Episode 49: Adventure Lab

With more and more Adventures available to find around the world, it’s a good time to check in with Erin Thompson and Stuart Schwartz from HQ’s Adventure Lab team for an update on what’s happening with the platform.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

InsideGeocachingHQ_Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 49: Adventure Lab
Loading
/

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 49): Adventure Lab

(link to podcast)

0:00:14.6 Chris Ronan: Hello there! Welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ, the podcast about the goings on at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. I am Chris Ronan. My geocaching username is Rock Chalk. I am one of the lackeys at HQ. Most of us still working remotely these days, though, a few have returned to the office, of course, complying with guidelines from local health authorities. We are most definitely looking forward to the day when we can welcome you back to visit with us at HQ. That will be a great day.

0:00:47.7 CR: So on this episode, we turn our attention to Adventure Lab, a newer app and platform from the HQ team. With more and more adventures available around the world, there is a lot more talk in the community about those adventures. So I thought it would be a good time to have Erin Thompson and Stuart Schwartz come by to discuss the state of Adventure Lab and where it’s going. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read a recent post in the Adventure Lab section of the Online Geocaching Forums. We will include a link on the podcast page to that forum post. The post is titled Update on Adventure Lab Platform Vision. There is a lot of detail in there covering some important points about Adventure Lab, and I got into some of that stuff with Erin and Stuart. Here we go.

[music]

0:01:49.4 CR: Okay, we have Erin and Stuart from the Adventure Lab team, and it’s been a while since we talked about Adventure Lab on the podcast. And so I thought it would be good to catch up on where things are right now with the team. And it’s been a while since each of you has been on the podcast. Erin, I was looking back, you were here to talk about GIFF a few years ago, so a little bit has changed for you at HQ as far as what you’re doing. So maybe we can start with that, just some introductions of the two of you. Erin, what is your role in the Adventure Lab team? What is your title? And for folks that may have been familiar with you previous to your time on this team, what other stuff have you done at HQ over the years? 

0:02:35.0 Erin Thompson: Well, thanks, Chris, for having us on the podcast today, exciting to get to talk about Adventure Lab and where we’re headed. As you mentioned, I’m Erin. I’ve had a few different roles and worn a few hats at Geocaching. My current role is Product Manager on the Adventure Lab team and working with the folks who build up this platform. And previously I’ve worn again several hats, including I have worked as a product manager on some of the website teams and some of the features that we released last year like the Cache on Our Dashboard, and maps, and some of the other features over there. Before that, I also had the opportunity to work with the community volunteer support teams, specifically with translators, with volunteer translators, and with GIFF, as you mentioned, with the film festival. I have enjoyed working in all of those roles because I think it strengthens a deep understanding of the geocaching community of which I would consider myself as well. And now, getting to use that over in the Adventure Lab product space to figure out what’s next is really exciting for me.

0:03:55.0 CR: Stuart, you had been at HQ longer than myself and Erin. Could you describe what your history has been like at HQ, and what you do now, and specifically, with the Adventure Lab team? 

0:04:08.0 Stuart Schwartz: Yeah, I’ve been with HQ for almost 10 years, nine years and change. And I was hired on originally as a full stack web developer. I worked on most of the website with respect to geocaching. Pretty much any part of geocaching.com, I’ve probably had a hand in some of the software there, the website itself and the APIs behind it. Throughout the years, I’ve worked with so many people within the building, and I’ve communicated with so many people outside in the community. It’s been really eye-opening and it’s been such a great growth opportunity working here at HQ. I really appreciate all of the different facets of this game, and just all over the place with respect to the things that I’m curious about and I like to tinker with, both with respect to the end impact in the community and the technologies that make it happen.

0:05:01.8 SS: With respect to my role here on the Adventure Lab team, my role is currently lead developer, that’s my official title, but essentially, I’m just really just synthesizing concepts and enabling people through technology. That’s what I’m doing on a daily basis, just trying to really get a feel for what the opportunities are out in the community, and what capabilities we have here, and just how to put those together. So it’s mostly about how to put things together and make them work. I hope that answered that question.

0:05:37.0 CR: Yeah, it totally does. And besides the two of you, what does the rest of the Adventure Lab team look like? How many people are we talking about? And what kind of skills and roles do those people play on the team? 

