designing-attention-how-crossfit-builds-product-community-led-growth-ben-mcallister-launchpod-logrocket
===

[00:00:00] All right, Ben, nice to have you on the show, man. Thanks for coming on today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it. I'm particularly excited this one, 'cause your background is more varied than even most product peoples I feel like, which says a lot. You graduated with a BS in physics from UNC Chapel Hill.

You were a consultant at BCG. You were a creative director and now running product, including for Matt. My run for a little bit, which. When I used to run, that was my app of choice. I love that thing. So this is awesome, man. Welcome to show. Can you film the app to me? Give us the highlight reel of like, how did you go from a bachelor's in physics to, you know, CPTO of CrossFit?

Yeah. Well thank you. That's all very kind of fun to hear and nice of you to say. And again, thanks for having me. This is super fun. You know, like that varied background. It is definitely true. I don't know if it's a good thing. I don't know if it's what I would [00:01:00] recommend, but I guess to answer your question, okay, so like, how did I get here?

I do often frame the story as like, as an undergrad, I studied physics, and I guess that kind of the theme of this narrative is I've just always been interested in a lot of different things. I've always been a little bit resistant to specialization, and so I liked political science, I liked physics, I liked, you know, thinking about things in different ways.

Kinda the left brain, right brain thing. Mm-hmm. I think like that made finding a career kind of a challenge. BCG was an amazing experience, but I was definitely not great at it. I then for years kind of was like, you know, I kind of wanna do something creative, but I also like thinking about things in kind of an analytical way.

I worked in advertising and brand for a little while. I just sort of by accident, stumbled upon Frog Design when I was living in Austin, and one thing led to another. I eventually ended up at Under Armour working with some folks who I had worked with at Frog, and that was where I got to know Alan, Mike Lee, the founders of [00:02:00] MyFitnessPal, and they really turned me into a product manager and they put me in charge of MapMyRun at the time.

That was an incredible experience to be able to work on a consumer app that has millions of users and just to live through that period of Under Armour. A friend of mine there at the time who's actually now at Spotify, he runs their mobile design team. And we would always just say like, man, this is gonna be such an interesting story to have lived through this period of under aor.

And it really was. But you know, I think like when I talked to PMs, it's kind of similarly random. I wish I had known when I started my career that this field existed because once I found it. It was the end of that angsty, like, what am I gonna do with myself? It was more just like, oh, this is like actually a field where kind of a weird person like me who's just curious and wants to do a lot of different things.

It's sort of perfect. I think we're about the same age and like when we came outta school, there wasn't proc or, or there was, but it was not what it is now. Right. Early on in my career, I worked at a company called Dynatrace. I remember basically the thesis there [00:03:00] was building an engineering product because that's who had, you know, at the time it was, you know, the, the mid Augh and that's who had budget, was people building the applications and the product team had, if you had a product team, they were an afterthought.

But I do love just the like, oops. I'm the creative director at Frog. Now you say you don't know if you'd recommend it, but it seems like you've turned out in a pretty good spot. You're at CrossFit, which is a, a cultural phenomenon. But you know, this kind of idea, you've, you've talked about this before, I think you used the term being an info vore.

What does that mean and, and how did you come to that kind of concept of, of revisionist history? I definitely borrowed, stole that term. All the best terms are stolen, right? Cowen, Tyler Cowen, the economist and blogger at George Mason is probably the person who's been most influential to just like my thinking and my approach to life and career.

I think he wrote a book called The Age of the Vore, and. He's just for me, a model in so many ways. He has an insatiable curiosity. He consumes content at an [00:04:00] astonishing rate. If you read his blog and just see how the volume of his reading and the breadth is just astonishing. So I'm not anywhere near that kind of stratosphere, but I do sort of have a kind of hunger and craving for information.

One of the things I talked to my team about. When I first joined CrossFit, especially, 'cause we have a lot of PMs who are kind of new to the field. Mm-hmm. They're not new to CrossFit, but they're new to being PMs. And I think one of the basic things I wanted to set the table with when I joined the team was being a PM is really, really hard.

