Berni Fisher === Jeff: ,[00:00:00] All right, Bernie, how you doing? Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining. Berni: I'm great, Jeff. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here. Jeff: It's good to see again, I think the last time we hung out was at a Celtics game. It was playoffs. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of the Celtics falling off in the playoffs, but it was a nice box at least. Right. Berni: Oh, it was a wonderful time. I was a little disappointed that they blew a 20 point lead, but hey, what can you do? Jeff: Yeah, that was, uh, not my favorite game to see, but it was a super fun time. So I'm glad you were able to make that. But, but now we're here and I think gonna talk about a couple interesting things. , The Apple maps. Debacle from back in 2012, as well as your time at ButcherBox. Customer obsession should be fun. Just for context, right? I love on your LinkedIn, you bill yourself as a first principles goddess, and that's always been a really important part of Log Rocket here and kind of thinking from that kind of ground up thinking. So, I dig that, but everyone knows, your VP of product over at Appcues now, you've been at ButcherBox, Amazon, MGE, TripAdvisor. Spent time in the mapping industry as specific that sounds both at TomTom and Apple. Everyone back in the day had a TomTom. [00:01:00] So, you've been in a lot of really like companies with a lot of awareness, but maybe can you give us the TLDR on just the journey that got you to leading product now at Appcues and what that look like. Really quickly, please. Berni: Yeah, absolutely. , So I, I think I'll just go back to when I got my first product job, which was really at Tom. Tom. I had been there for probably 10 years already and was really passionate about a specific space that we were trying to break into and solving a specific customer problem around needing to. Have on the fly self-service location, geocodes basically for bigger enterprises. And Tom, Tom historically had not had a software as a service product, and I was really excited to kind of jump in and own it. I pitched it to the GM at the time and he said yes. And so for two years I built the first ever SaaS product. I had to kind of learn what it was like to be a product manager when there really wasn't. A general description of what that meant, , and just kind of leaned in hard to really fig figuring out what the customer things were that we wanted to try to solve. And I launched that. And so that's [00:02:00] kind of where I got excited about product as a space. , And then over the years really kind of honed my product expertise through companies like Apple, like TripAdvisor, , and of course Amazon, where really focusing on like what is the core customer problem you're trying to solve and separating out. The business benefit of the thing you're building versus like making sure you're building the right thing and kind of grew into a career where I, you know, that whole first principle goddess thing really comes through where I feel really strongly that when you build the right things for the right, , customer, then the business benefit will come. And so that's kind of where my career took me. And I most recently landed at Appcues as the head of product There. I was really excited to join Appcues because, the CEO there, Ryan Berry is very much a first principles thinker, just like myself. , We're at a really pivotal moment with AI and how technology is changing the way we solve problems, and so I wanted to be, you know, really front and center in a place where AI is an enabler, but that the company at its core still believes very firmly in solving the right [00:03:00] problems. Jeff: Nice. So, you know, to dig in, right? , Let's jump into, , apple Maps, which I think is a story. Anyone in tech kinda. , I can think about, but this, this was particularly salient I I try not to watch the show Silicon Valley. , Not 'cause it's a bad show. It's actually a good show, but because like, it basically is like watching work, But there is this one episode where they launched the who phone and Gavin Bellin, it's, it's not going well. And he's talking to like his whole consumer insights board and he's like, how bad is this gonna be? Honestly, like, is this Windows Vista bad? This isn't iPhone four bad, is it? , And he goes, tell me it's not Zoom bad. And the, head of kind of feedback looks and goes, it's Apple maps Berni: Yeah, Jeff: And he Berni: where you were going. Jeff: cr but like it. It's a great product now. Like, it, it, so it's like it's, we can, you know, we can be a little funny about it because Apple's obviously such an incredible company and puts out great product, but it's part of pop culture now. Berni: , It's, it is. I, it's, but at the time it was definitely, just trauma, right? Like it was traumatic , I was one of the first probably [00:04:00] 50 employees on the Apple Maps team. I joined in May of 2012, which was probably a week or two before , WWDC announced that they were going to launch Apple Maps that following fall. , And my role when I first got there, to be honest, I didn't know what it was gonna be. , I don't know if Apple still does this, but when they're recruiting for something that isn't yet public, you don't get a lot of insight into what your job is. , But I had a feeling that it was something in the mapping space simply because that's where I'd spent my entire career so far. And