Michael Margolis [00:00:00]:
Having everybody in that session, watching it together, seeing it all together is a very, very powerful experience actually for the team. It's much different than, oh, it's recorded and yeah, maybe I'll watch it. Having that conversation and experiencing it together, hashing it out through that whole day is just like a massive hack for us because I don't write a report at the end of the day. What we do is everybody has sat through it and taken notes and talked about it. And then I send a Google form at the end that basically is like, okay, individually, separately, quietly enter, kind of what are your number one, number two, number three, big takeaways, any adjustments to who you think the bullseye customer is and you know, concerns next steps, this kind of thing. So we just, you know how Google form works. It just fills out a spreadsheet and then we have that and captures it across the whole team and then we can kind of look at that and the decider typically leads that conversation. And just you can see the patterns are very clear.

Michael Margolis [00:00:52]:
There's usually a lot of consensus, there's an enormous amount of alignment about what did we actually learn? And pretty good fodder for discussion about, like, what are we going to do next?

Erin May [00:01:04]:
Hey, this is Erin May.

Carol Guest [00:01:05]:
And this is Carol Guest.

Erin May [00:01:07]:
And this is Awkward Silences. Awkward Silences is brought to you by User Interviews, the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we're here with Michael Margolis. Michael is the UX Research partner at GV, formerly Google Ventures, and author of Learn More Faster, an exciting free new book that you should all definitely check out. And we're going to dive into the book as well as Michael's experience working with over 300 portfolio companies doing many different versions of design sprints across tons of different verticals, getting product market fit, boosting conversion rates, all sorts of great things. So excited to draw from that considerable experience. So thank you for joining us today, Michael.

Michael Margolis [00:02:04]:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Excited to talk to you guys.

Erin May [00:02:06]:
So we've got Carol here too.

Carol Guest [00:02:08]:
Glad to be here.

Erin May [00:02:08]:
Yeah.

Carol Guest [00:02:09]:
Excited to dig into this book.

Erin May [00:02:10]:
All right, let's do it. So to start off, maybe you could tell us just a little bit about your background because it is an interesting sort of trajectory.

Michael Margolis [00:02:17]:
Yeah. So as you said, I'm the UX research partner at GV now. So started as the first research partner in venture and that was in 2010, and that was kind of the culmination of a lot of different Experiences that kind of led up to that. So I studied anthropology and started out. My first full time job was as an editor in educational software company. So did that and then worked at the Learning Company and then at Electronic Arts and developing educational software. So that was like boxes of disks being shipped out. And so it was my first exposure to UX, to usability, to what it means to produce software in a waterfall as a team.

Michael Margolis [00:02:54]:
And then went from there to a boutique product design company, Innovation and Strategy in Palo Alto in California in the Bay Area. And so there what I learned got to work with really excellent researchers and got to learn deep ethnographic research. And how do you apply that to business? Big long expensive consulting projects basically for companies like Alcoa, Dupont, Ericsson and we did that and those were super fun kinds of projects. And then the.com boom busted. And so I went to a.com and so I went to Walmart.com, where then I had to kind of learn how to take a lot of those techniques and adapt them for high speed for low cost. Walmart is very everyday low cost, very focused on execution. And it was just me, it wasn't a big team of people doing it. So I had to, I got a lot of reps in and was really combining usability with discovery research there and then also learning how to basically thinking about the world as a shopping everything was kind of a shopping process.

Michael Margolis [00:03:46]:
How are people comparing things, looking at this and that and thinking about kind of the pros and cons of different options. And then went from there to Google where I was in the Gmail team. And interesting thing about Google at the time was we did a lot of watch parties and so they had invested in different kinds of video streaming from the labs and we had one way mirrors and all these kinds of things. So all of these different kinds of techniques and pieces of that then kind of came together for me the way I think about this kind of practical, scrappy team based research that I do at GV. Yeah. And so have been here now for it's getting close to 15 years.

Erin May [00:04:21]:
Fantastic.

Carol Guest [00:04:22]:
Many of our listeners would be familiar with the book Sprint and curious how. And we'll spend most of our time today talking about Bullseye customers. But I'm curious how you moved from that broader work on Sprints toward this work on Bullseye customers.

Michael Margolis [00:04:35]:
Yeah. So I helped develop the design Sprint process that you know, as you have seen in the Sprint book, what we saw is that to help people move faster, basically what I'm always trying to do is get them as quickly as possible to talk to their customers, and to talk to them not in a way that they are pitching and selling to their customers, which is kind of what founders are habituated to do. Right. They're very good at selling. They have to do that really well. And so then to shift from that mode to learning, listening mode is pretty difficult. But what I've seen over many years is that the highest impact, the fastest impact I can have on a team to have kind of those AHAs is to get them as quickly as possible in front of those customers, talking to them that way, the way that we talk to customers right when I'm not selling. And so what I'm looking for is ways to compact that and get that to happen as quickly as possible.

Michael Margolis [00:05:23]:
So to me, design sprints, you know, I'm super biased. I'm a researcher. So to me, it's a research activity. It's not really a design process that culminates in that last day, the Friday, when we're talking to customers. And what we've seen is over time, that founders, they're under just an enormous amount of pressure to answer these questions about like, okay, so who actually exactly is our customer and what exactly are we building? And so the faster that I can get them to kind of start clarifying that, it just accelerates the team and gets them moving faster. So going from design sprints, where it's a full week to get people to. To that point where they're talking to customers, the bullseye customer sprint is a way to compress a lot of the work and simplify it. And it helps if you're going to do a design sprint to streamline a lot of the work that you're going to do to focus that design sprint.

Michael Margolis [00:06:10]:
So if you're doing that or you're going to invest in big marketing campaign or any kind of other research, it just streamlines all of those things and helps you do that faster and helps you just start answering these questions much, much, much quicker.

Erin May [00:06:22]:
Amazing. So we go from a week to what if we could do it even faster than a week? But really through the lens of we're going to get more bang for our buck if we start with zeroing in on this bullseye customer. Is that right?

Michael Margolis [00:06:33]:
Yeah. And a lot of what the bullseye customer sprint is really figuring out, kind of like it's focused on the core value proposition. Like, who exactly is this and what is this? What's the essential thing that we're trying to provide them? What's the problem that we're solving, I think of a design sprint a lot more about how are we going to solve the problem? Like, what's the right way to implement this? And to answer that question, like, well, how are we going to do it? But to me, before that, a lot of it is clarifying, like, well, what is it? What's the core problem that we really want to focus on? And who is that person who's suffering from that problem? Exactly. And so if we can clarify those things, that moves people much, much further along. We actually don't do a whole lot of design sprints. I haven't done a full design sprint in a very long time. So we tend to just do this and do this kind of research process all the time now.

