on the trajectory of the company is so rewarding. So been doing that for a while, led me to Jam and ended up completing everything pre, post-sale.

Everything related to customers is my focus.

I love it brother. That's so awesome. Matt, let's jump into the first pillar team. Talk about the team that you and Danny and the jam team are building. Give us a sense for number one, give us the high level for what Jam is doing and what y'all are out there in the world solving. And maybe a sense for some of like typical customer use cases. And I'd love for you to get, jump right into that first pillar team. And how have you guys started to think about how to put the different players on the pitch? have you started to think about?

creating different areas of ownership and responsibility and accountability across the team. then, man, from our last couple of chats, guys are super cool customers. You guys are picking up steam. like, stuff's only gonna go faster, brother. So like, I'd love to kind of just hear sort of how you guys are thinking about the team and spend a couple of minutes kind of giving us a sense for sort of what the folks on the Jam Crew look like today.

Yeah, absolutely. So Jam's been around for almost five years now. The team has put incredible craft into the product and really build what I think is the right way. They started with a very, very engineering and product focused team. If you look today, of the almost 20 people are here, a large majority sits on the product side. And they've spent five years building this product and listening to users and kind of building this for a fan base. 200,000 people use Jam today.

speaker-1 (10:03.672)

Jam essentially is the easiest way to work together. Thank you. Yeah. Again, credit goes to the team and to not me, but 200,000 users, everyone from, know, PMs to QA to design to engineers to customer success and support, anyone who may encounter a bug in your software and needs a way to communicate that to their engineers in a way that they can immediately solve. And so Jam has like spent a ton of time and team

That's awesome, by the way.

speaker-1 (10:34.533)

on the craft of how you do that simply. There's so much context that has to share, be shared and switch hands and different people have different levels of that context. And so you have to build a really simple product experience to remove a lot of that back and forth. So that's what we've been up to. I would say in terms of the team, it has really been aligned around that product first and really thinking of everyone as kind of a steward of the customer experience.

And it's only recently that we've started to build more on the go-to-market side, what you traditionally call go-to-market, to figure out how we tell that story more broadly and how we bring more customers in with more focus on kind of going up market as well. So yeah, the team has done some incredible work to build a product that just works. And now we're kind of expanding the way that we serve it.

I love it. Matt, what? Before we get into the meat and the potatoes of not just what the jam tool and solutions do, but what were people doing before jam? Give the reminder, give our listeners a sense for what were some of the ways that companies would think about bug reporting? What were some of the ways, what were some of the tools that jam has ultimately...

disrupting and trying to revolutionize like what were people doing before with this stuff give us like a sense for sort of what was the old way and then what are we starting to build towards the new way

Yeah, absolutely. if you were anyone in a company who tested a product or found a bug, you may just take a screenshot and send it to an engineer or someone. And you may have just said, this button doesn't work or something weird is happening on my screen. And what followed was probably a long back and forth of like, OK, tell me more. Are you on web? Are you on mobile? Are you in a Chromium-based browser?

speaker-1 (12:26.768)

are you logged into anything else? What steps did you take? Like you'd have this conversation to pass along enough context that someone could reproduce the air with the exact condition. That's how you ultimately solve the issues. You have to have that, that environment set up in the exact way. And so it was very manual. It's like hand to hand combat in that way. You are a customer. You, you may get a similar request, right? If you, if you come into support and say, Hey, like something's going on here, this isn't working.

Got it. Yep.

speaker-1 (12:56.108)

you may be asked for all of these things that you may need to go do. They may even ask you, like, hey, can you right click on your browser and inspect the tab? Show me all this essentially like coded stuff that you don't need do. And so there's all this work that goes into just solving the problem, even though you were the one experiencing it. And so that's what teams still do a lot of today is this very manual piece by piece context gathering so that engineers can move fast.

Yeah.

speaker-1 (13:25.292)

Yeah, hopefully solve that in little bit better way.

No, that's super. It makes me think about like some of the some of the startups in New York City that I was a part of building. Honestly, part of why I would often. Have minimally a few of the senior developers as some of my best friends is as I was building customer facing teams and doing all of the CX stuff and the customer success and the support stuff. I used to love it, man, when I get my friends to be like we would do bug reporting, we were doing it shittily because.