so I walked into, uh, the first day and realized I was gonna be doing things like vendor management and source management of incoming. Data sets that we're gonna be building Apple maps, and so that's where my Apple Maps career started. Jeff: So you get to Apple and you are two weeks out at this point, right? From, uh, WW DC Worldwide Developer Conference. and pretty much , that's where you're announcing Apple Maps, right? Berni: Yeah, and, and it was actually a surprise to me when I got there. I was like, oh wow, we're being featured. This is [00:05:00] so cool. What a great way to enter this really. Amazing company to be something so big that they're talking about it on wwc. Jeff: Right. And so I love this though, because you come in, you don't really know the team you're going to until you get there. , And then you find out not only, you know, the maps team, but also, , getting featured at WWDC and it's gonna be , a big deal. And like, I remember it it was a big thing coming. Apple was doing their own maps. It was moving away from, uh, other solutions. we probably don't have to tell people what happened next, do we? Berni: No, probably not. Six months later, we launch and all hell broke loose. Jeff: Which to be fair, I mean, , a map product that scale is a huge undertaking, right? Like, it, this is not a small thing. Everyone kinda thinks like, oh, you just Do some location data, , but I think everyone thinks that because you just think you can start from using like Google Maps or something as a source data and you can't. Berni: That's right. You can't. And I think when I first got there, I didn't really have a lot of context into how much time we'd spent on it, or not yet. I certainly remember thinking, wow, six months is not a lot of time. You know, I had just come from a company that I'd been at for [00:06:00] 13 years where we were still trying to perfect the map and make sure it was the highest quality. And so I think I just was a little bit naive. In where we landed. But yeah, so we launched , and unfortunately we got really, really bad, , reviews, really bad press. Jeff: So, you know, we can kind of ignore the, the leading up to, 'cause you, you only had so much time there, but I guess afterwards, , what did that look like? Kind of it, it hits and, and. The, the known reaction occurs, , I can't assume it was a happy day, but like how did you guys start to attack that problem? You know, from the beginning? Berni: Yeah, it definitely wasn't a happy day. I think everyone on the team was frankly, really nervous about what the response of leadership would be. And what actually happened was just kind of an all hands on deck experience in a way that I had never seen before. , Leadership came in, they sat us down. They wanted to understand our point of view on what had happened. And then, , together we worked to commit to getting through it. And so the first thing we had to do is kind of step back and assess like, where are the biggest problems that we need to solve? [00:07:00] And, , how are we going to solve them? Are we going to rely on our current providers? Are we gonna start trying to tackle this ourselves? , And we landed somewhere in the middle, frankly, at the beginning. . Where we just really tried , to triage as best as we could and through everyone at quality and trying to figure out where, where were the biggest issues. Jeff: Yeah, I mean, and you had, you had specific context, so you were coming from TomTom and they had been sourcing the data from TomTom, so you kind of knew what it could and couldn't do. so I guess ultimately I'm not super familiar with. How they get data now or anything like how did they end up fixing this or sourcing this or like did they stay with TomTom or what? What was the end result there? Berni: I mean, we had no choice really in the beginning, but to stay with TomTom because as we talked about earlier and, and many other sources, by the way, it wasn't just TomTom to be clear. , But , you know, because it's so hard to build a map, , in a short amount of time, we had to stay with what we had and then we had to. Kind of mitigate alternative solutions, , in addition to , that source data to [00:08:00] provide quality feedback to our providers and have them make changes as fast as possible to start to build out, , technology that would allow us to, you know, essentially override some of the quality errors on our own. , Which was kind of the first step, I guess you could say, into us kind of going down the, are we gonna do this ourselves path or not? And so yeah, we basically just built some tech to start to really. Kind of get those major issues out and then worked hand in hand with our source providers to see how quickly they could turn around some of those things themselves and get us back better data. Jeff: everyone who's trying to do anything interesting is going to have. A pretty big failure or 10 or 20 in their careers. Right. , where do you start from a prioritization standpoint? Like what are the first things you go to fix? What was that decision making process like about what do you do? Berni: It's funny, I was actually talking with one of my former colleagues, this morning to try to like make sure my brain was fresh and, you know, essentially what we tried to do was say, okay, well, in any product. This is what you would do, right? Like, where's our biggest customer base? Where's the highest risk for exposure? And kind of based