Erin May [00:07:19]:
And what made you decide to make the free book and to actually bring it to market in that way?

Michael Margolis [00:07:24]:
Yeah. So for us, we found that this is just. It's incredibly impactful. So we're just doing this all the time. And we can just see every time, even when we go into it, we're like, I don't know if this one's going to work because the team or the product is complicated. And every time it just has this huge impact on the team and totally changes the way often either confirms what they know, which is great, like, all speed, Godspeed, move forward, or it shifts for them and gets them all thinking about, like, oh, now we understand what we're doing and what we're building. And so it's just been like this, I don't know, magic cheat code. It feels a little bit like this magic trick that we're doing and have gotten it down.

Michael Margolis [00:07:59]:
So there's this real cookbook to it. And so just felt like, okay, well, if we can share this, like more people should do this. We're just saving people an enormous amount of time and effort. Right. Because my goal is to have people do this and avoid going down some path too far down a path before you're investing a bunch of time, a bunch of energy, a bunch of money, your reputation, maybe on launching something like, go figure this out with. Build as little as you possibly can and learn as much as you can. So that's really. The book is learn more faster.

Michael Margolis [00:08:27]:
That's really what this is about for me. And fortunately, being at GV, we're able to make this available. Right. I'm not selling books. That's not really the Google ventures business models and selling books. So excited to just make this available to Everybody. It's at learnmorefaster.com, comma, all the materials, everything. Just go get it, share it.

Erin May [00:08:44]:
Fantastic. Okay, well, I think we should dig into it, dig into the Bullseye customer method. Who should use it, when should they use it, why should they use it? Obviously we're trying to learn more faster, but give us some use cases.

Michael Margolis [00:08:55]:
Yeah. So the main reasons, kind of the main prompt for it is, I'm building something new, or I have something that we have launched and it's out in the world. And maybe we're doing really well in a certain market. We're doing great in Germany. We want to sell the rest of the eu, so we want to shift to a new market. We want to understand what's different about them. Maybe we are selling to like very white glove sales process and we're selling to like our top tier big enterprises, and we want to shift and adjust to maybe a different tier and have more of a DIY sales process. We want to understand them.

Michael Margolis [00:09:25]:
Or there's something that we've launched and it's not performing quite the way we had hoped and wanted it to perform. And so it's really kind of a troubleshooting, like, what's going on, what's happening here. So those are some of the, like, the most common situations when, when we've used this. And it's just basically you have big, fundamental critical questions about your customer and your product.

Carol Guest [00:09:45]:
All right, and. And who is this Bullseye customer? Can you describe what it is and why it's so important to focus on it?

Michael Margolis [00:09:51]:
Yeah. So the Bullseye customer is. What we found is it's this. It's the way I define it is it's the very specific subset of your target market that initially is most likely to respond to buy your product. So what I'm looking for is usually to get much, much more specific. And I'm really pushing people to narrow down more than typically you see in Personas or ICPs. And there are kind of three sets of criteria that I use to get people to narrow these down. So the first one is these inclusion criteria.

Michael Margolis [00:10:24]:
So that's usually pretty easy for companies to think about because it's the big market that they want. Right. It's who they want to include in this product. And the harder part is to get them to think about, like, who are we going to set aside? Right. So those are the exclusion criteria. And so that's where usually I have to push them. And the way I do this is we do a Bullseye exercise. So I'm kind of basically interviewing them about these criteria.

Michael Margolis [00:10:43]:
I Have a whole set of questions that I run through. So these exclusion criteria are like, so it's probably not all of these people, right? You're creating a delivery service for specialty medications. It's not everybody who gets special to me. Like, let's try to narrow this down. Who would not be in here? And it can be very difficult for founders to set those aside. And we'll get to them eventually, but initially, if we can be very specific about who these people are, it helps us prioritize the input we're getting. It helps us prioritize our roadmap, like, which feedback to pay attention to, which things we want to build first. So these exclusion criteria become very important.

Michael Margolis [00:11:17]:
And then the third set of criteria is we think about triggers. So a trigger is what is the experience or event or something that's happened to somebody that makes them especially receptive initially to your product. So an example of this is we worked with an insurance, basically a company that was like, insurance tech, all right, and they were selling to millennials selling life insurance. So the idea was, well, everybody needs life insurance. People like, hey, I need to get life insurance. That's right. Yeah. But they weren't really doing anything about it yet.

Michael Margolis [00:11:47]:
Until what we found were the triggers were, oh, you've just had a baby or you've just gotten married. And now it's the to do list item has moved from, oh, yeah, I should probably get life insurance. That's the thing I should probably do to like, oh, no, no, like, I need to do this, like, on Monday, I need to go, like, sign up and make sure I take care of this. So that person is that bullseye, right? They're very receptive. They're initially. They're ready to go. And so I want to talk to them more than the people who are kind of like, yeah, like, eventually I need to do this.

Erin May [00:12:12]:
Gotcha. So the triggers are going to be more sort of behavioral, Whereas are the inclusion exclusion more sort of demographic, technographic, or. Not necessarily.

Michael Margolis [00:12:21]:
Not necessarily. It's a range. So some of the examples of some exclusion criteria could be something like maybe you just know too much. So maybe I'm developing a new. Let's say it's a new kind of a pharmacy or something. So probably I don't want to talk to pharmacists, right? Like, you're great. You're an expert, and you know a lot of this about this, and that might be good input at some stage. But as a customer, you're kind of weird, right? You just know too much.

Michael Margolis [00:12:44]:
So I don't want to talk to pharmacists. Or maybe it's somebody who has had some kind of an experience that makes them less interested or willing to do this. So if I'm developing a new treatment for a disease and it's a person who maybe for some reason has had a bad experience with medicine or had participated in something in the past, and they just, they don't trust doctors, like, okay, well, probably don't want to talk to you. Like, eventually maybe we'll address you, but not initially. A way I think about it sometimes is what are the things that you might hear in those first few minutes of an interview where you, you hear that and you think, ugh, this is just not. This is not the person.

Erin May [00:13:22]:
Right.

Michael Margolis [00:13:22]:
And so that's a lot of what I'm pushing the team to do is to think about, you know, and I have all those questions to prompt them, but, like, what's that thing you would hear? And you'd realize, oh, yeah, if this person doesn't like to get vaccinations, they're probably not going to accept some of these other. This medical treatment, for example.