We didn't have like a jam solution yet or anything about it. We were doing exactly like you said, manual stuff. And then as the team would grow, then you'd have to like think about how to build in processor. And all right, like now there's 25 of us. So y'all are going to find 10 bugs a day probably. like, here's a playbook for us to like get back. And then you'd have to work with your, your, your, engineering and development, your technology leadership, because that's theoretically 250 other things that somebody's got to do. But I remember like some of my favorite experiences.

H Bloom, One Fine Stay, Home Team. Home Team was awesome because that was a weird one. We were building in a healthcare space. You know healthcare, you consulted in it. We were building a healthcare space. like, I would literally just have some of it, but I'd become friends with our senior leadership because I'd be like, who can you just send in here and have sit on the front line with us? And so we would do these days where, and this is frankly about like all those years ago, this is years and years ago, but like, this is when I started thinking about like, okay, voice and customer is one thing. Getting really good at understanding the pulse, the heartbeat, the drum beat.

of what's going on with customers, they love it, whether they hate it, the good stuff, the bad stuff. But having my product friends come in and see those clicks, those scrolls, those 27 tabs open, which we're all getting better at now, but back in the day, we'd have 27 tabs just to run. And then what was always interesting to me is to have what you just said, some of my technical friends talking about...

speaker-0 (15:13.24)

their observations on the click, on the scroll, on the why, on the, asking a question from a different, a different technical prowess or point of view without, when they asked in a certain way, we'd be like, wait a minute, hold on. You're asking like this. So we already know how the customers, we already know why. And so like, that was kind of the beginning of where I started to see, wait a minute, like voice customer reporting and voice of customer, just general socialization within a business is fucking critical. But then this is what I started to think about, but wait a minute, if you don't have VOC connected to VOB or VOE, voice of builder.

or voice of engineer, you miss the opportunity to do translation, normalization. Because remember, like what I always thought by passing is like, people talk about silos all the time in organizations. True, they happen all the time, they form naturally, they're probably gonna be here forever. Even if you have an executive team that's good at blowing them up or, frankly, it's easier to build electrical and plumbing to them, right? Just connect them that way, make sure that somebody, but like.

One of the biggest things that I always found fascinating about what we're talking about is there's a different language that's talked when you start to think about some of these technical situations, bugs, reporting. What you just talked about with the minutiae, the granularities of like what a non-technical person might even think something is versus the person that knows how it was built, how it coded, how it was engineered. Plus they also know the product roadmap. So they kind of already know, okay, look, I know that you guys hate us today because of the 250 bugs, we feel like this is half of them, but like...

We're already a quarter into having this solved by our next spread. So like, I just find for our listeners, just think this is why there's still so much opportunity around customer focused business leaders finding out their own way and style. They don't be making friends with the leaders of your technology side, like translating that voice of customer to voice of builder to almost like, again, translate or reset priorities based on when those two camps.

agree and align upon things that they already know are going to push the needle or make the biggest impact whether it's your sales or your customer experience or your play experience. I love that. It's super cool.

speaker-1 (17:14.702)

Yeah, one of the things that stands out to me that it's kind of hard to want to buy simply, but was talking to a head of support that we work with about a week ago. And he was like, the number one thing that I hate is to send a bug report to our engineers and have it immediately kicked back. We're like, not enough information. The reason why is not because the bug report got kicked back. It's because it shows that I didn't put the context or the care into it.

And now it's reflecting this engineer had to take themselves out of building something and now they're probably frustrated. And it's like this credibility thing. Yeah. And so there's this, if nothing that happens over time, there's this scar tissue that builds between teams. And like all of a sudden engineers might look at tickets first to deflect them. Like with that lens more so than like there's a real issue here. And it gets even trickier. Then you add like this came from a customer who has

less context than any of us and now we're kind of translating. So I think, you know, one of the fun things about what we're building at Jam is not just that it solves customer issues, but like the employees that work on it can just be happier humans because they don't have to get into this really weird conversation and translation that frankly isn't natural to them. So yeah.