on usage of, [00:09:00] you know, what the product was on, which was iOS and kind of intersection of, , what we thought the highest quality or the biggest mapping issues were. And just trying to prioritize based on who's gonna see it the most. How quickly can we solve the problems for the biggest amount of users and try to lower the risk, , in the short term so that we can make the right decisions in the future in terms of like long-term planning. Jeff: and you know, ultimately right, they, they ended up building their own kind of data fleet here. Right? And kind of self sourcing most of the data. If I understand kinda the future story, right? Berni: Yeah, so over the course of the three years that I was there, my role changed a lot and it, and it changed in ways that was like advisor of like how does the current provider typically deliver product? Like can they do it faster or not to program manager? You know, keep in mind, apple didn't really have product managers at the time, so as a program manager, like. Playing that role with engineering as we're, you know, starting to get in bugs and trying to think about what are the first things to improve, like helping triage and prioritize on a squa. Like think of a squad as we would think of them today. and then ultimately before I [00:10:00] left, my role was really around field collection and I worked on a team where we were deploying Apple vehicles all over the world to try to get our own data, , in parallel, um, right with continuing down that path of still using source providers. My team was building out, uh, I don't know that it ever came to fruition, but we were building out a pedestrian, , field tool where I, you know, we basically would go and try to get not just the roads, but like how do you elevate, how do you go from a product that landed so poorly to something people definitely expected us to be able to do well to then taking apple's typical like surprise and delight. Personality and kind of going above and beyond while we were also trying to fix that core part of, of the product problem. And so we were like, great, well what if we can have the best pedestrian, navigation as well as, you know, road turn by turn. And so that's kind of where my role ended. But yeah, they were basically saying like, let's go out and start collecting our own data. Jeff: it's an interesting story because you can kind of really look back at it and there's a lot of things to learn from, this is why it's important to understand how complex something really is, because I, I think a lot of things seem easy until you really think about, oh, it's [00:11:00] just a maps app. You're literally trying to map the entire world in every street on it. Like that's not a small task. Um, and being able to have that ability to kinda like, quantify how difficult it's going to be and like, how do you. Make sure you have the ability to kind of, I, I think you talked about earlier, like pull the plug if it's not gonna be ready or, or have that kind of like safety valve. Berni: Yeah, and I think as a product person, even though my role didn't have the title product in it there, I think. That was the first time I had worked somewhere where there wasn't this idea of good enough. Right. That wasn't acceptable. And so Apple still does, and I'm a huge Apple fan. I, I have never stopped using Apple Maps because I helped build it and I believed in what they were doing. And I knew when I left that they were well on their way , to getting to the point that you just described, where they were the best of the best. , But it was just really exciting to be a part of a company where it transformed my thinking, frankly, about. Your expectations , and what you're willing to deliver to your customer. And, and I think the other thing that I really mean besides resilience and perseverance, right? Because when you're going [00:12:00] through that and at a company like Apple, you're under a lot of pressure. You're working nonstop, to respond to something that maybe we could have avoided in the first place, maybe not. But you learn all of those things, but you also just learn that the customer really is the most important thing. Because at the end of the day, , apple is successful because it builds beautiful, wonderful products, but because customers love those things. And so I just found that to be a really rewarding and, , huge learning experience that I've taken with me everywhere because now I know that. You know when you are thinking about when to launch a product, like you really do have to have clear success criteria. You have to have a clear bar and understanding of what is the right level of quality that is going to. Your customers to be super excited and to be surprised and delighted to use Apple's words. And so I'm, I'm eternally grateful that I got to do that. 