Carol Guest [00:13:38]:
So before we get into the step by step, a lot of our listeners are user researchers. I think user researchers know better than anyone the challenges of not recruiting the right audience. They've sat through it. Is there any advice you would give to a user researcher who's maybe trying to convince their founder, their product manager, of the importance of really doing that narrowing?

Michael Margolis [00:13:57]:
Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because they are so resistant often to set aside anybody, right? They're like, no, no, no. That's our whole, that's our market. And a lot of what I'm convincing them to do, like, before we, we got on here to talk, I was talking with a company about this and pushing and pushing and pushing them to be very precise and like, And a lot of it comes down to let's sequence it. And I say, like, I'll talk to that other group also. Where do we want to start? Who's the first group that we want to start with? And so that, that seems to make it a little bit easier. It's not that we are never going to talk to you, and it's not that this is the only chance to do this right. We'll repeat it. Let's do this as an experiment.

Michael Margolis [00:14:34]:
We'll pick this first group and then depending on what we learned, then, then we'll figure out who we want to talk to next. And so that kind of buys me a Little leeway. And I. I prefer to only plan the first one. So sometimes people like, okay, well, let's. Let's schedule a bunch of these ahead of time. Like, let's define the groups, and we'll get them all set up. But I prefer not to do that because invariably what happens is you run that first one and you learn a bunch, like, a lot, which informs how you want, what you are going to want to do next.

Michael Margolis [00:15:02]:
And so if you plan ahead too much, it makes it harder to adjust, to be flexible, which is kind of here. Right. I want to be scrappy and learn a lot and then figure out, like, oh, I see. It was. It was about this particular criteria. Like, people who are getting specialty medications, who are most concerned about, you know, theft, or they're most concerned, it turns out, about refrigerated medications. They're the ones who really need this, you know, predictable delivery. Let's go after more of those people.

Michael Margolis [00:15:29]:
So sequencing it and promising them that we'll. We'll do some more usually helps.

Erin May [00:15:33]:
So you're refining the particulars of the who the bullseye customer is as you go through the process. It's not static from the jump.

Michael Margolis [00:15:41]:
No, from the jump. So we basically are building a hypothesis together as a team. Like, what's your best guess of who initially will be most likely to be receptive to this? And again, it's just a stake in the ground. Let's start somewhere. And that helps me also, if everybody in the group is agreed, like, yeah, that is definitely our target. If we were to present these ideas to those people, I'm very confident that those are the people who will want this. I'm like, okay, well, that sounds great. And so then after I do those interviews, you can't say, well, that wasn't really the right person.

Michael Margolis [00:16:11]:
I mean, we might learn that it's not. And that's fine. Like, that's awesome. Actually, it's a great result. But going into it, we thought it was. So you kind of heard it and you understood it, and now we have to decide what to do next. But we learned it.

Erin May [00:16:26]:
Cool. Let's dig into the process. So what's the first step?

Michael Margolis [00:16:29]:
So the first step is I work with the team and interview them. Basically, we meet for 45 minutes or so, and I talk to them about. To understand what are your key questions. So I want to define, like, what do you really need to learn? The shorthand for this is basically what's keeping you up at night. Because a lot of times founders will show up and there's just a bunch of different things that they're worrying about. And sometimes they have these very specific requests or things they're concerned about. But when we ask, like, what's keeping you up at night? They kind of back up a little bit and take a step back and think like, well, actually, what I'm really concerned about is we have to make this big decision about how we're going to build out logistics. And I don't know whether to, like, for this medication delivery system, is it something where it's just in time that it's like, we're going to deliver it as immediately, like, as fast as we possibly can get it to you, or like, you don't need it for a couple days, but you just need to know, like, it's in this very tight window.

Michael Margolis [00:17:16]:
Like, that's a really huge consideration when they're going to build out their logistics for delivery. And that's really what they're worried about. Like, okay, let's go answer that question. So that first conversation, and it's with the team, a lot of these things that I'm describing, it's kind of a team sport and it's important to have the conversation. So much of the value is the group discussing and debating it and all getting on the same page around these things. Like, yeah, so that's what we want to know. These are the key questions that we really want to answer. So that's step one.

Erin May [00:17:42]:
Great. You mentioned aligning on kind of what are the questions? I imagine you might have some facilitation techniques for if you're seeing a lack of alignment, trying to kind of get there.

Michael Margolis [00:17:53]:
Yeah. So it's a lot of reflecting it back to them and being very clear. Also, when you go into that meeting defining, like, who are the key people who need to. Who are the key stakeholders who kind of have some skin in this game. Right. So if it's. I don't need 40 people in that meeting in the whole company. Right.

Michael Margolis [00:18:08]:
To have the conversation. So it's who's the decider and the product owners, et cetera. So it's, you know, three, four people. And what it allows me to do, because I'm coming in kind of from the outside, is I can kind of just ask a lot of dumb questions. You know, explain that to me, tell me why that is. What do you need? What do you already know? What, what you know, what do you wish you knew? What are you going to do with that information? What do you, you know, that kind of thing. And so it's Pushing them to do that and to just, again, like we said, reflect back to them. Like, okay, so this is what I'm hearing you say is like, these are the things, if you knew this, that would be like the critical thing that would help you move forward, help you make this particular design decision, business decision, something that you need that's blocking you.

Michael Margolis [00:18:45]:
So then I also am kind of checking that it's a high priority because I only want to work on the things that are the most important to the team and not get lost in some other thing. Like we're worried about the colors of this thing. Like, okay, we're not doing that. Right.

Carol Guest [00:18:57]:
When you think about this team, a couple questions. One is, is it the same team the entire time? Is that important? And then how do you think about who is included in the team?

Michael Margolis [00:19:05]:
Yeah, so it's the same. It's that core team. So often when I'm working with a startup, so it's often either the CEO depends on the size of the company CEO or maybe the head of product or the product person owner for this thing. It's often, maybe if they have a designer. Sometimes they don't have a designer yet. Somebody who's engineering somebody, maybe if there's like a salesperson. So that would be kind of usually the core. Again, it depends on how big the company is.

Michael Margolis [00:19:30]:
Those get more specialized when it's for people like, they're doing everything, you know, what this looks like at an early stage startup. But I want those core people who are the deciders, who are really owning the decisions and in that meeting can make the decision and say, yes, this is the top thing that we really need to know. Because if we have that conversation and it's like, oh, we need to go talk to the CEO, it's not as useful. I want them all in that meeting. And you said, is it the same people throughout? It is very important that those people then participate throughout all the stages of the Bullseye Customer Sprint for the same reason. Those are the key people who are making these decisions who have to own this and in the end are going to have to go build it. I'm doing the research, but they're going to have to do the hard work later. And when we're doing the actual interviews, I'm happy to have everybody else dialing in.

