Episode 74: Pivot Series, Part 2: Reevaluating The Future with Alex Haefner
Melissa Perri welcomes Alex Haefner to the second episode of this four-part miniseries about companies that successfully made major pivots during the pandemic. Alex is the Head of Product at Envoy and strives to create products for a safe and healthy workplace. Alex tells Melissa how Envoy, originally a company that made products for physical workspaces, had to shift its entire product strategy during the pandemic by staying closely connected to their customers’ changing needs. They talk about why a multi-product company is the goal, how to avoid the “innovator’s dilemma,” how to talk about your roadmap with your customers, and when to keep testing versus when to forge ahead with the data you have.
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Here are some key points you’ll hear Melissa and Alex talk about:
Alex talks about his start in product, his professional background, and his current role at Envoy. [1:40].
At the very beginning of the pandemic, Envoy had to adjust its product strategy because their primary customers were physical workplaces. [3:58]
As the Head of Product, Alex and his team put together a cross-functional team from product, marketing, and engineering to combat the global changes. The CSM was in constant contact with their customers to understand their current needs. [4:50]
To survive in the global marketplace, product teams and companies must be willing to reevaluate their roadmaps if they do not align with the current needs of their customers, and develop a product that is in demand. [9:04]
Constant customer research and communication allow your product team to be prepared for what your clients currently need and need in the future. [12:10]
Strive to become a multi-product company and try to make your products work together harmoniously. This benefits both the company and the customer. [14:42]
To avoid an innovator’s dilemma, you have to understand what your customers want out of your core product and what your product lacks. Then balance those two to ensure that you keep innovating and iterating on your product so it doesn’t become stagnant. [16:56]
As a product team, ask your customers every possible question so you can get down to what the customers and end-users need and what would benefit them. [19:03]
To build a successful product, the product team should consult with their customers when building their roadmap for the year and ensure that they are on board with the direction your company is taking. [20:53]
Overcome analysis paralysis as a leader by ranking the probability of what you and your team believe the future would look like. [23:41]
Resources
Alex Haefner on LinkedIn | Twitter
Transcript:
Melissa:
Hello, and welcome to the product thinking podcast. Today, we have a great episode for you all about pivoting during the pandemic, and we're joined by Alex Haefner, who's the head of product at Envoy to share their story about how they changed their entire product strategy and really thrived, um, after going in a different direction for the pandemic. So welcome Alex.
Alex:
Thanks, Melissa. Happy to be here.
Melissa:
Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about, um, your product career, how you ended up at Envoy and, you know, set the scene for us? Like what happened during the pandemic?
Alex:
Um, my background, I started as an intern at apple in 2011, 2012. I forget I went on Yelp, um, and I had roles built in engineering and product there. Eventually I led a product team there and I had used Envoy products at Yelp and, uh, at that time Envoy. So if you're not familiar Envoy as a company that builds products for workplaces, we had two products for workplaces. One was Envoy visitors, which a lot of people know cause you go to an office and you see our product there and it helps you sign in and meet the person you're there to meet. Um, and then Envoy deliveries, which helps manage packages. And I had used both of these products. I got a lot of stuff deliver to the, when I worked at Yelp, I, the products, I didn't actually know too much about the company, but when I got connected with Envoy, I realized there was a much bigger vision and, um, that the workplace was super dynamic and we could build lots of interesting products. So that that's what brought me there.
Melissa:
Great. And so when you walked into Envoy, what did it look like in the time? So you joined in 2019, uh, what did the company look like then? And what does it look like now?
Alex:
So in 2019 I had, it was late 2019 August. I remember because it was just a few months before the pandemic. I was the third PM joining to build a product called Envoy rooms for employees. We basically were a single product company. Uh, we had visitors and like 90 of our usage was on visitors and we wanted to transition to a multipart company that served more users in the workplace. And we were about to introduce rooms, which I was leading at the time.
Melissa:
okay. So you are working at this company, you're building products really for the physical workplace. Uh, holy crap. 2020 happens. Everybody goes home. What was it like, like what were, what were you guys thinking? Um, it's the early stages at your company? I'm sure there's tons of pressure for growth and making sure people are adopting your product and using it, like what was going through your minds? What, what was the conversations you were having?
