“Do what your customer does” to build great products
Jordan Raynor sits down with Phil Corson, Senior Product Manager at 7shifts, to talk about the value of literally “doing what your customer does” in order to cultivate empathy, how to get deep work done in a collaborative office environment, and how Phil and his team are using software to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
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[00:00:04] JR: Hey, everybody! Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I’m Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional, their most masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every single week, I'm hosting a conversation with a Christian who is pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We’re talking about their path to mastery. We’re talking about their daily habits and routines and how their faith influences their work.
Today, I am thrilled to share this terrific conversation I recently had with Phil Corson, who’s a Senior Product Manager at 7shifts. 7shifts is a scheduling software for restaurant managers and their staff. It’s used by 350,000 restaurant employees in more than 10,000 restaurants in North America.
By the way, if you have no idea what a software product manager does, you're going to love this episode. It's one of my favorite disciplines. Basically, product managers are entrepreneurs within larger organizations who are CEOs essentially of a particular software product. I’ve worked with a lot of product managers or PMs as they’re typically called, and Phil is a masterful one. I've worked with Phil before. You’ll hear a little bit about that story in this episode. He’s just an impressive thinker and a really devout follower of Jesus Christ.
Phil and I recently sat down and talked about the value of literally doing what your customer does in order to cultivate empathy and how this leads Phil and his team at 7shifts to work part-time in restaurants to understand their customers. We talk about how to get deep work done in a really collaborative office environment. So how do you do really focused work when your coworkers or your boss are constantly interrupting you? We also talked about how Phil and his team are literally using software to be the hands and feet of Jesus.
You're going to love this conversation. So, without further ado, here is this episode with Phil Corson.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:02:13] JR: Hey, Phil Corson! Welcome from the frigid North Pole. That’s basically where you’re living now, right?
[00:02:18] PC: Yes, yes. Glad to be here.
[00:02:20] JR: Let’s give the audience a little bit of context on how we met, right? I was running Threshold 360 day-to-day as CEO. At the time, you were a Product Manager for GasBuddy. For those in our audience who haven’t used GasBuddy before, can you give the one-sentence description of GasBuddy, your former employer?
[00:02:37] PC: It’s fine cheap gas but now it's – You get free gas. They’re evolving.
[00:02:42] JR: You give free gas through the rewards program?
[00:02:44] PC: Through the rewards program, yeah.
[00:02:45] JR: It’s super interesting, yes. So, if you live in Florida, I know a lot of our listeners live in Florida, you know GasBuddy because that's how we find gas during hurricanes. It’s so wonderful.
You and I – I was trying to sell you when I was CEO of Threshold 360 on basically 360 experiences of gas stations, which is still a fascinating idea to me. You and I just had a bunch of different phone conversations, and I was super impressed with how well you did your job, with how well you treated me as a prospective vendor.
Phil knows a lot of product managers don't treat vendors that well. They don't give you clarity on where you stand in the sales process. It's a very frustrating process. But I flew up to Boston to be with you in person. We had a number of conversations about Threshold and GasBuddy.
Right before we met, I was literally sitting in the GasBuddy little coffee area like five minutes before our meeting. I pulled up your Twitter bio, and it said, “Jesus follower.” I was like, “Oh! I get it now. This guy cares about me as a human being because of his faith.” I loved it.
Since then, that was what? Almost, that was probably, a year and a half ago?
[00:03:49] PC: Yeah.
[00:03:50] JR: I've transitioned into a new role at Threshold as Executive Chairman. I focus on my writing. I focus on this podcast. You’ve transitioned to an entirely different company called 7shifts, which I’ve actually had my eye on for a while now. Let’s start here. What is 7shifts?
[00:04:04] PC: 7shifts is a restaurant scheduling software. It’s trying to help restaurants with their labor management. Labor cost is really, really high for them. A lot of it has to do with scheduling and optimizing their schedule for the demands of the business, weather events because we have lots of machine learning, lots of pieces to really just help them schedule.
We just got additional investment, and so now we’re looking to grow more into that employee lifecycle of hiring, training, retaining, and paying. We’re mastering scheduling and then we want to grow up to those other out to those other parts of employee lifecycle.
[00:04:36] JR: Yeah. You guys have raised, what, 20 million or so in capital?
[00:04:39] PC: About that, yeah.
[00:04:40] JR: Yeah. You guys have got 350,000 restaurant workers using the product, which is mind-boggling to me.
[00:04:46] PC: Yeah, it’s a lot. Yeah.
[00:04:47] JR: It’s a lot. That’s a lot. How does that work? The restaurant employee has this app on their phone, and they pick their schedule or confirm schedules based on what the manager is pushing to their device. How does that work?
[00:05:00] PC: It’s a lot of employer to employee communication in terms of creating a schedule, publishing a schedule, pushing a scheduled, and a lot of feedback from the employees based off of their availability, their time-off requests, swapping shifts with other employees, managers approving that. It’s a lot of like one way, but we are evolving the product to be much more two-way communication.
We do have a really robust messaging solution that allows people to chat with each other, chat with their managers. Make it a little bit more fun in their kind of day-to-day work.
[00:05:28] JR: Yeah, that’s interesting. It feels more like chat than an employer-employee relationship.
[00:05:33] PC: Exactly.
[00:05:34] JR: Let’s talk about your role. I've always been fascinated by the role of product managers. I think it’s one of the most fun jobs out there.
[00:05:40] PC: It is.
[00:05:40] JR: But for our audience who has no idea what a product manager does, can you explain the discipline?
[00:05:46] PC: At the highest absolute level, it’s building solutions to problems. It sounds silly and really everyone should be doing that. I wrote a blog about that, about being a problem solutionist. But really at its core, you're helping your teams that are tasked with executing your developers, designers, your marketers. You’re aligning them on what the customer needs and you’re bringing it to market in a meaningfully quick way. You're not waiting a year to bring it to your customer. You’re trying to get it to them really fast, really iterative. That whole process is really exciting. Like you said, I couldn’t see myself doing anything else.