Absolutely. You and I talked about our last couple chats, man. That in and of itself is a major catalyst and a major ingredient for you gotta have, you have to have incredible employee experience to build world-class customer experience. So like what you said to me the other day about just like, dude, like as you get into bigger companies, bigger teams, bigger tick-a-thong experience, this stuff makes a big damn difference. And not just on the EX side, but brass tacks too, dollars and cents, right? If your team is spending the wrong time,

teeing those tickets up just to have them deflect. There's opportunity cost here around like, and then it's the consternation piece of me and you're talking about just the other day where like, it's where employees start to get the seeds of consternation and maybe not being thrilled. And then eventually customers do feel that, right? Cause if this stuff doesn't get fixed that needs to get fixed or it needs to get prioritized, ultimately customers start to feel that. And then, then, then you have a larger problem on your end with the business.

speaker-1 (19:22.158)

Yeah, I'm sure all of your listeners who are in customer facing roles can feel this. It'd be in a scenario where you get something from a customer that may be upset about something and they're like, I need you to fix this. And your first thought is like, cool, we got to jump right on this. I'm going to like set the context. Like, yes, we're evaluating and set expectations for like when we're coming back to you. Like I'm going to do all the things I've been trained to do of how we help this customer like feel heard and then ultimately solve it. You send a ticket through it.

maybe in the backlog for a few days, engineer comes back and says like, I actually need to answer these three other questions first. So then you're going back to the customer, you're like, hey, you those expectations I said, I don't enough information from you to start yet. That feeling of walking into that meeting with a customer, I'm sure most of us know of like, okay, how do I do this? How do I communicate this in a way that like gets us on the right path, but also I know they're gonna be upset and like.

Yes.

Yeah, right, right.

speaker-1 (20:19.756)

rightly so, right? we kind of missed the mark here. So that feeling of kind of being in the middle, I think is one that most customer facing teams can feel. it is part of that, like work charts are just hard to navigate.

Yeah, it's so true. And again, depending on every business's culture, leadership, executive strategic prioritization strategy around how they're going to actually tee up, whether it's OKRs or whether it's their whatever, that's why it's hard. It's why it's really. And then I also argue to younger companies, right? We've had a CXC, we work with a ton of, know, venture backed startup companies. Younger companies are inexperienced founders in leadership teams.

Sometimes it can be even worse because like, especially on the CS and the CS side, it's like, yo, we know exactly what the top three things are that if y'all could just blow some shit up on the product roadmap today, because we're already telling you that those 80 % of those, nobody cares about them on the revenue paying side here. like maybe they're technically important for whatever X, Y, Z reason downstream or to scale or to be able.

But like that is frustrating because when you're on the customer face inside and you're dealing with tickets every day, customer calls every day, customer you see very quickly. then, you know, with your pre-work jam, like a lot of the companies we consult with, I mean, and you can hear what the top three CTAs or the top three strategic priorities are in the first couple intro meetings when you start digging in with the guys and the gals who are banging out customer interactions every day. And sometimes they're spot on.

Sometimes they're almost right, but there's missing information or there's missing complexity on the technical side or maybe even a financial side. But like, it's such an interesting thing and it really is a big ingredient for what makes a business hockey stick growth and to blow up or kind of struggle to not just find new customers, but to retain, right? Keep the ones that they do put in the hop. So it's super, super interesting. Matt, talk about tools, man.

speaker-0 (22:27.15)

You can answer this few different ways. I'd love for you to talk more about Jam as a tool, but how have you and the Jam team had to kind of build out your tech stack over last five years? What were some of the tools or what were some of the big components of your tech stack that allowed you guys to kind of grow into the position you are today? And that allowed you to really kind of be able to manage all of the different things that you guys are dealing with on the customer front every day.

Yeah, I think we have the benefit again of being a small company, right? There are 20 of us. And so the decisions we make are never permanent, right? You can shift things quickly in a way that even five, 10 years ago would have been really, really hard to do. I think as we implement tools, they're kind of like two competing motions that are kind of always in my mind. They're like, we have to create systems and tools live within those systems, but we need to create systems for like,

how we work together. The example you just gave on how do we get feedback across the organization, both in feature requests and what we're hearing on calls and bug reporting, all of these things. How do we get the customer team and our product team to work closely together? We need a system in place, not necessarily just one tool. And so I would say we start really with like,

how are we essentially mapping it out of like, what is the best case scenario? What is the outcome we're trying to get to? Which is like a really informed product team on what we're hearing on the front lines. And then we start thinking about all of the endpoints of where we're getting that information. So we can say, okay, we need ways to capture, we need ways to share and we need ways to reflect. And some of that's tooling, some of that's process. But I think even for a small company, we have to have kind of like that system layer.