0:05:48.9 SS: I can speak to that a little bit. The Adventure Lab team, it’s a whole cross-discipline product delivery team. And what I mean by “cross-discipline” is that it’s not just engineers, it’s not just folks who know how to draw very nice-looking graphics. It’s a big collection of all of those things. So we have three engineers, including myself, so I’m a lead developer, and we have two React Native developers. React Native is the mobile technology we are using for the Adventure Lab app itself. It’s a pretty cool technology, works on both iOS and Android. That gives us a bit of a advantage with respect to how quickly we can put software out there and try new things. The team is also made up of a designer who is oftentimes sort of charged with figuring out how to sort of constructing a vision for what the software will look like before the engineers actually implement it. And then we have a product person who is in this chat with us, that is Erin.

0:06:52.6 SS: There are a couple other people who float in and around the team. There is a Scrum Master, is the role title, but it has numerous titles within different companies. We kinda call the role of Scrum Master here, but that person is mostly in charge of keeping us on-track and making sure that we aren’t stuck. So facilitating communication and facilitating daily process around the team itself.

0:07:22.0 ET: I would add a couple of the folks who float in and really enable us to move quickly as we work closely with the API backend team if there are questions around our technology and supporting them with the databases or with the APIs. And then we’re also collaborating with quality assurance, QA, and have recently begun working with QA here at Geocaching to support the development.

0:07:53.6 CR: Before we get to where Adventure Lab is now and the vision for it going forward, I thought maybe we just touch briefly on where it’s been and how it’s gotten to this point. It’s got kind of an interesting history for people that maybe haven’t been playing for several years, maybe you’re newer to the game. And Stuart, is it fair to say that you’ve been pretty involved with at least the Adventure Lab app, and kind of the transition from Lab Caches, as they were strictly known mostly at Mega-Events several years ago, and this transformation that we’ve had since I think about 2018 into the app. Is that fair to say, that you’ve pretty much been, you’ve had your hands on it throughout? 

0:08:38.8 SS: Yeah, that’s a really fair thing to say, a really fair statement. I don’t know if it’s well-known, but I put together the original mobile web version of the labs.geocaching.com player back in 2012-ish, 2013-ish. So I put together the very first playable prototype for the platform that eventually became Lab Caches. So I’ve had a hand in this since the beginning. The original genesis for it was I believe some of the founders had just come back from a Mega-Event in Europe, and they had heard that some of the folks who are hosting that event had a need for temporary private geocaches that could sort of enable visitors to that event, but the geocaches needed to… They didn’t quite conform to the rules of geocaching because they were to be private and temporary. So the idea was to create this concept that could support that use case.

0:09:42.6 SS: And originally, I think Jeremy, one of the original founders, wanted to call it Adventures and sort of take that opportunity of private temporary geocaches and slap some additional interactivity and opportunity on top of it. So opportunity for storytelling, he was a very big advocate for the power of storytelling. Storytelling is a very compelling thread that weaves its way through human history, so it feels only kinda natural that it might be something that we could sort of slap on top of a potential sort of adventuring platform that enables people to explore. So that was the original sort of genesis for this thing. And we put together a mobile web prototype, which wasn’t ideal for playing in the field ’cause web, you generally think of, is for desktops and PCs. But mobile web was just becoming a thing back in a decade ago, and we figured that was great for an MVP, that we could get people outside playing these things probably with that.

0:10:46.9 SS: And we did, and you’ve seen it. I’m sure people listening to the show have seen what labs.geocaching.com probably looked like back when it did have a mobile response and web player. If you hadn’t seen it, if you’re newer, the TLDR on that is that it wasn’t terribly effective. It was good for a prototype, but it was difficult to use, the usability was very poor. So it proved out the hypothesis that this had value and it was compelling for groups of people, but it wasn’t quite what we had envisioned for it. So over the years, we just sort of let it bake in the community and see what the community did with it.

0:11:23.6 SS: And then sometime around 2018, I kicked off a… React Native was a new technology. It came out about five or six years ago, I think. It became pretty mainstream. And just a few years ago, I adopted it, took some, went to a conference for it, and sort of was inspired by it, and I thought, “This could be a technology we could use to take that Labs’ prototype and make it a native mobile app.” So I kicked off an effort to put a prototype together, the company supported it. We rallied a team around it, and eventually shipped it, and it worked out. It’s just kind of snowballed to where we are today.

0:12:03.0 CR: And so over the years, leading up to when that app was launched, and then in the time since then, how have you and the rest of the team, and Erin, you as well now, tried to corral the many ideas that come in, the asks that come from the community? There are, I’m sure there must be, is it fair to say hundreds or more of various ideas for improvements and new aspects to the app and new things that people wanna be able to do with Adventure Lab? And how do you go about trying to collect all of that feedback and try to find ways to prioritize what could work and how long it would take to build, and just all of that stuff? I’m just kinda curious as to how the team goes about tackling that part of things.