[00:06:19] JR: Yes. I mean, your job is essentially to understand the customer's problems, right?
[00:06:23] PC: Yup.
[00:06:24] JR: By the way, interrupt me when I go off track here, right? But your job is to make sure you understand the customer's problems. Design kind of in collaboration with the customer what the ideal solution to that problem might look like. Then once the scope of that product is well-defined or that feature of an existing product whatever to lead a team of developers and designers to actually bring that product to market. Is that right?
[00:06:47] PC: Yeah. You nailed it, yeah.
[00:06:48] JR: All right. Give us an example of how this works, right? Maybe an example from GasBuddy, which I'm familiar with, or 7shifts, which I think our audience is now familiar with. Talk us through like a really practical example of a new feature or a new product that you brought to market and kind of what that process look like.
[00:07:03] PC: Like all great things, it starts with an idea. Whether that idea came from a customer or internally, we have a backlog of which is just really a big long list of things we could do. We have a backlog of things that we could be working on, and a lot of it comes and really great product managers have really good prioritization skills. They’re able to weed through the noise. They use data to inform the decision-making and they’re able to actually say, “This is the best opportunity right now,” and they start investigating that idea.
A lot of that comes with market research, talking to customers. Really trying to understand the problem before even thinking about the solution and say, “What is the customer looking for to solve here?” The next phase is really, “Okay. We’ve understood this problem. Now, what can we do for the customer?”
In some cases, you can't actually solve it with software. Software can’t solve everything. It can solve a lot of things but not everything. Sometimes, you go, “Okay. We can’t help with this problem.” It's a problem we know about and it’s good to have empathy for your customer to know that this problem exists. But in many cases, we can help with that problem.
So, then we start to go into a phase of discovery and ideating on what the solve could look like. That’s really where you’re kind of tag teaming with your designer to really think about, “Okay. I have a clear understanding of that problem and I have a clear understanding of how that user might interface with that solution.” You kind of brainstorm on what that might look like.
It’s really important to bring it to that customer in that phase because it's a lot cheaper to put up some wireframes and show them, and they say, “I don't want this,” or, “This isn’t what I want,” instead of actually developing it, bringing it to them, and then them saying, “Oh, I don't want this.” You really want to include the customer in that phase, and usually we try a prototype.
At all the companies I’ve work at, we kind of build like this VIP group or VIP buddies at GasBuddy. But we build this group of people that we trust to expose to kind of raw ideas to. Now, you want to come off polished to your customer base, obviously. But you also need to get that feedback, and so you get that trusted group of individuals, whether it's through your networker or through a system that your company has and you bounce these ideas off them to the point where you say, “Okay. Let’s build an MVP or a minimum viable product of this feature.”
Then you start working with your developers and figuring out how hard this might be. There’s a ton of layers that come into, “Can you build this thing from old technology?” to, “Can you build this thing and how fast can you build it in the market needs?” There’s all these variables to say, “This is the scope of what we’re going to build.” That’s also a really, really big skill set of PMs to be able to say, “This is what I wanted, this big vision of things.”
I definitely failed at that one out early like, “I want to build this grandiose feature.” But really, we can solve some of the customer pain by building this small piece. And then you just keep stacking.
[00:09:36] JR: Yes. By the way, for those of you listening that haven't figured this out on your own, although I think all of you have by now, because we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, a lot of current entrepreneurs. Probably, I don't know, I'd say 40 to 50% of guests on this show are entrepreneurs.
If you haven’t figured it out already, PMs are entrepreneurs. Within a startup, the product manager’s job most closely resembles, in my opinion, the job of the original founder of the venture, right? You are doing what the entrepreneur did at the start after the company's been up and running, you guys are developing new features and new product. But it’s the same process if you’re just starting a business and trying to find product market for it, right?
You go talk to prospective customers. You wireframe a solution before you write a line of code. You get feedback on it. It’s the exact same thing just done at scale in more mature organizations. Would you agree to that, Phil?
[00:10:27] PC: 100%. Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:29] JR: How did you get – Well, actually now, let me ask one follow-up question, because I think this is – It’s a selfish question but it’s interesting. You talked about how you often have a long list of feature ideas or feature requests that come from customers. Usually, those are articulated in the form of a solution, right? For 7shifts, that might be a customer saying, “I really wish that, I don’t know, I had the ability to have messages pop up in my employee’s text message app or instead of the 7shifts app.” I don’t know. That’s a ridiculous feature request, right? But that’s articulated as a solution, not a problem, right?
[00:11:04] PC: Yeah.
[00:11:05] JR: I think this is good for prospective entrepreneurs to think about. How do you reframe what people are asking for in a solution to try to get to the core of what the problem is?
[00:11:13] PC: Yeah, that’s a great question because that is a very dangerous space to be in. Where, as a PM you assume what the customer is asking for is actually what they need or want. I’ll give you a really good example. We have a lot of people, and the employer is asking for the visibility that – Like read receipts is what they're asking for. The visibility that an employee read the message that they sent.
Usually, there’s high-value menu changes or things that are very timely that they need to make sure people read. This is the very, very recent, I've been exploring that one right now, and really what it is is it’s not who’s read it. It's who hasn't read it, right? It’s almost like an anti-read receipt.
When you think about the solution, you can’t just ship this thing to market that says this person read it, because they don't care about that. What they actually care is who is the people who people who haven't read this and can we build them a solution that helps them get that message to them in a timely manner, right?
When you frame it that way and you think about and you try and undercut, like pull back the layers of what they're asking for and usually that’s through really good question asking with customers. A lot of times, I just use the word, ‘why.’ It’s a good fallback. It’s just like, “Well, why do you do that?”