Michael Margolis [00:20:15]:
I'm eager to have as many people, but it's important to define this is the core group that's really weighing in and their opinions kind of matter the most.

Erin May [00:20:23]:
So our step one is to agree on goals and key questions, how many goals and questions might we have when we've successfully completed step one?

Michael Margolis [00:20:31]:
It varies. Usually I'm trying to get it down to two or three big things. Again, these are usually like the very important things that they need to resolve. So it's not a giant list. So I'm pushing them to, as we first is just kind of develop the list and then to push them to prioritize. And you can go through various machinations to get people to prioritize, but usually it's pretty clear what the big things are that you need. And so we don't usually have to do too much fancy post its or spreadsheets. They're just like, yeah, if we didn't know that that's something that we have to decide.

Michael Margolis [00:21:02]:
We have to decide upfront. It's going to be hard to change it later. Like we have to. If it's something where they're like, whatever, we can do that. And then if we had to change it later, it would be no big deal. Okay, then it doesn't matter. Amazon calls us one way doors versus two way doors. Right.

Michael Margolis [00:21:15]:
So some of those kinds of things. So it's something where it's a big investment that we're going to make and a big commitment probably that it's going to require.

Erin May [00:21:22]:
Okay, so we know what our goals and questions are. We have our team in place. What's the next step?

Michael Margolis [00:21:27]:
So the next step is then defining who do we need to talk to. So I do what I call a bullseye exercise, which is this interview about these inclusion criteria, exclusion criteria and these triggers. And so I go through, and you can see it in the book and it's on the website, basically a long list of questions that I'm asking them about. And what I'm trying to do is tease out from them very concrete specific criteria that I can then take and translate into my screener questionnaire. Right. To find these people. So it's not just somebody who, you know, sees the doctor often. I'm like, no, no, no.

Michael Margolis [00:21:58]:
Like how often? Like in what timeframe? Like something that I can is fairly measurable and very concrete. Often what I find is what I hear back from teams over and over is just going through this conversation, both of these conversations, like we haven't even gotten to the research yet. But just hashing through this stuff as a team is super valuable to them because what happens is on a team, they develop kind of this shorthand of talking about their customers and right. We're selling life insurance to millennials. Like, okay, like that sounds fine. And everybody thinks that they know what they mean. And as I dig into it and just keep asking and asking, it becomes clear like, oh, well, not all millennials. It's kind of these millennials, or, oh, I thought you meant this.

Michael Margolis [00:22:38]:
Or it's actually this subgroup of the age and it's people who have this kind of lifestyle or they're not doing these jobs, whatever. And so it's really helpful to have them have those debates basically. And so it forces them to really think through it. Um, and over and over and over I hear back from people and like, oh, just going through that was really clarifying. Yeah, so this is again, that's team effort.

Erin May [00:23:00]:
And is that another 45 minute session? Do they have homework? They're just coming in and going live with the info?

Michael Margolis [00:23:05]:
Yeah, I usually do that as an. It's an hour. I basically just interview them and just push them and push them and push them. And what I'm doing is trying to tease out some of these very specifics about, like, what are related products that they might be using or not using. Right. So if it's a. We're developing a new delivery system, a delivery service, I want to make sure that they have probably used some other delivery. Like, have they had food delivered before? Because if they haven't even done that, then like the idea that they're going to have their, their medications delivered without having food delivered before, like, that's probably unlikely.

Michael Margolis [00:23:34]:
So there's some related things or maybe in their tech stack of whatever it is that this would fit in or not. Right. It's like, oh, they're already using that competitive product, then they probably are not going to use this one. Like, they're already locked in. So I'm pushing them, pushing them, pushing them to do this and then to force them to prioritize because again, it's very hard for people to set aside people. So these exclusions become really important. So I'm always pressing that.

Erin May [00:23:56]:
And then you get to the triggers at some point as well, and then you kind of have your profile from there. Are you looping them into the screener survey process or is that something you kind of do on your own?

Michael Margolis [00:24:07]:
Yeah, so often what I'm doing is I'm taking these very specific criteria, then I'll kind of like slide often sort of summarize back to them, like, here's what I heard and like, are we in agreement? This is. These are the criteria that really matter. And then I will translate that into a questionnaire for them. Usually. And it's. I'm showing it to them to, like, make sure. All along the way, I'm like, is this what we talked about? We're all in agreement. This is what we talked about.

Michael Margolis [00:24:29]:
And often doing it on user interviews. If I'm doing something that's very specific or hard to find, I'm doing it in other ways. Looking for, you know, where do these people kind of congregate online or congregate in person that I can go find them? Or we're doing snowball recruiting, some of their kinds of things. But I almost always have some kind of a screener questionnaire that I'm using still to just vet people and go through that. And a lot of the way that I'm approaching it is I'm trying to do this. When I'm doing the work with Google Ventures, my goal is to teach them how to do it. So all of this, that's part of the reason I'm doing this in this hopefully very transparent way. Like, here's the screener, here's what it looks like, here's how you write questions.

Michael Margolis [00:25:04]:
And, you know, these aren't leading questions. This is how I'm, you know, going through this. So the idea is that next time they can do it themselves and they have some of these templates and things that they can reuse themselves.

Carol Guest [00:25:13]:
Some of these questions that you're asking, like, do they use a related product or have they ever gotten delivery before? They seem, I think, clear in retrospect, but I would imagine would feel difficult to generate on the spot. So just to call out that in your book, it looks like you have a number of different things you could go through. Right? Target profile, new versus existing sector, scale of organization, lots of different places that might disqualify or qualify a customer.

Michael Margolis [00:25:38]:
Right. Because there's a lot of these things. Again, it becomes this shorthand where I just start. These are questions that I've collected over time. So, you know, you can imagine you're talking to a security company and they're developing new cybersecurity tools. And so they're like, you know, it's these kind of companies. It's enterprise companies. I'm like, okay, well, what size enterprise? Like, well, you know, and then they start arguing about how many employees.