On the customer facing side, some of the tools that live within that are just like, you know, software recording tools like Grain, where we're recording every call. From there, we're thinking, okay, we need a way for all of this to get to our product team. So how do those calls immediately get kind of contextualized and then shared with engineering in a way that they can use? Some of that is just like, hey, manual, like, hey, I have this clip. Let me grab it right now. I'm going to share it in the Slack channel that everyone's paying attention to.

speaker-1 (24:45.526)

Others just kind of like ongoing reports that come straight out of Grain and are translated to say, hey, we did 10 calls this week. Here are the like boom, boom, boom, like the five top topics with like links to where those calls are. Right. So we're thinking of it like as a system in that respect. But then we have our foundational tools like HubSpot, like Intercom, right? Some of these things that we use kind of holistically in the customer experience, which we can talk about. But I do think

even at this stage, we have to think about the system and what we're trying to achieve with it before we start experimenting with all these other new and unique tools that may fit within the system and the outcome we're trying to get to.

Dude, I could not agree anymore with what you said. You know, you've had to hear me say this a couple of times in our last couple of conversations leading up to this recording, but, most companies struggle with their tech stack utilization period. Most of them do most company. I've been blown away by how many companies from a growth and a financial perspective are technically crushing it and growing like crazy. I'll give it, I'll give you a granular example. I remember when

I got to ACV auctions and had a customer experience here in Buffalo, New York. And ACV was an absolute rocket ship, man. When I got there, there was maybe 300 or 400 people by the time I left ACV. The company had gone public. We were pushing 2,000 employees. was a rocket ship. And I remember coming in, number one, coming back to Buffalo from New York City. So that was interesting because I had just had the opportunity of a life spending a decade in

the Gotham, right? With some of the best and the smartest and the brightest and right. And got to bounce around on all these different things and work with all these different leadership teams and learn a bunch about the venture side of the world and come back to Buffalo. And I'm not hating on my hometown, but Buffalo, New York and Buffalo also, it only, only in the last 10 years have we had our first tech Renaissance or our first, you know, technology and startup boom Renaissance. And ACV was the winner. ACV was our

speaker-0 (26:54.67)

our loan unicorn and muffler. There's actually been a couple other really dynamite success since, but like, one of the first things that I, when I got into ACV, I'm looking at with a huge inside sales team. We already had 200 inside salespeople when I got there. And I was salivating as a CX person, cause I was like, wait, hold on. We have 200 inside salespeople that are making X number of dials and calls a day. And then we had, because it was an automotive auction, there's a lot of complexity to use the automotive auctions. You got titles, you got payments, you got transportation.

The operations can be, so we had another 150 inside ops associates. So I start digging in, like I'm doing our initial investigation. I first got into the company. I'm like, why are we doing any type of sentiment analysis reports on all of these? Because it was literally like 400 people in Buffalo, 250 sales, 150 ops banging out whatever their daily activity, whatever their customer interaction call. And then we had everything go under the sales force.

But we weren't doing like sentiment analysis. weren't doing daily, weekly, monthly word clouding. We were word smithing where you could theoretically take 400 people's weekly or we weren't doing dailies because now it's a little bit different. Some of the tools we have now, you can bang that shit out. You got tools like Graham that you can literally just T and F for you. Six, seven years ago, we were still kind of, I still had to sit in conference rooms with some of my data science buddies, kind of extrapolating and then normalizing to then be able to kind of report, you know, but like, like that alone.

was amazing where all of this hypothetical stuff or people would talk about customer stuff around, well, customers really want this with us or they love this about it. That what you're talking about, like being able to get into sentiment analysis and being able to take brass tacks on timeline activities, that's the voice of the customer. Like if you're starting to aggregate the primary buckets of what people are talking about, so then you've got, they typically talk about these three things on the product side, these three things on the sales side, these three things that.

That's a game changer. And then that becomes where you're starting to follow more of the math and you're following more of the the majority, not the minority or the one-offs that can oftentimes for a lot of companies, especially growing companies, they'll go chase one-offs instead of focusing on the common case scenarios that customers or users are bringing back to you. So I just, love, love, I love like how important that part can be in a lot of companies still don't do it. And we got all these tools like there's tools like Grain and Gong that do it for us.

speaker-1 (29:21.036)

Yeah, even taking that example further, if we start with the prompt, like how do we help our engineers and product leaders understand what's happening for our customers quickly? We can start to say like under that prompt, like, okay, let's actually like map this out. We've got people who download Jam and use it for free. get, what do we get from that? We've got, you know, dashboards of data on like how they're using the product. We've got

uninstall reports where we're getting qualitative feedback as to why someone uninstalls. We've got calls that my team's hosting. We've got recordings from that. We've got email traffic. We've got chat traffic in our column. And then we've got like a broader kind of just like what's happening in the industry. And we need to find a way like all of those endpoints, we have to design paths and a system where that can be served to our team to kind of like have that information diet every day.