Alex:
Yeah, so we had just launched the product that I was working on a month earlier. We had this super awesome launch and then in, that was in February. And then in March of 2020, we had a shelter in place. And I remember like sitting around the office, talking to folks a few days before that. And we were like, oh, we might be outta the office for a few months. And, and maybe like a week before that we had said, oh, we might be outta the office for a few days. Um, and so, you know, we were sort of adjusting our, our, uh, understanding of this event as it was unfolding. We went into, uh, shelter in place and we had to stay at home. All of our, uh, teams kind of kicked into gear to try and figure out, okay, what does this look like for us? And, um, our core users, right? Are workplaces, and now all workplaces are closed. And so that means our products that we've been relying on to, you know, get out to market and find new customers are, are really not gonna be that relevant right now to their primary needs. And so we decided to make some pretty big pivots and shifts. We would eventually launch a new product, uh, Envoy protect. Um, and we can dig in more on, on kind of how that unfolded.
Melissa:
Tell us about that. So you, um, you go home, it's like, oh wow. We have to reconsider our entire strategy. What were the actions that you took to figure out, what do we do next? Like obviously you can't just keep going with the same roadmap that you had to throw it out the window. What did you do? Um, as a head of product, how did you get everybody, you know, together to really change strategy and figure out what was the right strategy to go after now?
Alex:
Yeah, we did a couple of things. We brought, um, a cross-functional group together. So obviously like product folks, but also go to market folks like our CSMs, who talk to our customers on a weekly basis. Um, and our a, who are hearing stuff out in the market and, uh, our engineering partners. And we got sort of like a little war room together, basically trying to predict the future and understand the needs of our users. Our users were typically like a facilities manager or, um, a security team or like an HR person within the company. And so we came up with some ideas of what the future might look like for them and what this new normal look like, and what problem might have that we could solve, we had a kind of short list. It was maybe a page and a half of potential product areas that we could dive into.
I think, um, as an example, we thought maybe we could help companies manage their, uh, cleaning because we knew that every company now had to do regular cleaning and, and, but, but when we would go out, eventually when we go out and talk to customers, we would learn that that was probably not the best. We can talk a little bit more about why, um, what we realized was, um, there was a lot more promising opportunity in health screenings, daily health screenings in order to get back into the workplace. So, um, and how we learned that is we went and talked to a bunch of customers. So I mentioned that cross functional group, we had, we try to keep really tight relationships with our customers. And it's really great when you're in SAaS, because your customer pays you and they're more than happy to go on the phone and talk to you about product ideas, product feedback.
Um, and we try to leverage that as much as possible to make our products better. So we were in probably like a two week period in, in early April where like maybe first, second week of April, where we were just on the phone with tons of customers across different industries, across different geos, trying to understand what it would look like for them. And we were throwing these ideas at them and trying to understand, you know, how are you approaching this in your work places? And what challenges do you have? It became pretty clear that this daily health screening, um, was a, was a really interesting idea that they all seemed like they needed. And there was no prior existing product in the market that, that existed because there was not a pandemic before this. Right. So, um, we then took all that feedback, brought it together in like sort of one place.
And, uh, within the next, I would say week and a half built a prototype of what that could look like and pitched that to back to most of these same customers and some other ones, um, where we would, you know, put a, put a prototype together, uh, test it out with one customer, get their feedback, uh, see where they got stuck. And then, uh, within like the next hour, do a bunch of tweaks and then jump on another call with another customer and do the same thing. Um, and we kept iterating. So we got to like a place where we felt like, okay, we know this is a big problem. We know a lot of our customers have the same problem and this feels like a broadly applicable market. Um, and we feel like we're getting on the, on the right path in terms of solution.
And on top of that, we're tuning like our talking points, uh, of how we talk about this product, cuz we're, we're learning in real time. And after that, we basically built a pitch deck for all of our teams to, to then talk about that product to their customers. And at the same time we started building it and we brought every single like engineer in the company, basically on the one project and just said, this is the most important strategic thing for the company right now. And we're gonna take everything that we had been working on at this start of the year. And we're gonna put it on pause and we're gonna focus on this. And in about four weeks, we're able to launch our, our first version of that product. We would later go on to add a bunch of functionality and innovation, but that's really like the core of where it started and where all that magic happened.