0:12:54.0 ET: I am new-ish on the Adventure Lab team. I’ve been on the team now for two months. And as part of my own ramping up into this role, I really wanted to understand the breadth and depth of that ideation that has been happening over years, and especially in the last two. Since the player, the app went live, we’ve been feedback from a multitude of sources, in-person, in the app feedback, community response, also looking at data. I would validate that the idea list is in the hundreds, somebody recently throughout maybe 600 ideas, it might be close to that. And currently, they’re in a spreadsheet and I’m tracking them actively. The feedback from the community is incredibly valuable to help us identify the wants, the needs, the hopes, where this product can provide value to existing geocachers and also, really, to expand the audience to welcome new folks into this exploration of the world around them.

0:14:10.9 ET: And one of the ways we look at all of that feedback and prioritize is by, I like to call them themes. I think themes of where might this add value or utility to players, where might this add… Some of it is purely a pain point, or some of it is new features. Some of it is really innovative, which is hopefully is the juicy stuff that we really want to be able to enable and innovate with this platform. That’s part of our vision of where we’re headed is, “How do we enable creators to tell the stories to be more compelling and more interactive with the world around them?” That, I think, is really the opportunity space that we are trying to look at. And there’s lots of those ideas as well. And then we layer, there’s multiple factors of the strategy of where we’re headed with Adventure Lab, and tracking all that feedback, mapping it to, “What are the paths to be able to provide what creators are asking for, to be able to enable and unlock creators to create more compelling stories that are approachable for existing geocachers and also, welcoming new folks?”

0:15:33.8 CR: There was a post in the Geocaching Forums at the end of March made by HQ, and I will include a link to that on the podcast page. It was titled Update on Adventure Lab Platform Vision. And we can talk about the content of that post and some of the points that were made there. What was the inspiration for that? And what were we hoping to get across when we shared some of that information with the community at the end of March? 

0:16:02.8 ET: Like as I mentioned, I am new on the team, roughly two months this week, working with all of the folks who’ve been stewarding this vision. I’m not new to geocaching, but new to really deeply understanding Adventure Lab and the vision of where it’s headed. And as I began to work with the whole team, the company, really, the product delivery team itself, Stuart, the other engineers, the folks who’ve been answering community support questions, and the senior leadership, Bryan, who I think has spoken recently about this vision for Adventure Lab as well. I really felt like it would be valuable to communicate where we’re headed, and put some of that down on paper so that the community could see and reflect, and that we could also reference that we really see an exciting opportunity space ahead of us. And collectively, a lot of these words already existed, but hadn’t been shared, and thought that it could be a valuable tool for communicating where we’re headed.

0:17:09.0 CR: So we can go through a couple of the points that were shared in that post and maybe talk a little bit more about them. One of the first ones, and you guys have each kind of touched on a little bit to this as we’ve talked so far here. But one of the first ones was talking about the experimental nature of Adventure Lab and how, I guess what I was taking away from the point, which was, and I’ll just read it: “HQ will continue to experiment with the platform and with features to enable more people to discover and explore the world around them. And the improvements may happen in steps, and there could be some instability along the way.” I guess when I read that, to me, was, “Hey, this is still a work-in-progress. We have a lot of stuff that we wanna try, a lot of possibilities out there, and it might go a little rough and tumble here and there. So hopefully, you’re okay with that. And what we’re hoping is we’ll get through that part, and then it’ll, we’ll all come out the other side and it’ll be a lot better for it.” Is that a pretty good summary? 

0:18:08.9 SS: I think that’s a pretty good summary. I think if I were to expand on that bullet point, that sort of headline a little bit, essentially, designing software is pretty easy to physically design software. It’s kinda like just computer science kinda stuff, you just map it out. But to really meet people’s needs is super difficult. Most of the time, needs are unknown, so they’re unknown in advance. You generally don’t know you’ve met needs until after they’re met. So there’s a bunch of approaches to discovering undiscovered, unmet needs. Those are usually phrases as opportunities. It’s hard because you don’t know what they are in advance, oftentimes, but you sort of know they’re out there because economies can grow infinitely. There’s just infinite opportunity out there. There’s so many ways to make things better for other people.