And so it has to be something you enjoy. I think if you're not kind of having fun with it, it's gonna be a grind and it shouldn't feel that way. And so some of that. Thinking around being an info vore and just consuming content, looking for interesting connections is because honestly, I just find it fun.

I think it like sort of makes things more interesting. A big part of being a PM is getting people excited about. What you're doing and sometimes getting people excited about your idea, that's not their idea. Not [00:05:00] exclusively of course, but you know, you need to get people, even if it's not your idea, it could be your boss's idea that you have to do.

You wanna get people excited about it. And I think the more you can draw on that stuff, it just makes the workday a little bit more interesting. I mean, to that point also of just like really caring about what you do. I actually had a meeting with the team just late yesterday afternoon with one of the PMs, and I was just kind of like, I wanna make sure.

That you are not just like writing in a deck, the things that you feel like you're supposed to write in a deck and that, that you feel that our CEO wants to hear. Like it's really important for you to believe in this stuff. And this PM actually is kind of a well-known person in the CrossFit world. So him especially, it was kind of like, you need to believe in this.

I want to hear the unadulterated point of view that like you are passionate about, that you think is right now. Maybe that doesn't work in all spaces, but like I think in consumer. Often that's really important and certainly kind of in like the, the fitness world. So at the end of the day, the info forward thing is about bringing a better quality of idea, a better quality of thinking, thinking differently at times, but also just having fun.

I think when you're trying to bring someone along or [00:06:00] explain or co or get people on board, it does help to tie it to, you know, other examples or real life things that, that aren't obviously tied together. There actually is a lot of grounding in kind of the idea of juxtaposition drives recall. So when you take maybe an element of, you know, you're working on something for the CrossFit open and try and explain why you're doing it to the team and make some parallel to uh, maybe some book you read or some, you know, classical play or what, I don't know.

I don't know what you read for fun, but those two things, you can get it right and make sense. So you're really gonna bring people along a lot more. There's real science here. Absolutely. And my thinking is. This is just kind of a hunch that mapping kind of one concept onto another is not like a trick of communication, but I kind of feel like that is literally how learning works, right?

And that if you're not somehow transposing one thing onto another at some level, you're not really understanding it. We've all sat through PowerPoint presentations that are just like this endless litany of facts. It's sort of a cliche at this point, but somehow I think it's still hard for people to [00:07:00] get that, that like, if you want to be memorable.

If you want people to hang onto something that you say you really have to like attach it to something. People love a story, right? A species that evolved language basically through storytelling, right? There was, you know, small communities that that told stories to passed on history. There's a great book about that.

It's one of my favorite books. It's one of the most things that stuck with me. It's called On the Origin of Stories by a guy named Brian Boyd. It is phenomenal and it is basically exactly what you just said. It's a theory of like what explains. The impulse to tell stories. Why did we do this? Every movement starts when people pushing something.

You know, CrossFit didn't start with millions and millions of users, but yeah, I mean, I, it's interesting, right? The, the connections and the storytelling, they don't have to be so far apart that you're like, here's how baseball relates to Shakespeare, right? I'm not sure how much you know about our product, but basically we started a session replay, and now we've built the kind of AI agent that watches everything.

Just tells you what's important. 'cause session, replay on its own is mm-hmm. Kinda a crappy solution. Like no one watches more than a couple [00:08:00] hundred sessions at best. Thats tiresome. So like how do you get all that data locked away? The point of it was, we want to convey to a lot of people, you know, we are the, the one with the agent that watches everything for you, just tells you what's important.

Mm-hmm. And how do we do that? And I remember the founder of the Savannah Bananas, you know, like the kinda Harlem Globe draws of baseball. Yep. A one of the greatest shows I've ever seen in my life when I saw it in Fenway. But he talked about in an interview, at some level, it's really just about attention.

Driving attention is a huge part of it. And after that you can drive recall and da da, da, but if you can't drive the attention, you're never going to drive any of the downstream things from that. Mm-hmm. And that was kinda a big guiding principle of how we looked at this initiative where we just need to get this one singular message.