Melissa:
That's awesome. It's so good that you guys like used the paused, put the roadmap, you know, out to pasture because it was not gonna work anymore and really reevaluated, you know, where you're going. I feel like some companies and I think the pandemic was a great test for some of these companies. Um, they wouldn't be willing to do that, right? Like, uh, maybe with the pandemic as drastic as it was, it encouraged some of those ones that, you know, are more reluctant to just throw something out the window, uh, to actually change. But, uh, in my experience like working with big companies and some, some smaller companies too, that are just not super product management oriented, they're hesitant to, you know, make that leap and to do those things. How is your perspective on like changing roadmaps and, uh, being more flexible with them? How has that changed? And what's your advice for people knowing when they've got to put something out to pasture? Like maybe it's not as big of as a pandemic, but I'm sure there's other outside factors or other factors you're looking at as a head of product too for this.
Alex:
Yeah, absolutely. So for us transitioning our transitioning away from our roadmap, we had built a one year roadmap at the start of that year and we had really clear goals of where we wanted to land. Um, you know, the future just didn't play out how we wanted it to. And when we looked at where we would be a year from now, it was not a successful path. And I think if you wanna win, you have to keep reevaluating what that future looks like. If you keep doing the same thing and if it's not a winning path, you gotta change how you play the game. That is super hard. There's a lot of like tips and tricks I could give in there. You have to manage your stakeholders, your customer expectations, um, you, your customers, that this is a dynamic environment and things are changing and we're changing because of that.
Um, and you gotta help your teams be empowered to, to talk and have, have good ways to speak about that and like your go to market teams, but it's very doable. Um, it's just about making sure that you're in a spot where you're gonna win, um, a year from now. And I can tell you that, you know, in hindsight for us is absolutely the right call. Uh, we, would've not done it differently. Now how we actually like organize our roadmaps. We do it differently in, in an example where it's a zero to one, like our new protect product was when we built it during the pandemic that was going from, you know, we have no customers, to we get thousands of customers onto that product in a very short period of time. And, and that means we just gotta be super dynamic because we're not totally certain about every feature, everything that we're gonna put on the roadmap.
Um, so we were constantly reevaluating, I'd say on like a two to four week basis, especially early on. And we had a plan roughly like a two month plan every, and we would just, you know, restart on that plan, um, every two to four weeks. Um, so that was how, how we did it. We are lucky because we have a bunch of new of new products that we built that are being used and we can then build on longer term roadmaps for some of those products, as well as balance. Some of our products now are zero to one efforts that we can, um, do short term, uh, mapping on and be more flexible.
I think the other just like key here for us was, were big believers in trying to predict the future and figure out where it would land. And we, I was a really big fan of a book called super forecasting. And we, uh, in that book, they outlined principles for being good at, at, um, predicting the future. And one of the PR core principles is that you, um, your assumptions about what the future's gonna look like, and the pandemic didn't look the same in March, as it did in may. Another sort of curve ball was vaccines. Um, for our business, they ended up becoming really important as a product feature. Um, but early on, like they were gonna launch in November, 2020, and then they kind of launched in like January 20, 21. And at that point we weren't even sure they were important for our business, but later on, it became clear that most people didn't feel comfortable and comfortable going back to an office without a vaccine. So then we built, you know, vaccine features into our product. Um, so I just think being able to predict what that future would look like and rapidly do it and redo it every month or so is, is super crucial if you're in a dynamic environment.
Melissa:
So what types of, um, you know, meetings and are you having to have come out in the future? You know, what data points are you looking at? Who are you inviting to those meetings? How do you, you know, how do you brainstorm this stuff? How do you start to look at it?
