Episode 160: The Value of Flexibility in Hybrid Work & Product Management: Jon Sadow Shares Scoop's Approach

In this episode of the Product Thinking podcast, host Melissa Perri is joined by Jon Sadow, Co-Founder & Chief Product & Technology Officer of Scoop Technologies. Join them as they discuss Scoop’s journey from a carpooling application to a software company supporting hybrid work and workplace management. They explore the dramatic impact of COVID, pivoting the business, and the benefits of embracing flexibility. They also touch on the importance of building relationships and forging connections in remote and flexible work environments, as well as the future of work and the possibilities for innovation and improvement in remote and hybrid work environments.

You’ll hear them talk about:

  • 05:15- 09:11 - COVID drastically changed the way we think about the office. For a company based on commuting to and from the office, the impact is huge. The volume of traffic dropped overnight. People stopped going to the office. You then had to navigate through layoffs. For Scoop, then came the challenges of building a new version of the product to adapt to the changing work landscape, noticing a gap in the market and finding a new opportunity. 

  • 14.58 - 24.21 - The shift to hybrid working means being flexible. You need to understand employee goals and ensure that they can be productive and fulfilled in both remote and office environments. Companies' positive attitude towards flexible work, such as having work location flexibility, can increase revenue growth. With FlexIndex, policy decisions are backed with data, helping companies make positive data driven changes, not to mention the benefits of embracing hybrid work policies and how companies that recognize employees' needs for flexibility are likely to attract better talent and foster innovation.

  • 26:30 - 29:28 - Forging relationships is different in remote and hybrid workplaces than when you’re in the office, five days a week, and able to have regular chats by the watercooler. Different doesn't mean better or worse. Remote onboarding is successful with a more structured process. This can include specific goals, scheduled meetings, and clear expectations. It all comes down to reevaluating what’s important and questioning the utility of legacy activities, such as long unimportant meetings, and replacing them with purposeful and targeted alternatives.

Episode Resources:

Other Resources:

Melissa - 00:00:01: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day-to-day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary-pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.


Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Today, we're talking about hybrid work and what businesses can do to make it more effective. We're joined by Jon Sadow, who's one of the co-founding brothers of Scoop, and he's their current Chief Product and Technology Officer. Scoop is a platform that helps companies manage hybrid work environments, but that's not how they started. I'm going to let Jon tell you all about that pivot because it's really exciting. But before we go and talk to Jon, it's time for Dear Melissa, and this is our segment where I answer all of your burning product questions. So if you have a question for me, please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what it is. It's time to go to the phones for our caller.


Caller - 00:01:18: Hi, Melissa. I have a question about building SaaS products for global market while still catering to local needs. So, for example, let's say you have a product that is very tied to maybe a local workflow, like a finance or farming product, and you're trying to build a global platform like Delivery Hero or Uber. There's many local requirements and things that are tied to maybe regulation or how a certain country does something. How do you balance the two? Do you build something that's super successful in a specific market but doesn't scale globally, or you can focus on things that are relevant across regions, but then maybe they're not as in demand in each market? Wondering how you would think about this. Thank you.



Melissa - 00:02:04: So I think the key here when we are building products that we want to expand globally is to first start small. And most global platforms that you talked about, Uber, DoorDash, all these things, they did start small. They started in one location and then they expanded and then they expanded and then they expanded. You don't start globally, right? That's a really, really hard way to enter a market and to win. You're not going to be able to solve all the problems for everybody immediately. So you're going to want to focus on a location that you know you can win in and then you're going to want to expand from there. So that's really key. I see a lot of companies doing this strategy where they try to be everything for everybody at once. And if you do that, you're going to lack focus. It's going to be really, really hard to solve all of those requirements. And you're not going to really be concentrating on what customers need at its core. So what I'd suggest is first look at your platform and say, what are the biggest problems we can solve for our customers, solve those problems, right? And then ask, where else do people have these problems? And then start expanding from there. And you might do something that's easy and adjacent to start with. So for example, if it's an English-speaking platform and you're in the US, maybe you go to Canada next, depending on what the laws are there, right? English, English, a little bit closer to home. You can expand geographically that way. There are different strategies on how to do that. And I do not claim to be a global expansion expert here. But you're going to want to see how much overlap there is and how hard it is to break into the market. Then you start worrying about the regulations. Then you start worrying about what you're going to have to customize for each product. Now we're going to get to scale where we've got operations in a lot of different places and we want to maintain our platform for scale, but still make sure that we are customizing certain regulations or certain issues in different areas. 


This is actually how product operations got started in Uber. And our conversation with Blake Samick, I think last year we had that, about how Uber grew this was really, really interesting. And I invite you to check it out. But what they did is they kept tabs on the local hubs of where Uber was and started bringing the equirements or the needs back to the central development part of Uber. And they started talking about the commonalities between the different geographies and different places. So that's a great way for you to start to discover things, boots on the ground, get people out there talking into different geographies. And you come back and you look at commonalities everywhere. And then you're going to start to think about how do I shape my product for this? Do we need different components that are just customizable for each country? Do we need certain parts of it that may look different in country A versus country B? That's where you start to really spread. At the core, though, you want to have a platform that's, let's say, a high percentage similar everywhere so that you can maintain it. And I see a lot of companies that expand geographically have completely different products everywhere. And that does work in certain cases if you can scale that way. But if you want to get the benefits like Uber has or DoorDash has, they really have a core platform. And then they customize different components on it depending on where they are. So that means that your development costs are a little less. It's easier to maintain. And you can keep scaling. So you're going to want to think about what's your core and concentrate on that first and then worry about going globally. Really, really important to have your core persona down and start there. 


