At Centercode we believe in technology's ability to make everyone's life better. In the Delta Huddle Podcast, we bring together industry experts and visionaries to share their insights about building products and bringing them to market.
We're excited to announce the next episode of the Delta Huddle podcast! Joining Centercode’s VP of Marketing Chris Rader and Technical Trainer Stefan Stenroos to discuss how to grow an internal beta program is Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights at Trimble Inc.
On previous episodes of the podcast, we’ve talked to industry experts on how to build a program, who to recruit, and how testing has evolved over time. This episode is all about taking it to the next level. Once you’ve established a program and built momentum, how do you get other teams to see the value in user testing? And more importantly, how do you get it to go viral, so that user testing happens everywhere across your organization?
In this episode:
- How user testing and support teams are fundamentally connected
- The value of user testing as a high-quality layer between customers and stakeholders
- Challenges in recession and beta testing in a high-stakes industry
- Customer stories and unique feedback
- Using KPIs, metrics, and "roadshows" to grow awareness of beta testing
- How to scale a beta program within a company using Centercode
- Maintaining a testing program's "internal brand"
- Grow effectively by creating a need for more resources first
- Key KPIs and strategies for beta program success
About Our Guest:
Alex Larsen is the Manager of Product and Customer Insights at Trimble Inc. With over 10 years of experience in building beta programs in a primarily B2B capacity, Alex has led high performing teams in executing tests, removing roadblocks to success, and creating a thriving, engaged community of engaged customer testers. Alex is currently leading Trimble's Product and Customer Insights team, which manages user testing programs for stakeholders across Trimble's global footprint of supported products and industries, from commercial trucking to 3D modeling to farming and beyond.
Alex and his team are finding new ways to bring new value to new groups every day. With a passion for technology on the cutting edge, Alex explores new solutions and innovation with other user testing professionals. When he's not changing diapers and watching Bluey, he loves playing hockey and disc golf. Alex lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota with his wife and two children.
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Podcast Transcript:
00:00:00
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Coming up on this episode of the Delta Huddle podcast.
00:00:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
If you want a lesson on how to scale a beta program, you just heard the quick rundown of it. That was exactly the things you do to scale up.
00:00:15
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Well, I'm Stefan Stenroos and this is the Delta Huddle podcast by Centercode. On previous episodes of the podcast we've had industry experts come in and talk about all aspects of beta testing, whether that's starting a program, recruiting the right users who to bring in for your program, and even just looking at user testing throughout the year. Today's episode is all about bringing that to the next level.
00:00:38
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Once you've established your program and got some momentum, how do you make other teams see the value in your program? And more importantly, how do you get it so that your beta program goes viral so that everyone across your organization is getting value out of testing? Joining me and Chris Rader to discuss how to make that happen is Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights at Trimble.
00:01:02
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Alex brings over a decade of experience in the user testing field. Everything from the start and user testing all the way up to scaling programs and the challenges of testing in his particular field and how he's actually overcome those challenges like you heard in our clip, there's a ton of wisdom packed into this podcast. Like Chris said, if you're looking for a rundown on how to scale a beta program, this is the podcast episode for you.
00:01:29
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
And if you just want to learn how to do everything well at scale, Alex has tons and tons of wisdom to share with you. Without further ado, let's discover how to make a beta program go viral with Alex Larsen. So, to kick things off, can you actually tell us more about Trimble, what you guys do over there and how you got started in user testing?
00:01:50
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, so Trimble does a little of everything. If it's if you're involved in heavy industry of almost any kind, there's a good chance you use Trimble technology. So, Trimble is a global corporation that a lot of people haven't heard of. But we build technology that supports almost every, I guess, heavy industry. So construction, rail, transportation, so like, big rigs, tractor trailers, commercial trucking design, 3D modeling, civil construction automation, autonomous vehicles.
00:02:33
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Trimble is building software that sits right in the middle of all of that. And our mission is creating a software platform where if you're in any of those industries, you can subscribe to some element of the Trimble platform to help you do your job. So it's really all over the board. I have lived… my team and I have lived in the transportation division of Trimble since I started there four years ago.
00:03:01
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so we've really been focusing on B2B user testing in the transportation space. So we're developing hardware and software for the commercial trucking industry. Commercial drivers use Trimble tablets and software in the cab to track their hours of service, navigate from place to place with Trimble maps and much, much more. Translate all the data coming off of the vehicle bus, the engine, the engine data coming off the vehicle.
00:03:33
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
All of that is transmitted through the cloud, through Trimble devices so that the folks in their back office can use it to run their business more efficiently. So we were in transportation, I'll get to my origin in a second. We were in transportation for the last four years and earlier this year I made a pitch to some of our leadership that after working with some of the other sectors and realizing that I think that there's an easy onramp to supporting beta support for the whole company in any sector, any any line of work, any industry can benefit from this practice.
00:04:14
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And I can use Centercode to do that, watch me do it. So I did that with a few different teams around Trimble just kind of on my own. And then I asked leadership. I said, Is there a chance that we can just make my team kind of sit centrally within Trimble and support all of these industries with this practice?
00:04:35
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So kind of moving us from transportation experts to user testing experts. And they liked the idea. And as of January 1st, we moved from being the transportation beta team to being the Trimble product and customer insights team. So now we sit centrally in what's called the platform team and we offer alpha, beta, user testing services to any and all product teams across the Trimble-verse.
00:05:08
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And we're swamped right now. There's a lot of people that want to get in on this and there's no shortage of opportunities. So it's an exciting place to be. I'm learning a lot about all the different Trimble divisions, what they do, trying to put it all in context. In my brain, it's maybe too much, so I need to keep growing the team, growing the program and allow people to specialize maybe a little bit as we expand into these other sectors, these other industries.
00:05:41
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But we're getting there. We're building it's the biggest program I've ever run. I got my start in the home security industry, so I worked for a company called Alarm.com, who I believe is still a Centercode subscriber. I keep up with some of the folks over there.
00:05:59
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yep.
00:06:00
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And it's a similar story to maybe what others have said previously and in other stories that I've heard is I started in tech support and I was frontline tech support and we were a very small team at what was then a startup, probably 120 employees and, one day my boss asked me to start doing some testing of new products at my desk because we would get a PDF with a product overview when a new product was launching and it was like, Yeah, we built this and launched it.
00:06:39:05 - 00:06:44:12
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Also, you're going to get calls on it soon. So here's a PDF with instructions on how it's supposed to work.
00:06:44
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Be prepared.
00:06:46
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Right? Exactly. Yeah. This is this product, by the way, we launched it. If you have questions, let me know. But here's the overview pdf and that's what we would do. That was our launch process at the time. And everyone wore so many different hats that my boss was like, okay, here, you know, you're going to test these products out while they're being developed at your desk and let us know, you know, what we think we're going to get calls about.
00:07:12
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so I started by doing that. I started, you know, working with our product teams to be like, Hey, can I get an extra copy of whatever you're making so I can try it out and try to figure out what customers are going to call about so we can document it. And then I did that for probably a year and a half, two years, and then at a loud party at a company retreat.
00:07:34
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
The CTO, I think it was the CTO, one of the software heads, leaned over to my boss in a conversation we were having and said, We need a beta program and it's like yelling over the music. And I was standing right there and my boss just kind of turns to me and goes, You want to do that? You know, I was like, Sure, let's do it.