Alex:
Oh, that's an interesting question. For us, we rely a lot on customer research and as like an information L input, um, especially when you're doing like the one or, or like in a very uncertain environment, you know, it doesn't really make sense to like look at competitors. It doesn't really make sense to think about AB testing. This is very much like a research driven first Princip way to think about how you're gonna build your products. So I would just say like grounded in this was our meetings were cross-functional because we had to have the representation of our customers and the market, as well as like the product perspective, as well as engineering perspective on like where we're going. Um, we also did look at a bunch of, uh, forecasting markets at that time, just to understand, like there were places you could go and you could look at super forecasters forecasting out when vaccines would be coming out, um, and all that other stuff. So we did actually pull data in from like third parties and we would follow very regularly the news. And then we would just have round table discussions about where we thought that would.
Melissa:
That's awesome. I like, I like all your different data too. That's great. So, uh, one of the things that you're dealing with right now, it sounds like is, you know, balancing for a multi-product portfolio, you've got protect, you've got these new ones coming out, you you've launched a couple other ones. I heard, uh, as a product leader, like what are you doing to make sure that you're investing in the right products at the right time? And how are you thinking about, you know, structuring your teams and managing that entire portfolio.
Alex:
So, so we launched another product in 2020 out, outside of the protect product for health screening. We launched, um, desks, and that was our next move into hybrid work. And now we've got the suite of products, as you mentioned for hybrid work and hybrid work is, is still not a done deal. Um, it there's a lot that's changing and moving in terms of how workplaces, uh, build their spaces, how they bring people back, how often they bring people back, some companies are dealing with, they have people move out of market. And so now they have like new offices are spinning up. So for us, that still means we have to keep our eye on what the future looks like, just to make sure we have like the right feature sets across our products. Um, we are in the, in a, in a fortunate world that we're a multi-product company now, but that does mean we have to balance making investments that, um, make all of our products work better together.
That's like super crucial when you're in the multi-product world, if you're in single product, you should, my recommendation, based on our experience, you should try to jump to multi-product when you're multi-product should try to get cross product synergies, um, and a hybrid world. Like we have a desks product, a rooms product, um, we have a mobile app that people can use to get into offices. And so we're enriching all of those with like rich mapping, for example, that brings it all together. Um, and so when we think about placing our investments, it's really just about, um, building a better set of products that, you know, one to 1, 1, 1 plus one equals three. So each of our products by itself is awesome, but when you get them together, it's, it's even more value. And that's really what we've been focused on.
Melissa:
Yeah, that's a really nice strategy is trying to get those cross sales and sales and all that wonderful stuff in there. Um, before too, you mentioned to me, uh, offline about like the innovator's dilemma. Um, do you think Envoy avoided it? And if so, you know, what advice do you have for other companies to avoid it?
Alex:
Yeah, so the concept of the innovators dilemma is, you know, you've got this, um, the, the simplified concept is you've got a core product that's really successful. And the challenge is you get more and more customers on that core product and they ask you for more and more features and functionality, and then your development teams end up basically fully committed to that product. And then a competitor comes along who doesn't have the customer base right now and is not beholden them to all of those feature requests and they build it slightly differently or slightly better, or they find some edge and then you're not able to catch up because you're still fixing all the things that your customers are asking for and addressing all those. Um, so when we were in the pandemic, we were probably like 70% of our resources were on our core product and 30% on that new products.
And when the pandemic hit, we shifted to basically 20 10%, you know, on the core product and like 90 percent on net new. So I would say we were pretty fortunate that we were able to avoid that dilemma because it wasn't like we didn't have customers asking for functionality on our core product, but we were able to kind of enrich their experiences along the way. Like some of the stuff we were building, we ended up being able to launch new into our core product. Um, but we also served a big need. That was actually at the time, ended up being bigger than our core products need, like why we were so helpful to all of them and why they kind of, uh, understood the value that we were bringing. So, um, I would say for us, it was super crucial for anyone looking at products, uh, superficial to think about that, um, and really keep it in mind, as we figured out how to continue working on our, um, protect product. We, we felt that we had continued, we would down the path of just on our visitors product, enriching that product probably wouldn't be where we are today. Um, we probably would've been much less successful during the pandemic. And so I think, you know, that that's just sort of, the advice I would give is look at your core product and those customers, and, you know, make sure that you're always innovating as well. And you gotta kind of balance those two. Um, and, and building new things as well.