Well, I hope that helps. If you have any other questions for me, please go to dearmelissa.com. Let me know what they are. And now it's time to talk to Jon.



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Melissa - 00:06:06: Welcome, John. It's great to have you on the podcast.


Jon - 00:06:08: Awesome to be here. Excited to talk to you.


Melissa - 00:06:10: So you've had a really interesting journey to founding Scoop, which is a remote work hub, basically. Can you tell us a little bit about pre-COVID, what were you working on that led up to Scoop and how did it actually develop?


Jon - 00:06:24: Our journey is certainly an interesting one and not what we predicted when we got started in 2015. And so, you know, we first started the company from 2015 till well into 2020. Our focus and first in scoop was building a carpooling and commuting application. So we built the country's largest enterprise-oriented carpooling app. And our whole focus was on the trends that were driving the commute to be more challenging for sort of everyday employees around the country, where more people wanting to live in suburban environments, but commuting into big cities, going to the office five days a week, offices becoming more crowded and more dense. All the trends that now in a post-COVID world seem crazy, right? Like they're totally the opposite of where we are now, which is office vacancy. And so we built that business from 2015 to 2020. And then when COVID hit, it kind of stopped on a dime. All of a sudden, people stopped going to the office, weren't allowed to go to the office. And it was over the course of 2020 that we started to see around the corner to the beginnings of hybrid work and understanding the way that people were going to change, where they're working, what offices they were going to and kind of the solution of the everyday commute. And we thought there was an opportunity to lean into that change as we saw Scoop continue and the trends toward hybrid continue.


Melissa - 00:07:31: So take me back to 2020. COVID's about to happen. When you're studying the commuting, you know, in this commuting business, how many people are you? How big are you growing? Like, at what point did the world just kind of stop for you?



Jon - 00:07:45: Yeah, fortunately now I've sort of digested or I've lived through the full stages of grief. And so it's easier to talk about it in retrospect. But if I were to flash you back like January 2020, we were around 170 people. We had raised over $100 million. We went into the year with a healthy list of enterprises and a fortune 50 that were customers of Scoop. And really that was going to be our expansion year, right? We had really ambitious goals into a new scope ofspread around the country and other things. And then tell this little anecdote and I haven't shared much publicly, but I remember it was the last week of February in 2020. We were in an exec team meeting and I remember getting another push notification on my phone from CNN about the coronavirus. And I remember... Stopping the meeting and looking around and be like, hey, you know, I've gotten a few of these now. Is this something we need to worry about from the context of people being sick in a car together? Because you're a car killer, right? It was just that immediate localized thing. And we were like, you know, let's keep an eye on it. Let's do some research. Let's talk about it next week. And I think... Two weeks later, the shutdown in San Francisco started. And we saw our entire volume drop almost overnight. And that was the beginning of a really hard year for us. And we had to do... We, like many tech companies, did layoffs that April. We kind of navigated through the next six months trying to build the best version of what we thought commute might look like post-COVID. Then you get to July, August of 2020, and you realize this isn't going away. COVID is not a short-term thing. We're not going back to normal. And that's when I think we started to realize that the whole business may need to change. And eventually did, as we reset the company at the end of that year to focus on hybrid work instead.

Melissa - 00:09:16: So as a leader at a company, you're looking at this, you're going, is it going to change? Is it going to change? There's this huge decision that you're talking about. Like, do we wait it out? Do we not? How did you go through that process and make that decision to pivot? 


Jon - 00:09:31: Yeah, you know, it's interesting for us. I think we got to the end of 2020 and there were just so many indications that even if COVID cycle was shorter than it has ended up being, the universe of commuting was going to be affected in a way that was so unpredictable. It was hard to sort of stake our business around that anymore, right? Pre-COVID, I would have given you all these stats around, we've increased the densification of offices. We've had more people commuting longer, more single-passenger vehicles, et cetera. And even if people ended up going back to the office with some regularity, we knew frankly that the market and the dynamic of that behavior would be at least changed for a decade or more because of the onset of remote work. So for us, it was one of those where even the best-case scenario of commute no longer necessarily felt like the right business to be in. And we looked at hybrid and we said, you know what, we spent the last eight years or I guess at the time, five years, thinking about the dynamics between employer and employee and employee productivity and motivation and how that was affected by the pandemic and the pandemic itself. And we thought, we just thought we were in a really interesting position to try to support everyone into this hybrid future. And I mean, we agonized over it for probably like six to eight weeks over what to do. And then we finally said, this felt like the best chance we had of being able to continue to succeed as a company. 


Melissa - 00:10:45: So when you're going through that, deciding to pivot, saying, hey, we're going to change these things, how did you kind of test that concept and figure out what we should be concentrating on next and then communicate it to other people? 