00:08:01
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so, you know, 11 years later, here we are.
00:08:08
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
What a party conversation. Yeah, you should really do a beta.
00:08:12
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Oh, well, this is the kind of guy that would love to talk about, you know, process gaps at a party. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was fun, but that's how I got my start. And I built a program at Alarm.com. The first thing I did was look up Centercode and because I needed to, I was spending way too much time sending emails and managing spreadsheets and realized that I could do the work of four people with, with the aid of Centercode.
00:08:49
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And then I grew my team. I had a teammate that I hired under me, and we worked together to build that program up. And then Trimble had, Trimble I found and I met through a Centercode user conference, and it turns out that they also are in my hometown here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/Saint Paul.
00:09:16
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And they had at the time an eight person team managing their beta program. And I was like, I want to get in on that. So I kind of made friends with them and they had an opening on the team and I came over and then I, after about six months as a project manager on the Beta team, I applied for and was selected for the manager position.
00:09:42
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So I've been doing that ever since.
00:09:46
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
A great story. I love the play of that. We got the dogfooding. And actually when they dropped off the product at your desk, like what do they call that? Just like learning the product.
00:10:00
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, I, I don't know what we called it kind of, it was just kind of internal beta I guess was what we called it at the time. We did a lot of that. The products were mainly… it was, it was mostly a mobile app, but it was home security technology. So you've got a security panel in there and Alarm.com makes a chip that goes in the panel that allows you to control it from your phone so you can retrofit old security systems.
00:10:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
New security systems have a lot of that built in and you can do a lot of cool stuff. You can do thermostat control, you could do lock control. You could, you know, manage all your home automation in addition to just arming and disarming the system. They also did cameras and video and motion detection and all of that. So there's a lot of stuff that was fairly dogfoodable you could play around with at your desk.
00:10:57
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It's a consumer facing product. You could put your consumer hat on. And we were pretty successful with a dogfooding program there. We can't do as much dogfooding at Trimble because we're not all professional surveyors, professional civil engineers. We're not, we don't have a lot of the expertise and equipment that our folks in the field have.
00:11:22
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so that's what makes beta tests so valuable for us.
00:11:25
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
It's definitely a challenge for a lot of B2B places like they just don't have that use case. For example, at Centercode, our HR team isn't running beta tests, so them testing out a tool to run tests isn't necessarily super beneficial in your case. They can't even do it because they don't have the equipment to do it.
00:11:48
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I don't have a CDL. All right. So I can't hop in an 18 wheeler and let's see how well our hours of service automation works for you. I don't really have the perspective to let you know.
00:12:03
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah.
00:12:04
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
I thought this is something that everyone just did kind of every day, you know, at lunch or whatever. Just hop in the 18 wheeler and whatnot. Go ahead, Chris. Sorry to interrupt you.
00:12:12
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
No, no, no problem. I love the informality of it. It's similar to, you know, Luke, our CEO’s stories. I mean, just came to his desk and said, you know, you got to run a beta. It's like, what the what is that? And that's the same case for you. Someone comes to you and says, here, I need you to do your job better by learning this product.
00:12:32
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Right. Or be able to do your job because you know this product and it's so informal, there's not like a standard process. I'm sure the feedback channel for you, giving feedback on the product wasn't necessarily a big thing. Maybe you gave feedback to your boss or said, Oh man, this is not good or that's great or anything like that.
00:12:50
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But it was a word doc, right? So I would, you know, a word doc for every product that I tested and it would have, you know, some iteration of, of fix, improve, promote in a word doc. So that was it. And I would just distribute it to my boss. And we had what's called a knowledge base which was an email folder in outlook that we all had access to of important emails.
00:13:22
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And that was, that was our wiki, that was our knowledge base. You'd go and look through the outlook folder that had all the important emails that the for.
00:13:32
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Not even an intranet just like yeah, just now have access to the folder and click through there and you'll find it eventually.
00:13:38
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It's startup stuff right. It's fun. You don't always have software solutions for everything. Sometimes you start with an email folder and you know, now I'm sure they've got an incredible searchable, tangible database of knowledge, but it started as an email folder.
00:13:58
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Mm hmm. Yeah. I love the start, too, of support. We have a lot of people that start in support. I think the customer interaction tends to be like oh this, this person's interacting with customers. So they could probably interact with customers during data time. You don't always want engineers interacting with customers and in a lot of cases, but.
00:14:19
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
You get the right mix of technical know how and the ability to talk technically about anything or your product with the approachability of working with customers. So it's a great place to start and it's something I draw on a lot and it's something I still feel really passionately about. I think if I weren't in beta testing, if I weren't in this field, I would probably try to manage support centers somewhere because I still feel really strongly about how support should be done.
00:14:53
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so I think that would be my, my, my alter ego if I wasn't in this line of work.
00:15:01
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah, it's definitely a great start. I've actually seen a handful of companies sprout from the support team.
00:15:08
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I've recruited for my team heavily from support. So when, when we have openings, I do really like to give people from support a chance to see if this is a place they want to move up to. And they always impressed me with their because beta in many ways is about it's beneficial to support. You're kind of upstream of support and you're trying to make supports job easier so they know what it's like when when you don't have user feedback and when users are blindsided by things, they know what that feels like and it's very not fun and they're extra motivated to run great beta projects to prevent that experience for someone else who's
00:15:56
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
in their shoes or who's in, you know, the role that they formerly inhabited. Yeah. So I think that the support people are motivated by their past experience to run great beta projects and get as much feedback as we can before we put that product into support hands to carry forward.
00:16:15
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah, I mean I joked about being prepared thing like someone drops off a product at your desk, you need to learn it so you can support those people. It's the same thing when you get the support team to listen to customers beforehand, right? So the idea is that when you do get calls, when you do get emails, when you get problems that come through having a previous record of what things are not fixed because not everything is going to get fixed in the beta.
00:16:43
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
We know that pretty well. Having something that's a knowledge base article, having something that is a course, a call script to work around, something to give customers say, hey, we understand this problem, here's how you get around it. Or yeah, we're working on that. It's actively in development. Like you just have a good firsthand knowledge of what's going on in development, the problems that you're encountering to better help those customers.
00:17:06
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, two of the big things, two of the big initiatives at both companies I've worked at has been to create a known issues database that is searchable for support and that gets updated when new builds, new releases drop to commercial release, commercial availability. There's usually a whole, you know, a slew of known issues that get uploaded to that database when that happens.
00:17:36
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And then we actually have a whole JIRA project devoted to it. And so we have, you know, filtering set up and it's actually, it's changed the vocabulary in the support teams at both companies where now you're referring to specific non issue numbers and these are all coming out of there discovered in beta much of the time.
00:17:58
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Support can also discover them if we missed them in beta and then report them themselves. And that just does so much for a support department to just have a shared understanding of what issues are expected. A common language around workarounds like what you're allowed to tell the customer about that issue, how to resolve it and when we expect it to be fixed, you know, like what build we expect the fix in and communicate all of that in one place.
00:18:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And it makes those calls so much less scary, so much more approachable.
