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00:13 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. I am Chris Ronan, my username is Rock Chalk, I am one of the lackeys who works at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. Today, I am excited to share a conversation with Allison Kelsey. She is the director of Product here at HQ. She will explain what that means as well as what the product team does, and how it shapes the tools that you use to go geocaching. So here is me and Allison talking Product.

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00:52 CR: Well, Allison, before we get to what you do here at Geocaching HQ, I thought it would be helpful to talk about what the product team is at Geocaching HQ. Who makes up the product team and what is the mission of the product team here? 

01:07 Allison Kelsey: Great question, good way to start this out. So the mission of the product team is to provide meaningful experiences through the products that comprise Geocaching. So our website and our apps primarily, we have a vision of the product that is pretty expansive, I would say, which is that geocaching as a game has the ability to reach a lot of people across the world and support community and meaningful experiences. So the team that we have working on that to bring that vision to life are primarily comprised of product designers and product managers and we also have some folks that I’ll go into a little bit of detail, just a bit later, because it’s very much tied to how you develop software.

02:00 AK: So product designers are the folks that really have that deep empathy for the community. What is it that makes geocachers tick, what are we looking for when we engage in the game of geocaching? And it’s different for everyone. There are some folks that I’m thinking of people I’ve met at community events that are on their thousandth day streak, and that’s what gives that type of person a lot of enjoyment. There are other folks where it’s really all about teams and community and challenges and going out in groups of people, or maybe physically challenging themselves or just getting away from the city with their dog. And it’s the product designers on our team that really go out and get deeply involved in understanding all of those dynamics for people that play our game.

02:52 AK: They’re incredibly curious, they’re incredibly non-judgemental. Designers are so cool to hang out with because they just wanna know about everything and they over time develop that empathy to where they can really try to see through other people’s eyes. Our product designers work one-to-one with product managers and product managers also need a lot of those same skills to really care about and be passionate about our community and the people in our community. But on top of that, our product managers really focus on what specifically does our community want. What is gonna be giving that inspiration and that thrill and also thinking about the business side of things too? How do we keep our game afloat? How do we keep investing in our platform? And thinking in terms of value.

03:47 AK: When you have a pair of a product designer and a product manager, you get that well-rounded approach to thinking about what we build and what we deliver to the community. The community value the metrics, the data, the product vision coming from the product manager, and then exactly how and what and why we build what we build coming from that product designer. The other key folks that I have on the product team are called scrum masters and program managers and those terms are probably completely unfamiliar to anyone who’s listening who hasn’t worked in software, I think project management if you will.

04:29 AK: So we’ve got all of these ideas, and we’ve got the plan for what we wanna build, we’ve talked to Engineering, we’ve got our designs. If we were just left to our own devices, I don’t know if we would ever be able to actually deliver things out to the community if it weren’t for scrum masters and program managers supporting actual delivery planning.

04:56 AK: We’ve got a lot of work in flight that we’re working on, and these are the folks that help keep all those pieces from colliding, slamming into each other. We can’t release everything all at once. And these are the folks that have those conversations with all the lackeys on various teams to coordinate the release planning and down to, for example, who’s gonna post-release notes to the forums? When is that going to happen? How much lead time do we need to let the community know if we wanna do a press release or something? So these folks are keeping track of all of those details and providing support for the end-to-end process of getting software delivered.

05:42 CR: You came to Geocaching HQ with a lot of experience in product and I’ve always wondered, is geocaching unique and how there is such a wide range of experience levels among the people who play the game and in turn, a wide range of needs and wants for the tools that we use to play geocaching. Is that similar to what you’ve experienced in developing other products? 

06:07 AK: No, it’s really pretty different. And it’s one of the things that I find the most exciting about being here at HQ. I’ve come to the conclusion that there is so much breadth of people and experiences in our community, things that people seek after, because there’s something really fundamental about this game that appeals to us as human beings. I know that sounds really grand, but it just feels like there is something deeply human about wanting to connect, wanting to go adventure, wanting to create things, wanting to challenge ourselves. And I would say this is unlike any other product that I’ve worked on. The other thing that’s really different about being here at HQ is the investment in the community and the perspective that the community really has to be central to how we think about what we’re doing. I’ve worked at other places where revenue was the most important thing, or technology was the most important thing. And if we build it, the players or the “users” will follow. And this model that we have here is completely the reverse of that. Which I find really powerful for me at a professional level too.