Jon - 00:10:57: This is a really interesting product story where one of the things that has been interesting about our evolution from commute to now hybrid work is we've sort of moved down the chain from B2B enterprise to B2B SMB to really like product-led over the last three years. And that's a really important thread here because our sort of, I'll call it epiphany about hybrid work and the solutions we could build were born out of the conversations we were having with our enterprise customers on the commute side. So we were working with some of the biggest companies in the country and hearing about their challenges coming out of COVID. So them coming to us saying, hey, we're thinking about having more smaller offices, but we don't know how to get our people there. Or we're thinking about doing permanent remote work and hearing the beginnings of this. What should our policy be? How will we bring people back to the office? What will hybrid work look like at our company? And we kind of realized pretty quickly that the large companies have the resources to build solutions for those problems. They had internal teams building check-in apps and desk booking and other types of things. And then as soon as you would talk to anyone that wasn't a FANG company or a Fortune 50 company, they all needed the same solution but didn't have the software. And so the first light bulb was there's this enterprise privilege, so to speak, that can be distributed in the mid-market or an SMB world where everyone's going to need a way to check in, a way to have capacity and attendance managed, a way to handle desk booking. That's kind of where we started in our hybrid journey. We've evolved out of that. We've evolved out of that a bit from a product perspective. But that was where we first said, hey, we're in a position to deliver what we're hearing from enterprise to that next long-tail tier of company. 


Melissa - 00:12:29: When you pivot a company like that, did you end up like shutting down the commuting part of it? Or is it something that you just added on to this? 


Jon - 00:12:35: We basically, over the next 6 to 12 months, moved it into what I would call a maintenance mode. And so we stripped it down to the core mechanics. It ran pretty dormant during all of COVID, like during shutdown. And then we saw a kind of natural pickup, frankly, in that business over the last year, year and a half as people returned to whatever this new normal of work is. Now it's a small fraction of the business that it was before. And large part because of what I was talking about before, which is that just that market doesn't exist in the same way. Even in the best case scenario, people are going to the office three times a week, maybe. And so we see some usage in the larger areas we were in before. But the actual priority for us as a company was how do we reduce the amount of resourcing that is required? And we've basically been 99% focused on building hybrid software for two and a half years. But we let the commutables continue to sort of run on autopilot.


Melissa - 00:13:25: Do you kind of like check in on it and make sure it's still worth maintaining it, still have it there? Like, how do you kind of make those decisions? Because I know a lot of companies who have legacy software or something that they started with, right? And they're moving into other things. What's your like process for reviewing it, making sure it's still worth like maintaining and looking at it? 


Jon - 00:13:42: Yeah, that's a constant conversation. And it's come in very different cycles. You know, I think there was a period where there was a lot of internal tension on, hey, is this still worth it? Without getting into too much detail, the economics of it makes sense for us. And that's always been the core barometer is like, does it benefit the overall company for us to keep operating this? And just in terms of dollars in and dollars out. And so far, the answer has been yes. And we've made some decisions to support that. We've cut out some software that we didn't need or pieces of things that didn't matter anymore. We streamlining even the economics and how we approach the business. But every quarter, I would say for three years now, we've kind of said, hey, we still know what we're doing with this. And I do believe over time that the context of that evaluation will continue to change as our core hybrid business grows.


Melissa - 00:14:22:  When you're pivoting, right, you had this commuting product out there in the market. How did you go after new customers? Did you approach like the same customers who already bought the commuting product for you? And then how did you communicate to them this either shift or these new products you had out there?


Jon - 00:14:37: Because so much of our very first hybrid products was borrowing what the enterprises were building for themselves and then trying to create a scaled solution. Almost all of our customers of that business knew what I would call workplace management. That's how we typically talk about it. But that business were new. And so I would say we were heads down building something new for the beginning, let's say, half of 2021. And then we started selling. I mean, we were doing mid-market sales. In that case, we had kept the salesperson on from the commute enterprise sales days. 


We were very comfortable selling to the mid-market, honestly, coming down from the enterprise. And we had probably overly qualified folks who were able to sell and set up business. And that did pretty well. I mean, we signed on a few dozen customers in the back half of 2021. And it was toward the end of 2021, actually, that we kind of decided, honestly, that we didn't feel that workplace management business was the ultimate version of hybrid product that we wanted to build. And so... You know, just to go a little bit deeper on that. The end of 20, the end of 21, there was sort of this convergence around workplace management software. And anyone who had been anywhere near that space pre-COVID was trying to get into it, whether they were a visitor management system or an office planning system or packages or other stuff like that. Basically, everybody knew that desk booking, check-ins, vaccination tracking was going to be required. And by the end of that year, even though we weren't started to build a nice... We just didn't think that was the core hybrid problem. We ultimately felt the real hybrid and flexible work problem was about employee experience. Right? Am I able to get the full value out of this flexibility and be productive and do so in a way that works for both me and employer? And at that point, we sort of did a mini shift again and said, hey, you know what? We want to build software that the employee is choosing to use, as opposed to it being like a top-down check-in software that's very utilitarian or very administrative, but not really providing broad value to the employee. 