00:18:35
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Actually we had that at WD, when I worked at WD we had it with our list of beta issues that came through with. We'd have the ones that needed to get fixed that dev would prioritize as before to the next release and the handful of tickets that we knew were not going to be fixed. So we would send those off to our support team, which would then create that KnowledgeBase article saying, here's the known issue, because most people are going to hit Google, They're going to go throw in a search of, here's my problem or here's what's happening.
00:19:07
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
And they land on that page versus picking up a phone and calling someone, which again, the call centers cost a decent amount at scale. So that was just like practice. We'd have a status field inside our issue tracking system that said, okay, this is a known issue. We need to create a Knowledge Base article. This is an issue that needs to get prioritized by the dev team.
00:19:29
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
This one's going to be fixed in this release and that release. And the idea was that you collect feedback and it's not an endless hole of information. It's that you have something, something you take action on for every, every ticket that comes through. And that's the value, right? Because you think of data and you say like, oh, it's going to we're going to fix those things.
00:19:49
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
That's the only value I get, right? It's like, No, you're going to fix those things. And yeah, you're going to save money because you fix those things. But then we're going to get even more value by taking action on this other stuff they were not able to address. And it's just that's the compounding value of these issues that you collect inside data from customers from testers.
00:20:11
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah. Yeah. It all adds up. And I think part of it that gets overlooked sometimes is just the impression that the customer gets around your preparedness. So when they call in an issue and you say, Yes, we're aware of that, we have it documented, here's the documentation around the solution, I'll send you a copy of of the workaround that is such a better experience and such a better reflection on your company than, oh, let's let's go through the troubleshoot.
00:20:43
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It takes an hour of troubleshooting only for me to escalate it and then someone tells me, Oh yeah, that's a known issue. We're aware of that. Yeah. Big waste of time. And but the last thing people want when they call support, which they already don't want to do, is to have their time wasted with troubleshooting steps that they didn't need to undertake.
00:21:03
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So I would love it if I could like if my internet wasn't working and I called my ISP and just one time they said like, Oh yeah, there's there's an issue going on, we know about it and we'll have it resolved in like 3 hours as opposed to you're like, All right, let's start by rebooting your router, which have already done right.
00:21:24
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So like.
00:21:24
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Yeah.
00:21:25
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
That's, that's maybe the experience to avoid. But I would be very impressed if my ISP was just straight up with me like, oh yeah, this is an issue. We're aware of it. Here's the workaround, here's how you can get back online today or here's when we expect to resolve it. That would be really impressive.
00:21:42
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
And that dynamic of proactive versus reactive. Right. And I kind of like what you've been saying is that beta testing really puts you in that proactive state of mind where it's like we're really going to try to catch these things or they, you know, reach the customer and then the customer does all this. I can't count how many times I've tried to go to some forum somewhere that's hosted by a company.
00:22:04
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
But, you know, most of it is just users going in and saying, I had an issue. And it's like, well, did you try turning it on and off? You know? And if you work in tech, turning on and off is like, yeah, that was like steps ago. Yeah. But I also heard something kind of interesting recently. When you're a podcast host, you inevitably start listening to a bazillion podcasts or to be a better podcast host.
00:22:24
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
But it was Ginni Rometty who was the CEO of IBM for about eight years. She was talking about just reducing layers between teams in a company and how things moved faster and there were better results overall just by getting teams kind of closer to each other and reducing the amount of steps to get things done. And one thing that you touched on that I thought was really interesting, it was like when you have these programs in place, kind of end up being the customer advocate and you reduce those layers between, you know, here's the product team or here's the dev team ideating and here's the customers, you're going to be impacted.
00:22:59
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
I thought that was something really interesting that you brought up. It's like, Hey, we can actually reduce the distance between the person and the 18 wheeler and the person who's developing this tablet, etc..
00:23:09
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, it's interesting. We reduce the layers by adding a layer like we, you know, it in, in maybe an ideal world with where everyone had infinite time, the products or the product folks or the devs would, would directly reach out to the drivers and be like, how are you experiencing the product that I own? But they don't have infinite time and they don't have infinite capacity and energy.
00:23:34
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So our team comes in as a middle layer and does a bit of the translation of, you know, here's technical release notes, here's how it's going to impact you, or here's how we expect it to impact you. Does that track with your experience, does that track with your expectations? Is that's where we're trying to move our program away from just bug detection and preparing support for the calls that they're going to get and moving more towards getting in sync with the users sentiment about the product, about the company, what makes them more or less likely to adopt a feature, what makes them more or less likely to buy ultimately, because we're, you know, in the
00:24:21
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
business of making money, I think we forget sometimes that that's like the core goal if you want to make people happy, but you also want them to buy your stuff. So I'm starting to think more, more along the lines of maybe that's because everyone's talking about a recession all the time and it's like recession, recession, recession.
00:24:40
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Luke Freiler has had Wartime CEO in his email signature, for like three years. So I'm in that mindset. I'm always kind of now like, how is this product… you know, my ultimate accountability to the CEO is, is this product going to make money for Trimble and our customers are willing to buy this and pay for it?
00:25:06
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Does this create value for a customer that they would be willing to pay for? So that's kind of the ultimate question. And the better that we can build products that solve their problems and meet their expectations or ideally exceed their expectations, the more willing they'll be to exchange money for that value.
00:25:31
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah, a big challenge is especially during recessionary periods, like it's the idea that you could just lose your customer because they're in a vulnerable position with money. So by anything really impacting that does bring up that question. So if they run into issues where, for example, they're not able to see their fleet like the fleet management systems down, they can access it.
00:25:58
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Like do we even really need this right now. Right. That's a problem. Could I get something cheaper from someone else? Like it's those things of like you have loyal customers and then they run into something during those periods there the risk is much higher to losing a customer.
00:26:14
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Margins in transportation, in the transport in the trucking industry are razor thin. Like if you have a truck sitting on the side of the road out of commission for 4 hours, you're losing an unrecoverable amount of money that like your whole month is off if you're a small enough fleet. So if you're not, if your vehicles aren't rolling all the time, like they're losing your money.
00:26:42
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So the stakes in transportation when we're beta testing were and are really high. We are frequently in a position where we have to support a customer, like we'll have a customer run into a bug on a beta and we have to get them an answer to day like right now because they they have no choice but to test this stuff in real trucks because that's what we're asking them to do.
00:27:10
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
We can do a certain amount of testing on simulators in offices in what we call bench testing situations, but ultimately to understand if this is really truly going to work in the field, they need to put it on a real truck and have a real driver interact with it. And if they run into a critical bug, that's burning money for them.
00:27:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So it's really important for us to be on that and to have good partnerships with support and QA and dev so that if that happens, we can swarm on it, get a fix as soon as we can, or a workaround at least and deploy that. We also have to be really responsible in how we deploy beta builds and how quickly we roll them out.
00:27:58
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So when we launch a new beta, we try to start really slow and gradually go further and further, get more and more vehicles involved. It's yeah, the stakes are really, really high. And we can't we often can't roll back either. Once we've detected a problem, we have to fail forward. We have to send them the newest version that contains the fix.
00:28:25
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
We can't just roll it back. The software is designed to be as simple for the driver as possible, so we don't want them to have to navigate Android menus and deal with build versions and roll them back and stuff like that. We just want them to use the thing and have it work. And their office pushes new versions down to them and they want it to just keep working because they have a job to do.