Out to the market. I think the idea of attention is another one of my recent obsessions. I think it's so important in product. I remember like early on when I joined CrossFit and I was. Giving some design feedback about something and there was a, the response from the person I was talking to was like, well, [00:09:00] we like put it through usability testing and you know, when prompted to do X, we found that people were able to do it.

And I think the problem with things like that often is like, yeah, but like in the real world, no one's going to prompt them. So like we have to somehow get inside their head and understand like, are they gonna be motivated to do this in the first place? If so, where do we think they're naturally gonna look?

And to the point of attention, what's the right kind of moment, time and place to put something in front of them? I think that is such an underrated. Skill in the world of product because understanding the way attention works is just so important. What really the good book on attention to read is the Master in his Emissary.

It's a question at the beginning of the book is like, why do we have a split brain? Yeah. Like why in a thing that's supposed to all be about connection. Would you actually sever. A lot of the connections and it's, it's kind of like, I think with the way he describes, it's almost like parallel processing.

Mm-hmm. And his theory is that it's all about attention and that you have two ways of attending the world. You have like a broad [00:10:00] scope of attention, almost like peripheral vision. Things catch your attention outta the corner of your eye, and then you have sort of the spotlight that's a little bit more consciously directed.

One of the interesting insights about that, uh, though, is that this kind of, the broad scanning attention is like not within your control. Yeah. So like you think about something just flashing in your peripheral vision and your head snaps to look at it, you don't really control that reaction. It's all happening automatically.

Whereas like the spotlight is a little bit more directed and you can think about product design as kind of. An exercise in balancing these two types of attention. Mm-hmm. Right. And having an intuition for where's the user spotlight right now? Is it appropriate to catch something? And kind of the wider perspective.

So yeah, attention. Attention is everything and likely hard to, you know, to tie it back to product. Likely, if you're not managing how people are spending their attention within your product, even as you're building your brand, arguably it's unlikely to build a great product experience if you're not thinking about it.

What do I want them paying attention to? [00:11:00] What am I doing to, to drive that? What am I doing? Maybe, like you said, that's, that's causing that flash over here that might draw their attention away from the thing I want them to do. Within CrossFit, the, the physical experience or the digital experience, or, you know, when we're building Log Rocket or if you're using Log Rocket to manage your experience.

Mm-hmm. How do you use that to understand? Where do you want people focused? Are they focused there? What else is going on? You're a marketer, right? And I think marketing is famously undervalued by product people because certainly, you know, we've seen many notable cases of amazing, like product led growth or products that are just so good they don't need to be marketed.

But that's not always the case. I mean, everything in product is so contextual, especially if you're a like CrossFit's, like a pretty lean company, right? And one of my pet peeves, and this was true back at Under Armour Map, my run as well, one of my pet peeves is a PM kind of like complaining and making excuses about, well, you know, we didn't get enough marketing or whatever.

And for one it's just sounds a little bit like you're [00:12:00] making excuses, you know? So that just kind of like intuitively, I'm like, eh, I don't like that. But the bigger point, especially if you're at a company. It doesn't have like some massive marketing budget is like, okay, well you knew that. You knew that when you built this feature, and so why would you try to build and ship a feature that depends upon marketing with you, knowing that you're not gonna have access to it.

That tells me either you need to get scrappy and kind of like figure out your own marketing plan, your own go to market, or you need to think a little bit harder about that feature. Should we build it? Should we build it differently? In light of that reality, but like making the excuse of like, oh, well, it was somebody else's responsibility.

Mm-hmm. No, it's like it's all the same thing, right? If attention is what matters, you have to become. Aware that something exists, something has to be salient. You have a problem or you see an interesting opportunity, how does that arise? Like you as a PM have to think about it. You can't just assume that like, well, I'm just waiting for somebody to walk in the door miraculously, right, and use this product.

Before I got into [00:13:00] product, I worked at an advertising agency in Austin called GSD and m, and they had, you know, as ad people, they had like lots of little like slogans that we would like, you know, say to each other. But the one that I loved that it was like so refreshing, it was like on the wall, like almost like a big mural.