0:19:03.5 SS: What we’re doing is taking an exploratory approach, explorative, I’m not quite sure what the word is there, we’re exploring our way into opportunities within the geocaching community and communities outside the geocaching community in the space of location-based. Essentially, the mission of the company to inspire and enable adventure and exploration and community. We really want to be able to do that as well as we can.

0:19:32.1 SS: We believe that there’s more opportunity in this space, and our intention here is to sort of carve out an expectation that we will be exploring our way into this space, and we won’t necessarily know if we’ve made it or not until after we’ve tried. So we’re hoping that the community will support us in trying and will come with us, and help us by letting us know if we did or did not meet needs. And if we didn’t, we’ll take it back a little bit and try something else.

0:20:01.3 ET: I’ll explain a little as well because I think one of the things I think of often is that our time to experiment with useful, let’s call them features or tools, we are adopting an approach on our team where we want to be able to get experiences, features, tools out faster. And what this means is they may not be perfect. A lot of the feedback I read from the forums and the Facebook posts and the community, there will often be a question around this concept of perfection. And we are actively trying to get features out faster, which may mean they’re not perfect on the first try. We will learn, and it is our intention to not be perfect so that we can try faster to learn if what we’re building really does unlock something for creators or unlock something for the player out in the field who is experiencing this.

0:21:05.7 ET: And so I think it’s that ask, that expectation that it won’t, that we are trying to not be perfect with our releases. And it’s very easy, I think, as humans, to see the small imperfections and focus on them. And we really wanna be looking at the experiences and enabling people to get out there. Stuart actually shared a really great thought process with me, and I think a lot about my car. I drive a 2001 little Honda. We call it the go-kart. It doesn’t have brake shocks, and it bounces a lot, but it gets me from point A to point B. So it’s not the really, really nice Ferrari that would be beautiful, but it works, and it’s fulfilling that value right now. And then we can try to fill more of that value sooner if we’re not building the Ferrari right away, and that’s the only thing we’re building. Not recommending go-karts necessarily be the way, but getting to that experience quicker is our goal.

0:22:14.6 CR: So continuing to go through that forum post about the vision for Adventure Lab, one of the points was that HQ intends to expand the Adventure Lab audience and welcome creators and players beyond the current geocaching community. And as that happens, some decisions will favor welcoming new audiences, rather than trying to integrate Adventure Lab into the existing geocaching game. And so I wonder if we could just talk about the background behind that, and what that points to in the future.

0:22:50.8 SS: Our attempt with Adventure Lab is to create a superset around geocaching so geocachers can enjoy it, and people outside of geocaching can enjoy it. It’ll have something for everybody. That’s our intention. In order to be a superset, it has to support things that core geocaching just can’t support. With Adventure Lab, we would like a place to experiment with enabling location-based experiences that are in the same spirit of geocaching, exploration and adventure, but with a little more flexibility. Sort of relieving the requirements that geocaching currently has so that we can enable exploration and adventure in locations in ways that geocaching currently cannot. In order to continue to do that, it’ll be very difficult, if not impossible, to reverse-integrate some of those features back into core geocaching simply because we don’t have control over core geocaching.

0:23:49.3 ET: I would also say at a high level, we hear a lot of feedback that geocaching isn’t as accessible for many people in certain circumstances. We want Adventure Lab to be available and approachable for anyone who wants to explore the world around them. And maybe that means that they are temporary. Maybe it means that they are inside. Maybe it means that they tell really compelling stories that move people through the world around them, but that story happens within 0.1 mi of the next stage. And so that’s not possible in geocaching. We want to enable the flexibility for more exploration and discovery by more people. How can we unlock new opportunities for those who haven’t found geocaching to be available to them, or who don’t have the tool set or the woods, or the willingness to go and put their hand in dirty holes trying to find containers? How might we still enable exploration and adventure for this whole other group of folks that we’ve heard feedback from? 

0:25:03.0 CR: So the Adventure Lab platform will be, will continue to be distinct from core geocaching, it’s one of the things that was highlighted in that forum post, “with a limited intersection of features” was the words that were used. And one of those intersections came recently with adventure pins on the map in the Geocaching app, which was something that people have asked for for a long time. I wonder if we could just kinda talk about what kind of a project that is, to have an intersection like that between the Geocaching app and the Adventure Lab app. Kinda seems like it would be a pretty significant project. How much time goes into that? And how much overlap is there between the two teams in trying to work together to make sure that this feature is working the way it should in both of these apps? 