Michael Margolis [00:25:57]:
And it's like, well, is it about employees or is it about how much data they have? Or is it about how many customers they have? Right. And I'm just pushing to figure out some of those things exactly, like scale the organization. Right. Is it about size? And budget. Like what are we actually talking about so that I can again, because you guys know, right? I'm trying to translate it. I know, like, oh, I'm gonna have to write a questionnaire out of this. So what, what's the number? What's the thing that I'm asking? That's gonna matter? I guess.

Erin May [00:26:21]:
One last question on screener surveys because our audience has made one or two before and you've made many before. Any pro tips on really nailing a great screener survey? Other than obviously doing that work you're talking about, about getting those criteria right in the first place. But any hacks or pro tips?

Michael Margolis [00:26:38]:
One thing I like to do is I usually will add in some question that's just an open ended. I'm just fishing for some qualitative input. Basically, you know, what's the hardest thing about doing this thing for you? Right. And that's not. And sometimes it helps me when I'm reviewing all the responses because it gives you a sense like all of these things when I'm, you know, when you're reviewing the responses that you get, you're looking for a, like a picture of these people that you're trying to tease out, like, is this really the right person? I'm trying to like draw a sketch of the person through these questions. And so, so some of those kind of questions help me. And it's also just helpful, like you end up with a hundred responses or whatever to answer like, what's the hard thing? And it's helpful for the team to see like, oh, nobody has mentioned the, the problem that we're trying to solve as the hard thing about this. Like, that's interesting, right? It's just kind of like a freebie survey question in there.

Michael Margolis [00:27:28]:
The other thing that I have been doing more and more and more is I'm actually leaning more on open ended questions because what I'm often trying to do is suss out like, is there some particular product or something that you do? And if I, you know, I could either give you a list and you can pick, but if you need to generate it on your own and if I can see whether the thing I want pops up. Right. What, what podcasts do you listen to? You're a researcher. What are your favorite research podcasts? Right. If I list awkward silences, then maybe they chose it, but if it's just blank, then I can see if they're generating it. Yeah, so that's the other thing. I've just been doing much more open ended questions actually.

Erin May [00:28:03]:
Yep, yep. Which can work well when you're only trying to find five people, depending on how many responses you get. And are these, is it always five people that you're looking for in this process? Is that kind of the magic number?

Michael Margolis [00:28:13]:
Yeah, yeah, the five people. Because the way I talk about the kind of the formula, it's 5 and 3 and 1. So it's five bullseye customers, three simple prototypes which we can describe and then do all these interviews in one day in a clump. And the five interviews is helpful, the five people, because I can do it in a day. Just logistically we can get through it. And I'm doing it so the whole team can watch. And by the end of that, you have data saturation. So people just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, I got it.

Michael Margolis [00:28:36]:
We're hearing the same thing over and over. I understand. Like, we've learned from this group, this experiment. Let's go do the next thing. So 5 seems to work pretty well.

Erin May [00:28:44]:
Awkward interruption. This episode of awkward silences, like every episode of awkward silences, is brought to you by user interviews.

Carol Guest [00:28:51]:
We know that finding participants for research is hard. User interviews is the fastest way to recruit targeted, high quality participants for any kind of research. We're not a testing platform. Instead we're fully focused on making sure you can get just in time insights for your product development, business strategy, marketing, and more.

Erin May [00:29:09]:
Go to userinterviews.com awkward to get your first three participants free.

Carol Guest [00:29:15]:
Because you mentioned open end questions, sort of a branch off of that. Have you considered or had any success using AI to find people? Like, if you're getting a bunch of open end inputs, have you looked at people who say this, or are you more looking for the detail and assessing it yourself?

Michael Margolis [00:29:32]:
Yeah, I mean, I actually find it really valuable to review it myself. So I learn a lot from the recruiting process. So being able to go through those responses and see it and to spot the patterns and to see what those answers are, I learn a lot. That informs me to prepare for the interview, actually to understand who are these people, kind of what's the context of the world of people who are listening, researchers listening to podcasts. If you get a couple hundred responses and I can sift through those, like that doesn't take very long for me to dump it all out into a spreadsheet and zip through it. It helps me get smarter than when I go into those conversations. So I do it kind of manually in terms of people using AI to answer the surveys that you can kind of see it. And I'm seeing It more.

Michael Margolis [00:30:14]:
It irritates the hell out of me. But you do see it. When I catch it, I try to just get rid of those people. And depending on how you write your questions, you can kind of pick that up.

Erin May [00:30:22]:
Something Carol's team's working on vetting out. Yeah, for sure.

Carol Guest [00:30:27]:
Yes, we will jump into user interviews specifically, but in a moment, in not so long, you'll be able to see at least if someone copy pasted a screener answer in user interviews. So you can start to assess that.

Michael Margolis [00:30:36]:
Yeah, for me it has been a bigger problem when I have done something where it's a screener like out to a different community, not through user intervals, quite frankly. And then I've just got a bunch of stuff, like I did one a little while ago where I got a bunch of stuff and ended up interviewing people. I'm like, oh, this was just bs like people had lied. This was just not right. And that was not through user interviews.

Carol Guest [00:30:57]:
But we're diving deep on screener surveys. Just to back up broadly, what are some of the. We love talking about recruitment, of course, user interviews, but what are some of the main methods that you find yourself using to recruit customers?

Michael Margolis [00:31:07]:
I rely pretty heavily on user interviews, quite frankly. The other things that I will do, like I was just talking to a company, I've been talking to a couple companies where what we're treating are essentially a couple rare diseases or a little less rare, but pretty unusual. So for those, what I'm doing is contacting the large, essentially patient support organizations, their foundations and things, and trying to work through them and get their help. So that's a little bit of a slower process, working through them and getting their help. So there's that kind of thing. If I'm looking for something where it's a company that's like, I did a lot of work with oncologists, so the company had contacts with oncologists. Right. They were in that world, they understood them.

Michael Margolis [00:31:46]:
So they would be able to get me started and start networking me through them. And either they were finding the people or helping me kind of start snowball. So going from one person to the other person. I think about that in terms of where do those groups aggregate in person or online and to try to find and target those. So there are national associations for anything you can possibly imagine as an example. So if you needed restaurant managers, I did a project a long time ago about POS systems in restaurants. If you contact the membership director for the National Organization of Restaurateurs or whatever, you can get through to them, those kinds of things. Just try to do it and just be very clear that I'm paying people, like I'm not.

Michael Margolis [00:32:24]:
Compensate you for your time and do it that way.

Erin May [00:32:27]:
So you found your five people. Are you usually finding a couple extras? Maybe talk a little bit about the scheduling you mentioned you don't kind of schedule them all back to back because you want to have a learning process. So how do you kind of get them in a schedule?