And so it's not perfect yet, but I think that's, we think about like, how does customer, how does the customer experience team, how does our team be great internal partners? I think that's where I'm most focused is like, what is the system by which you all stay really, really in touch with what our customers want and need, and then we can make great decisions off of that. So totally agree. I used to be that consultant who would show up in a conference room and be like, okay, what is this report going to look like? How often can we serve it?

Literally.

Being around this report, you know

speaker-0 (30:50.538)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's funny too because...

traditional or historically sales leaders, they're good at doing the, number one, they're on the floor every day, especially in traditional world, like they're on the floor every day, they're hearing it, they're hearing it on the floor. And then they're doing their one-on-ones, they're doing their directly weeklies, they're hearing the high level, so then they get really, really good. And then obviously most modern sales revenue leaders are obviously good at following the data, so the story is backed by facts and truth. like, I remember like,

disrupting what the what the at the time some of the primary messaging was that was coming from our senior sales leadership around what we're going to focus on and what people love about us and what what people don't mind about. And then when we started to actually extrapolate this stuff and then be able to show some of this reporting based on all of this to your point, all of these different signals from the customer, it was interesting the differences like there. So it's like, but Matt, I'm going to push this into the third pillar process because

You just basically said like, Ader, this is one of the things that every company's got to really think about. This is what we're doing here at Jam. This is what being able to socialize or democratize the information so everybody in the business knows exactly what the hell's going on. How does process play into that? I love for it to jump into the third pillar process because I think you were about to go there anyway, like tech is one part of it. Having the data, having the technology, having the information signals, having things connected and integrated to be able to have all this stuff in a centralized view is one thing.

How has process played into this game for you and the team at Jam? Like, you spent a couple minutes kind of talking or answer this is Matt, like over your career, how have you kind of had to think about wrangling process? Is there been ways that you've always kind of had your teams building a living playbook? Is there ways that you manage FAQs and what I always like to joke the team, tribal knowledge? How the hell do you think about centralizing tribal knowledge to that storytelling, those expectations, and then that organizational alignment because

speaker-0 (32:52.718)

becomes easy through process. I kind of understand how you've thought about process over the years.

Yeah. Yeah. It honestly starts earliest consulting days. I didn't know at the time, but my team would have me do service design blueprints and learn how to actually map what was happening and what different processes were in place, who was seeing what we had to do to support the experience, what tools were there. So you kind of had to look at it holistically. And I think the danger of not having team members learn that exercise of like, we want to solve this problem.

and here are the actors and it here are the processes that they follow and the tools that support it. Like if you don't look at those holistically, you start to get these kind of wonky things in the results. So if you only look at process, there's gonna be a lot of work about work because like all you're thinking about is processes of how people do things and you may become over-indexed in that way. If you only think about tools, you may be too deep into just like frankly, like science projects and experimentation of like, look at what I did, this is great.

Yeah, right.

And so like, you really can't look at any of these pillars unless you're looking at them all together of like, how does, what's the outcome we're trying to drive and like what processes enable that and what tools do we need underneath of it? For us in process, think something you touched on or just hitting on, just like living, breathing documents. So this is something that I spent a lot of time on as a for sales hires. Like there is no playbook.

speaker-1 (34:25.922)

playbook is write it down and then correct it every single time. It's going to be ugly and you probably won't want to show it to your friends. If it's pretty enough that you feel confident showing off, it's probably not a living document. It has to really be lived in, in a way. And I think, again, we're a 20 person team, so it looks a little different at this stage, but I think that's very much true for how we're building our customer-facing team as well as like weird.

Yes, yes.

speaker-1 (34:54.636)

live document everything we're doing and learning and then refining on a daily basis. But when you start introducing a whole bunch of other stakeholders and different teams, that just becomes so much more important because you have to consider their roles and how that aligns with their goals and what's feasible for them to do and how often and when and set those kind of internal expectations so that everyone can work together. So yeah, happy to talk more about process, but I think.

No, no, that's literally perfect, man. There's two things I want to hit on. When you talked about the mapping, service mapping, we do a ton of customer journey mapping at CXE. And I cannot tell you how many executives that became clients that when I started to say after like our audits and our assessments, I started to like basically call out, hey, look.