Melissa:
Interesting. When you, when you're talking about like these core needs to that, um, these companies had like really uncovering and coming down to it, um, before, you know, we jumped on this, you were mentioning too, you were kind of building a product for a future, um, where people didn't know what their needs were, right? Like they were emerging still with this pandemic. I've gotten some feedback from people where they say, well, you don't need to do user research or you don't need to do customer research when you're building something that nobody knows they need any yet. Right? Like, you know, apple, didn't go around asking everybody if they needed the iPhone or if they needed the iPod. Um, you're kind of in an interesting place too, where you're watching, you're predicting what they're gonna need before they actually know they need it. How do you think about, you know, staying in touch with your users and doing customer research and balancing that with that task of building something that they might not know is important for them?
How do you balance like, uh, doing customer research, right. With building something that they don't know they need, cuz people will be like, oh, I I'll wait for customers to just tell me what they need and build it. Yeah. And you're like, it's like, I, I, what, what's your method for, you know, talking to them and uncovering like what might they need in the future or looking at all the signs and bringing that together. Cause what happens is like, I'll tell you the short versions, like people just dismiss customer research and say apple didn't know, customer research just built the iPhone, which we all know is not true. right. So it's like, how do you think about that too? With, with what Envoy's doing?
Alex:
So in B2B that there's, it's important to stay humble because your buyer in B2B is buying software for the end users of their company. And it might be a lot of different people that, that use the software. So for example, our buyer might be the facilities, our HR team, and our end user is lots of employees. So you have one buyer who gets the software to potentially thousands of employees. The buyer might ask for stuff to, uh, to us and our team on a research call. They might ask for some feature and they might not actually serve the end users need. So without doing really good research, we're not gonna get down to the bottom of what do they actually need and is it for them or is it for the end users?
If we can build stuff that's for the end users, we know that they're gonna love using our products so much more and that like all their, all the people that they bought the software for are gonna give them more positive feedback about what we've built. And it's all about digging in and diving in with the right question. I think I've found that, um, especially on my research calls, you should just ask or in ideally you can go in person and research with them, but you should just ask every single question that comes to mind, even ones that might seem a little direct or, um, you might ask yourself, should I ask that you can learn a lot from people and people are usually very willing to share. Um, and that is really how you get down to what are really their needs, what are their end users needs and how do we balance those legal product that, that benefits both?
Melissa:
Uh there's uh, I hear a lot from B2B product managers, um, you know, balancing that customer side versus the user side is really, really hard for them. And they have to like satisfy, you know, you have to satisfy the buyer to a certain point because they're giving you money. Um, do you have any like tips for how to make sure that you're not, you know, you told us, we need to make sure that we're solving for the end user. Sometimes what they request is not for the end user. Um, so we're gonna go do user research there, but if the buyers are asking for a bunch of stuff and you know that it's not going for the end user, how do you talk to them about that? Right? Like how do you say like, Hey, we're not, we're not gonna build that or we've got bigger, you know, fish to fry over here. What's that like for you? How do you think about building your roadmap and having those conversations that way?
Alex:
I think you can learn a lot from being really clear with customers about what your priorities are today and what your roadmap looks like and understanding if that aligns to what they need. So typically when people come to us with a lot of functionality that they're looking for, um, I do try to tell them, actually, we, we're not sure that's on our roadmap or that's not on our roadmap. If we know it's not. Um, and to gauge like, let me show you what we do have and what would you rather us be building than what's on this roadmap? And let's talk through that. Um, I just find it like really helpful to get people, to show you their priorities. So we like to do a lot of like, okay, tell me more about stack rank those like, walk me through why each of those is important to you. And I just think there's a ton that you can learn there where you might uncover like, oh, we're, we're totally off. We need to go our, or you might help educate like, oh, this company really thinking the right way. Maybe I do want some of the functionality they're, they're planning to build
Melissa:
What a novel idea, having an actual conversation with on a roadmap. I think your, your approach is so spot on. Um, and it's, it's crazy that some people just don't do that. They're afraid to go into the customer and with a humble open mind and say like, you know, this is what we're thinking, but like, let's talk about it. What, what do you have? What is, what are we not thinking of? Here's what we're thinking of and going back and forth. So, uh, I really love that. I think that's, that's a good approach, um, you know, for any B2B SAAS company to take away from this. So I'm sure you have a million lessons learned from all of this journey as well. Um, tell us a little bit about them. What, uh, what did you learn? What would you take with you? Um, I'd also love to hear a little bit about what would you not do again, or maybe what were some of the failures and you'd approach it in different ways next time?