00:28:52
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And Richard [Ball] actually mentioned this on the last episode because we met with their team just to see, what are the similarities between our programs, What are the differences? It was a really good conversation. And one of the big differences was that our stuff very much feels like… the risk that a fleet takes on sometimes in beta testing in terms of running into a critical issue that could affect their operations is maybe a little higher than someone testing a pair of shoes or something like that.
00:29:33
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
You know, I guess so. So it's hard for us to get people to sign up. Sometimes. Recruitment can be difficult unless you have a lot of new value to give them in exchange. Right. So there are the unknowns that they're accepting as part of testing that something may not work. As expected, we are continuously getting better at escaped criticals.
00:30:01
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
There are very relatively few actual critical issues that go out into beta these days, which is great. Um, but we also try to be careful to balance that risk that testers assume by putting commercial code on, you know, functioning commercial vehicles and balance that with new value that we're creating that they can take advantage of. So ideally they can save time and money if things go well and if they identify bugs, we fix them quickly and get them back in a good place.
00:30:42
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You're finding those critical bugs inside the beta. Now there's one team or this one company or this one fleet is experiencing, but you’re preventing a lot of fleets from experiencing, which is huge for your company, right. Like super great for them. Yeah. And that risk that they're assuming again you need to outweigh it with those benefits.
00:31:00
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
It's something very similar at WD, we're doing with, with servers, with drives on servers and people are putting their data, their company information on drives. And we had to be very clear like, hey, let's let you know, here's the situation, here's the risk that you're assuming, Here's the things. And again, we have to be very, very upfront about the value that they get from it.
00:31:19
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You get access to influence the product. You get the ability to talk with our product teams and you get first frontline support from real people quickly. So we're all very quick to move in developments there to help fix anything. And you're bettering the world by solving this problem early. So that's a wonderful sentiment that you just put out.
00:31:46
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
And again that's still only on the bug side of things.
00:31:48
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Right, but yeah, the value they get we try and really lean on the the the operationalization of of new code so they they get an advantage over their non-beta participating peers by having a six week period to learn understand how things are changing, how functionality is being modified or improved or you know complying with regulations in a new way and they get to figure out how they want to disseminate that information to their drivers, how they want to train their people who are usually all over the country at any given time.
00:32:34
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so training and operationalizing change is a big consideration for these fleets. And if you have a longer on ramp to day one, you know, launch day, that's a huge advantage in kind of planning and smoothing out that that on ramp. So, we lean on that a lot when we're talking about the value. We also, you know, we do talk about the influence that they can have that their ideas, their feedback, their contributions to our roundtable calls all help us prioritize the backlog and make better decisions about what we need to release next, what we need to modify or change and why.
00:33:28
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And that level of influence is huge, too. I don't think there are any other companies in our space that have a beta program as developed as we do. So we are able to at least I'd like to think that that's a differentiator for Trimble is that we offer more ways to get directly involved in the release process and in the development pipeline than our competitors might offer, at least in a structured and organized way earlier.
00:34:05
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Earlier you were talking about just having that influence, right? It seems to be a good strategy for getting testers in and making them feel kind of valued and whatnot. And Richard was talking about in his episode, he was talking about the value of qualitative data, you know, where it's like, Hey, this is a really interesting story from someone that really kind of made an impact on the team or drove the product in a certain way.
00:34:29
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Do you have any examples of that where it's like we had a story from the field that came up and suddenly brought in some new insight to the team?
00:34:37
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, there's a couple of recent ones that stand out, both examples of new products where we kind of introduced them to a very small group of users. First to see what their initial impressions are. There are two different products, but one of them we had a like a ten customer alpha basically for this new, this new product that we have and one of the users on a roundtable call,
00:35:14
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So we were all on a Zoom call together. Um, at the end we asked it, you know, does anyone have any, any wins or success stories they want to share with the product so far? And one guy said, I don't know if you guys are looking for brand ambassadors, but if you're willing to help, I'm willing to print a wrap-around decal on a 18 wheeler and drive it across the country.
00:35:42
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I'll put it on one of my cross-country runs and I was like, that's that's pretty cool. So if we develop a trailer wrap for, you know, this, this new product and you’ll put it on your truck and drive it across the country, you liked it that much and he was dead serious. So I don't I don't know if marketing ever followed up with them on that effort, but that was a big win.
00:36:07
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
That was very cool. And that wouldn't show up necessarily in a NPS score, right. That's not more than a number. That was a good story. And that kind of has you know, you tell that story internally and people really turn their heads and they listen like, wow, you must really have something here. If a customer would be willing to advertise our stuff on their own truck, then the other one is actually from an NPS.
00:36:38
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
We asked an NPS question on every release and we had one. It was a really small initial beta with I think three or four customers, which is sometimes what you get in B2B. And so we got the most feedback we could and we eventually gave an NPS question on this brand new product that kind of brought new value and utilized our data science team, which was a new proposition at the time.
00:37:13
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
We didn't have a lot of that was our first product that our data science team put forward. And it helped drivers, it helped fleets utilize, not utilize, analyze their routes for profitability and determine which routes are their most profitable routes and where they should put their resources. And we asked, would you recommend this product to an industry peer or colleague?
00:37:41
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And he said, No. And then in his comment, he said, I'm using this to win. Why would I recommend it to an industry peer or colleague he's like, No, I want this for myself. I don't want to share this with other people. So I thought that was a funny way to answer the question. You get that sometimes in B2B where it's like, No, I want to compete, I want to win business and this is helping me do that.
00:38:09
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And so his low NPS score, I think he gave it a zero because he's using it to win. His low NPS score was actually like the most positive feedback that we got out of that project.
00:38:23
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Competitive Advantage!
00:38:24
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Don't don't always trust your number scores. Read the comments. You know.
00:38:30
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You need it.
00:38:31
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Any stories like that from WD at all it's someone rated a hard drive zero because it gave them so much data access power that they didn't want to give it to anybody else?
00:38:39
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
No, the one that always sticks with me, it's a real stupid one because like you probably hear it like in everyday conversation. We had a tester at the time say something like this. This is so easy to do that my grandma could use it like it's so easy to do that. My parents could do it like that.
00:38:58
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
The idea that the person felt like whatever they had to do, set up the product. I don't remember exactly what the task that they were doing or what product or software they're using, but it was really big because at the time we were developing a persona that was actually targeting older generations. So we were in the alpha state at that point.
00:39:20
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
And the idea is that we're going to graduate or beta state and we're gonna start bringing in the personas that were a little less tech savvy. So by that user saying, like, it's so easy, my grandma, we never tell that user that we're going to be targeting that segment. But it gave us confidence and we had other data to support like, okay, they do say this is easy.
00:39:37
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I think we're ready to graduate to our beta tests. It was just that's something that always kind of happened.
00:39:43
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Played right in your hands.
00:39:45
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Not all of them and like that. We had plenty of the other side of the stories of this is not this is not easy. Please, please fix this. But that was, that was a positive qualitative story. Yeah.
00:40:00
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
I always like seeing people's faces light up when you tell those stories as they kind of give that human element. I like talking about the human element. I don't know why. Maybe I'm on the creative side of things so that kind of affects how I see it. But Alex, earlier you were talking about how the Beta Program within Trimble has been growing.