[00:12:12] JR: The five whys, right?
[00:12:13] PC: Yeah, exactly. It’s a learning curve definitely for early PMs, because they’ll just take the customer at face value. I think that’s – In some cases, the customer does know the solution that they want and they just really need you to build it. But there are many cases where they don't quite have a grasp of the problem that they're facing, and you have to really uncover that as the PM. It’s really rewarding when you ship something. They’re like, “This is not what I asked for but this is what I needed.” Right?
[00:12:37] JR: Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing. How did you get into product management, right? I'm just really curious about the story there. Like there’s not – I mean, are there product management degrees that you can – I mean, most people are getting CS degrees or just business degrees. What did you go school for? What was your story into getting into this discipline?
[00:12:56] PC: Yes. The story, I went to a Christian Bible college that had business and music. I’m very passionate about music. I play bass guitar. I love it. I couldn’t imagine doing any other instrument. Actually, it’s my favorite. But I really just took a business degree. It wasn't anything. It’s just a straight a business administration degree. What it was though – is I started my career in account management, and that really builds your chops as a PM to interface with customers in a professional way and understand and have empathy for them and what they're trying to do and really help them with whatever products you're helping them with or that they’ve purchased, right?
That’s where I started, and it was really an offering of some of my skillsets. Actually, I was at GasBuddy, and they said, “Hey! I think you might actually a good fit for this product manager role.” At the time, I was like, “What is product management?” I’m like, “Okay.” That night, I remember staying up in still like wee hours of the morning like Googling product management. Ironically, there's not a lot at the time. It was just like over the map. I’m like, “Oh! Who are these people?”
[00:13:52] JR: When was this? What year is this?
[00:13:54] PC: I think this was 2016.
[00:13:57] JR: 2016, and maybe this is still true today in 2020. But like 2016, The Lean Startup was still like the Bible of like how to think as a product manager. Is that still the case?
[00:14:09] PC: I think it is for the early product manager. It’s a good like introductory understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, especially when you think about shipping small and shipping fast. But when it comes to some of the fundamentals of product management, I have yet to find a book that really is able to do that. Maybe that's a niche I could fill. But in terms of like a book being able to say, “These are the things that divide really great product managers from kind of the subpar,” there's definitely blog posts and articles but there's really nothing out there that's like –
There are some classes and schools that will teach and get certificates, but I just – They could be good. I just haven’t looked at them enough.
[00:14:43] JR: You just teed up my next question perfectly. Like what's the delta between masterful product managers and their less masterful counterparts.
But first, real quick, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur or if this conversation about product management sounds interesting to you, The Lean Startup really does hold up. I think the book is like 10 years old, maybe older now. It’s such an essential way I would argue about thinking how to bring new things into the world as quickly and cheaply as possible. So, I highly recommend it.
All right. Go back to that question. What is the delta between great product managers or great entrepreneurs and their less just good ones?
[00:15:20] PC: Yeah. I would say one of the key ones that I found very early on was humility. I think that’s – At a high level, a lot of it is soft skills, to be totally honest. That differentiate the really proficient, really masterful product managers over the ones that are maybe aspiring to be so. Those individuals have humility. I learned that really early on, because there was a saying that was around the product managers and CEO of the company, and that's really kind of where your thought of like you’re an entrepreneur.
It’s a very dangerous mindset because what it says is you have authority. You have actual authority to say you should build these things. As a product manager, those of you that don’t know, you’re working off of referent power. You actually can't tell the developers, “Build this thing.” They’re trusting you, and so you have to build that kind of referent power relationship.
A lot of that is through really strong humility and them knowing that I don’t have an ego. I'm not here to showboat. I’m going to elevate the team how that’s actually building this. It’s a lot of put your ego at the door. If you have an ego, I would say you're probably not going to be a successful product manager.
[00:16:20] JR: Yeah. I remember reading a post of yours on LinkedIn a couple years ago about this skill of empathy, right? It’s one of the most important skills as a product manager. Can you talk about that, why that's so essential? I mean, I think this is related to humility and I guess the follow-up question would be how do you cultivate that. How do you cultivate empathy as an entrepreneur, as a product manager, somebody whose job it is to build things that customers need?
[00:16:45] PC: Building and cultivating empathy, I would highly recommend doing what your customer does. I did that at GasBuddy. I actually shadowed a lot of fuel retailers and watched what they were doing. I went on to say I was very fortunate to have some – We had an early product that we’re building at GasBuddy. Some few retailers are open to me coming to their office and watching what they do and just understanding their day-to-day.
Doing the same thing at restaurants. We go at 7shifts quarterly multiple times on site to restaurants. We watch how they work. We go in their back office. We have some really good customers that are willing to let us kind of sit there and be flies on the wall. Having and cultivating that culture of empathy with your product management team or if you’re an aspiring product manager, is just really being the customer.
We actually have some product managers that work in restaurants part-time that really want to be a part of that industry, because you come to those conclusions much faster and you're able to better prioritize that backlog of is this important right now? Versus is it important in the future? I think that's a big way to cultivate it. But once you understand that customer, then that empathy starts to come more naturally in conversations, because really the product manager is the customer advocate.
The hope is that when you're in conversations, your engineering team says, “This is going to be really difficult to build,” and you say, “I don't care. This is worth it,” right?
[00:18:01] JR: Yeah.
[00:18:02] PC: Or this is going to be complicated for my design team. You say, “It doesn't matter. This is the complicated outcome that we need to build to actually solve the customer's problem.” Really, you’re trying to advocate for that customer.
[00:18:12] JR: I love that. I was reading the 7shifts’s website, and there’s a line in it that really stood out to me that I love. It says you guys are, “Focused 100% on the restaurant industry." That's a crazy hard thing for startups to do. As a lot of our listeners can attest, you focus exclusively on one vertical. I also think it’s hard in the sense of your career, right? Just like at a startup, you got lots of different verticals that you could serve and a career. You have lots of different things that you could pursue mastery of. It’s tough to focus on one discipline. It's why I wrote Mater of One. It’s what the book is all about.