0:25:53.4 SS: This was mostly on our core mobile team, the majority of the effort and the majority of the interesting challenge was with the core mobile team. How to get access to the directory of adventures, and how to display the pins alongside core geocache pins. I believe there was quite a large effort to re-factor the maps to even be able to support this use case, to re-factor the code that drives the maps. So I can’t take a significant amount of credit on the Adventures team, we can’t take a significant amount of credit. The majority of it was with the core mobile team.

0:26:26.2 SS: The intersection of the features, in general, I like to call it a convenience feature. So for geocachers who want to be aware of adventures near them while they’re geocaching, this feature provides them with some awareness of what adventure opportunities they have near them while geocaching. So the feature itself, I wouldn’t necessarily call it an intersection because it’s not necessarily doing the same thing on both platforms. They do happen to be pins on both platforms, but the intent is just to make geocaching users aware of Adventure Lab opportunities.

0:27:07.7 ET: Yeah, I was gonna add a little bit to that with regards to dots on the map. And a lot of the feedback we hear and one of the decisions we’ve made around really wanting to focus on where we’re headed with Adventure Lab, and enabling storytelling for creators, preserving the stories that creators are trying to tell and also, our vision to really build something new and innovative with Adventure Lab, I believe that ties into both the dots on the map conversation, and the making decisions around intersections with core geocaching because we really wanna preserve the space to innovate. We envision more for Adventure Lab and not all of it.

0:27:54.9 ET: We envision so much innovation that we don’t think it will be possible for all of it to be functional on core geocaching. It is a unique platform, and we want it also to be engaging for geocachers. But a lot of the functionality are the dreams we have. The opportunity space that we’re trying to preserve by not necessarily, at this time, adding more features to core geocaching is to enable us to experiment with additional opportunities that the community has asked for with storytelling. And we really want to enable that. And for the time being, that’s the direction of where we’re headed, is looking at the ways that we can unlock more tools that may not integrate fully, and most likely, won’t be possible on core geocaching.

0:28:50.0 CR: Well, we have to wrap up here shortly, but going forward from this point, what would you like people to know that we haven’t talked about so far? And maybe where can they go if they wanna share feedback or what have you as this Adventure Lab process continues into the future? 

0:29:09.4 ET: That’s what I was thinking about sharing, is that if you go to the Adventure Lab app and sign in and go to the profile, there’s a feedback button where you can send us your ideas. And I’d love to hear the innovations that you are seeking. What could Adventure Lab do that is beyond what we’ve already been dreaming up? I would love to explore more of those ideas of where you think storytelling in the future with place-based tools like Adventure Lab could go in the future. If you have that feedback, I’d love to hear it. That is the best place right now to share that with us. We actively look at that feedback from the in-app tool.

0:29:53.5 SS: I do want to reiterate that we are attempting to innovate and build something new with Adventure Lab. We envision Adventure Lab enabling storytelling to provide players with opportunities to learn something hidden in plain sight about the world around them, something that they would have never realized that this platform expands their understanding of the world around them. So we have big dreams for this platform. And I think it would be so helpful for us to hear about the dreams that the community might have for this platform, what opportunities do you see that we could incorporate into this thing.

[music]

0:30:32.0 CR: Thank you to Erin Thompson and Stuart Schwartz for stopping by from the Adventure Lab team. I hope there was some interesting information in there for you. If there is a topic that you think we should cover on the podcast, please send an email to podcast@geocaching.com. We get a lot of our episode ideas from your emails, including the idea for today’s podcast, so keep those ideas coming. Until next time from me and Erin and from Stuart and all the lackeys at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

Inside Geocaching HQ transcript (episode 39): Catching up with Bryan Roth

Link to podcast

00:15 Chris Ronan: Hello everybody, welcome to Inside Geocaching HQ. This is the podcast about the goings on at Geocaching HQ in Seattle. My name is Chris Ronan, my user name is Rock Chalk, and I am one of the 80 or so lackeys who works at HQ. And on this episode, I am checking in with one of my fellow lackeys, Bryan Roth. Bryan is the president and one of the co-founders of Geocaching HQ, and we had a chance to chat about what’s been happening at HQ during the pandemic. We talked about the new cache owner dashboard, and we chatted a little bit about the adventure lab app. So let’s get into it, me and Bryan, talking about all kinds of stuff. Here we go.

[music]

01:08 CR: Well, we will kick it off here then.

01:09 Bryan Roth: Welcome to the Geocaching podcast. Go ahead, you do it.

01:14 CR: No, you did it right there. We’re in.

01:16 BR: That was pretty lackadaisical. Here, wait. I’ll try a better one.