00:40:16
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Do you feel like having those stories has maybe helped to connect people to the idea of beta testing your to expand, not to editorialize your answer too much.
00:40:25
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It can help. I tend to focus on the efficiency we can generate when I'm talking about how to expand our program. The results are good. I always quote raw numbers. I worked with Chris actually a few years ago on how to develop KPIs for my program.
00:40:46
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Good blog, by the way. You should check out that blog. It actually does pretty well.
00:40:49
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I’ll check that out! And I put some numbers together that seemed to work consistently no matter what was being tested, no matter what industry sector we were working in. And so I tend to rely on the KPIs, which are just raw numbers for the most part. I don't have to add a lot of context. I can just say, here's how many bugs we identified, here's how many features got requested.
00:41:17
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Here are the number of teams we support, and here's the average feedback per user that gets submitted. So I kind of track those and those are all project agnostic. You can kind of get a good idea of the value of the program, regardless of what's being said with that feedback or what product is being tested. Those are kind of universal values.
00:41:37
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So I take those numbers and I go to new teams and I say like, here's what we're generating in transportation. What would this mean to your business if you got this in, you know, our geospatial division or our agriculture division? You know, Trimble does that too. We do tractors and tractor automation. And that story is usually pretty compelling to people.
00:42:02
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And then the time saving story and then the connection, the other story that helps with people is just giving them a structured way to do this. There's so much not randomness, but people just kind of grabbing at any way to get a connection with their users and most of those people don't have time to really devote to it.
00:42:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And I offer that. I come in and I offer like, this is our whole gig. This is all we have a structure? We have a program, we have home pages, landing pages, feedback forms. We have structured ways for you to get this feedback and engagement from your users without investing a ton of time. And that usually wins the argument like there usually is no argument.
00:42:59
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It's usually like, yes, this makes sense. When can we start this? Six months ago? I heard multiple people at Trimble say, I just think, okay, here's the project. When do you want to start? And they say, can we start tomorrow? Six months ago? So everyone wants to start tomorrow. And I'm trying to get everyone started at the same time.
00:43:24
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But there's just a tremendous demand just for the structure. I think people just crave a way to reliably repeatedly professionally engage with their users. That isn't like just calling random customers to see what their impression of the product is.
00:43:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Interviews, support surveys like the standard way to talk to customers.
00:43:53
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, and those are all important too. I try not to diminish what people are doing currently. They're doing the best they can. I like to say like we can, we can just offer more, you know, we can add on to what you're currently doing to get feedback from your users. So yeah, the thing I lead with is usually the efficiency thing is just like, we can save you time, we can help you capitalize on the time you do have and multiply the returns you get by.
00:44:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I usually say at least a factor of four. Whatever time you're spending right now, we'll multiply the return on that by at least four.
00:44:43
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I mean, when you talk about organizational like maturity and like you saying you feel like your organization's like a little more mature just by having that centralization and the way that you can speak to this stuff is definitely puts you above when you think about those teams that were not using you before and you think about where their maturity level was in terms of user testing and customer feedback, and they're using things like, Oh, I call somebody, I use surveys or you know, I maybe I email people.
00:45:11
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
We say that those things are a little bit less maturity. As you grow maturity, you're doing more holistic interactions with your customers at different points in the development lifecycle and you're starting to see how you can apply more data more quickly at certain points based on having a good methodology to use. And so like I think you talked about it, you did your roadshow, right, Like you went from from team to team.
00:45:36
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Richard talked about it last time on our last episode, Sharon [Rylander] talked about it on one of the previous ones. It's the idea that getting that adoption in the organization is important, showing what they can get, proving it, handling it, any objections that they may have that you may have interacting with them about getting the feedback? And it's great.
00:45:56
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
So I love hearing about your road show and laying the pitch for each of these teams to get something more and help them because that's what you're there for, right?
00:46:06
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah. And now and now I'm starting to get over the hump a little bit where I've I've done the 30 minute demo enough times over the last year to enough teams where now I'm getting people emailing me every week and saying, hey, I saw this some, you know, someone who sits near me showed me what they're working on through the that we call it the early engagement portal, which is our Centercode instance.
00:46:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And I saw some of the projects that my coworkers were doing in their early engagement portal that looks like it's exactly what I'm looking for for my product. How do I get involved? And so now I'm getting word of mouth interest, which is awesome. I don't have to go to every single person and sell them. It's selling itself at this point.
00:46:54
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
It's on me to try and keep up on my team and I to keep up.
00:47:00
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I have some stories from my early days actually with John Little. You know John, right Alex? So he's our VP of product, but him and I would do those roadshows. So we were doing a combination of alpha testing, beta testing and also usability testing at the time. And then we had a whole slew of other methods we're doing and we had our pitch deck and we'd go talk with the UX teams for that division.
00:47:25
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
And at the time we were split into business or B2B focused things and B2C, which is consumer focused, and we go do our shopping around, we do our pitches, here's how we can help. And it definitely starts turning into the, Oh, I want what that person is doing and you get the word of mouth. We even did these things.
00:47:43
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
We call them expos. So we would actually bring products to each of these like headquarters. This is when we were all in the office. We'd bring products and we just collect feedback. We would bring products, let them test it there. We'd be able to answer questions and little time after that, I'd get event marketing coming to us saying, Oh man, we want to learn the product.
00:48:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Can you come show us the product so we can get our hands on it and use it? I have had worldwide sales reaching out like a general manager, like, Oh, we need to make sure that our regional people have access to this information. It's like it just blew up from there. Everyone wanted access to this information beforehand.
00:48:22
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You don't necessarily want information after the fact, after your release. Obviously, you need to make sure everything goes well. But having it early is a huge advantage for everybody. So you're doing the good work by getting everyone the company to adopt. And it seems like it's catching fire. So that's good to hear.
00:48:40
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
There's something in it for everyone. Right. So it started with support and it started with like we're providing value for support, but now any given week I will be working on projects in meetings with UX, user research, product managers, product owners, QA, developers, marketing, customer success, all of these different people. And I'm like, I have different things to say to each of them and they all have different questions that they want to get answered through this process.
00:49:21
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And they so it really puts you in the middle of, of things in your organization and you really quickly get your eyes open to all of the different roles that a company and what they all need. So I think it's helped me really round myself as a professional just because you work with so many stakeholders that you eventually start to figure out what makes them tick and what understand what they need, what they need to win in their role, and you try and provide that to them as much as you can.
00:49:52
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah, in my early career too, that's because I started in beta, just like you. Like my first job was I was a QA tester and then they'd also do beta testing. I'd interact just with the testers and then I give information to an engineer who would push it into the company. But as I was doing Beta, I got to start talking to all those stakeholders.
00:50:13
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
All right, Like I got to start talking to product and I'd go network with marketing teams and I'd talk to support and documentation teams and people that built the, the actual hardware design and all that. And I got to see in a company like what's interesting, I was, you know, 20-something and I got to see what everyone did.
00:50:31
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I got to see what they cared about and they'd show me around and show me what they had access to. I'm like, Man, that's what I want to do. So I'd find I got really associated with product management. I loved product management and I saw what they're doing with those people are cool. I want to be a product manager, so that's getting a start.