Advertising is an uninvited guest. And I always thought that was so cool because that is showing a certain respect for attention and the fact that you have to earn it and like an acknowledgement that like this thing that we're all making advertising, like famously everyone hates it except when you do an amazing job of it.

Right? And I think like that's what that slogan was sort of reminding everybody of and that's why I loved it. I think that's. It's been one of the biggest things I've pushed in my career, no matter what company I've been at, is distribution is part content. But the other thing has been no one gives a shit about your product.

Nobody cares that. Right. Unless you make it so good or so important to them that they will care. None of these things work without driving attention at so many levels. So yeah, it's like a form of like solipsism, like I'm the center of the world. Everyone is just waiting [00:14:00] to see what this product from this company is gonna look like.

Like, no, they've got their own problems, you know? Unless, unless you're open AI or something, it's, it's not gonna, right. Right. And even that, because it's so, it was so incredibly amazing when it came out. That that forced attention because it was such a paradigm shift of the world that you had to pay attention to it.

Maybe that's part of the problem is like, yeah, we, we read all of these stories about like the most famous, most notable companies, right? And like, yeah, we're all following like the ins and outs of open AI and the company. I was just reading some Wall Street Journal article this morning about what thinking machines that spun off of Open ai.

Some of the drama there and it's like you have to remind yourself that like in all likelihood, like you don't work at open AI at this moment in this time. So not everyone is waiting with bated breath, but there are those cases when they are to ground our conversation a little bit, right? If you look at CrossFit did not start out with an audience of millions of people where the open.

Would just automatically draw like, what is it, hundreds of thousands of entrance? Yeah, I'm not, I'm not a hundred percent sure of the scale there is. Is it that big? Is it hundreds of [00:15:00] thousands? Is that right? It's hundreds of thousands. Yeah. Geez. Yeah. I mean that you didn't start being like, oh, hey, we're gonna do the open BAM six figure the patient.

No, it's amazing. It's amazing. You know, the interesting thing about my role at CrossFit is that it's not certainly what you'd call a tech company. Yeah. But what it is is an internet company. It's an internet native company. Mm-hmm. That started with this brilliant trainer, Greg Glassman, who was training people in his gym and posting these crazy workouts on this website, crossfit.com, and it really grew.

It's actually a great sort of story of product market fit. That didn't, didn't, I mean, it definitely had marketing. I think in some ways Glassman was and is kind of a genius marketer, but it's marketing that doesn't look like the typical marketing playbook, and so it really was sort of an organic phenomenon that caught fire.

He's a very. Charismatic guy, people wanted to hear more from him. So he started posting seminars. Mm-hmm. And that turned into, now that's like a third of our [00:16:00] business still is running seminars to train CrossFit trainers. People wanted to open CrossFit gyms. And so he organically came to this idea of, well, I'll charge you a flat fee and you can call yourself a CrossFit gym.

And that became our affiliate business. Yeah. Which is another kind of third of our business. To this day. And so CrossFit is not a franchise. You'll notice when you drive around, you see lots of CrossFit gyms, about 10,000 CrossFit gyms around the world, roughly half in the us. You'll notice they all look pretty different.

Well, that's 'cause they're all independent businesses. They're not franchise. We don't tell them what to do and how to operate. Somewhere along this journey, the founder said to one of the execs, what if we threw the Woodstock of fitness? And that turned into the CrossFit Games, which is kind of the other major chunk of our business.

So that starts with the CrossFit Open, which you're describing, which is I think, the largest virtual participation sports event in the world. So, you know, around 300,000 people do it last few years, and that is the beginning of the season. It culminates in the CrossFit [00:17:00] games during the summer where we crown the fittest on earth.

So those are kind of the three pieces of the CrossFit business. It happened very organically from just, you know, I think really powerful ideas. They were very counter-cultural and counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom. Mm-hmm. In sort of the strength and conditioning world and just absolutely connected with a certain type of person out there.