We don't have a blueprint. don't have a customer journey. Either you don't have a customer journey map, you don't have a user journey map, you don't have a service blueprint, or in the audit and the assessment with the stakeholder group, oftentimes extended leadership team members who are the guys who guys that literally know this shit better than anybody. They're living it, breathing it, and dealing with it every day and day. And then some of them are good at reporting up to their executive leadership team. Some of them are fucking terrible at it. That's just the reality of every business. But one of the things that I will argue with anybody, mean,

Like, I can't tell you how many clients we've worked with that were working with their SVPs, students, even their C-level executives if it's the executive sponsor on a mission. And to your point, you said this in a certain way and I want to jump back on it, like, bringing a team of people through a full customer journey. I'm talking, I'll do this real fast, but like, how does a customer become aware about a product? How does a customer consider our product? How do we convert after we've created awareness and consideration? How do we sell that shit? How do we convert?

Then once we convert, now the game for Matt and Adrian starts. How the hell do we deal with, how do we onboard them? How do we think about customer success? Then we can get to the world of retention loyalty. Now, I just laid out six or seven variables, imagine that across the journey. Cannot tell you how many of our clients that we've worked with that initially rolled their eyes or said, I want to de-prioritize customer journey mapping in this SOW. But then when we bring their extended leadership team members into that session or into those sessions, because some of this time, some of these businesses have really come.

speaker-0 (37:14.23)

Some of these businesses, not only do they not realize they have multiple user journeys or customer, meaning like a healthcare company, you might have patient journey, you might have provider journey, then you might have insurance journey. So that's just like one example. Certain platforms, they might have mechanical user journeys, meaning the guys and the gals that are out in the field like,

Then they have OEM journeys. Like then they have the air conditioning and the elevator companies. Then they've got property management groups. So I'm just giving a couple of examples here, like most companies don't have a super duper easy, let's bang out a customer journey map in an hour type of thing. That's number one. Number two, one of the most valuable parts, because we've done hundreds of journey maps. For me, Matt, over the last 20 years, I've probably done hundreds of journey maps with like hundred different, easily with a hundred different businesses.

The arguments, the disagreements, and then the, I didn't know that, that happens with extended leadership team groups supported by their executive sponsors is the most valuable part of the exercise. And then this is where consulting land and you're gonna, this is to make you laugh, but like, you can literally, me and my team can literally, oh, wait, is this a disagreement? No one on this table here, we're just gonna back off and let you guys talk this one out. Because then that's where then you start to see all the,

minutia of across awareness, consideration, conversion, onboarding, customer success, is the data that we need? What are the signals that we need? What are the mediums that we need? What technology is being applied to these things? Who's the internal owner? What are the KPIs and the metrics and the goals that today? This shit can get complex. So my point is I love that you're, because like it is an exercise that's can create value, a lot of our, a lot of like at CCC, a lot of our actual partner implementation work.

We do journey maps first for a reason. It shows you left lane and center lane, right lane. And then it shows you oftentimes across marketing, sales, customer success, support, onboarding, operations, et cetera. It literally shows you which variables need to get collected and populated and then measured and managed over time. So it's like, you know what I mean? But it's hard. And for people that have never done it, it's like,

speaker-0 (39:35.778)

They don't, but it's such a great way to be able to understand all the, all the, all the caveats of the business.

Yeah, there's one other thing that I've heard a lot of recently, I spent a lot of time with support leaders and teams and the world of AI and how it's changing that particular group is, everyone knows at this point is pretty fundamental. And one of the trends that I've seen in conversation is people saying, support team members need to grow and think in new system thinking. They need to change their approach to their role in their organization and think as system thinkers.

to go like build proactive customer experience. And I think that idea of system thinking, like it's essentially what we're talking about here in a way of like people in processing tools. I think part of employee experience at this point, especially in the world of customer teams is to teach that skillset of like, we are gonna help grow people who are really good business builders if we teach them how to consider how all of these pieces that are moving and somewhat independent.

come together and how whenever you're starting a new project or something new that you want to pitch the team on or go execute, you have to have that mindset of those three different pillars to build something that scales. And so I would say that's like not to take it down to too much the IC level, but I think that's a real opportunity for customer leaders right now is how do you teach that at the team level and build that skill sets of people who are building scalable

seamless, better experiences with those factors considered.

speaker-0 (41:10.478)

I totally agree, And then especially with what's going to happen with Little Buddy AI over the next thousand days. It's already changed the world. You're crazy if you don't already see it, but the next thousand days will be interesting, And then you know what? People like you and Danny and all the jam folks and people like us that are already all about it accepted that, learning about it daily, understanding the intricacies of how to make better models that equal better outputs.