Like 7shifts, you are crazy focused and have been for like very early on in your career on this one vocational thing of product management. Why that discipline? What is so appealing about that to you?
[00:19:00] PC: It’s just a very rewarding job. You get to work with really smart and amazing people, and it’s really a job where you can empower other people. It’s kind of like it's a bad example. But when you’re a parent and your kid does something and it’s really, really awesome and you’re like, “Oh,” you feel really proud. The same feeling happens when you get a team together of developers and designers and marketers, and you align them on this problem or when you bring that solution to market and it solves your customer’s problem. It’s just this kind of euphoric feeling of empowerment, of energy, of reward.
It’s a really fun thing to be doing but it's also challenging, and I love a good challenge. It’s something that you're not going to be falling into and finding it to be easy. It’s something that you have to be passionate about and realize, “This is something that I want to be good at,” and really invest your time and energy in practicing and learning, because a lot of product management is failure. You mess up a lot. But because you're moving small and iteratively, you’re going to fail, and it’s not the end of the world. As a startup, you only have so many failures, right?
Early on for 7shifts, it was kind of like they were going in all the directions, and they found restaurants are really using their solution and they honed in that. Even from just like a marketing positioning has actually been pretty beneficial for them to just position themselves as, “We’re the restaurant scheduling software,” which we do have people that are not restaurants using us. But positioning it that way can really, really help by just saying, “We’re here for restaurants,” and restaurants will come.
[00:20:22] JR: I love that story. I mean, listen. 7shifts is a great success story. You guys have raised $20 million. From some of my favorite VC firms, including Teamworthy Ventures in New York who I’m a big fan of. But like I think a lot of people expect that at the start of a company, you’re super focused on one industry but you really quickly as quickly as possible expand all these other verticals.
But 7shifts I think is a more common story. You start by experimenting with a bunch of different verticals, find the one that’s working, and then ignore everything else. As I’m saying this, I’m realizing this is also Master of One, right?
[00:20:54] PC: It is.
[00:20:54] JR: Experiment widely in your career, find the thing that's working, and pour all of your water onto that and maybe expand in the future, right? But like you guys are nowhere close to like owning the restaurant market in North America or global. You guys have a ton of customers, 10,000 restaurants. But like there’s a lot more market for you guys to go after.
[00:21:15] PC: It’s huge.
[00:21:16] JR: Yeah. I want to ask a really selfish question, because this is something that I am like currently actively wrestling with Jordan Raynor & Company, right? It’s this, right? We have a very, very big mission, very broad mission, which is to help every Christian do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. There are a million different products that we could bring to market in order to do that, right?
I have my Master Collaboratory for Founders, this high-end mastermind group that’s like 1,300 bucks a month. That's one product. We have this podcast, which is free to all you, The Call to Mastery. But like I want to do a Netflix series, right? I want to do a YouTube series for kids that takes them into the day-to-day lives of people, of Christian serving at all different lines of work. There’s a million different products I want to bring in the world.
When you have seemingly limitless opportunity, like you guys do at 7shifts, like you guys do at GasBuddy, how practically do you discern the essential from the noise? How do you pick the best opportunities from the nearly good ones?
[00:22:20] PC: A lot of it is the testing. You try all of them, like you said, and you try and get an understanding of which one makes the most sense right now because you can have a really good idea. We’ve had one. For example, over a year ago, we had this idea to build kind of tasks or checklists for customers and we started with that idea, and it felt good and it felt right. I wasn't there at the time, but it ended up being the wrong timing in terms of the company, in terms of – It takes a lot of I would say clouds I guess or wisdom to be able to say this is valuable but not right now.
We just brought it to market in December, so we still got to it. It was just a matter of saying, “This isn't the most important thing we’re doing right now,” and a lot of it has to do with timing. When you're thinking about any opportunity, whether it's a faith-based opportunity, business opportunity, which I would argue are almost one of the same, but when you're weighing those odds, a lot of it comes down to, “Okay. How can I try this without diving in headfirst?” because the trying will usually reveal some of those insights you wouldn't get by diving deep in. By then, it's too late.
[00:23:27] JR: Yeah. That’s good. We had a really simple spreadsheet when I was at Threshold, our feature scoring spreadsheet to evaluate new features, new products and it was just really simple, right? We had a couple of different grading criteria, like what’s the sales value this thing to existing customers? What's the internal value of this thing? How much time is it going to save us? what’s the strategic value? And just assign different weightings to those things. It was a really helpful framework for us to think about feature prioritization. Do you guys use something similar to that? If so, like what are those criteria that you're evaluating for each new feature, each new product?
[00:24:00] PC: At GasBuddy, we used a RICE score, which is reach, impact, confidence, and effort. That can be really advantageous for companies that are quite large. We had a very large customer base, and so your risk of what you decide to build was quite high. As a PM, you had to really sell your executive team with data using those scoring metrics to say, “This is why I think this is the opportunity, because the reach is high, because the impact is high, our confidence is high.” You get that confidence by doing those tests, like I mentioned, doing those prototypes, getting that feedback.
Then the effort is a big one as well. You might have this grand idea. But if it’s going to take your development team six months to build, probably going to get tabled or tell you to make it smaller, right? Really using that was helpful, and we’re evolving that at 7shifts because we went from when I started. Last year, we only had 70 people. Now, we’re 140+, so we’re really growing fast and those growing pains are starting to show in our ability to effectively prioritize as a product team and say, “This is the best market opportunity we have.”
We do have a loose metric that we’re working on, but that's one of our 2020 goals as a team is to come up with a really strong score that says this is the right thing we should building and this is – There is data to back this up as well.