Yeah. Who, you know, you talk to people who have been doing CrossFit for a long time and the thing you hear time and time again, it's amazing, is that, you know, my friend invited me to go to this gym. I didn't know what they're doing, all this crazy stuff. And after the first workout I was hooked. And you hear people say that so often.

I would say actually for people like me, that's not necessarily true. I'm not like a gifted athlete. I am famously one of the least fit people at CrossFit, and I think that's part of our challenge is like kind of bridging from somebody who's maybe like a track athlete in college and wants to do something similarly intense and competitive afterwards with, you know, [00:18:00] just like ordinary people who kind of wanna stay fit, maybe don't think of themselves as competitive, maybe don't think of themselves as fit.

And of course CrossFit absolutely can. Serve those people really well and does, but there's some perceptions that, you know, actually it's only for the elites. And so that's kinda one of the big challenges we have. What you just laid out and kinda the backstory of CrossFit itself and kinda how we, you know, how you guys got to it here is a great applied example of what we were talking about for quite a while here, right?

Like it starts with attention. It wasn't all of a sudden, you know, hundreds of thousands of people setting up for the open. It was Greg Glassman training small groups of people. It was him posting content. Early on when fitness was starting to spike to just, just free content that caught attention the right way and it was, it filled a need.

This is another one of my big, like, kind of, I would, I think up until recently I would've said my marketing theories, but I've kinda realized like, I meet now with our product team every, you know, weekly, we have a, a big kind of overlap and, and looking at back to like, attention really is everything. And like you said, if you, you know, if the product's not working, don't blame marketing, don't blame [00:19:00] sales.

It's, you know, look at yourself first. And same. Working, but like he, he saw something that worked and he, he leaned in, which I think is one of the most important things. I'm sure there's a lot of like, step one, you know, steal socks, step two, question mark, step three, profit here. But you know, you look to what the open is now and, and when we talked earlier, you talked about how people will, one of the most trafficked pages is that scoreboard for the open.

The open only happens once, but people are checking it all year long about how they compare and stuff like that. And there was a big part of. How do you draw people in with this like friendly competition or, or, or get them to, to push themselves to be better And CrossFit really drives that. But all started with driving attention from this bit of free content that really served a need.

And then how do you just level up and level up and level up If that's not a product lesson, I don't know what is here. Yeah. And the thing about the leaderboards, so to maybe just to like give a little bit of background, you know, so, so I always, I kinda help but think of like, I'm coming into CrossFit, I'm learning all these interesting things and I'm always kind of replaying, so like I'm learning that like.

Matt, my run, of course, was a seasonal app. Yeah. Being a running thing. Very [00:20:00] weather dependent. CrossFit is seasonal in a different way. When you look at all of our software products around this CrossFit game season, and what you see is you see these massive spikes in our website, our mobile app, everything during the CrossFit open, this big competition.

Mm-hmm. We're talking about that. Hundreds of thousands of people do, and you see other peaks throughout the CrossFit games season. And the other thing you see is we have kind of two separate websites, crossfit.com, which we call main site, and then the games site. Mm-hmm. games.crossfit.com. And when I joined.

Everyone was reminding me like, oh, just keep in mind, you know, like most of the traffic goes to the game site. And I'm thinking, okay, that probably means that like there's all these diehard fans, the CrossFit game, which there are, and they're following their favorite athletes. They're reading news about 'em, all this kind of stuff.

And it turns out that's not the case. All this traffic is people going to the leaderboards and predominantly looking at their own scores from this year, from last year, from 10 years ago, and that. For me raises this interesting product question about, okay, we're thinking about the open. [00:21:00] It's existed for well over a decade.

I think we might be getting to the 20th anniversary of the CrossFit games in the open. Damn. So what do you do with an insight like that? Right? And I'll paint the picture a little bit. So. You to participate officially in the CrossFit Open, you pay $20. And effectively what you're getting for that is to see where you are on the leaderboard.