Michael Margolis [00:32:40]:
Yeah, so as I said, I try to do it in one day sometimes because of time zones. Like the group I just talked to today, they're in Europe. So what we'll do is I'm in the west coast, so we'll do like two mornings or one day, but try to clump them as much as possible. So it's these qualitative interviews that get clumped. And the reason for that is that with the whole team watching, we have a process. Like it's a one hour interview, half hour debrief and then kind of repeat that basically. And we have a whole structure for leading those debrief sessions. When we pack them together and clump them like that, it's just really easy to see what the takeaways are.

Michael Margolis [00:33:10]:
I haven't written a report in many, many years. We just kind of do that and extract that together and it just becomes really clear when you do it in a clump. So that's kind of how those get scheduled. And we. Yeah, if I'm doing it through user interviews, I just do it through that. You asked me whether I recruit backups. I typically don't. What I'm doing is through the course of the days leading up to the actual interview, I'm building confidence that the people whom I've recruited are actually engaged and are going to show up.

Michael Margolis [00:33:35]:
So let's say it's through interviews, they've confirmed that they're going to be there. And then I'll send them an NDA, my consent form, and see, like, do they respond to that? Do I have to nag them? Are they just ghosting me? Am I getting one word responses, sending reminders? So I'm just trying to see, like, are they there? Are they like a warm body that actually really seems engaged and is looking forward to this? And if they're not, then I will kind of cut my losses. And I also pay enough that people show up. So that's the other thing. This is a lot of times I work with companies and they're like, oh yeah, we have like, we're offering a $25 or $50 Starbucks card. Like, people are not predictably, consistently going to show up for that. You know, somebody gives them a better offer for lunch, they're going to go do that thing. So that gets people to show up pretty consistently.

Michael Margolis [00:34:15]:
So I have a good turnout rate. Every once in a while, something happens, somebody's kid gets sick or, you know, things happen. But even if I can get four to show up, then it's usually enough for the study for us to feel like, yeah, we kind of see what's going on here.

Erin May [00:34:27]:
All right, so we have our research questions, we have our Bullseye customer defined. We've recruited five people, and what are we going to do with them? You said you usually do remote sessions.

Michael Margolis [00:34:37]:
Yeah, so these are remote. The other key thing that we're doing is we're building these very, very simple prototypes. So again, what I'm trying to do is minimize the amount of work and the amount of energy that's going into whatever we're doing. So these interviews in the end are going to be these two part interviews. So the first part is kind of discovery about your life and your experience with specialty medications. Like, what have you done before? How has that worked? What services have worked or not? What's kind of blown up and gone haywire for you? You know, what do you worry about? When do you get this, all this kind of thing? And then the second half is looking at these prototypes. So to prepare those prototypes, what I do is I try to consistently have three different prototypes. And when I say prototype, these are essentially like the wrapper on a product.

Michael Margolis [00:35:17]:
So most often what that looks like is kind of a very fake landing page. It's like if you were to go to the website for this product that describes the value proposition, what does that look like? I mean, I'm showing it. It's basically a flat PDF. You can put it together in Google Slides. I make them sometimes, or Figma or whatever. It doesn't take a lot of time. But the key thing is what I will work through with the team is what are the key variables and kind of the attributes. So, for example, imagine like in the book I talk about a burrito shop.

Michael Margolis [00:35:45]:
So if the different value problems kind of the promise, one of them is about authenticity and one is about convenience, and one is all about awesome, fantastic ingredients you can imagine across these three versions. And then there are different ways to pay for it. Maybe one of them is about you have a subscription model and one of them is buy one, get one free, and one is just $10 per burrito or whatever. So you have these different variables and I'm laying out attributes and different variations of these possibilities and then creating three distinct recipes that represent the three possible burrito shops you might shop at. And again, this goes back to what I mentioned about being at Walmart and thinking about everything as a shopping process. So what I want to do is present these to people and have them then compare the pros and cons. So I don't want them to say like, oh, this is the one I need. I mean, it might be, but the goal isn't to pick a winner.

Michael Margolis [00:36:36]:
The goal is to pick apart these different features and elements and tease out what are the parts that are most important or most valuable to you or matter to you most and which are the parts that you really don't like. So that I can identify across these two recipes what's the best ideal thing that we should take forward into the next round of this. So developing those three prototypes. So I have these two part interviews where I'm again, this discovery part. And the second part is comparing pros and cons of these different, very simple prototypes.

Erin May [00:37:02]:
Great. You talked about the next round of this. How many rounds? As many as needed till you're done, or how many rounds do you usually go through?

Michael Margolis [00:37:08]:
What I'm trying to do is do enough that I can start answering those questions. And especially at a startup where they have enough confidence to do the next thing. And it's a startup, so they're very used to making decisions with not very much information. So sometimes it's two rounds, sometimes it's three. But at some point they're like, yeah, okay, we're good, we're going to go and do the next thing. And maybe the next thing is start to build something. Maybe the next thing is like, oh, now that we know this, we can do some larger survey across a larger sample to validate that thing that we found. So it looks like that will help us focus this other research effort that we were going to do instead of doing some gigantic thing.

Michael Margolis [00:37:45]:
Now we know who to go talk to or how to focus that. So it varies. But, and sometimes I've worked on things where the next thing is like, we're going to kill that project. Like, it becomes clear to us that there's not a lot of heat there. Or as we define the bullseye, we realize like, oh, that's the bullseye. And then when we go size that market that we've gotten it down to, of where, who it matters to, it's not really that big an opportunity. Not big enough an opportunity. And so we're gonna go focus our energy on something else.

Carol Guest [00:38:09]:
All right, so we've got our prototypes, we've got our five customers. Take us through the interview.

Michael Margolis [00:38:13]:
Yeah, so that's kind of what that interview looks like. We're describing building this arc and building rapport with people and digging into very concrete stories and examples about specialty medications, how and when they've done that, for how long they've been doing that, you know, just. And really getting stories is what I'm really trying to elicit. And that first half of that interview where I'm doing that. So it's roughly, you know, the first. It's an hour long interview. Roughly first half hour. Ish.

Michael Margolis [00:38:37]:
I'm trying to understand their attitudes and their expectations and their concerns and opinions about all of that, which provides the team. Partly they just learn a lot and understand who their customers are better, but partly it sets me up so that then they can understand the reactions to those prototypes. So then they can see, oh, now I see why they would react that way. And what I'm usually trying to get them to do is pay a lot more attention to what people have. Have actually done in the past or what they say they've done as opposed to that. Like, oh, yeah, I would totally do this. That doesn't at all line up with what you told me 10 minutes ago of the things you have or haven't done in the past. Suddenly you're all excited about this prototype.