[00:25:09] JR: I love that practical take away, the RICE score, so reach, impact, confidence, and effort. Do you weigh all those equally?
[00:25:16] PC: No. They have their own kind of scoring. Your rich is the number of people, your impact can be a custom calculation based off of different weightings, your confidence is a percentage, and your effort is just the point values. For those that don't know, developers use points to kind of estimate how complex or how big something might be.
[00:25:33] JR: Yeah. I love it. All right. You’re pursuing mastery of this craft. You’re also married. You got a lot going on your life. What does your day look like? From the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed, what does a typical day in the life of Phil Corson look like?
[00:25:45] PC: I wake up, let the dog out, because that’s important.
[00:25:49] JR: Very important. Don’t forget the dog, yeah.
[00:25:51] PC: Yeah. Got to take care of the dog. It's a coffee, and I like a light breakfast and dive into this in some devotions. I really like the Bible App. It just gives me like kind of 10 minutes that I need while I’m eating breakfast. I usually use one of those devotions to go through. I went through yours actually last week, your Master of One.
[00:26:07] JR: Oh, nice! Thanks. Yeah.
[00:26:08] PC: Really good. I really enjoyed it. I’m off to work. I walk to work, so it’s about a 15-minute walk. It’s cold when I walk. I do have to bundle up when I walk in the winter. But when I get there, it’s almost like you have a switch that you have to turn off of like, “I now need to be in work mode.” Get your coffee and you’re essentially at the demands of your teams. Really, your role is to unblock your team, and so you are there to serve your team and what their needs are in the day-to-day, right?
When I’m not thinking about what's our next big project when I'm taking a month out, I'm thinking day-to-day. People will come – Developers will come to me and say, “Hey! We’re trying to solve this thing. What’s the best fit here?” I provide advice and then work with product marketing and work with design and work with all the different cross functional teams that are needed to execute. Really, you’re there to connect those people, because sometimes this person is blocked and this person is blocked.
You and your unique role are able to say, “Okay. You two should talk, because there's a moment here that you guys need to have that will just unlock both of you, right?” So, a lot of it is those moments of helping other people. And a lot of meetings where you're talking about what we should be building, planning ahead for what we should be building. There’s a lot of meetings in your day, and so I end up blocking off of kind of deep work time in my day. Because if you don't, you get bogged down in those small unblock conversations or those meetings. You hit five o'clock and you didn't really get actually a long-tail work accomplished.
Usually, I’ll block off the time of deep work, which is hard because it's hard to force yourself into deep work and to be able to dive in and think long-term and think strategy about how you want to take and where you want to take those features and those products for your customers. It’s like two channels of thought really. It’s that short-term, “How do I unlock my customers?” Long-term, “How do I continue to add value to the overall kind of enterprise value of 7shifts for our customers?”
[00:27:59] JR: You’ll leave work. What does your afternoon and evening look like?
[00:28:02] PC: Usually, I'm trying to network with Saskatoon because I’m new to the city. I’ve gone to some young adults group. I’ve connected with the church here. I’m trying to connect with them. I do play on the worship team. Usually, in the evenings, I’ll go there. We’re having more meet-ups now, so I try and go to meet-ups. Usually, after work, I'll end up going out for wings or for beers with people at work. I mean, there's a lot of restaurants near us, so it’s pretty dangerous when you're done work. A lot of people are like, “Oh! Let’s just go for wings and a beer,” right?
[00:28:31] JR: Right. Right.
[00:28:32] PC: That’s usually what it is. Then when I get home, it’s kind the wind down period. I'm always thinking, and you're totally right on the entrepreneur. I'm always dreaming of, “Is there something that I could build with a group of people that I know?” And you kind of do that dream of maybe there's something there. So far, there isn’t, but it’s fun to dream.
[00:28:47] JR: It sis fun. Well, I’m curious. Is there a problem that you see kind of consistently throughout the world that you could envision a solution for?
[00:28:55] PC: I don't have a problem that I would see out of the gate. A lot of it comes from my day-to-day life where I end up applying my job to the normality of life, and it's really just the nuance of like there's definitely a better way to do what they’re doing. You’re like, “I could totally build this.”
Lately, it's been my wife works in galleries and art communities, and the software that they use for managing their inventory is old, very old. It’s not web-based and it’s not fast. It’s not – There are so many slick solutions, but you kind of have those ideas and then you start to do the market fit and you start to think about market cap. Then you’re like, “Hmm, maybe not.” That’s happens a lot. That’s happens a lot.
[00:29:37] JR: Market sizes everything. Art galleries isn't the right table to be sitting at. Restaurants, however, that looks like a –
[00:29:44] PC: That’s on that table, yeah.
[00:29:45] JR: Hey! You mentioned deep work, which I’m a huge, huge, huge proponent of. We talk a lot about deep work when people are talking about their daily habits and routines on the podcast. But you’re in a kind of pretty unique environment, right? I mean, tech startups, when you're going from 70 to 150 people in a year, are chaotic. It's organized chaos but it's chaotic. It's also hyper-collaborative, right? What are some practical things you do to stay in a block of deep work when you need to get really focused work done?
[00:30:15] PC: We’ve actually done a good job at 7shifts. We actually have these little tags that you can put at your desk to say like, “Don’t bug me.” I think that’s really important, especially in that hyper-collaborative space where you’re only a desk away or a couple desks away from someone. That rule has worked out well for people honoring that system, as well headphones in usually means you need to honor that space and use a messaging service to message them and say, “When you’ve got a second, come find me.” Then it's on their own time. That way, it gives you more control.
But I found that sometimes even people break those barriers. Sometimes, it's just a matter of finding a place to hide and locking yourself into an area where you're harder to find. I don't usually go to the same spot, because then if people who know I usually go there, then they go there, and so I kind of just like – 7shifts’s office, as you can imagine many tech offices, have really great places to kind of sit and have quiet spaces and beanbags and wherever. So, I’ll find a spot and kind of crow myself in that deep work time.