Mm-hmm. And I think there's other emotional benefits attached to it. Like there's a sense of accountability of like, this thing is coming up once a year. It's kinda my fitness checkup. How am I doing? Have I progressed in certain skills? Can I do. Double unders, which is like when you do a jump rope twice around each jump.

Mm-hmm. Or can I do a muscle up, like when you do a pull up and then push yourself up? These are like kind of core CrossFit things, but skills you acquire over time as a participant, but you pay that $20 to get on the leaderboard. What also happens is most gyms will host an event to sort of celebrate and do the open together, typically called Friday Night Lights.

Mm-hmm. [00:22:00] Obvious reasons you get together, you make it a party. Sometimes people will wear costumes, they'll do other kinds of intramural competitions associated with it. But going back to the beginning of CrossFit, Glassman always described it as an open source ecosystem, and this is really true. Right. So we published the open workout.

Anyone can do it. Mm-hmm. Jim's hosted. And most of the members at the gym who go to like a Friday night lights event are probably not gonna pay the $20 and be on the leaderboard. So what do you do with that? You've got most of the traffic is people checking out the leaderboard, and yet most of the people over here are actually not writing the check proverbially and actually participating in the official event.

So do you double down on those performance benefits of it, double down on what's already working, or do you try to broaden your scope and say, okay, maybe there's like another. Dynamic of the open. Can we tap into the fun and the community element that happens at those Friday night light events? And those are questions that are like, that's like a live debate right now.

Yeah. Within the company and, and one that I am like ruminating on. All the time. I think the other dimension that I think about in [00:23:00] it is, you know, as I mentioned earlier, our model is we're, we're, it's an affiliate, what we call an affiliate model. So, you know, the gyms pay us a flat fee to use the name, and it's a balance that we have to strike between the relationship, between CrossFit and the gyms.

We wanna be respectful. Of like them as entrepreneurs and the Friday Night Lights event being something that like they are putting on. The thing that we have to think about is what is our unique role? We wanna be thinking about what can we do as a centralized entity, as the owner of the brand that's gonna benefit.

Our global thousands of gyms and what are we uniquely positioned to do? If you go back to this idea that CrossFit was an open source ecosystem, there's a lot that CrossFit HQ doesn't do. We don't provide the gyms with gym management software. We don't tell the gyms, this is the workout you have to do today.

It's a pretty live and let live. Model. But at the same time, it's really important that we focus our energy. 'cause again, [00:24:00] at the end of the day, not a huge company. What is the thing with our like limited resources that we can have the most impact on? That by virtue of being the owners of the brand can be most impactful.

So that's kinda the last thing to think about, but again, very live debate. Do you lean into your strengths or do you try to fill in those weaknesses? I can say personally, which side I always go to is like. Be weird, you know, do the thing that makes you unique. Don't worry about the stuff that you're not as good at.

I am really curious to see where you guys go with this. 'cause I think there's a lot of cool pass you can take and it's, it's a really rad brand. Like, it's cool to see the, the cultural phenomenon that CrossFit comes. So, we'll, we'll have to have you on maybe like six months a year down the line, and we can talk about what you did and why you guys went that way.

But, but speaking of which, there's a lot of. A lot of CrossFit experience that you need to help drive. And it turns out, you know, I do all the things at Log Rocket than than host a podcast. So I also have to depart. I gotta give you back to Glassman and all those guys. So Ben, this was a blast. I really do hope you can come on again and we can talk [00:25:00] about where you guys ended up going.

'cause. Your brain works in a, a way that I, I find deeply amazing and I love so, so much. Thank you. It is been really fun. Jeff, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, thanks for coming on LinkedIn. If people are looking to reach out and investigate a little of some of these topics, is LinkedIn a good way to get in touch or, or something else?

Yeah, LinkedIn and I am still a Twitter x obsessive. I am Ben McAllister on there and I'm, I'm certainly findable. On LinkedIn. Awesome. Well it has been a blast man. Thank you for coming on. I'm going to read the Attention book and the stories book and I'll, you know my thoughts, but I appreciate all the chat today.

This is brilliant and yeah, look forward to having you again. Thank you so much for coming on. Thanks, Jeff.