07:31 CR: Okay, so you’ve described the product team a little bit, what about your role, what does that entail, what is your day-to-day like here? 

07:39 AK: My day-to-day varies a lot. My role as a leader here at Geocaching is to support people on my team in being as effective as they can be, in a nutshell. One of the things that’s really powerful about working here as well, that’s both personally and professionally meaningful to me is the concept of servant leadership. And rather than top down authority, sort of hierarchical model, my goal is to build a team of people who are really passionate about making great things for the community, trying new things, inventing, exploring ideas and to provide them the tools and support that they need to do that. In my role spanning several pairs of product managers and designers working together I also am afforded a breadth of perspective where I can see across all of the different projects that we’re working on, and I can bring the team together to share that perspective with them, support each other to connect with each other so that we can figure out where to get synergy, where we can avoid being siloed for example. So I like to think of an analogy of product teams are like jazz bands, everybody’s got their unique music that they make. And my goal, and my role as a band leader is not to have everyone focus on that sheet music, not even to write that sheet music, but to put some beautiful sheet music in front of them, have them riff on it, invent, and make that music together.

09:18 CR: And so, maybe if the product team is a jazz band, then maybe HQ is an orchestra. Because as you alluded to earlier, the product team interacts with various other teams here at HQ to get these neat features out the door in the app or on the website? 

09:37 AK: I think that’s a great analogy. Yeah, there’s no way that we could be effective at HQ, if it was just a product team coming up with ideas. We have to work incredibly well together to deliver value, meaningful experiences and fun to our community. So that is another thing that I get to do in my role is to look at how I can support collaboration between the product team and engineering and the community team and even finance facilities. We all have to come together like that big band, lots of… Big horn section, shall we say. [chuckle]

10:15 CR: So when you first got here, how much did you know about Geocaching, and how much have you learned since? Because I’ve noticed that you have attended a lot of events both locally, and you’ve had a chance to go overseas as well. There’s a lot to learn, isn’t there? 

10:32 AK: There is. And I’m in a really great place with my own experience of geocaching in that I’m learning how much more… The more I know the more I know I’m gonna need to learn still. For example, I’m looking forward to going to the APE cache Mega this weekend. And I was talking to some Lackeys yesterday about how should I plan for this? And I talked to six different people and they all had six different approaches to what they’re gonna do on the day. And I pretty quickly got completely overwhelmed like, “Oh my gosh, I thought it was pretty straightforward. I’m gonna go to this event. I’m gonna meet a bunch of great people. I’ma go see a historical cache,” and it probably will come down to that.

[laughter]

11:16 AK: I’m keeping it as simple as I can, but there’s folks that are gonna go off-roading and go find some really remote caches. There’s folks that are starting their day at 6:00 in the morning, it’s gonna be a 13, 14-hour day. And what I’ve enjoyed is just trying as many different ways to enjoy the game as I can, and find the sweet spot for me, and kind of going back to that vision that we have. That’s the way this game works for folks. I will say to answer your question more directly, when I joined in December, I was a very new geocacher, I’d only been playing for four months. And, I thought that at 50, 60, 75 finds, that I had a pretty good feel for how this game flows, but there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t go out and find some new mechanic, some new cache type. For example, I just got into where I go this past weekend. That was amazing. And so I would say, yeah, having the last eight months on top of that first few months, it’s really open my kind of expanded the vista that I have for this game. And as you said, getting the chance to talk to people at events, it’s an amazing and powerful experience too because there’s no way I could discover everything there is to know about this game on my own. I think it would take a lifetime. And in my role it’s really important that I understand as many different perspectives as I can, and so when I go to events, I like to ask questions.

12:58 CR: You’ve described how varied people’s needs can be, and you’ve experienced it yourself. So having said that, how do we decide what to make and what features to come up with, and I’m sure you’ve gone to these events and heard from people that have said, if you just did this, or this or this, I’ve got this great idea, If you would just implement this it would be awesome. And before you know it, you’ve got tons of great ideas and then there are great ideas here among the lackeys. So how do we decide which of those ideas we have the time and the bandwidth and whatever, and that fit into what the company wants to do and what’s good for the community.