Usually, people are very honoring of that if you're in a space. We do have a quiet room that is like if you go in there, you just don't bug anybody. It’s usually leveraging what the culture has provided as a way to actually get that deep work done.
[00:31:24] JR: Yeah. I love the headphone rule. That’s one that we had at Threshold 360, but I do think it's important to, first and foremost, like make sure everybody within the organization values deep work, right? Because I found that once everybody's on board with the idea that I need totally focus uninterrupted time to do my best work, they respect – They don't interrupt you much. It’s love your neighbor as yourself, right?
[00:31:46] PC: Right.
[00:31:46] JR: Hey! I remember after we met in Boston. I sent you a copy of my book. We went to lunch. We were able to talk about faith and work. I sent you a copy of Called to Create, and to my surprise you actually read the thing. I give a lot of books and an honor when people actually read it. You mentioned an email shortly thereafter that it changed some of your perspectives about work, so I'm really curious to know how specifically. How that maybe other content, other books have helped you think about this intersection of faith and work?
[00:32:17] PC: Yeah. I actually gave away all my copies because I thought it was such a good book.
[00:32:21 JR: You’re very kind.
[00:32:22] PC: It was really groundbreaking, especially learning about people that I did not know that were Christians, which is a bad and a good thing at the same time. But I didn't know that they were, and it makes more sense now that you read through that. But from sharing that book and learning from it, one of the things I was struggling with early in my career is diving into mastering product management and being able to be the best product manager. I found that it was competing priorities between enriching my faith and growing closer with God but also becoming a better product manager.
I found that it was pulling in different directions. It’s a very frustrating time in my faith walk, and my wife can attest to that. Being a couple, you kind of hear everything from each other. It’s a really struggling time. But once I read that book, it almost unlocked this thing in my head that said, “It's not that they're competing. It's that they're the same.”
When you're mastering being a product manager, especially in that role serving other people, you’re building solutions to make their lives better, to have better versions of themselves. Whatever you’re building, right?
That just like opened up my eyes to realize, by me being a better product manager, I’m actually enriching my closeness with God, right? That was mind-opening to realize that, and it unlocked something that said, “I still need to find time to dive into His word and to devotion and get connected with the church community and really disciple others.” But really, it didn't feel competing anymore. That was the kind of unlock moment that I had after reading that book. It was really spiritually changing for me.
[00:33:52] JR: I love it. I mean, yeah, our faith, our work, the work that we do is one of the practical ways in which we live out our faith, right? So, yes, we should continue to study Scripture to remind us of the Lord's command to love our neighbor as ourselves. But how do you love your neighbor as yourself? You go build great product to make that restaurant manager's job easier, right?
[00:34:13] PC: Absolutely.
[00:34:14] JR: You are loving your – I mean, Phil, you know this better than anyone. This is the essence of product management and entrepreneurship. Because if you don't do that well, if you don't love your neighbor as yourself, you’re going to fail, right? You’re going to fail in your role. The venture is going to fail. It’s just a great example of biblical principles at work in the real world, whether or not the founders of 7shifts are like conscious of that, right?
[00:34:38] PC: Yeah.
[00:34:38] JR: It’s a really beautiful thing. I’m curious. Do you think your faith causes you –We talked about empathy. We talked but humility, these obviously Jesus-like values, right? Are there other ways in which your faith causes you to approach product management maybe a little bit differently than the non-Christian might?
[00:34:55] PC: I think one of the ones that I learned actually in school and this is probably one of the things that set me out to be where I am today is I went to a school that taught business with a Christian context. That helps you understand a little bit better some of those Christian principles and how they might intersect with your work. That happened earlier on in my career in terms of my faith working as just a student, part-time jobs. I would get lots, “There’s something different about you,” That really open people up to have those conversations and that’s when I could really share with them my story and my testimony of who I know and hopefully that they can come to know.
But in terms of me and my drive for wanting to be a better product manager and aligning that with my Christian principles, I would definitely say stewardship as a theme I would say and understanding not only that you're here to serve others is a really kind steward mentality. But also, when you think about, and I don't have a lot of people that I’ve talked to think this way, but you’re a steward of your company, right? They even trusted you with money, salary to say, “I want you to build me value,” right?
When you're thinking about becoming a product manager, you are product manager and thinking about the time that I spend has a value. It has a dollar value, because people are paying you. When you think about doing the best that you possibly can and being a steward of 7shifts’s time, of their money, when you're thinking about buying third-party vendors even, you are a steward of their money.
I see a lot of business people taking that for granted, and they're willing to throw money in different directions. Really, that’s like you should treat that money as if it's your own money. That’s what’s being a steward is, is taking that and realizing, “I need to execute at the performance standards of 7shifts or of our Heavenly Father,” right? Either/or, it’s almost one of the same.
[00:36:48] JR: Yeah. There is – It’s so interesting you mention that. I think that's wise advice for anybody, whether you’re a product manager or wherever you work. Especially for those people who are in a job right now that they don't love, remembering that you are still being a steward of something that God has entrusted you with and resources that He's entrusted others with, your employer primarily.
I remember – I’ve always said that like one of the best advantages for the Christian for raising capital is I think it makes it more concrete and understandable that like you did not produce the resources that your venture have been given, which is always true whether or not you raise capital. God gives us all these resources.
But when you're taking money from investors, that becomes real practical and really visible. It’s like, “Oh, no! We have $5 million in the bank, because somebody has invested this and entrusted it us.” It helps you think in that stewardship mentality, which I think is really productive.
7shifts, you guys are on the space with a lot of minimum-wage workers. Am I right?
[00:37:47] PC: Mm-hmm.