Melissa - 00:16:31: What have you seen as some of those biggest issues for employees when it comes to hybrid work? 


Jon - 00:16:35: Yeah, I mean, I think what we've learned over the last 18 months, sort of dating us back to the beginning of 22, the first eight months, so I guess 18 to 24 months, is... People do want to go to the office sometimes. There is a genuine appreciation of the in-person time and the in-person work that happens. But they want to do that in a way that's practical and productive as opposed to doing it because they were told to. It's not useful for me to come into an office on a Tuesday to do heads down work or to not meet with the people I need to. It's also not useful for me to only come in on Tuesdays just because it was easy to put a spreadsheet together that said, let's do Tuesdays. What they want to do is do certain types of work in the office and certain types of work at home. They want to work with certain people on certain things in certain places. And the other is it changes. Sometimes it changes just based on the mood. You just want to get out of the house. Nice day out. You want to get out. You want to walk around. You want to go to lunch with people, etc. And sometimes it's like it is outside here and it's in the 20s and 30s and the idea of having to get in a cold car and drive to the office is just not super appealing. For us, the success that will come in high-quality work is understanding all of those variables to be able to enrich the employee experience which has been in turn going to deliver back to the employer what they're looking for, which is a happy, productive workforce. 


Jon - 00:17:48: So when you're designing Scoop, how do you kind of manage for that flexibility?


Jon - 00:17:53: The biggest thing for us was to hear from employees, what are the things you're actually looking to accomplish, right? And what are the things that are causing challenge for you? And help then provide value to them that we think will then make them want to come into the office, right? The reason return to office mandates have been such a topic now for several years is because there's this natural gap between employer thinks they need to have some sort of administrative pull into the office and employees say, hey, you don't get us, right? You don't fully understand. It's almost like having a teenager, right? It's like, hey, I know what's best for you. You don't know what's best for me. And the answer is somewhere in the middle. And so in point on the thread of those problems, like any good product builder does or product building team does, we've gone back to like, okay, well, what are the challenges? Well, the challenges are, first, I need to have visibility into what people are planning on doing. If I go into the office and my manager is not there, well, that's a waste. So I need to know where my manager is going to be. I need to be able to cross-reference people's plans with what's on my calendar. And I need to be able to make good decisions around the types of meetings or work I want to do when I'm in versus when I'm out. So that was number one. And that was the core of our platform from the beginning when we started really focusing on the employee side, which is just visibility of where people want to be. The second is around just trying to reduce or streamline the operational overhead of these office planning days. Just even asking, are you going to be there? Are you not going to be there? What days next week work? So that people can put a little bit of planning ahead where before they didn't have to. It used to be I'd just show up at the office and everyone will be there. And so having that visibility needs to be amplified by making it easy to get it and see it. So we built things like office polls, syncing that with your calendar, syncing that with your Slack status, and trying to reduce the challenge of understanding what people's plans are going to be and building those tools in a way that make them super easy. We would interview tons of people who almost all of them would say there's some massive long running thread in Slack each week or something like, hey, anybody thinking about going to the office this week? And eventually people would try to navigate that and it would be unreliable and they would just give up. And they were just like, you know, I remember it was a phase. I think it was an early 22. Where I was doing sort of deep dive on user research experiences around hybrid. And almost everyone would say, I don't go to the office as often as I probably wish I could. And they would basically say that they had been disappointed so many times with going in and it not being worth it, that they just stopped going, even though that was suboptimal for them. And they, in some cases, wanted to find another job where people were going in more regularly or more reliably. The third bit for us, which is really what's front and center for us today, is going beyond the where of work to the what of work. And really what we found is that at the end of the day, the office planning problem distills back into, well, how am I spending my time? What meetings am I in? Who am I meeting with? What heads down work am I doing? When do I have time for that? And so we've actually really shifted a lot of our focus of the core product to go beyond office planning to actually meeting planning and how I spend my time part of hybrid work.


Melissa - 00:20:46:  That's really, really fascinating. So I feel you brought it up just a couple minutes ago, too, about how there's this huge push to return to work. And employers are like, you must be in here either four days a week or on these days. What have you seen be? And I think everybody's trying to figure this out, right? It's like, how do we effectively manage a flex schedule, but also if we want to be purely remote, manage purely remote? And what are the critical criteria to keep people innovative, collaborative, and working together? What types of things have you seen work? 