01:19 CR: Alright.

01:19 BR: Alright. Welcome to the Geocaching HQ podcast.

01:26 CR: I think we should just keep that actually, and I’ll just play that at the start of every…

01:32 BR: Right.

01:33 CR: Every podcast. [laughter]

01:35 BR: The people who know me will be like, “Oh, that’s cool that Bryan gets to do that little piece.” But I think you too you’ve got a good one also.

01:42 CR: Everybody knows you, Bryan. Everybody knows your voice and says, “I know that guy. And if I don’t, I wanna know that guy.”

01:51 BR: No. Oh, oh, Chris. [laughter] That’s pretty funny. I don’t think so, but anyway. I’ll take it.

01:58 CR: Well, it’s been… I guess we last talked in March here on the podcast, and so on one level, it feels like that wasn’t that long ago, but for me personally, it seems like forever ago. So just kind of checking back in since then. Just kind of for you personally and your family, how has everything been going for you guys?

02:20 BR: You know, I think we’re doing okay. We’ve been social distancing and staying home and staying safe, just like everybody else. Just trying to be responsible, wearing masks. I had to run out this morning and get some groceries and so it’s surprising that it’s almost become second nature to know that I have to have a mask with me pretty much to leave the house. And when we’re walking around the neighborhood, it’s not really a problem because the people that are walking, everybody knows they’ll go to the other side of the street or just give everybody kind of a wide berth or latitude, if we’re gonna use some geocaching terms. Give people some latitude.

03:05 BR: But yeah, I think where we’ve been pretty fortunate that nobody has it, and so we’re just trying to stay safe and do what we can, and it’s been a pretty significant life change for us as a family. Otherwise, on a personal level, things have been okay. I would like to be done with this, and I’d like to get to see friends and family and that’s just not easy to do. The sooner we can get through this as a society, the better.

03:36 CR: And for people that don’t know, there is a Geocaching mask available at Shop Geocaching.

03:40 BR: Yes, there is, and in fact, that was the mask that I was wearing this morning. I have two of them. Well, I have a Shop Geocaching mask or a geocaching mask from Shop Geocaching, and I have a Star Wars mask that was made by a person that I know. And it’s just lovely, and so I kind of trade off between the two.

04:03 CR: Yeah, I love the Geocaching one. It’s of course green and little geocaching logo and the word “Geocaching” on it. That’s what I’ve been wearing everywhere, so hopefully people are… Hopefully it’ll help spread the word a little bit about… [chuckle]

04:16 BR: Yeah, I mean, for all of you out there, find a mask that you like and just use it, and let’s try and get through this COVID thing as quickly as we all can.

04:27 CR: Yeah, for sure. In general, how do you feel like HQ and the lackeys at HQ have been handling the pandemic from a work standpoint?

04:39 BR: It has been interesting. I think the last time we spoke was probably maybe a week or so into the remote working… I don’t remember the exact date, but I wanna say this past Thursday… So today is Monday… This past Thursday was 18 weeks of working remotely for a company that has always been a positive kind of office culture where everybody shows up every day and we all work together and have meetings and eat in the Signal Cafe together. To go relatively… Well, literally… Overnight to 100% remote working has been challenging in a lot of ways, but in other ways, it’s allowed us to learn some things about just how resilient and flexible we are as individuals and as a company.

05:36 BR: So I would say as a company, we’ve done quite well. We’ve made the transition. I think everybody has understood what it is that we have to do. We still have to get the job done, and it’s just the environment has changed drastically. And so on an individual level, for some lackeys it’s been really challenging, and for others, it’s been a little bit easier. I guess I would point out some of the lackeys that have young children or multiple young children, that if there’s an absence of daycare or school, well, then you have parents or single parents trying to manage children while also managing their job, and that creates some stress and can be…

06:23 BR: Can be difficult. One of the things that we’ve said to the lack is… Really at the beginning of this and then kind of throughout this time, is we said, “We really wanna be able to look back on this time and feel like we, as a company, made the right decisions and kept the important things as priorities. And so the safety and health of the employees is of paramount importance, and the safety and health of the community members also. And so regrettably, the visitor center at Geocaching HQ will be closed for a while, and that’s just what we have to do, what we know we have to do. At some point we hope to be able to return to HQ in some form. It’s not going to be, “Hey, everybody, come back tomorrow and let’s fill the office with people.” It will probably be a phased approach, just like many of the governments are doing.