00:50:49
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
In beta is like, it's so cool because you are central to so many people because you're connected to two things. You're connected to the product, which is central to all of the organization and the customer. So like those two components together, everyone wants it, everyone matters who you are, like everybody wants that. Legal's concerned about what the customer is worried about, right?
00:51:09
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Like, like everybody wants that information. So you're like, you're the hot tamale inside the company.
00:51:15
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, it makes retention for my team kind of difficult sometimes because everyone's like every time there's an opening, someone's reaching out to my team members saying, Hey, you should apply. You'd be great for this. And it's like you said, it doesn't matter what team is recruiting either. You know, it could be product management, could be you could be a support leader or something.
00:51:38
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And it's like you could do a great job, You'd be perfect for this. It's like, I'll be perfect for anything.
00:51:44
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
And what I really like about testing programs is it just seems to break down the walls like organization wide. Just get engrossed in everything. And like you guys said, it ends up being like an information engine. Like marketing wants these, you know, testimonials from customers, you know, product wants these ideas. Other teams want these people and it ends up being like this massive promotion engine, almost like it's like you can grow yourself and the company just by having a testing program in place, which is always really fascinating to me.
00:52:13
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, you become a professional de-siloer. Your job is to run back and forth between silos and make sure that they're getting disassembled. Right.
00:52:27
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Demolish them!
00:52:28
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yes, exactly. Yeah. What you do. So we're we're, we're swinging the wrecking ball.
00:52:37
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
That's awesome. Yeah. How has Centercode kind of helped you desilo in some areas because I know you're kind of getting this virality, right? You spoke to someone on the one team will see it and say, well, boy, I want that. But other than that, you know, how has it kind of helped you break down those walls and perform more efficiently as an organization?
00:52:55
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
With the kind of the customizable permissions that we can set up, we can let people in the organization get involved at whatever level they're comfortable with. If someone is just interested in seeing what the users are submitting and just kind of observing a project, we have observer roles for them. They can get involved and they can just kind of see what's going on.
00:53:26
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
If someone's interested in eventually building up to a place where they feel like they're kind of running their own project to the running their own community. I've got a few people I've been working with recently just because just because my team and I can't personally run every project that we're asked to Right now, we have something like 40 projects that are currently active or close to active, and we have five people, so we can't personally run them all.
00:53:55
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So recently I've been trying to identify opportunities where, depending on the ask, is this something where I can kind of train up this product manager to manage this, this community, this project on their own. And thankfully, I think Centercode has gotten more approachable in that way over the years. There's still some elements of the product that are difficult enough where I need to kind of maintain some involvement like, hey, if you need to set up feedback workflows, I don't want to spend time training every product manager how to do workflows.
00:54:35
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I reserve my team, you know, reserves the administration of the community level because that's an organization of our complexity. The community onboarding process is complex, to say the least, and intricate. And I want to preserve that and not let things fall apart. I call it a house of cards, that maybe is maybe a little bit of a disservice to the structure we've put in place.
00:55:06
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But there's a lot going on at the community level. So we maintain admin at the community level. But yeah, this is giving product managers a way to, if they're interested, directly manage their own feedback community for their product. More and more I have people not looking to do a like a four week time based thing, but to give their users a consistent, persistent community where they always have the option of being a version ahead of the commercial release and they always can provide feedback.
00:55:43
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And these are often smaller products or or kind of fledgling products that are just kind of getting off the ground. And you've got a small user base that a product manager could potentially support and interact with themselves and yeah, I'm building towards a place where I can pick and choose opportunities to just train up product managers on doing what they need to in Centercode, creating content, posing surveys, responding to feedback.
00:56:20
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Um, sending out updates and email blasts and stuff like that. I think that most people can figure that out in a short period of time. And so we're really able to expand quickly by not insisting on being directly responsible for everything that happens in Centercode and delegating some of that out responsibly with the roles and permissions that we have set up.
00:56:48
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So I'm pretty willing to let just about anyone be a project manager if they want to. We use templates to make sure that we're putting best practices in place right at the beginning. That's actually been critical for us. So we developed the template. We determine what goes in it. And when I create a project for a product manager and I get ready to hand it off, it's already got all of our best practices built in.
00:57:12
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So the feedback is all going to be, you know, we use the same visual theme. The feedback is all named issues, ideas and praise to start with. If they change it, ask them why and if they have a good reason to change it. Sometimes they do, not often, so we usually get to stick with issues, ideas and praise.
00:57:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Usually there's a fourth one for discussions. We have survey templates that kind of say, modify this survey and you'll be in a good place. Send this out if you have a feature. So send this out. If you have a project closure survey, send this out for a software launch survey. So we've built best practices into the template and I'm getting better about trusting other people in the tool to run their own projects with our team standing by.
00:58:03
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And then we get directly involved and we kind of heavily run projects for the really higher priority or the larger communities where you have dozens to hundreds of participants and the stuff that needs more active management. If it's three or five, you know, external developers partnering with a Trimble product manager to work with our APIs or something like that, I'll trust that product manager to manage that experience.
00:58:31
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But luckily with Centercode, I don't have to say no. I can usually say yes to pretty much everyone, like there's something I can do for you, there's something I can provide. Um, the trouble is, I am trying not to be seen internally as like a Centercode gatekeeper. And just like this is the person you go to if you want to get access to that software tool.
00:58:52
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
What I'm trying to get to is this is the person or the team that you want to go to. If you want to get access to the process, if you want to kind of unlock the potential of this process and not just get the software platform.
00:59:07
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
If you want a lesson on how to scale a beta program, you just heard the quick rundown of it. That was exactly the things you do to scale up. You need those things in place. Like those templates. You rely on a central team that has the ability to configure the things you want, and gives you access to it.
00:59:27
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Here's what you need to do, and then the rest of it's interacting with customers, asking the questions that you want. It makes everything look simple. So, great Alex! Scaling 101 by Alex!
00:59:40
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
The next part after the scaling up and just getting it out there is I think what I need to focus on personally is following up with those folks that I've kind of handed the keys over to and making sure that things are going well, that they actually have the time they think they had to devote to this and that we're, you know, using customers time appropriately and that we're asking good questions and keeping up with best practices.
01:00:11
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I think your program has a bit of an internal brand. And I'm very aware of our program and our brand and our reputation and when you hand that over to someone, you kind of trust them with your brand a little bit. And so one thing that I need to continually remind myself to do is, hey, check back in with these product managers that are running their own communities, make sure that they are able to keep doing that or see if there's any resources.
01:00:40
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I can free up to help them.
01:00:44
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
We had an interesting comment in our Discord recently where someone said, yeah gotta plug the Discord! centercode.com/community. Thank you Chris. But I have you but yeah the comment was everyone builds the beta program at like 30,000 feet, which was interesting, but it sounds like having that structure there, it's just kind of a great way to make sure that the beta testing plane takes off with both wings attached.
01:01:15
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
That's just kind of how businesses work, right? Like, you have to have the need before you create the solution for it. And so like I could you could that that's why this always feels like you're building the plane as you're flying it because you line up tons of opportunities and you line up demand and you've got a bunch of people beating down your door and then you figure out how you're going to support them and how you're going to solve that problem for them.