Alex:
So I think, uh, personally, a couple lessons learned and then there's there's company lessons learned. So for my personal lessons learned, I think, uh, it was really important to have a lot of grit. This was an incredibly stressful time and to manage stress, stress is not a bad thing. Challenges are not a bad thing. You'll have them in your career and then, and lots of opportunities. Um, but it's more about how to work through them, um, and how to do it in a, in a healthy way. So I think just as a note for me, I ended up doing a lot of exercise trying to make sure I got outdoors every day, um, because we were really dealing with challenging work, um, that, you know, I thought the end result in the reward was huge for all of us and ended up being totally the right move.
But I do think having that grit and being willing to take on those challenges while also balancing your own personal mental health is really important. Um, I think the other piece that we, that, that I thought was really helpful for us was to be comfortable pivoting away from our roadmap, be comfortable, pivoting away from, um, our core product and, you know, really not being dogmatic about what we were gonna be building and focusing on winning and making sure that we were building the right things to win, um, for something that I would've done differently. I think I would've loved, it's easy to say in hindsight, but I would've loved for us to pivot it even faster, knowing how we were on the right path. You are constantly second guessing yourself. You're constantly looking re reevaluating user feedback, looking through specs and designs and saying, is that the right thing I'm building? Um, but at the end of the day, it was all there. All the, all the research we had done, we, we launched a bunch of functionality we would end up, um, removing or changing. And I think that was totally okay. I think we did that well, but I would've, I would've just said we should've just gone faster and, and made some of our moves faster because it worked out for us really well.
Melissa:
So when you're, um, trying to balance all the information that you have, I, I I've suffered from this too. I feel like you can get a wealth of information, look at all the data. No, you should do it, but still sec, guess, guess yourself, like you said, like, could we have gotten more sure. Is this really the best way to do it? Um, what are your tips for people who get stuck in that analysis paralysis there where they're like, I'm not sure if this is a moment where I need to go test more or I do have enough data to act like, what would you suggest for people to do to figure out which way to go?
Alex:
I, I would suggest that, uh, it's always a gray area and that it's probably most important to, to rank and probability match what you think the future's gonna look like. And for us, it was like, okay, can I get over 60% confident? So it's gonna look like, can I get over 80% confident? I'm never gonna be a hundred percent confident, especially during a global pandemic. We were also lucky in that, you know, I was comfortable with the concept and we were comfortable with the concept of a black Swan event. Something that is a huge inflection point, everything's gonna change. So, you know, when, you know, you're in those inflections, you need to ride 'em, but you're gonna have a ton of uncertainty. So just trying to think in like a, more of a, uh, I don't know if everyone thinks this way, but in like more of a probability based where it's like, well, I think, I think 80% chance we're going this way. And so I take those odds in those cases.
Melissa:
Yeah. Those thoughts at all. I wish, uh, more of us had, yeah,
Alex:
We always wanna have a hundred percent chance of being right. But I don't think anything we do is, is like that. And I think most of the people who are good, the future, they don't think about it in of it's a gonna be this way. There's like that it will this way, my on odds right now.
Melissa:
Yeah. I really that's really cool. So, um, workplace technology, right? Uh, a lot of us are now working remotely. It looks like more and more companies are struggling to bring people back to the office. I'm sure some people are excited to get back to the office, but a lot of other people don't wanna give up working from home. Uh, how are you thinking about this new future, right? Where we've got some people in the office, some people not in the office, a lot of teams like completely remote. Uh, how are you guys thinking about it and what do you see as trends for workplace technology in the future?