07:18 BR: I have to say that I’m really pleased with how well we have been able to weather this as a company. I think we’ve also been fortunate. So for those of you who… Out there in geocaching world who haven’t noticed, there’s quite a few people that have taken up geocaching as a way to get outside, stay active and social distance at the same time. And so with the new user growth, membership growth and activity in the game, we still have to keep doing what we can to keep things going. And what it’s meant for us financially is unlike restaurants and airlines and hotels, we haven’t really been negatively affected by COVID from a financial sense. And so we’re really fortunate that we haven’t had to make some of the really challenging decisions that other companies have had to make with regard to furloughing or laying off employees and things like that, and I… We don’t take it for granted and do feel very fortunate and our goal remains the same.

08:25 BR: We try and be responsible as individuals and as a company, and at the same time, we try and do our job and make sure that the website and the mobile apps are functioning, and we are continuing to push forward with the projects that we have for new features and functionality and new things that we wanna bring to the game and give to the global community. So that’s kind of how we’re doing.

08:52 CR: You alluded to it just a little bit there, about increase in sign-ups and things of that nature. Geocaching, like any activity, we’ve had to figure out how to do it safely and how you can keep playing during this whole thing. But in general, what have you seen as far as just geocaching activity, sign-ups are up, are people finding more caches? What is the… The statistics that you’ve been able to see, what does it say about how people are playing geocaching right now?

09:29 BR: Well, I think what we’ve seen, it’s been a little bit of a cycle, so as the world went into kind of a COVID quarantine, we saw moratoriums placed on cache placements. Caches were not being published and we didn’t want a lot of people rushing out and getting to specific areas at the same time, and really, we didn’t want a lack of social distancing. And I think that the community volunteer reviewers around the world looked at their regions and said, “Here’s what we need to do at this point for the safety of geocachers,” and I believe that was handled really well. There was a lot of people that were trying to go out and maybe find a lonely cache or two, or bringing hand sanitizer and lysol-ing the cash before they open it and when they close it, and doing things like that. We’ve seen an uptick in people playing with Adventure Labs, which is nice because there’s no containers involved except perhaps for bonus caches, but as things have moved like here in Washington State to phase two, we’ve seen activity start to pick up, cash publications have increased in different countries around the world that as they’ve made improvements in their status.

10:52 BR: It feels like we had a dip where things really did slow down because people were staying home because they had to comply with the law. And they weren’t even allowed to go out, and that was in certain countries, but as the regulations have eased, we are seeing people come back and more people playing the game. And so from a year over year perspective, we’re seeing more geocaching activity this year, than we saw last year. We are seeing more membership growth this year than we saw last year. And last year was a good year for activity and growth, and so to see an increase on that, it feels really positive. When we think about geocaching as an activity, we know that it’s good for people, we know that it’s good to get outside and have adventures and explore the world. And so for us to see more people doing this, and particularly seeing more people doing it as a way to keep themselves happy and sane and engaged during a time where maybe a lot of other outlets are really limited, it makes us feel really good about the work that we’re doing and trying to contribute to making people a little bit happier at a time when that might not be as easy to do it as it used to be pre-COVID.

12:16 CR: You have been involved with this company for so many years, one of the co-founders, but no matter how long you’ve been a leader of a company, nobody, I don’t think is educated in how to lead a company through a pandemic, and so this is absolutely a new experience. I’m just curious. From that standpoint, what are some of the things that you feel like you’ve come away with over these past few months or maybe things… I don’t know, things you wish you would have known before this happened, or things that you feel like you’ve learned that will be valuable in the years to come?

12:24 BR: It’s a great question. There’s really so many aspects of this that have presented new decision points and moments where we have felt like it is not a choice to not make a choice. You have to do something. And so really early on, we were hearing about things happening over in Kirkland. So near Seattle, the first nursing home… Seattle was kind of ground zero for COVID in the United States really early on because of that one nursing home.

13:31 BR: And so we were very, very well aware of what was happening. And I had been over in Bonn, Germany, for the Beethoven Mega, and I got back to the office. I flew back on March 1st, which was a Monday, and so Tuesday 2nd, I was in the office, and on Wednesday as a senior management team, we met and we had heard that… I believe it was Microsoft and Amazon… Were basically sending their employees home. And so we sat in a room and we said, “Okay, what do we do right now?” I’d been in the office for two days and we said, “Look, the responsible thing to do for the safety of our employees, safety of the lackeys, ourselves included, is hey, it’s Wednesday, let’s get an announcement out to the company. Starting tomorrow, everybody is working from home.” It is, I believe, the first time it was strongly recommended that everybody work from home, and then within a very short period of time, we got more guidance from the local government, and we made it mandatory that everybody work from home.