It's those folks that you just said, you're gonna need leaders like that in a future business that have that ability and have that hardware to be able to do all the things that are about to come with how AI is gonna change the game. Matt, let's jump into the fourth and final pillar of feedback. How do you guys think about kind of like managing your customer and your employee feedback at Jam? Spend like a minute or two kind of just talking about the ways that you guys, you hit it a little bit earlier, but what are some of the big things that you care about the most as a CCO at Jam in terms of how you're...

Gathering that information, understanding it, synthesizing it, and then most importantly taking action upon it. So just spend a couple minutes talking about customer and employee feedback.

Yeah, I'll start with myself personally, like how I'm thinking about it. I think there's this job is if you're doing it well, you have like a healthy level of paranoia at all times about how your team's doing and how your customers are doing. And I think the only way to like bring that paranoia to something good is you're constantly checking in with your team. You're constantly pushing on things that you feel like this may be about assumption or like

I don't think this is going as well as it could. And it requires it to be proactive of like, hey, notice this. Are you feeling it too? Are you seeing it? But this didn't feel like it checked out to me. Like, do you think we're?

speaker-0 (42:58.838)

Especially with your A players, right? Especially with your A players.

Yeah. And I don't think it takes much in most cases if you kind of create that role for yourself where people know you're going to check in in that way and are constantly like, hey, I know we just built this system. We just rolled out this new process. Is it working though? Yeah. Let's not be too committed to the thing we just did. We did work. But is this working for us? And constantly kind of pushing to say, is

the things we're building only work if it works for the team. And like, we have to be willing to like deal with some unfortunate things time to time that feel like wasted work or changes if it means the team feels better about where we're headed. I would say like healthy levels of paranoia at individual levels is kind of how I think about it for the team and then for customers as well. I my role, would say when I started Jam, I think it's really easy to meet a customer and be like,

You really want things to be perfect. Let's talk about the opportunity. And I've gotten more into the role here in past jobs as well. I find the way I talk about it with customer shifting to really, really trying to be like, I don't think this is going well for you here or there. Am I feeling that wrong? Are we missing the mark here? And just really running to the fire faster. Because you find the things that you're probably not going to get feedback on unless you really pull it out of people.

Thousand percent. Thousand percent.

speaker-1 (44:27.852)

Yeah, maybe it's just like a comfort level that over time you get better as you build like trust and relationship.

I think it's that, I think it's that. I think it's as we get deeper in our career, absolutely. And then I think it's one of those spidey sense plus at that's where it comes together. I know exactly what you're talking. There's things that now I might have just a, I might not even have any facts or figures on it. I might, I might, somebody might say something away, a client might say, and I might be like, hold on, can we stop for a second? Can we go back to what you just said? Do you fucking hate that? Is there something that you do not like about that product?

And then obviously as I've gotten deeper into my career and this stuff and like, and then just learning like it from this incredible community of folks like you and all the, there's something interesting about jumping on something that somebody might not tee up. And then if you do that, sometimes you might be wrong. Sometimes they might go, no, you're a dancing bear. didn't say that at all, but sometimes they go, you know, actually, yeah, that part, you know, I wasn't going to bring it up because like we're a tech company too. So we know that that might be a big ass, but yeah, that thing sucks. Like you brought it up. that was.

But like getting to that is so much better than dicking around with three more QBRs where they're not saying the thing to find out on the fourth QBR, you ain't renewing with us? What the? You guys, what the? So like, you're right. It's like that paranoia, but then almost pushing and prompting and pulling, like pushing, prompting, pulling it. Cause you're either going to get a, no, Matt, no, either, no, it's not that big of a deal. Relax. Okay, good. That's my paranoia. Fine. I'm going to shut up. But.

in the two or the three out of 10 times where they go, actually, you brought it up. Yeah, let's talk about it. And then it's this whole other bigger thing that you you just expedited or you just increase the velocity to get to potential resolutions, turn it turn around and remediation. And that's a game changer. And people that is like modern customer experience and customer success where you're it's the partnership thing. It's it's the play in the game. Like, you know, we get better as a business if you are thrilled with what we do for you, because then we can go find more people like you and that.

speaker-0 (46:28.266)

It's the Army promoter stuff, but I love that.