01:01:41
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But the problem has to exist first. So it's the same thing as hiring for my team. I say yes to opportunities continuously until we're drowning. And then I'm like, okay, we probably need to hire help now. Like we need to expand our headcount because we can't keep up, which is a much easier case to make. Then I intend to do more.
01:02:05
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
You know, I intend to build the program. So I need the headcount to get where I want to go. No, it's like, no, we have work that exists and I'm having to start to say no or I'm making tradeoffs. Quantity for quality. And I'm having to make those hard decisions. It's much easier then to go to leadership and be like, I need to build my team more.
01:02:27
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I need headcount.
01:02:30
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I need more resources coming to me.
01:02:32
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, well.
01:02:34
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
You just show up with the massive why and then and this is the how this is how we'll do it.
01:02:39
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah. There's the maturity. You don't build the scale immediately going into it. You have to get dirty first, run the tests, it's going to hurt and then you're going to prove the value and it's going to scale. We talked about that idea of a little bit of maturity models, that idea of like you set up the scale and the next thing you're looking at, which is that I put it in the top end of the maturity scale is the idea of continuous improvement.
01:03:08
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
So the idea that I'm looking at evaluating and improving on these best practices and these templates and I'm tweaking them, I'm looking at these metrics and I'm saying, okay, what can we get better? Here's our feedback rate, here's how much we actually address or what the value that we get for the test. How can I get more?
01:03:24
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
That's the top end of the maturity scale. So you're well on your way with that mindset you already have. So I'd put you up on that scale as well.
01:03:32
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I'll plug the program KPIs again because those are generally if I see upward trending lines, I know we're building our program, we're delivering more value, we are engaging our users. So again are three KPIs that I track are feedback engagement rate per user. So that is a measurement for every active user in your project.
01:03:56
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So everyone who's logged in, how many of them have submitted at least one piece of feedback in the project, whether that's a survey or a bug or, or an issue or an idea or praise. And you will see that vary based on who you're working with, what you're working on, how you know, how sexy the product is. You know, if it's a black box, it sits under the dashboard of a truck and you get an engagement rate of like 0.2, that's like, great, awesome.
01:04:25
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
That's amazing.
01:04:27
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
That's something.
01:04:28
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Something, you know, you know, sometimes you're testing products or if they're working perfectly, the user doesn't notice them. Like the user doesn't know they're there. And those are really hard to get feedback on. If you're testing a bike with a video screen that you ride for fun, you'll probably get a ton of feedback. So it's different. There are different applications, but the metric you can still track improvement, right?
01:04:56
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
You can still track improvement of feedback per user and that number is useful as you iterate through projects, you can look at what your last project generated and I come up with ideas to improve that on your next one, no matter what your testing the next one for building a program is. We measure the number of teams that we're supporting with a project.
01:05:21
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
That doesn't mean that we're actively running the project. That might mean that we're working in an advisory capacity, kind of checking in on them. It might mean that we set up a portal and are providing support for, you know, if they want to use some more advanced functionality, if they want to set up integrations, if they want, you know, help creating content or notices or automation, that's still a project we're supporting as part of our platform footprint, our program footprint.
01:05:49
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So we measure that and that's steadily been going up obviously over the last year. And then the last one is community growth. Just how many users are in your community. Is that number shrinking or growing? Obviously, it should continue growing responsibly. You should probably have some kind of user purging process as well. If you have users that aren't active or contributing in your program in any way, it's probably responsible to remove those accounts at some point, have them sign up again if they really want to be part of it.
01:06:22
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
But in general, you're like your active users should be growing over time. So we measure those three things. One of the things I need to do now that we're a more horizontal team in Trimble's corporate structure is create a dashboard that tracks that in each sector, in each division, and compare and contrast what each division is doing and learn lessons.
01:06:52
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
If, you know, one of the things my leadership is hoping we can do is take things that we're learning from projects in agriculture and apply them to transportation or apply them to civil construction or drawings or some of the 3D modeling applications, like let's try and learn from what these different groups are doing. And I think we're well positioned to help with that.
01:07:19
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
I'll give you one extra on this. My secret sauce for every successful program out there is measuring impact. Impact is you had in their engagement, you had in their reach within your company or adoption within your company. You have your growth within your community, which is always good to have. Not everyone has huge committees that run.
01:07:42
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
It's small committees and people have really big committees. But the percentage of feedback that actually has action on it, whether or not it's going to support, if it's an issue or whether or not is going to your team or dev team. Well, I went to the UX team. The idea that you're measuring the percentage of things that were either addressed or handed off and something's being done for it is huge.
01:08:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You need to understand that impact so you can. That's the true testament of all the stuff that we're doing. Here's what it results.
01:08:11
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
What's a quick way that you could set that up?
01:08:16
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Status. Status is your best friend in the world when it comes to feedback. So every feedback that comes through in a program from a tester needs to have been talked about earlier. I workflow it comes in as new it gets reviewed. What happens with it? Did we decide not to use it? Did we decide that we are going to use it?
01:08:36
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Will we use it in one way or another by having those fields kind of set you understood action on, your feedback. And we have those three KPIs inside Centercode right now, which is your Delta Score, which tracks things like your project Health, So your Delta Health score, which tells things like how much feedback and how much activities are being completed, which is the input, the data coming in.
01:09:02
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You have the sentiment range of that feedback, which is the product success score or success score, and then you have your impact, which is the percentage of things that were addressed. Those are three. You have other ones that are very program oriented added on to that. But those are, those are the bread and butter for us.
01:09:23
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Use cross project labels to make sure that that's consistent in every project.
01:09:28
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
So right now those health scores do bubble up to the community level, so you can see engagement rates, you can see your sentiment across all projects. And if you have it organized well enough, you can actually see it by those different divisions and whatnot and you can see the impact there as well. So what percentage of impact are you having?
01:09:49
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
And it goes above the 100% mark. There. So those are my keys. You have to have it set up. That's the big challenge. And when we talked about those KPIs a couple of years ago about setting us up in a company, it's a roadmap, just like you don't build scale for immediately, you don't tackle every single KPI immediately, there's no way you can handle it.
01:10:12
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You have to be able to grow into those things. So impact is the upper echelon of what I would consider the other side of his team performance. But that's a different thing. But your impact is key.
01:10:28
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
I like what you said about status, Chris.The one thing that I would add to that is also just making sure that every single piece of feedback coming in is assigned to some sort of feature because then you can track down exactly like, okay, you know, they had an issue, but specifically with, you know, this element of tracking in the truck where they had this specific idea that they wanted with, with mapping things out, etc..
01:10:50
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
And I think that what allows you to do is you can go in and say, okay, I can see the project level stuff. You know, I can see exactly how well the project's doing and the product's doing, but then I can dive down really deep and get those KPIs for my specific features as well. So you might have one feature that's amazing.
01:11:05
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
The screen is absolutely perfect and you know, lots and lots of praise coming in and then suddenly you see, oh, Wi-Fi is not doing well at all. And it really allows you to kind of focus your intent. And they like, hey, let's let's tackle this. And, you know, we can maybe leave this by the wayside and focus our resources.
01:11:21
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
That would be the other element I'd add. Status and Feature.
01:11:26
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
It’s huge for the product and the project that you're running. And in the program world, he has those, those key things that by and level here's what our engagement rates are. We can have that broken down by division. Here's the reach we have. So it's X number of teams being supported by Y total teams available and that's a sometimes difficult number to come by.