'cause you know, as I was thinking back, um, and having a little PTSD this morning to talk about this, I was like, let's think about all the positive things that came out of it. And, funny enough, I was. Traveling to Denver this past week for, uh, for [00:13:00] Appcues. And I sent a link to where we were gonna meet for lunch, and I used Apple Maps and my coworker was like, apple Maps, what are you using Apple Maps for? And my boss chimed in and he goes, um, she kind of helped build it. And, and so when we got in person, he's like, okay, okay, I'm, it is much better than it ever was. Like, you know, but it's just funny. People still have this like. Reaction to it. But yeah, we've proven them wrong and that team is doing a great job. Yeah, Jeff: and that is a dope credential to have. I mean, like, how cool is that? To be able to say you know, from a credit card perspective there, there's not many things that top, I was part of the Apple Maps team, , the Apple Maps team from back in the day. Berni: Maps team, I agree. I totally agree. Jeff: But I wanna move on because, . You, you later on, you, after Amazon, you ended up at ButcherBox, you were head of product there, a VP of product for quite a while, , right post COVID. , Maybe let's just give people the kind of TLDR on, on what ButcherBox is and, and how you kind of entered the company and stuff like that. Berni: Yeah, so ButcherBox is, , a [00:14:00] very high quality meat delivery subscription service, , founded by Mike Ro. He was really trying to solve a core problem for his wife. that immediately resonated with me was that Mike was literally started a business because he was trying to solve a customer problem. Uh, it wasn't necessarily something he thought would be what it is today. And basically he couldn't find high quality meats that really met the needs of his wife's diet, and so he decided to start delivering that to people in their homes. , And so I joined in I wanna say 2022 end of year, , to work alongside Leslie Moler, who is the, chief Product Officer at the time, and really was excited to kind of transform the way. That an e-commerce company thought about the customer, and of course you have the, how you sell the product, which was the website. And so there was a major initiative around that in a Shopify migration. But it also was really thinking beyond the business and saying, okay, like how can we provide a better experience to our customers once they receive the meat, , and or need to keep repurchasing? And so I just thought it would be, , a nice pivot from [00:15:00] some of the stuff I've been working on to think about product in a way that was. , You know, in hindsight, something that I needed to balance a little bit more carefully with the business side than in any other role I'd ever been in. Jeff: There is so much that goes into the product that is ButcherBox. I mean, he talks about how to source meat even at some level. And, you know, going through USDA butcher houses and how do you get all this together and, and packaging and, the cold chain and everything. But then there's also kind of at the consumer end that, like you said, the e-commerce piece and that from most companies is like an entire problem solve onto its own. So I guess like I am curious kind of, 'cause this is right post cover, right? This is 2022, only two years removed. Things are still a little weird. Like what was the state. Of, supply chains and stuff at that point, like were you guys pretty confident in, in delivering things or, Berni: By the time I arrived, we were, I think, right before I got there. One of the things that I love about ButcherBox is their focus on customers , and of course during COVID there was. A lot of fear around if their suppliers were, would be able to [00:16:00] deliver, and yet a lot of demand because people were stuck in their homes and, you know, right place, right time. so a good problem to have for Mike and team. But, he wanted to protect his existing customers and so he paused member subscription sign up until he was confident that suppliers could be able to deliver. The product, , and continue the subscriptions for the people that had already been spending their money with him. Said, obviously by the time I got there, they were starting to grow again. supplier was not an issue. and so my role really was thinking about how do we drive customer satisfaction as much as possible through technology and through kind of. Leveraging, you know, strong partnership with customer support team, leveraging that voice of the customer to really think about not just the way in, you know, the website, which you sell the product techno technologically, but also kind of that end-to-end supply and kind of. quality reporting stuff, right? Whether that was issues about packaging or early thaws or, you know, product. Tried to play a role in all of those things in terms of filtering and supporting [00:17:00] various teams. And so we had squads on the backend. Uh, we had squads obviously on the front end side on the e-commerce side. And so product kind of like was a little bit across that entire experience. Um, I would say the main focus point for my team in the first year or so that I was there though, was really. Trying to improve tech to be able to deliver, technology onto the Shopify platform to just get us to a better place where conversion of a checkout was gonna be highly improved and easier for our customers. We had a really archaic checkout before I got there, like a three or four step checkout. We were a little bit , behind the times, so, yeah. Jeff: I mean, it says a lot about the product market fit that it did that well. , You know, the interesting thing about this business is you have all the problems with like a grocery business, an e-commerce business and a SaaS business. 