Jon - 00:21:22: Yeah, I mean, you know, what's interesting is, obviously, in the early days, there was a whole variety of different policies. And one of the things that we built earlier on with Scoop is sort of a sister property that we call the Flex Index. And the goal of the Flex Index was to really put hard data behind what are companies doing, right? How are they managing return to office plans? How many days are they requiring? Are they having flexibility? What are the different policy distributions, etc.? So that gave us a really interesting purview on what's happening out there in the world. And, you know, the first thing first is things did kind of settle in and normalize around two to three days in the office. So, you know, practically speaking, it seems now kind of obvious in retrospect where most people prefer not to go in on Monday and Friday. And so they go in on Tuesday, Wednesday, and or Thursday. And so what's interesting about that is it did simplify the problem a little bit around, okay, now it's a matter of this is probably when I want to go in most. What do I want to do? And what does it look like for me to be productive? And so, you know, the companies that have succeeded... Are the ones going back to what I was saying before. Who have really oriented around what are you trying to accomplish when you are in the office versus the ones who focused on seeing is believing. When I say seeing is believing, what I mean by that is there's a lot of companies, I think, who built policies around. This is something my brother talks about a lot when he speaks for the FlexiNex, which is, well, I know that before COVID or before this latest economic downturn, we were doing better. And we were doing better when everyone was going in the office. If so, facto, if everyone goes to the office, we'll do better again. And it wasn't what happened to the office or why people go. It was, if you're in the office, I know you're there. I know I can see you. And that must mean that you're being productive. Reality is all of us who have worked in an office know that there's plenty of people who are coming in every day who are also not productive there either. And so the ones that have been most successful are the ones who say, okay, there's certain value we want to get out of the office. How do we create an environment for that to happen? And sometimes, ironically, that's not about getting work done in the office. It's about building relationships. It's about having certain types of experiences. It's about building culture in certain ways, which is more than just being there on the same day. But that's been the most common denominator. So I might focus on the output metric of how many days are you coming in, or I might focus on what the goal is or the output goal is of you being in the office. 


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Melissa - 00:10:57: I think that's so important. And nobody's really talking about that. I think in the return to work dogma is about like, what are you trying to achieve there? So I really love that you guys are focused on that. I wanted to repeat this too for our listeners. In your Q4 Flex report report, I really liked the statistics that you outlined here. And I think they were pretty surprising to me as well, because I wasn't sure what kind of numbers were on here. So I'm just going to say them so the listeners can hear it and then we can discuss. But you've got 62% of US companies now offer work location flexibility up 51% at the start of 2023. Full-time in-office has dropped to 38%. That's a lot lower than I thought it was, which is cool. A company's age is highly correlated with its attitude towards flexible work across all industries. I think we could have said that too. Fully flexible public companies outperform on revenue growth by 16%. And Mississippi is the least flexible state in the United States with Massachusetts being the most flexible, which is also very interesting. I think that outperformance thing with the 16%, that's wild. I never knew. I love that you guys have a metric on there for that. 


Jon - 00:25:17: Yeah, and I love that you're bringing this forward. And I think for us, we don't know, we have a hypothesis going in, but especially with the FlexiDex, frankly, we go into it unbiased. Our whole goal with the FlexiDex is to say, hey, can we put hard data behind these policy decisions and what they're doing to the citizen? Over the next year, we'll continue to do this with new insights and new benchmark capabilities and so on. So it was interesting for us to say, hey, let's pull some revenue. Let's actually look at what's happening to these businesses with the expectation that... Similar to what I was saying before, it's kind of this like, when things get tough, people get tighter. And tighter tends to turn into these more, dare I say, draconian policies. Whereas when business is going well, and we're trying to be creative and innovative and push our productivity, there's an appetite for more flexibility. Now, there's also a relationship there with industry and tech and things like that, where the growth sectors tend to embrace some new working models faster. And I think that's a correlating variable here. But we were really excited to see it because it's exactly the kind of thing we think companies need to look at and say, okay, what is the point of why I'm having a policy? And how do I not look in the rearview mirror going back to where we were because it's comfortable? But how do I look forward in the next decade at work to get the most out of what the universe should and will act like from a work perspective, actually now in 2030, 2035? 


Melissa - 00:26:34: Yeah. And I imagine this is not like my personal opinion here, right? It's like we're never, I don't think people are going to be happy to going back and being mandated to be in the office constantly. And I love your hybrid flexibility kind of approach with that. And I think a lot of people are looking for that flexibility, recognizing that you're human and you've got choices to make and you've got this need for a social interaction, but you also need to get stuff done. And sometimes you're more comfortable in your house and sometimes you're more comfortable in an office to do that. And I think more people are looking for companies that actually recognize that as well. So I firmly believe, and I can't wait to see if you guys can prove this with all these reports, which would be great, that the companies who kind of embrace these policies are going to do better over time. They're going to attract better talent. They're going to attract better people. That's like firmly my stance on that. So I can't wait to see you put some numbers onto it in the future as well. 


Jon - 00:27:23: Yeah, Speaking just personally, I think I tend to agree. And I think the data will see if it bears that out. I think one of the things I often will talk to folks about if they're reflecting on how to approach the problem is we forget sometimes to ask ourselves, what would you design if you were starting from scratch today? And it's so hard to let go of what we're comfortable with. And one of the things I remind people is the only reason we go to offices is because we moved on from factory work to desk work. And we did factory work because there was no way to do factory work at home. And then we got used to the idea that you go into a place to work, even from a zoning perspective. Like, not to get too geeky, this is where the commute background in me comes out. This goes back to zoning, where we needed to have enough space for people to co-locate to be able to do their work. And this is pre-internet. So this is back when we didn't have laptops and internet and all that. And I think sometimes we're so used to saying, well, this is how it always has been. It's kind of a classic innovation situation where if you were just to start society today, we have laptops, we have video chat. And design. An operating cadence or an approach to work that said, hey, you can go into this place together or you can work from home. What would you do? It seems almost obvious that you would never say, well, let's never be together. Let's only always be together. There's costs and puts and takes in every case. And I think that's where your hypothesis or your point of view here, I think, bears out or will bear out. This mixed or hybrid solution kind of seems more obvious when you think about designing it from scratch, given what we have today to do our work. 