[00:37:47] JR: I mean, the 350,000 people using your product are some of the most marginalized oftentimes in our communities. I’m really interested to hear your perspective on like – I know you're not speaking for 7shifts. I’m asking for Phil's opinion here. Do you see a redemptive story line to what 7shifts is doing? Is there something that the product actually does to, in the words of Mr. Rogers, help us be repairers of creation, right?
[00:38:17] PC: Yeah. No, that's really good. Honestly, it's part of what drew me to 7shifts in the first place. This was not a move that I made lightly. I was asked to come work for them. It wasn't me looking for work, and so I had to weigh a lot of those pros and cons to moving to 7shifts.
But one of the big reasons was that this software genuinely is helping people. It’s very, very clear in terms of making their work life a little bit easier, making them a little bit happier and how they communicate with work or engage with work. Whether or not that's the manager and we’re helping them, really just saving them hours and hours.
When you're thinking about building a schedule without 7shifts and Excel spreadsheet and people are asking to swap shifts and people are text messaging you, it’s just chaos when you're trying to just schedule your restaurant, right? You’re just trying to staff it. That’s it, right?
When we come to market with this solution that uses machine learning that on one click can actually build the schedule and reduce hours and hours and hours of time scheduling, that is a really great feeling and that’s what really called me to 7shifts, not only for the employees and them having a really good solution because there's probably employees out there that are thinking the same way I am.
There has to be like something better out there than this Excel that's getting pasted to a bulletin and yes there is. It’s 7shifts, right? Even helping the employee and giving them a little bit of joy and belonging in community within their workplace, those were really big callings on both of those sides, the employee and the manager.
[00:39:48] JR: That's a really beautiful way to say it. I'm just envisioning right now and I'm sure there's a lot of these stories in those 350,000 restaurant employees who are using the product in North America.
I’m envisioning the single mom who is working at a restaurant, who’s using your product. She's also got another job. I mean, this is such seemingly small thing. But because of your product, she doesn't have to respond to eight text messages about the shift tomorrow, going back and forth with her manager and other employees about taking her shift, so she could stay at home with her sick child, right?
[00:40:20] PC: Yup.
[00:40:20] JR: You’re making that seamless and easy and making her more present and more fully engaged in her home, in her life. That is – If that’s the only thing you did for that one woman, your work is important. It's eternally significant and meaningful. What a beautiful, beautiful way of being the hands and feet of Jesus with software, right? That’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Phil, three questions I like to ask everybody who comes on The Call to Mastery. Which books do you recommend or gift the most to others?
[00:40:52] PC: As of late, it’s definitely been the Called to Create. I’ll be honest.
[00:40:54] JR: I love it. I love it. Good.
[00:40:55] PC: I bought more and shared more because – Especially with folks that are either teetering with their faith or are very deep in their faith and just want to better understand how their work applies. So, I was not the only person that was thinking that between my kind of network.
The second one was actually that I’ve shared more recently – I moved in a role that’s more growth-based, and it’s more like growth hacking at 7shifts. I'm not going to go into that. Google growth hacking, and you'll find out what that means. But a lot of it has to do with the psychology of humanity and how they think. That was one of the first books that – It’s Why We Buy by Paco Underhill. It’s a really good book. It talks about the psychology of critically thinking about yourself when you walk into a store or when you're making a purchase decision and some of the factors that go into there. Some of them are conscious and some of them are subconscious.
That actually unlocked a lot of kind of questions for me that's I think really help me now in this kind of growth hack mode at 7shifts, thinking more about how people think and how they’re wanting to buy our product. That’s been a really, really good book, and so I’ve been sharing that one really. It’s a little older too but it is a one good.
[00:41:59] JR: Yeah. I've heard of that one before. I got to check that out. I haven’t read it. All right. What one person would you be most interested to hear talk about how their faith influences their work on this podcast?
[00:42:09] PC: I've been following this guy for a while but James Kelly at FaithTech. He’s built a tech incubator out of Waterloo in Ontario. It’s an interesting concept because it's a tech incubator just for kingdom-based tech companies. It’s building software for churches, which I'm passionate about. But I know that I don't feel called to go there, mainly because it's a very difficult place building software for not-for-profit organizations.
[00:42:34] JR: Incredibly difficult, yeah. That’s a good answer. I got to look at this guy. James Kelly?
[00:42:38] PC: Yup.
[00:42:39] JR: All right. I got to check it out. All right. Finally, what single piece of advice would you give to somebody who is pursuing mastery of their vocation, whether it's product management or entrepreneurship? We talked about a bunch of different things in this episode but one piece of advice to leave us with.
[00:42:54] PC: Listen to God’s calling. I think in terms of being attentive to what you're doing in your career and being open to being called in different directions I think is really, really big. Then once you find that and you feel that calling, go headfirst. Dive right in and just be amazing at that thing that you're doing. Passion is a big one and being a master something. I've never seen someone who's not a master of something that's not passionate about what they’re a master of.
[00:43:21] PC: Yeah. No. It goes in line with what I write about Master of One, right? Passion follows. Mastery passion grows with mastery. As we get better at what we do, we grow to love it more and more and more.
Hey, Phil! I just want to commend you for being masterful at your craft. I firsthand got to see this. By the way, talk about a practical way in which you’re different at your craft than your non-Christian counterparts. I always felt that you cared about me as a vendor, even though you guys never – You never ended up buying from us. I always knew where we stood, and you just treated me well. You treated me like a human being.
So, thank you for being masterful at your craft. Thank you for being the hands and feet of Jesus with software and meeting the needs of your customers and your users. Thank you for the ministry of excellence that you minister to your employer, to investors, to vendors, and again customers and users. Hey! Thank you for talking about empathy today. I want to commend you for your humility, your empathy and just doing your work really well.
If you want to connect with Phil, you can easily find him on LinkedIn or Twitter @pccorson. Phil, I think you do a terrific job blogging when you do. You need to be blogging more, man, on LinkedIn. But, yeah, pccorson on LinkedIn and Twitter to find out more about Phil and product management and everything he's doing at 7shifts.