Michael Margolis [00:39:16]:
I don't believe that. And so a lot of this is helping teams learn how to listen and showing them this different way of conducting this interview that doesn't look like selling. And your listeners will be familiar with this. Right. It's about this kind of humble inquiry and genuine curiosity and a lot of listening and less telling.

Erin May [00:39:33]:
All right, so you've gone through five of these, and then you've had the. You mentioned the debriefs that you have afterwards. So I imagine that's an important part of this. Yeah. What happens in there?

Michael Margolis [00:39:42]:
Yeah, so during the interview. So the way I'm doing this is I'm conducting interviews usually over zoom, and I'm live streaming it for the whole team. So it's not a whole bunch of heads in those interviews. It's just me one on one with the participants. And so they're kind of all in the back room watching the live stream. So typically, one of my design partners. So I get to work with Kate Aronowitz and Vanessa Cho for years and so they're helping kind of facilitate that the back room. So everybody's taking notes in a shared document and a big Google Doc.

Michael Margolis [00:40:07]:
And also we have a typically a Slack or a Google Meet chat going on. So there's also kind of those other questions people are having about like, wait, will they mention that thing? Like, what are they talking about? Or other GIF wars in the background. And it's also a way for them to pass questions to me. And then during the debrief, I have a structured spreadsheet that where I've basically pulled out the key things, not the questions I'm asking, but the key things that you wanted to make sure that you learned from each of these interviews. And so those are kind of the rows and then the columns are by participant. So in the debrief we're just like summarizing. You have all the big notes and then we're summarizing it down into the spreadsheet so that by the end of that you can kind of look across it and see what were the pros and cons of each of these prototypes and we can see kind of what stood out.

Carol Guest [00:40:48]:
I'd love to dig a little bit deeper on the Watch Party. I think if there's anything that's going to feel different to user researchers of this whole process, like it's going to be really the beginning, like the goals and the goal setting and finding the customers. And then this research is a team sport element. Right. So just a couple of questions. One, tactically you mentioned that you are using Zoom and then you're live streaming it. Any other sort of like setup, logistics tips that you have to make the live stream happen at the same time as the Zoom as the interview?

Michael Margolis [00:41:15]:
Yeah. So I'll set up that live stream. It's a private stream. The way I do it through Zoom is to YouTube, so it's private. So that's an important thing. So it's not just a public thing anybody can tune into. As I said, we set up all these documents ahead of time. So I have the Google Docs set up.

Michael Margolis [00:41:30]:
We have a format for that. All of these are in the on the site. Learn more faster and the Slack channel that's going on so that we can have those conversations. And I make sure that everybody joins 15 minutes before the first interview. So we have just kind of like get into your cockpit kind of prep time, which turns out to be very important because otherwise people show up for the first one and like, wait, I can't access the spreadsheet or I don't know how to use Google Docs or these different things that happen. And so we have learned that it's helpful to get everybody just kind of in their seat and make sure that they can access the live stream and everything before it starts. Because once it starts, like what I've described, like, I'm doing this hour interview, half hour, hour interview. You know, we have a little break for lunch, but like it's a train that's moving and so we need people kind of ready to go.

Michael Margolis [00:42:12]:
So I've assigned roles of who's taking notes for which interviews. So that's all set up ahead of. So they know, like, oh, I'm on. And we take turns doing that. We have people manually taking notes. It's not AI doing transcriptions because we want. It's a. We found it's a way to get people to kind of lean in and pay attention and really not be checking their email like they're busy doing this.

Michael Margolis [00:42:33]:
Yeah. So that's mostly what's going on. I have a little playlist that I. My geeky research playlist that I'm usually playing while we're waiting for participants to show up.

Carol Guest [00:42:41]:
Like music. Is that your site?

Michael Margolis [00:42:42]:
Yeah.

Carol Guest [00:42:43]:
That's fun.

Michael Margolis [00:42:44]:
It's on the site. There's a very nerdy research themed Spotify playlist that I play while we're waiting for partialism.

Erin May [00:42:50]:
Ah, I love it. I'm gonna, I think I'm gonna. I know what I'm listening to after this.

Carol Guest [00:42:54]:
That sounds very fun. Just any other recommendations or things that you think work well for engaging that group?

Michael Margolis [00:43:01]:
Yeah. The reason the watch party is so important to us, I guess I just wanna emphasize is having everybody in that session, watching it together, seeing it all together is a very, very powerful experience actually for the team. It's much different than, oh, it's recorded and yeah, maybe I'll watch it. Having that conversation and experiencing it together, hashing it out through that whole day is just like a massive hack for us because I don't write a report at the end of the day. What we do is everybody has sat through it and taken notes and talked about it. And then I send a Google form at the end that basically is like, okay, individually, separately, quietly enter, kind of what are your number one, number two, number three, big takeaways, any adjustments to who you think the bullseye customer is and you know, concerns next steps, this kind of thing. So we just, you know how Google form works. It just fills out a spreadsheet and then we have that and Captures it across the whole team and then we can kind of look at that.

Michael Margolis [00:43:52]:
And the decider typically leads that conversation. And just you can see the patterns are very clear. There's usually a lot of consensus. There's an enormous amount of alignment about what did we actually learn, and pretty good fodder for discussion about, like, what are we going to do next? So this is what we've learned. And I don't need to go write a report. Like, you've all seen it. I don't need to digest it for you or explain what's happened. Like, oh, there was this really cool story and she told us about her kid, like, whatever, you know.

Michael Margolis [00:44:18]:
Right. We talked to Betsy and everybody's like, oh, yeah, Betsy, that was awesome. So that watch party is this very powerful event where we can bring together, like, here's your ideal hypothesis of you think who the customer is, of what you think these product concepts are, and we're going to mash it all together in these interviews and you're going to watch it and have your big takeaways, and you'll be aligned about what's next.

Carol Guest [00:44:37]:
The other thing you mentioned in the book that I just loved was also the idea of having your team make a prediction and then be able to compare that after.

Michael Margolis [00:44:44]:
Yeah. So we do that. There's a kind of a prep meeting I do the day before the watch party where I'm explaining kind of a lot of the stuff, like how to listen, what your jobs are going to be confirming and just clarifying for everybody. Like, here's my understanding what the goals are. Like before I do the interview is this. This is really what we still want. Right. To make sure I can tweak the interview the right way.