Melissa - 00:28:51: Yeah, it's definitely different from even like 20 years ago, what we were doing as well, which it's only going to keep getting better and better. One of the big questions I think people ask about remote work when it comes to, or hybrid work, right, when it comes to product management specifically, is about product management is this role where you need to talk to a bunch of people, right? You need to talk to stakeholders, and you've got to manage so many different people, and you have to really build relationships. And sometimes it's hard for people to do, they think, let's put this, there's an assumption that it's hard to do remotely, right? When you're not in an office where you can't just have a water cooler talk or go talk to people. How have you seen people build or forge those relationships, especially if you're new in a company, online or in a remote or flexi work environment? 


Jon - 00:29:33: I think it's easy to quickly get to the, oh, it's not possible, right? Not possible is different than different. And what I mean by that is building relationships, in my experience and what we've seen from others in a remote environment, in products and maybe in most operational roles or heavily cross-functional roles, just requires a different level of effort than it did before, and a different type of effort, right? I go back to even Scoop pre-COVID. You're in the office, you're a product person, you're going to be having lunch with people and having coffee with people and turning and asking, and that makes it easy. Easy doesn't necessarily mean better, just means easier. One of the things I tell everybody on our team, especially when we've hired new people, is you have to put the time in to say, hey, can I just grab 10 minutes to talk to you about some stuff or get to know you, what have you? But that, yeah, it requires a little bit more formality. And so the first is embracing the fact that in order to engage and create that space between you, you've got to actually put the effort in. And I know that seems maybe basic, but there's a lot of folks who are like, oh, right, I need to schedule time just to connect with somebody, just to ask them how things are going. That's one. Two for me is, is resisting the urge or the pull for everything to be asynchronous. It is easy to say, well, I'll just put this in Slack. So we'll go back and forth and everything just becomes another person at the end of a text-based message. This goes back to the first, which is you've got to find opportunities to say, hey, you know what? Let's do the video chat. Let's have the one-on-one. What's funny is we still have this bad tendency to always want to have meetings as a group, but then we don't want to go live on a Zoom to have a conversation that's maybe a little less formal or a little more exploratory. The third for me is I don't think you can get away even in a fully distributed business. I think most of those companies have resolved this as well without having some in-person touch point. I think the key there is I don't think you need it every day. In fact, you may not even need it more than every six months. But you do need, I think, some mile markers on a relationship with the person where you get to know their mannerisms and what they're about and how they operate. Because you do lose some of that in video. That's just reality. You don't get the body language and the idiosyncrasies and things like that. I've shown a lot, ironically, in my team of even understanding someone's presence or their height or things like that can actually affect your understanding of where they came from or what personality they bring to the room or how they feel comfortable, etc. But I think you can really bank a ton of credit in a relationship by spending two or three days with each other. One of the things we did at Scoop is we started doing every six months off-sites. And we went from not doing off-sites as a group to every year to every six months. And it's had a huge effect because it really just gives you this sort of updated point on relationship, which makes it a bit more comfortable to say, hey, let's have a virtual coffee or hey, I want to talk to you about this thing one-on-one or spend some more time together. 


Melissa - 00:32:08: Yeah, I think that's really important. I have a team of contractors that I work with, but we work very closely together. And we all met face-to-face for the first time this year in Lisbon. And we've been working together for four years. I didn't even realize it was four years. But after that, everybody's like, oh, now I know all these little idiosyncrasies about you, right? Like now I know all this background. And it's been great to just like foster that collaboration. So I think having some kind of face-to-face time is so important.

Jon - 00:32:32: A hundred percent. And I think, you know, similarly, I think you have to embrace the things that are easier in this way. So for example, I think this, the world we're in now puts a premium on writing and writing quality and being able to articulate your thoughts and usually it's the same, but good ways. And as a product manager, I think that's a core skill. And it's a core skill that I think in all the PMs that I've worked with, or products and engineers that I've worked with, is not always one that people have. And so now being able to convey your ideas in writing in a way that someone can digest that becomes more important. And I think that should amplify our skill set there just through repetition, which I think can balance out with the need to build relationships and connect with people. Because I think that's the other side of the coin. It's like, you're not just building relationship for relationship's sake, you've got a relationship to operate better, but operations require more than just knowing the other person.


Melissa - 00:33:18: I'm really happy you brought that up because I think there was this whole misconception, I think, when Agile came out, when we were talking about Lean Startup and stuff like this about don't make too much documentation, don't make too many things, right? Like too many artifacts, right? Instead, focus more on collaborating and talking it through with people instead of just like documenting everything. I saw that pendulum swing like crazy, right? Where it was no specs. We can have no specifications whatsoever, right? And I had came from a waterfall product management environment before I started learning about Agile, you know, like back in the 2010. But... I was used to writing these giant specification documents. So when I started Agile, I started just getting more brief and more brief and more brief, but I never kind of lost that training of writing. And then I see a lot of new product managers come to the role where they never got that training to like write it all out, right? To think it all out, to actually sketch it all out and then think about breaking it down. And I feel like that's a big disconnect in the way that people approach the role because they're not like starting from this higher level. Let me get my thoughts down. Let me get the vision stated. Let me like explain to you what the concept is and then go into the weeds. They start from just the weeds and nobody has that bigger picture. So I'm like really happy you brought that up because it's one of those issues that I see. 