'cause you have all the subscription revenue at the same time. So like, what is, you know, I, I love that you just kinda chose like, what's, what's one of the hardest business models I could go check out and I'm gonna go do this. Berni: To be fair, I don't think I knew that when I went in, I was like, oh, cool, let's, let's do this. This sounds great. And then I was like, oh yeah, the subscription piece is really complicated and Oh, [00:18:00] right, like you have to deliver it in a pro, like a packaging that's gonna make it like make the customers how you did the, cus that's not how you did the, the decision in your head like, oh, this is gonna be Yeah, that'd be, that'd be, that would be interesting if that you're like, yeah, no, full on. Most Jeff: difficult just get as hard as possible, right? So basically you got there and, and the remit was like, improve this kind of checkout , and subscription experience, , experience. How do you start I mean, aside from obviously one, you had the obvious one, like just fix the checkout flow we probably don't need a ton of. You know, you look at it, you go, this is too many steps. Let's make that less steps. Berni: That one was pretty easy, pretty straightforward in the sense of knowing what problem to solve. , I think generally speaking, you know, I had to kind of step back and understand, you know, this is a major migration. It was the second migration I had ever done, and it was in the way of us getting onto like. Other things, right? Improving the product and customer experience in other ways. We had to be on a new platform and so my main job at the beginning was to step back and say, how do I wanna tackle this? Is this gonna be a kind of while the plane is flying kind of [00:19:00] migration? , Are there things we can do to improve the customer experience while we're migrating? What are the risks around that? , Or is this a, let's rebuild the site from scratch and flip the switch. I'd done that one already at MGE and just a completely different business. So it was a lot easier to do that. , We made the choice to do this while the plane was flying, and so, we basically had to say, okay, well, where's the biggest potential impact for the business and the customer with the least amount of risk? And so that's how we attacked it. Right. And , we definitely honed in, obviously on checkout to start, but I think the cool part about this in e-commerce is like. We kind of pushed the limits a little. Like we were pushing hard to hit Black Friday, cyber Monday and make sure that, , we were ready to go. And one of the cool things about being there was like, I'm like, okay, let's assess the risk and how much can we test this? Can we test it a lot before we go live? not really. It's checkout. They didn't really have a test version of checkout, and so we did our due diligence, of course, on the engineering and product side to be as sure as possible that it was gonna work. We obviously had the ability to fall back if we needed to, [00:20:00] but what was really great was partnering with leadership there to say, okay. I'm like, I feel confident we can do this. The uplift is incredible in terms of conversion, and we're getting ready to hit our busiest four weeks of the year. I wanna flip the switch. And you know, Mike's like, let's go, let's take a risk. And we did. And it, and it worked out in our favor. We saw incredible numbers. I think it was something like double digit conversion return just by simplifying the checkout. , But that was kind of like the first major initiative I did there, where it was really around, obviously an improved customer experience, but balancing the potential business impact that it could have as well. Jeff: It seems like one of the big kind takeaways here is beyond just obviously the lifting conversion is. a little bit more awareness maybe from some of the, you know, apples that we talked about earlier about like process rigor and like, like you said, the worst case scenario. You had the fallback , to what was already working. Was there anything more like, I guess anything else on the kind of process in rigor side it seems like this is an area that that is rife for a lot of kind of diligence and experimentation. Berni: Yeah, absolutely. So a couple other things we [00:21:00] did throughout ButcherBox and, and specifically to check out the other thing that we did was like a slow dial up, right? Like people forget you don't have to flip the switch for every single consumer. And so we diverted to some amount of traffic to minimize risk. , But then if you take a different look at, you know, we kind of going all the way back to the top of funnel, , there wasn't really like a strong. Experimentation mindset, you know, when I first joined, and so we were definitely seeing opportunity to improve acquisition off the top of funnel. , And what I did was basically created, , a different core squad that was completely focused on top of funnel conversion. Think of like a Spotify squad, right? You had your triad, you had your tech lead, you had your product manager, you had your designer. They partnered directly with marketing. We leveraged our data team, uh, to really kind of set up. List out all of the hypotheses as to what we thought was going wrong with the funnel. This was after watching several session replays, hundreds of session replays, probably just, you know, lots of data that we'd gotten from our BI team and our data analytics team. Listing out all the hypotheses, prioritizing them by impact and effort, of course, and then just starting to chip away at them, right? And so we worked really [00:22:00] fluidly. We worked really quickly. We didn't have your typical like sprint iterations