Michael Margolis [00:45:02]:
And like you said, part of that is. Yeah. Get everybody to predict with a very specifically, like, what do you really think is going to happen here? What are you going to learn? And so that's very valuable for us afterwards when there's hindsight bias and people like, oh, we kind of knew this was sort of obvious. Like, well, maybe it's obvious now, but what you said yesterday was very different, what you thought was going to happen. Or maybe it's not. Maybe you were all correct, but we found that that's a great exercise. Yeah. Is to have everybody make those predictions fun.

Erin May [00:45:27]:
Someone get bragging rights if they were right.

Carol Guest [00:45:28]:
Or.

Erin May [00:45:29]:
I know it's not about that. It's about learning. Yeah.

Michael Margolis [00:45:31]:
I mean, that's the whole goal, is for everybody to learn and to be aligned. And so it's not about shaming anybody.

Erin May [00:45:37]:
Right, right.

Michael Margolis [00:45:37]:
Yeah. We're just learning together and figuring it out, which is an important part of like the, I don't know, the feeling you want to encourage in that session.

Erin May [00:45:44]:
Yeah, for sure, for sure. All right, well, we only have a few minutes left, but I know we wanted to talk about, just based on your many years and many clients you get to work with on a day to day basis, the depth of experience you have there, what's one trend that's sort of happening right now that you are really interested in? Have a hot take about something that you think would be good to cover for just a minute or two.

Michael Margolis [00:46:07]:
Something I have a hot take about. I guess I'm seeing more and more AI research tools. So I guess one hot take I have is the trend towards a development of some of these like AI interviewer things. I'm not excited about because what I'm, as you can tell from the way I talk about this, what I have found is the most valuable thing is this watch party. Right. You have to have that. I'm trying to get people into contact with their customers. I want them to see it.

Michael Margolis [00:46:32]:
I want them to experience. The goofy way I describe this is like I'm the tour guide. Like I want them to come and see these folks. And so I worry with some of these tools that are, it's like one more excuse or reason somebody might not actually have that interaction. Right. You like send out your agent to go do it and come back and give you the results. It's just not. I don't believe it's the same impact.

Michael Margolis [00:46:54]:
I'm sure there are cases where it's a great thing to do, but for the work that I'm doing, it makes me a little sad.

Erin May [00:46:59]:
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And no is a perfectly acceptable answer. Is there anywhere where AI has been useful to you in the kind of work that you're doing?

Michael Margolis [00:47:08]:
For me, not yet. I'm not generating huge amounts of data that I'm analyzing or synthesizing, you know, so I don't have Giant Transcript. The work that I'm doing isn't. It's not relevant. There a place where I'm interested in exploring some more is using it to develop some of these prototypes. So if there's a way, and I haven't done that and gotten good at that yet, but people are more and more using tools to do that. And so being able to expedite the creation of those three recipes, I'm very eager to kind of play experiment with that a little Bit the core of those. Creating those prototypes is really a writing exercise more than anything, like, being very crisp and clear as a team.

Michael Margolis [00:47:43]:
Like, actually, what is this or isn't it? So I'm curious to play with that and see how well I can get that to work.

Erin May [00:47:49]:
All right. Rapid Fire section. Favorite interview question. And you made this distinction before, but a question you like to ask in an interview, not a learning objective, right?

Michael Margolis [00:47:57]:
Yeah. So my favorite thing that I find is very powerful is to do comparisons. Right. I've kind of alluded to this a lot of different times, but getting people to either compare two different concepts or prototypes or something that you're doing now versus how you used to do it. Yeah. So getting people to talk about one thing is much more limited than when they can start comparing and contrasting different ideas and different times and different experiences that they've had, different stories. And so I find that that's very powerful. I love doing comparisons.

Erin May [00:48:25]:
Yeah. I imagine that pulls out emotion, too, right?

Michael Margolis [00:48:28]:
Yeah, it just highlights things in a very different way. Things come into relief, and you can just see actually which parts of this were important and which weren't. Because if you're just looking at one thing, they might comment on a lot of stuff, and once they start comparing, it's what they say and which things they leave out are both really interesting.

Carol Guest [00:48:43]:
What are your top two to three books that you most recommend to others?

Michael Margolis [00:48:47]:
So one of my favorite books that I recommend to a lot of, especially to junior or newer researchers, is a book by Greg Bernstein called Research Practice. It's less of a how to do research. It's more to how to be a researcher. And so it's like having this community of really expert, experienced researchers kind of in your pocket. And so I'm a big fan of that. Other resources I look at, Lenny's podcast is a really great source for me. I've learned a huge amount from that. And I think for researchers, partly it's just a lot of great guests, partly I think it's a good way to get some insight into your product managers and into your stakeholders to understand kind of how they think about how they approach what they worry about.

Michael Margolis [00:49:22]:
So those are two that I'd offer up.

Erin May [00:49:24]:
Fantastic. And then lastly, where can folks find you? Are you on LinkedIn or anything else? Yep.

Michael Margolis [00:49:29]:
Yeah. So LinkedIn is a great place to find me. Learnmorefaster.com is where the book and all the materials and everything is there. And if you and michaelarnmorefaster.com, you can just send me as you're trying this and have reactions to some of this. Just I'd love to hear your stories. Let me know how it's going, what makes sense, what doesn't make sense. If you're not at a startup, how are you applying it? What have you learned? So yeah, those are the best ways to reach me.

Erin May [00:49:51]:
Awesome. We're right at time. Perfect. Thank you so much, Michael. It was wonderful to have you here today.

Michael Margolis [00:49:56]:
Thank you. I really appreciate appreciate. It's great to get to talk to you guys.

Erin May [00:50:05]:
Thanks for listening to Awkward Silences brought to you by User Interviews Theme music by Fragile Gang hi there Awkward Silences listener. Thanks for listening. If you like what you heard, we always appreciate a rating or review on your podcast app of choice.

Carol Guest [00:50:30]:
We'd also love to hear from you with feedback, guest topics or ideas so that we can improve your podcast listening experience. We're running a quick survey so you can share your thoughts on what you like about the show, which episodes you like best, which subjects you'd like to hear more about, which stuff you're sick of, and more just about you, the fans that have kept us on the air for the past five years.

Erin May [00:50:48]:
We know surveys usually suck. See episode 21 with Erica hall for more on that. But this one's quick and useful, we promise. Thanks for helping us make this the best podcast it can be. You can find the survey link in the episode description of any episode or head on over to userinterviews.com awkwardsurvey.