Jon - 00:34:30: Yeah, I totally relate. And I think this goes back to, you have to adapt to the changes in the work environment that you're in. And I think, again, there's going to be pros and there's going to be cons. And everything has its sort of other side of the coin, right? We all get to benefit from the flexibility of being at home and the things that come from that when we're not at the office every day. And yes, it changes the dynamic of the relationship building, et cetera. But there are positives that can come from it and it will cause us to accentuate different skill development, different skill usage over time. 


Melissa - 00:34:59: So when you're working with people too, who I think the other issue that people have is the onboarding of new people into an organization, especially if you're a remote or hybrid organization, can't just go into the office and like pull them around and be like, this is this person. They say you're blah, blah, blah, blah. Take this person to lunch. How do you onboard somebody successfully in that environment? 


Jon - 00:35:18: Again, share from our experiences of what I think have gone pretty well at Scoop. And honestly, what I've heard have been challenges in other places from customers and otherwise. I think this is one of those where my own personal opinion is, I think we like to say that onboarding remote is harder or broken or worse yet, not possible. I think it's more of a case of it catching people where they didn't have good practice in the first place. I think that... In an earlier era, like pre-COVID, you could get away with a pretty crummy onboarding process because they'll be in person. They'll be in the room with you. You'll have lunch. You'll get to know them. But then you still had plenty of onboarding failures when you had built the relationship or the know-how about each other, but the person still didn't know how to do the job well. Let's face it. The ultimate goal of good onboarding is to set the person up for success as an employee and a contributor. So again, it goes back to, then you go to remote onboarding where you don't get any of the three parts. You don't get the stuff that gets thrown in. And so if you don't have a structured onboarding, if you're not saying, hey, you need to meet these people or learn this thing or deliver this other thing, you're kind of out with nothing. And so I think fortunately at Scoop, for example, we had actually built a really nicely structured onboarding process. And we had some really great people on our people team and an earlier version of the company who helped do that in terms of really establishing what do you want to learn week one, week two, week three, week four, who do you need to meet with? What does that calendar need to look like, et cetera. And so transitioning from that to remote onboarding was in some ways pretty successful because you're able to say, okay, great. We know what we're trying to hit milestone-wise and what the checkpoints are. We know who we're trying to have to meet with. Let's get that on your calendar. Let's get you on the Zoom. Let's have you interact. I think the hardest part to then add in was the, okay, I'm not sitting next to you. So how can you ask me a question and not be on the shoulder? And a lot of that, again, goes back to, you've got to formalize some of that interaction time and part of it is also really impressing upon the people on your team, the importance of saying, hey, it is okay to ping me. It is okay to ask for time with me. One of the managers on our team did that he thought of on his own. And I really, really admired that works well is he literally put a daily standout with someone who joined his team for the first 12 weeks of them being on the team just to have five minutes every day and be like, cool, you good. Like, how's it going, et cetera. And what's funny is it works great because it's, yes, it's not adverse end and it's not going to happen without it going on. Your calendar being a thing, you've got to be ready to join, but it allowed him to build that trust in relationship with somebody. But if you're not going to put the effort down, then yeah, it's going to be really hard. And you're going to say, oh, well, it used to be easier because they were just in the office. Like, no, it used to be easier because you got to be lazy and still get away with some of it. And now you've got to put a little bit more diligence into it.


Melissa - 00:37:57: Yeah, I think that's a really good point there. I, you know, one thing that you were saying too, that I feel like I haven't seen people do this and it kind of, it drives me nuts a little bit, right? Where we are used to like 30-minute blocks and one-hour blocks for meetings. And the fact that you just said they put a five-minute stand-up, like something so fast in a calendar, like you can do that remotely, you can do that on Zoom is huge. And I feel like people are afraid to put those meetings in there because they're trying, they're like, I don't want to take up all this time or these blocks, but there's like this fear out there of just putting like five minutes or 15 minutes in, right? And I've suggested for people, I'm like, I think this could be a five-minute meeting or 15-minute meeting, but they're like, oh no, we need 30. And then you get in and it's like, you don't really, right? It's not targeted to what you want to accomplish. So how have you seen people kind of like get over that fear? What kind of like check-ins do people do? And what are some maybe like abnormal meetings or things that people wouldn't think of for meetings that you've seen? 