that you might, if you were building a more like long-term product. And we just tried to fail as fast as possible and we met as often as possible to say what was working and what wasn't. , We ended up redesigning, , essentially the flow in which customers would sign up with ButcherBox and, you know, again, had great results, but didn't go that easily all the way through it. But we learned along the way. Right. That was the whole point, like, how do you just give people and empower people? To feel like they have permission to try things and to fail, and then just get right back up and try again. And I think that was probably one of the things I was most proud of at ButcherBox is just leaving the product team with that feeling of like, oh, okay, I can do this and this is how it's supposed to work. Like I'm not supposed to get it right every time. Jeff: I have to give you back to Appcues shortly. , And you know, there's only so long we can, I could, I could see you in chat product forever, but, um, there's only so long we have But at Appcues, I love this one thing that you guys did that I wanna talk about real briefly. I don't think I have to explain to anyone that there's this thing AI that has happened, right? Berni: [00:23:00] What? Jeff: Oh yeah. What's that? , But you, when you were looking at how to approach, you know, there, there's plenty of like salt bang of ai, you know, onto the thing where you just kind of like AI washed off or say, oh, now with ai and it's like some useless piece of garbage, but, , I've never seen this before. App use, you all basically went out to the customer base and, and sent a poll and asked them. , What do you think are the best ways we could implement , and solve problems for you using ai? What was kinda the, the thought behind that or like, because I, I've never, like I said, I've never seen that before. Berni: Yeah, so if you know anything about Appcues, part of what we offer is in product messaging. And so we went ahead and ate our own dog food and used our own surveys to basically set up in product messaging, reaching out to our customers to say, Hey, we, we know there's a number of problems we're trying to solve for you. One, can you validate that these are the things that you care the most about? And two. How much trust would you put in a solution that was powered by ai? Um, and which of those things would you trust AI to do? And we had come into it with, you know, [00:24:00] typical confirmation bias, right? Like, well, here are all the things that we think AI can solve. Keep in mind, like I am a firm believer that AI is a, an enabler to solve a problem. It is not the where you start. , But we knew that, you know, we had to be involved with AI because it did have a lot of opportunity to solve problems for us in a way that we hadn't done yet. But I think we had a different opinion of where we would start than, and we're very surprised about where our customers said, actually, this is the thing I need the most right now. This is where I'm willing to trust AI right now. This is where I'm not willing to trust ai. And that frankly has been driving our roadmap. , And so what we started to do is we build out what we call our Captain ai. , He has not been publicly marketed in a major way, though he is available to all of our customers. , And, you know, we heard them loud and clear. I wanna hear about things like insights. I want help understanding where I might have to update some of my flows because they might have errors in them. And so we started conversationally and. It has been the most successful launch that we've had in terms of a future without even a major marketing [00:25:00] campaign. We hit our metrics that we were, we exceeded our metrics in the first quarter of, in terms of usage. And we continue to leverage our customers to say, okay, like, what's next? Here are the things we think we should be solving. What do you think? And then we follow the typical, product, process and rigor, how we deliver, how quickly, and to whom and, and experimenting and getting their feedback and just doing that loop. Jeff: anyone who says they know exactly what's going on with AI , is. Probably, uh, a little bit early on the Dunning Kruger effect curve there. , Because just like, it, it's still too new. I mean, obviously like, if you're a researcher over at like Gemini or open ai, yeah, okay. You might actually know, like, nevermind you, you're really far down the curve. But, most of us in product, I, I think we're, we're all still trying to figure it out and, but you nailed it, right? Like, let's solve real problems. , Let's start there and then, you know, add just a good tool amongst other tools. , Bernie, it was a real pleasure having you on. I I wish we had longer. , We'll have to have you on again sometime soon, but, , yeah, good to see you again. Thanks for taking the time. , If people wanna reach out and, you know, learn more about, uh, a Captain AI or, or your, you know, your time at [00:26:00] ButcherBox , is LinkedIn the best place to reach her? Is there some, somewhere better? Berni: Yeah, LinkedIn would be great. Um, and if it's appcues related, by all means you can reach me at my email, which is Bernie, B-E-R-N-I, at appcues.com. Jeff: Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure having you on. Thank you so much for the time and, and have a good rest of your day. Berni: Thanks for having me Jeff. Jeff: Thanks. Berni: See ya. Bye.