01:11:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
But you do your work to go say, okay, here's where I see where I could go. And it's probably changing because you find new things that you didn't know about and, and then things like your impact and how you can support them, which is like your community. So I have this community. I have this kind of result. Here's what I'm getting today.
01:12:04
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Here's the impact or results that I can influence for you. That's absolutely another 1014 from Alex. He's got a we're going to have to get you listed into a whole bunch of blogs.
01:12:21
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Well I think I think we should probably circle back another time and and talk through how I would set that up because that sounds useful. Impact is a new metric that I haven't heard you guys talk about before. So that's one that I need to dig into more.
01:12:39
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Yeah, definitely, Definitely cover that.
01:12:42
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Yeah, I'm coming up on time here. This is an awesome conversation all around. I think we had so many 101’s here that we could build a whole course out of it, just this one podcast but I got a question. It's a two parter and I want to pose it to both of you. A, What does the future of user testing look like to you?
01:13:01
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
And B, what are you passionate about in testing? What drives you forward every day to keep doing that? I'll start with Alex.
01:13:11
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
The future of user testing to me looks like… let me think for just a second on that. The optimist in me sees the future of user testing as something that everyone just does by default. Every company has some kind of program built around user testing, making sure that the products they're building meet user expectations. I see it being a lot more seamless.
01:13:50
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
I see it being less of a handoff experience like, okay, here's the beta test we can't release until you finish the beta tests. I see it being much more of a continuum where user testing and I'm building towards this in our program. User testing happens continuously. From I have a design. I want to get your feedback on this wireframe.
01:14:14
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
To, I have a prototype. I want to get your feedback on this first engineering prototype that we've built to. We have our Alpha version two, we have our beta version to launch and post-launch like users and maybe the same users can be engaged throughout that continuum, giving you feedback at every step in that process. So I see it. I definitely see user testing moving left.
01:14:38
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
If you use the left-right convention and really having an approach to user testing that gets them involved even in design or pre-design, which is often conflated with UX, but I think that feedback can be directed and channeled in the same place that you put your beta feedback, your your delta feedback, what have you.
01:15:07
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And I think being able to have a consistent place to measure and track that and that changing perceptions and users a consistent place to go if they want to give feedback on the product that they're interacting with, whether it's in design or beta or launch, they know they go to the same place to go in and provide impressions of that product.
01:15:32
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So that's where I see it going. Everyone's got a user testing program and everyone's got a place for users to engage from idea to execution and all the way through the continuum. And then the second part of your question was around what kind of a my passionate about in testing and I that for me is really user experience and it's like day three is is my favorite day of a beta test because you've launched the users have had some time to read your release notes, understand your plan and they've probably cracked open the product and are using it and they you get those first few pieces of feedback start to come in
01:16:20
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
and you feel the momentum building up and you're like, okay, we're getting underway. The work starts to pay off at that point. And the way I always feel is like, okay, now the project runs itself. I don't need to be in the driver's seat. I don't need to, you know, push this so much as the boulders rolling down the hill.
01:16:42
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And that's a really exciting project for me. I really love that moment when you've worked so hard to get the project ready to create a great user experience to minimize your barriers to entry and get as many people as involved as they can be. And to drive that excitement towards your product.
01:17:05
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And then when they take that cue and they start running with it and they're giving you the feedback and they're telling you, you know, what they need and what needs to change and what they love and what they hate, that all turns into just pure value for your organization. So it's just the value stream starts and it just feels really good.
01:17:26
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
And that's what I'm passionate about. It's like getting to that point as quickly as possible and like staying in that mode as long as you can, trying to harness that energy, whatever it is, it's some mix of like the good part of human nature. So like there's curiosity and like tapping into people's curiosity, tapping into people's a little bit of altruism where they, like, just want to help.
01:17:53
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
We hear over and over that people aren't even that motivated by Amazon gift cards and giveaways and stuff like that. They're just motivated by knowing that their feedback helped and that it made an impact. And that's so weird. But I think it's maybe part of the human psyche that we get to tap into for a few days and maybe if you can hold on to it long enough.
01:18:16
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
So just being able to unlock that is what I'm really passionate about.
01:18:22
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Great stuff. We just had a recent blog post that was democratizing user testing, so that's where I see really a lot of the future of this beta testing, of testing, dog food and all that stuff. It's the idea that anybody can do it because right now we see a lot of companies are really small like Alex you're in the upper end right now of a big B2B company.
01:18:48
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
You've got a whole team. Not everyone has that access to resources so they're just stuck in the world of hey I need to do a beta because I'm not confident. I'm not I'm not sure that I'm going to be okay. Maybe we're on a stealth mode startup and we're trying to get some feedback early on with this, you know, real working thing that we have.
01:19:10
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
So the idea that anybody can run a test, whether or not your product or support or a UX team or a key engineer, is like the idea that everyone can get access to something. And I think that's something that Centercode is really passionate about, is the ability to get testing into everyone's hand so they can influence their product to ultimately make sure that everyone's experience is better, right?
01:19:32
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
So we want the idea that we can make technology better by getting feedback from people, that's A.I.. It was all about that, right? Like you have A.I. get smarter with people that use it, right. Products get better with people that use it, not just the A.I. ones.. Products get better when people are giving you feedback and things aren't being developed in like the ultimate silo that you're talking about.
01:19:57
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Like you break down silos between teams. Like the ultimate silo is building a product in your company without getting people real customers out in real environments. And over a period of time, like you talked about day three, like the idea that someone's going to use a product for a week or weeks or months or for a year and give feedback on it
01:20:19
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Is so important. It's not 30 minutes in front of a screen saying, I like this, I don't like this, and then you go on your merry way. And that's that's what it is. Someone's going to change their opinion of using a product after an hour, hours, weeks of using it. And it's going to change. Your trucker can get real upset about something that's going on or that company gets real upset about something that's off of cross country travel is important to be able to measure back and forth.
01:20:47
Chris Rader, VP of Marketing, Centercode
Right. And then over a period of a month this huge right. You're going to learn so much more from that. So that is what I'm excited about is getting this in front of everybody that can then actually, you know, improve products, make everyone's lives better. And then I'd say that that's also what I'm passionate about is having a bigger impact on products because this is how we do it, by implementing feedback from people that use it.
01:21:18
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Well, excellent two perfect answers there. Lots of lessons learned today. I mean, I'm going to walk away from this thinking about nine different things. So, Alex, thank you so much for joining us. Awesome having you on. We'll have to circle back at some point, round two of the Delta Huddle Podcast.
01:21:39
Alex Larsen, Manager of Product and Customer Insights, Trimble Inc.
Yeah, but yeah, thank you so much guys. Thanks for having me.
01:21:44
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
Thank you for listening to the Delta Huddle podcast by Centercode. If you enjoyed today's podcast, like, follow and subscribe on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts, Audible and YouTube. And to learn more about how Centercode is democratizing beta testing for everyone and to launch your free beta testing program today, visit Centercode.com. We've got the resources, tools and help you need to run a successful testing program.
01:22:09
Stefan Stenroos, Technical Trainer, Centercode
We'll see you in the next episode of the Delta Huddle Podcast by Centercode. Happy testing.