Jon - 00:38:47: Part of this comes back to the product we're actually building, right? Which is that, frankly, calendars are not built for the way that we operate today, right? They are built for really structured, bucketed time where you're in an office and you're moving from place to place. And it is in 30 to 60-minute intervals, basically, in all cases, no matter what calendar application you're using. And this is another example to me of like, how would you build a calendar if you were building it for the current way that we work, right? Where location matters and time can be handled differently and we move faster in many cases. And so that's one. And so in some ways, our core product at Scoop is really oriented toward how do we just scrutinize the way we want to have meetings in the host place? One of the things that we think about a lot is that so much of our asynchronous work has evolved over the past three and a half years. New software, new practices, new learnings. And our synchronous work is the same. It's still too many poorly planned, too long meetings. It's still too many meetings that have bad follow-through. Like, everyone says it. And the only thing that's changed is we now have more meetings, right? Statistically, we put out some data on this. We have more meetings. We spend more time in meetings. Everything has become a meeting going back to if it's a group chat, it's always a meeting. And if it's one-on-one for whatever reason, we only want to do that in chat because that makes, I think, more sense for people, even though it's sort of, I think, inverted. And so things that I've seen work well are eschewing the historical requirements of what a meeting actually is, having more ad hoc jumping on a huddle or jumping on a Zoom. Letting go of 30 and 60-minute increments. And then, honestly, vocalizing, do we need to have this meeting or not? What are we trying to accomplish? And what is the right amount of time for it and why? And I think once you kind of throw out some of the old rules, it allows you to say, okay, we're trying to be productive in a synchronous fashion for some reason. But what does it mean to be productive in that environment? And obviously, this is core to what we're doing with our meetings products, and we're rolling out more of them in 2024. 


Melissa - 00:40:40: I'm excited to see that too. I like, I wish people would be better. Meeting hygiene is always important, I feel like for all of us. So I'm curious, we've been a couple years into the post-COVID world, into this, you know, flexi work remote. What do you think is going to be the trends or what do you see evolving for the future of this over time? 


Jon - 00:41:00: In some ways, I think we've hit the baseline or we've established rather the baseline of what hybrid and flexible work we're going to be. I mean, one of the data sources we look at and we did some collaborative work with them is there's a company called Castle. Basically, it's the badge data source and they put out reports all the time. And if you look at their most recent reports, we basically flatlined in our office occupancy and attendance, right? So this idea of what's going to happen, it kind of has just stagnated. Like we're there and it's not surprisingly, it's about 50%, right? Which basically means that in general, people are going in two and a half days a week on a given day. So the first things first is, I think that's that. Like I think that ship has sailed where in general, the average employee is going to go in half the time. They're going to spend the rest of the time at home. And so I think any conversation of, well, what is going to happen around office usage? If I had to guess, I don't believe it will change much over the next 10 years. I think that's just going to be how it is. The areas I do think might change or will be challenged. I think there will be major shifts in the way that we spend our time synchronously. As I said before, like obviously, this is a bias I have with what we're building and how we're thinking about it at Scoop. But I think that the idea that I have all of this asynchronous flexibility in my tactical work, and yet I still would tell you that about half of my time is unproductive in meetings. Something about that is going to have to get scrutinized because it's at odds with the very sort of like energy and concepts of like how people are trying to spend their time working now. And I think it affects hybrid work in a very significant way, right? The idea that I would commute into the office for the meeting to get canceled. Or for the meeting to be ineffective. Or the person not to be there is the ultimate waste of time. And so I think that's going to force us to really say, okay, what am I doing with these meetings? And what does synchronous work look like when we're not synchronous and in person? Other things I think that are really interesting to me, kind of outside of my own domain of expertise that I'm sort of intrigued by, I do think that real estate usage, office design, the physical world we work in is going to have to change quite a bit. It's funny because like, you know, I think about the advent of coworking, the spaces and what do we want to put in an office, what that's going to look like. And I think we've probably just scratched the surface of what a modern office should look like and what it needs to be like. Even things like I work from home every day here in Atlanta. And I sometimes am all like, you know, maybe I'll go do a WeWork just to be around some other people. And even the idea of being around other people who aren't even on my team is interesting. And so I do think there will be these interesting combinations of what am I trying to get as a human being who needs some human interaction versus what do I need to do because it helps me professionally, my own company. And how does that affect where I want to work or how offices are designed or what that looks like? I think that's going to change quite a lot. I don't know exactly how, but I think we've always started to see what's going to happen there. And the main reason why is I think companies have been really reticent to innovate here because they're holding on to leases and so on. And then I think in the next generation, they're going to say, okay, what do I really want to do with this space to make it be productive?


Melissa - 00:43:51: I'm really excited to see what comes out of this. It sounds like a good future to me. Thank you so much, John, for being on the podcast. If people want to learn about you or Scoop, where can they go? 


Jon - 00:44:00:Yeah, it's great talking to you, Melissa. If they want to learn more about Scoop, you go to scoopforwork.com. If you want to see the FlexiDex, I've got flex.scoopforwork.com and you can get in between those. Then you can follow us on Twitter at ScoopForWork or at FlexiDex. Then I'm at John Sadow on Twitter, but not a ton of action there. So I'd start with the Scoop side of things. 


Melissa - 00:44:20: We'll put all of those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.com. So definitely go check it out there and get in touch with John and check out Scoop. 


Jon - 00:44:28: Thanks Melissa. 


Melissa - 00:44:29: Thank you all for listening to the podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode and another fantastic guest. Make sure that you submit any questions for me to dearmelissa.com and I answer them on every episode. We'll see you next time.

Melissa Perri