13:38 AK: That is so hard. [chuckle]

13:40 CR: We’ve got all the time in the world, you can just… [chuckle]

13:44 AK: People have so many great ideas. And my perspective is when I read the forums or when I go through our community survey answers that come back, or I go to events, I hear really great ideas and those all get written down. We have, I would say, probably 10 years worth of ideas that we’ve got in what we call our planning board. And the thing that I do bring with me from other product management, product team experiences that I’ve had is that we all have our own most important thing, each person, myself included. There are a few things that, if I could wave a magic wand and I wanted to make this game all about me that I would say, let’s pop these to the top of the list but what we wanna try to do is understand more broadly how important are these ideas to people across our community.

14:47 AK: And so there is a methodology, there’s a process that is really pretty much led by our product designers to go out and do that research and build these holistic views of people within our community, we call them archetypes. It’s kind of a ten-dollar word but it’s sort of the profile, if you will of what motivates this particular type of person within our community and then to understand what are the biggest needs across the community rather than my needs or the person that I met at the last event, but to try to understand where to position those in the overall array of opportunities we have, we have so many opportunities to keep making our products better, to make the game more enjoyable, more meaningful.

15:40 AK: And we go to events and we talk to people, it’s not just to make people feel good that they get to talk to someone, it’s to actually take those notes, bring ’em back, talk to the product team about these ideas and try and get some data as well. So that’s part of the methodology. A lot of outreach happens to you and Cindy and other folks on the community team to understand how loud or how strong the signal is on a given idea. So we get all the ideas together and sometimes we start out with just a gut feeling. There’s a lot of long-time geocachers here at HQ and we use you guys as our sounding boards, have you been hearing about this for a long time from the community? The way you play this game, you’ve got 10000 fines, does this resonate with you as well? And it’s a really hard, hard process of prioritizing because we would love to say yes to everything but we have limited resources. There’s actually not that many of us here at HQ working on this international game, there’s maybe around 70 people in total, maybe 10%-12% of all of us lackeys are people working on the product vision. And there’s a lot of work that goes into that, there’s about a 2:1 ratio. Tell me if I’m getting too crunchy here, but…

17:03 CR: No, crunch away. [laughter]

17:05 AK: But there’s about two to three engineers for every product manager. And so when you think about the size we have to… We always have more that we wanna do. We’ve got quite the backlog as we say in software development parlance, probably several years worth of work that we’ve defined and prioritized, and so we’re looking at a mix of how big are those signals, how feasible is it given the technology that we have right now, we think about too, how to make what we call deposits to the community. There’s a concept that we have about, again, I don’t wanna get too nerdy but sort of our leadership model here at HQ is this concept of this emotional bank account. How are you making deposits or withdrawals and we know that certain things are gonna really be super exciting for the community and make deposits, so to speak, and that’s what ultimately we try to put to the top of the planning board that we have.

18:09 CR: So let’s talk about this planning board is and I’ve heard the term “roadmap”, there’s different terms that are used but there’s this more long-term plan of, of what’s going to be done, how does that get put together and… I don’t know how far into the weeds you wanna get here, but I’m just curious, how does that get put together versus, Okay, you’re… Let’s say you’re working on these big projects and then… It just… I feel like you’d be getting showered continuously with more and more needs and ideas and what have you, but there are certain things that are being worked on continuously and you can’t just veer away for a shiny thing over here or a shiny thing over there. You have to stay the course on some of these big things.

19:00 AK: Yeah, that’s really true. We have to make commitments. And so I’m really happy to get in the weeds. So pull me back if you see me getting down in there too much. So our process is to gather ideas and we do something at HQ. It’s first time this year, we had an idea fair and people brought all their ideas and a lot of ideas came from the community. People, lackeys brought to that. Everything from that idea gathering, goes into our planning board, and then we ranked them based on what aspects of what we think is gonna give to the community and what it’s gonna do to help sustain our business. So there’s two main components to the benefits side of the ranking, and then there’s a cost and complexity component to the ranking as well. And so we’ll do a pass on that and then talk to community, talk to marketing, talk to operations, talk to lackeys that have played the game a long time, kinda cross reference. So things do get shuffled around. So the thing that’s potentially going to be the biggest deposit to the community, give the community something like the most exciting, to drive the game forward, for your experience may actually be really hard.