Alex:
Good question. We are building a mobile first product suite. And then from the employee perspective, it's like one mobile app that you can do pretty much anything you need for your hybrid workplace. And your hybrid workplace might be a different place every day, uh, depending on where you live and how you work. So we're trying to enable people to really have, from, from an individual's perspective, almost like a consumer like experience of using your workplace, being able to show up there, get, uh, the desk that you need, make sure the team of people you wanna spend time with that are able to collaborate with you in person. And that in person, uh, working together collaboration is really why you should go there. So if we can enable that with our products, that's what we are trying to, to, uh, help the world with. I think to see that pretty much every company is adopting some kind of flex work model.
Alex:
And then to make that successful really requires you to have great software that helps bring people together and form communities of people within the workplace who are working on the same project, have the same challenges they're working through. Um, I've, I've been back in our office since, um, may of last year. And I can tell you that, um, I don't mind being on zooms to, to go through lots of things, but there are certain things that you just cannot replace with in person. And even if your company is partially remote, um, those folks will occasionally be in person together in most cases for most companies. Right. And so we wanna make it easy for them too. Um, I think the last piece for us is at least for our products and for where we are, we have a lot of companies using our products in spaces all over the world.
And we oftentimes have customers using our products in the same building. Um, and so we're really excited and interested to try and enable new experiences there along with like building operators where, you know, my company let's say has a floor in a building, but we run outta space that day because we're a hybrid company and we've got too many people coming in today to collaborate in person. So maybe there's a flex space down a few floors that actually opens up on boy. Um, and we're really excited to make all that stuff super easy to use on your mobile phone.
Melissa:
Cool. Uh, do you see any like emerging challenges from in these hybrid work environments that you feel like are, are things that we really need to pay attention to as you know, both employees and hopefully managers of people too, listening to this going forward?
Alex:
Um, can you, can you actually expand on that one a little bit? I'm not sure what you mean. Yeah.
Melissa:
So like, um, we hybrid remote work. Some people remote, some people in the office, like what are the challenges you've seen emerge and what do you think people are gonna be dealing with, um, between the office and remote workers that maybe some of these, uh, you know, leaders who are listening to this haven't anticipated yet.
Alex:
See, there's so many interesting challenges in a hybrid work model that are also super to try and solve . Um, for us, for example, some of the things we've seen, there's a lot of people out in the world in hybrid work who now have to bring their, uh, devices to do their work home into the office every day. Would you never had to do pretty hybrid work? I don't know if people actually thought about that. Um, so, you know, like enabling things like being able to have like smart lockers in your office so that you can like really get a cubby that locks that you can keep expensive equipment in and make sure that it's there. When you come into do your work, that's just like never, you never had to have that before, but that's a new emerging kind of trend and, and something we're seeing.
Alex:
Um, I think, uh, also it's really important that teams come back together. So you just don't want individuals coming back to the office because then there isn't that sense of community and yeah, we've just seen people wanna come back together. And then, you know, I think for us, we early on saw that there were just a lot of health and safety challenges to get people back, which we've done our best to address with like including vaccines and testing and our products. So you can upload those. Um, and that really helps to, to make people feel more comfortable. Um, and then there's logistical challenges of making sure people can get in easily. And, and, and that the workplace actually is like set up and ready and the teams that run the workplace are all there, um, and able, and, and capable of running that workplace at scale. So it's been interesting to see companies going back, you know, one of the challenges they face is while we just went from, uh, 20% capacity to 80%, and that is just a, a big jump in people in the office. And, uh, some of our facilities are not ready to handle that yet.
Melissa:
Yeah. Those are really good things to think about, uh, before back to the office or as we start migrating back to the office. So thank you for thinking about them for us too. well, thanks for being on the show today, Alex. Um, if you wanna learn more about you and Envoy, uh, where should they go?
Alex:
Uh, they can reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn when happy to, to chat there and, uh, keep the conversation going
Melissa:
Great. We will post, uh, your LinkedIn and your Twitter and the show notes too, on our produx labs website. Uh, for those of you listening, uh, if you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a review. Uh, that's how people can find us and make sure that you subscribe to the product thinking podcast, where we have a new episode out every single Wednesday. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you next time.