Phil, thanks again for joining us today.
[00:44:45] PC: It was a pleasure. Thanks, Jordan.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:44:48] JR: Who wants to be a product manager? Pretty great gig. You basically get to be an entrepreneur on someone else's dime with a lot less risk since you’re a part of a bigger company. Thank you again to my friend, Phil Corson, for that terrific conversation.
Hey! Before you go, I’ve got another shorter conversation I want to share with you guys. As you guys know, every week in my weekly faith and work devotional emails that go out on Monday mornings, I recommend a book that I’ve added to my personal reading list.
I recently sat down with one of the authors of one those books on my reading list. His name is Doug Gehman, and he's the author of a book called Before You Quit, where he’s basically sharing the story of dozens of people, ordinary people like you and me who have done extraordinary things for the kingdom of God, because they simply kept going. They didn't quit. They pushed through and persevered in their vocations or whatever God had called them to do.
I loved the concept of this book. I think a lot of us struggle with that temptation of quitting what we’re doing now, so we can move on to the next thing. So, I’m really grateful for this book and I sat down recently with Doug to ask him just a couple of questions to wrap our heads around what this book is. So please enjoy this conversation with Doug.
Hey, Doug! Greetings from the other side of Florida. How's everything in Pensacola?
[00:46:11] DG: It's raining today. But other than that, it's beautiful. I love living on the coast.
[00:46:15] JR: I can't blame you. I love living on this coast. Doug, I got really excited when I read the title for this book, Before You Quit. It's a topic that I’ve talked a lot about in my devotionals and just finding joy wherever you are in life and pushing through and persevering though tough times. Tell us, at the highest level, what is this book about?
[00:46:34] DG: It’s about perseverance. For a Christian, it’s about getting a God-given vision and then having the grit, to use Angela Duckworth's term, to have the grit, the determination to see it through and not quit until your dream is realized. That's really the essence of the book. It goes broader than just our aspirations. It deals, of course, with the when you go through a hard time that’s not voluntary, a crises, what I call moral courage.
The Bible is replete with examples of people who had have moral courage or difficulty. Not to quit on your vision, not to quit on your faith, not quit on your covenants, your marriage, your loved ones, the people around you. Say it through. God has a purpose for your life. That's what the book is really about.
[00:47:22] JR: How much did Angela Duckworth and grit influence this and what other books influenced your own book?
[00:47:27] DG: Angela Duckworth's book, of course, is written from a business perspective, from a secular perspective. But it was actually recommended to me by one of the editors at Moody as a good book on the subject of perseverance. It was greatly influenced, and I quote her a lot in my book. I think she really dug into an important component that is missing in a lot of ways in our modern culture where people – It’s kind of a cliché, but they're looking for instant gratification.
Entrepreneurs and business people can fall into that same trap of thinking that, “I will have an idea, I will bring it to the market, and it will be successful within a short period of time.” That really is just not true for 90% of the people.
[00:48:11] JR: Yeah. That's exactly right. There's a lot of value in discipline over time, which Angela Duckworth talks a lot about. Your book, Before You Quit, who is this book for?
[00:48:21] DG: Well, Moody wanted me to write it to the younger audience, the young adult audience. The popular term, of course, is millennials. But I chose not to use that term in the book and not to write, especially with a guy my age, I didn’t want to write with any kind of a patronizing tone towards a younger audience, so I chose to write with a tone that was more timeless and deal with more timeless principles.
I use examples from when I was a young man in my 20s and having just come to Christ and what was going on in the culture at that time, as an example that things aren't really as different today as they were then. I tried not to make it too focused on one group but yet write it with that younger audience in mind.
[00:49:08] JR: We get a lot of people listening to this episode who are passionate about following Christ. They’re also passionate about doing really masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others, but a lot of them don't feel like they can do it in their current role, right? They’re discontent. Maybe they're having a hard time finding joy in the work that they're doing today. How is this book going to serve that person?
[00:49:30] DG: I think everybody, young people included, have to come to terms with the fact that anything we learn to do well is going to take time.
[00:49:38] JR: Amen.
[00:49:38] DG: Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers says that it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something. You’re a pianist. I've been enjoying your book, by the way, Called to Create.
[00:49:51] JR: Thank you.
[00:49:51] DG: Yeah. I read it once. I'm going through it again. I could spend a lot of time just diverting to that subject because I love the subject of creativity, and it actually goes hand-in-hand with perseverance. Gladwell deals with that in his book, and Duckworth deals with it in hers that 10,000 hours. You think about that. 10,000 hours. That means if you practice the piano one-hour day, 365 days a week, it’s going to take you 27 years to become a master. If you double down and do it two hours a day, it’ll be 13+ years to become a master, a virtuoso.
So, why do we think that suddenly we're going to waive our hands around on a desk and create something and we’re going to successful in three weeks?
[00:50:38] JR: Yes. For those of you listening who have read my new book, Master of One, you understand why I’m so excited about Doug's book. You’re preaching my language here. Not just 10,000 hours but 10,000 hours of purposeful practice, which unpacked in Master of One.
Doug, hey! Thank you so much for writing this book. I'm thoroughly enjoying it, and thank you for spending a few minutes with me today.
[00:51:00] DG: You bet. Great to be with you, Jordan. Thank you.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[00:51:03] JR: Thanks again to Doug for giving us an overview of Before You Quit, which is out right now. It came out yesterday, so you guys can go pick up a copy of that book.
Hey! If you’re enjoying The Call to Mastery, make sure you subscribe to the podcast. Write a review wherever you review podcast. I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you, thank you, thank you for the work that each of you are doing out in the world this week, right now for the glory of God and the good of others. Thank you for following The Call to Mastery. I’ll see you next week.
[END]