20:22 AK: It might be the hardest thing. So, even though we’d wanna put that at the top of the roadmap, it’s gonna be a little bit lower down. So we spend all this time, talk to engineering, figure out how we might build this thing and then based on our objectives for the year, we will build a roadmap. And the roadmap is that prioritized and sequenced list of projects that we want engineering to work on with us. And there’s this approach to delivering projects, software projects called Agile. And Agile means that we don’t go a whole year on a project before we put something out there and then cross our fingers and hope it was still the right thing. We try to deliver software in much smaller chunks. Let’s be… Let me be more specific. So if we think about the last part of this year and going into 2020, we’ve got a lot of projects that to be really done might take six months or more, but the way we’re gonna approach it is to break each of these big projects down into smaller projects and then start releasing those and testing to see, is there something about our design that needs to be improved, is this getting as much interest as we thought that it would? And so we create these opportunities to sort of reassess.

21:53 AK: But you’re absolutely right, we will get completely unfocused if we are constantly changing and taking new things into our roadmap, so we try to not do that more than on a quarterly basis. So right now we’re starting to plan into second half next year, but I fully expect that in January, February, as we’ve started rolling things out on the website or in the apps that we’ll take a moment, see how that’s going and see if there are any new ideas or opportunities that feel more important than the next things that we would work on.

22:31 CR: Let’s say you get to the point where you’ve got this great product, you’ve got to the end of this long process, you’ve done it in chunks, you feel like it’s done, you’re starting to get feedback from your customers. How do you be objective about this stuff? And I think it would be difficult not to take it personally if you’re getting arrows at you about, about something that you’ve put out that you think is pretty good.

22:57 AK: Well, that is a great question, and it is so true. Sometimes it hurts a little. You thought, “Oh, I had this great idea. And we thought we knew how it was gonna land with the community, and we got something wrong, maybe it was, we didn’t do enough research up front. Or maybe the community’s interests have changed. Or maybe there was a way that we delivered this new feature that wasn’t quite spot on with how the community want to use it. Going back to the role of the product designer, those folks are very much incorporating that qualitative feedback back. So whereas a product manager may be looking at a lot of quantitative data, how much time do people spend with a given feature, what’s the satisfaction rating of that feature, what features are people not using at all. The product designer may look at well understanding why people are or are not engaging with features of the game in a more qualitative way. And there’s a lot of survey feedback, we are reactivating some player tester groups that we have, where we can do a mix of testing early designs gathering feedback that people will tell us about.

24:17 AK: You may write an answer to a one or two-question survey, about a new thing we’re testing, but then also look at the… What we call behavioral data that we can see about generally how engaged people are. So the product designers really are on the forefront of taking that early feedback from the community, understanding it and working with fine tuning designs, for example, or maybe changing directions on how we build out features after that first release.

24:56 CR: I’m sure you can’t get super specific about what’s coming down the pike and what’s in the hopper for new stuff. But just in general, if I say what’s coming, can you be general about just are there any themes? Is there anything just that I should be as a cacher watching out for here in the coming months? 

25:17 AK: I’m sitting up higher in my chair right now since you asked me that question.

25:20 CR: You are. I can confirm for everybody she sat up higher in her chair.

25:25 AK: I’m really excited about what we’re gonna do. We are in a very intensely creative phase right now for the product team looking at some innovative things that we can do for the community, as well as kind of taking time to double back and look at things that we can improve for our community now. I think Cache owners are gonna be excited, I hope, that’s our goal. And we’re performing some research now to validate our hypotheses if you will, our hopes and expectations. And I think that’s probably about all I could say. [chuckle]

26:06 CR: Well that’s something. Like I said, I know you can’t get super specific. But… And as you said, as we’ve talked about before, as you do research and what have you, ideas form, and it takes time to do that, so it’ll be exciting to see what’s coming down.

26:23 AK: Exactly. I think we have the general the geo-fence laid out on some of what we wanna bring out to the community, but we don’t have the specific coordinates of ground zero yet. But I…

26:34 CR: That’s a great way to put it.

[laughter]

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26:40 CR: That was Allison Kelsey, Director of Product at Geocaching HQ. Hope you enjoyed the chat. If there is something you would like us to cover on the podcast, please send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com, we always appreciate hearing your suggestions and if you like what you hear on our podcast, and you listen via Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us there, we would appreciate that. From me and from everyone at Geocaching HQ, happy caching!