Yeah, I've said this a lot recently in customer calls and not a lot, but a handful of times where like, I can't quite put my finger on it, but does this feel like this is going the way that we set it out to do it?

You say that well, if I was on a call and I was with your customers, you say it so gently and delicately that you would just want to say you'd want to, actually Matt, yeah.

Yeah, so I think like, if you're honest in that way, like it shows a certain way that you're like, you're actually there to listen. think then that the second step of that, like it loses its impact if like the thing that comes out, you don't go address, right? yeah. Or if we get to it now, here's when we are. But yeah, I would say that those are just like the ways of getting feedback. And then as we talked about a little bit before, think.

We have to constantly look at what are the systems that are gathering feedback when we're not in the room and how do we make sure that the people who need to know have it served to them in the places that they work. And I think everything else kind of falls within that mandate. And you kind of check if whatever you're doing fits that description. If not, then we have to adjust.

speaker-0 (47:44.878)

I love it, man. Matt, this has been absolutely incredible, dude. There's so many more things that we could talk through, before I let you go, can people learn more? If people want to get in touch with you, Matt, or if people want to go check out Jam, they want to see what you guys are building, they want to learn more about what you're doing with your customers, they want to learn more about how Jam can literally be the game changer for their business, where can people find those things?

Yeah, jam.dev is a good place to start. You can also reach out to me, Matthew at jam.dev. Funny story, I was actually the second Matt at Jam in a company of 20 people. were too many of us. So I didn't get Matt.

Did they differentiate the maths where you just Matt are and the other Matt? How did they do the?

You know, it's been a recurring joke. Various versions of calling me Matt 2 or other Matt.

Other Matt? Matt 2? Come on!

speaker-1 (48:35.438)

It's actually, it's a lot of fun. It's self-deprecating. I encourage.

Who's bigger? Is there a big Matt and a little Matt?

You know, the other mats in Australia, so it's, I'm unsure.

A pack man America man. They can you guys gonna work on these the naming here? There's a lot of opportunities here.

That's the fun in it, right? It's like we'll be in a meeting, someone can come up with their own version of it. And it's kind of a fun thing for the team. But yeah, anyways, you reach out to me. And I always love to chat. think our focus right now, what I'm spending a lot of time on, is listening to other customer leaders who are thinking, well, all these new tools and ways of work, we're getting closer to our customers, but we're also getting closer to the product. And trying to figure out where my team plays a role.

speaker-1 (49:19.906)

We think Jam is a tool that kind of unlocks a lot of AI tools for customer teams. so spending a lot of time in that space, just listening and trying to understand how we can help.

I love it. I've said it a bunch of times in our last couple conversations. think what you guys build is an incredible tool. I think you guys are to be extremely successful. I think you're ahead and early of this game. My joke, I keep saying to you like next thousand days guys, better win everybody. you're not already, if you already haven't developed your plan and your game plan and your action plan and your education plan. So I don't care if you're, I'm a non-technical founder. I've got in the last 18 months, I've got five AI tools that are sitting on my open tabs every day.

for content creation, for prospecting and business development. Cause I'm a founder too, so I gotta do a lot of selling and conversations. I've got my, on the content front, we've got two or three really cool tools that I want to get into. It's made the podcasting and the content creation games. So like every one of us can find a handful of tools that you, it's just like anything else in life. You start using it, can do regular at bats, regular reps. A couple of weeks later, you're like, holy shit, I'm like,

good at using it, then you go to the next one. Then you go to the next one. some of the stuff that I've been building, like even myself, like just for fun building with Replet over the last year, like, if you would have told me like a few years ago that like I could, I would have been like, what? And then, so like, guys, we're in an interesting time. like, those of us who just fucking commit and start to self-educate, learn, invest, some of this stuff's gonna cost money, but take, you know, you gotta invest, right? gotta invest.

That's gonna be one of the ways that you can separate yourself from future business leaders for sure.

speaker-0 (51:03.854)

Maybe we will. Maybe we will. Maybe we will come back to this. But, Matt Rewrite, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show, my friend. Thank you so much for coming to the CX Chronicles podcast, sharing your story about Jam. can't wait to see what you guys do next. And I'm already looking forward to our next conversation, brother.

Thanks, Adrian, appreciate it.