Getting face-to-face in Texas (y'all).

Nothing important happens in the office. NIHITO. An acronym coined by Pragmatic Marketing, one of the more established product methodologies, it’s a concept most of us in Product and Marketing who’ve been around the block should already have deeply engrained in our cores, and likely still don’t do enough of.

If you are in either of these discliplines, particularly in a Scale-Up stage business, or if you are just coming out of a post-pandemic remote-work daze… I remind and encourage you to take it literally.

Two weeks ago I had some very visceral reminders of why this is true, when given the opportunity to drop into Houston for one leg of ZayZoon 's “Payday: RV there yet?” RV-tour across America in a branded wage wagon. As the world reopens and as our core product, Earned Wage Access, becomes a better-known concept available to more workers, we figured "what better time than now to go out and visit a handful of strategic partners".?

On this journey we’re seeing independent payroll service providers, PEOs, and many of the teams selling and running the most prolific payroll platforms in the world as they think about how to supplement their core offerings and bring additional value to their clients — the backbone of the economy: small and medium sized employers.?

We also had the privilege of being able to visit numerous business worksites and chat with employees directly. Some of them knew exactly who we were when we walked in. Others didn’t know who we were, or that a service like ours was even available to them. We visited, chatted with, and some cases broke bread with shift supervisors, location managers, and other staff of retail establishments like Pet Supplies Plus a (you guessed it) pet supplies store in Houston, several full service restaurants like First Watch, Aspire2B’s Starbucks location at City Place by the Exxon campus, the central office of over 30 Sports Clips hair salons managed by long-time client Syma Ventures / RECS Clips.

I had expected to learn more from these in-person visits than we do from our remote discovery calls. Sure enough, the amount we learned was astronomical.

There is a depth and level of authenticity in conversations when you have them face-to-face, and we learned things that simply would not have been learnable over a phone call, video conference, or screen-share. This is not news. I get it. But as I reflect on why that experience was so rich, here’s what I found.

The 6 reasons to get out of the office and watch customers use your product:

1. When you are in person you experience parts of the journey you don’t think about often, or ever (ie. design bugs).

For us, this took the form of getting to experience and observe what happens with our customers outside of our software flows - for instance, witnessing how the message gets shared, and sadly, how often it doesn’t get shared. We believe our message is clear, but it’s not. We also know that this message-sharing is key to adoption, but seeing it in action really sheds light on the mechanics of a key part of the experience that is outside of our software product.?

Seeing the friction that occurs before people even get started was really enlightening. Then, for some of the things we require in onboarding, seeing what happens in the physical world that manifests in funnel drop-off (e.g. I’ve gotta go to the back room to get my ID card and don’t have time right now) was enlightening. We assume drop-off is a reflection of intent, but often it’s a reflection of circumstance. We have data and analytics tooling out the wazoo (some of the best) but it does not cover these experiences.

2. You develop an understanding of the nuances between the players in your ecosystem and what they care about.

And you can use this understanding of persona to better your product. It did not take too many customer visits to begin to see patterns in how they run, and to develop an intuition for what challenges are unique challenges (hint: n-of-1, real corner cases), which ones are nuances of specific flows people have to go through, and which are more pervasive/universal issues. Most importantly, you uncover persona traits that I firmly believe you just wouldn’t get insight into in a time-boxed meeting. On our trip we uncovered needs for a key player in our ecosystem that we (I) had completely glossed over so far in our product experience, and we’re excited to work on new ways to serve them more precisely.

3. You get insight into which of the smaller things you’ve been putting on the back-burner will make the most difference.

Prioritization at a micro level, is often subjective, particularly when it comes to optimizing user flows in the absence of deep user research. Seeing your product out in the world even just a handful of times will bubble up the most important things you’ve been thinking about, but not actioning. For instance we learned that “signing up through the mobile app” is a flow we need to focus on improving because when an employee tells their colleague about ZayZoon (before the digital interaction with us even begins), the first thing that colleague often does is download the app.

4. You get insight into what known bugs are being faced by real-world customers and can't be ignored.

If you have a product/service amenable to dog-fooding, you can and should do it that way but even that is not foolproof. There can be nuances in flows that change the experience(s) of those interacting with your product that you never get to experience when you dog-food (e.g. how are your customers onboarded? How do they discover your product? What happens when they leave?). The real world shines a bright light on these experiences and shows you what’s not working. If you have multiple flows that are contextual in nature then try to go and see them all.

These are all great and true, but two MOST impactful reasons to get out of the office are:

5. You uncover new opportunities that weren’t on your radar — when you zoom out, regardless of whether you are working on a product with product market fit or new products, interacting with real people face to face uncovers opportunities that just don’t surface otherwise. For instance, we were able to uncover a new persona that is a critical enabler of our product and frankly one that we knew existed, but heavily under indexed for in the design and delivery of our product. ?

6. Your motivation to help is simply higher in-person — we left our key partner meetings pumped about their business, and excited to not only help them achieve their goals but to work with them bringing new and incredible products to our mutual customers that can really impact their businesses, livelihoods and happiness of their employees. The motivation is stronger with a personal connection established in-person, and luckily I feel like it’s a wave we can continue to ride.

At the end of the day...

None of what we learned was earth-shattering, It usually isn’t. Nor should it be. A clear strategy is clear because once it's known, it’s painfully simple and obvious. Same with the insights from these types of initiatives. That being said, most of them are actionable, and now we can be confident that those actions will be impactful.

I’m so happy I work at a company that not only does stuff like this, but brings everyone along for the ride (literally). Every single member of the ZayZoon team has been invited to join the journey, regardless of what team they sit on and that functional cross-talk and extreme context awareness is at the heart of our insane growth these last several months. Kudos to Tate Hackert (Co-Founder, President, Visionary, Air Guitar Master) for the idea, and to the countless folks on the team involved in the execution.

So.. are we there yet? Nope. Not even half-way.?

I hope I can join Tate Hackert and Tanner Hiltz on another leg before this once-in-a-lifetime road trip comes to an end. In the meantime, if you’re in the Houston area, get your pet food at Pet Supplies Plus (Braes Heights), your haircuts at Sports Clips Haircuts , your breakfast at First Watch Restaurants , your carpets at Carpet Giant INC and your payroll services at AllianceHCM or one of many other US-based partners that offer ZayZoon.

To those I met — thank you all for your time, it was a pleasure meeting you and well worth the flight down..

… oh and I only caught myself saying “Y’all” once in real life. It was in earnest.. ..and there’s a 60% chance it landed without anyone from my team noticing.???