14:39 BR: What was interesting about that, and I alluded to it a little bit earlier, is that we were never a company where there was a lot of remote working. There were people who would do one day a week, and some people would do two days a week, but by and large… To give you some idea, in 19 and a half years, I worked remotely less than five days in 19 and a half years. Because being in the office was important, and that’s where a lot of the dialogue was taking place, and things like that. And had you asked me pre-COVID, “Hey, what do you think about testing out remote working? Let’s have the whole company work remotely for a month and see how it goes,” I would have said “You’re out of your mind. That’s absolutely crazy. I don’t know. It’s a big risk. Look at what could happen. Things could go wrong. We might not be able to communicate.” Like, there’s plenty of plenty of things to be fearful about in the absence of knowing, but here we were, here we are being forced to test the theory.

15:42 BR: And it wasn’t just a week or a month. Now, it’s been many weeks and our expectation is this is gonna go for quite a bit longer. One of the things that we’ve said to the lackeys is that nobody will be required to return to the office until at least January 4th of next year at the earliest, and so it may even go longer than that, but we didn’t feel it would be responsible to force somebody to come into the office when there is a substantial risk to their health. That doesn’t feel like something that a good company should be doing. So that was a lesson. That’s a decision point. There have been a variety of other things. What tools do we use for communication? How do we do collaborative projects together? How do we set timelines? What are we willing to accept in terms of a balance for employees who are having a harder time at home? And so one of the other decisions that we made was, essentially, if you are an employee and you are struggling for whatever reason with COVID, we are just asking that you find… And the phrase we used is ” comfortable balance.”

17:00 BR: We don’t want the lackeys to suffer during this time. And everybody’s kinda suffering in their own way, and everybody’s got different challenges, but it’s important for us to get through this as a team, as a company, and as a community. And so being a little bit flexible with ourselves as individuals and our team members is something that felt really important to us. And I guess one thing that I would say that I’ve been able to reflect upon is over the years, we get asked like, “Hey, look, this company is 16 years old, it’s 18 years old… Now, it’s 19-plus years old. How did you get to be this kind of company?” And we’re proud of a lot of the things that we’ve accomplished. We’re on Outside Magazine’s best place to work. We are helping millions of people around the world have a fun and exciting outdoor activity. There’s a lot of good things to say about what has been accomplished by the team here at Geocaching HQ with support from cash owners and community volunteer reviewers and moderators and translators. And it’s this full community effort that has created what it has created, but we never sat down and said, 20 years ago, “Hey, here’s a business plan for the kind of company that we’d like to create.” The truth is we had no idea what was over the horizon. We didn’t know what came next, and so.

18:29 BR: What we see today, I believe, is the result of 10,000 individual decisions that have been made with a good set of values, and compassion, and caring, and the type of things that I think we would all want from leadership in any form. And so bringing that to this company… Yes, some of those decisions that we’ve made have been bad decisions and we can’t get them all right, but by and large, we brought good values to it. Here’s where we are, and it’s an exciting place to be. And I think that when we look at where we are and how we’ve responded to COVID, it’s pretty much the same thing. I don’t know what tomorrow’s decision is gonna be. We don’t know what the next question on the horizon is going to be, but… And it’s not just me.

19:19 BR: It’s the board of directors, so it’s Jeremy, and Elias, who are thoughtfully considering this alongside… It’s the senior leadership team, and it’s the lackeys themselves who are coming up with ideas and the dialogue and suggestions for how we can do better or make a better decision or respond to a specific thing that we need to respond to. And so when you take a series of good values across the company and across the community, and then you take guidance of, “Hey, we wanna be a good company, we wanna do right by the community, we wanna do right by our employees, well, then the next decision that comes by, we’re gonna do our best. We’re gonna make a decision, and we’re gonna go forward, and if it’s not the right decision or if we need to adjust it, well then we’re gonna try and adjust it as quickly as possible.

20:09 BR: So what we have learned is we’ve learned how this company with almost zero notice goes from a non-remote working company to a fully remote working company. And I have to say, I’m proud of the team, I’m proud of the company, and I’m proud of the overall community for how people have responded and come together and the dialogue that we see on social media. People welcoming new people, helping out new geocachers, answering each other’s questions, that’s one of the main reasons why this is so cool is because I think that the geocaching community, particularly now, has demonstrated why it’s such a positive model for any type of community out there.

20:57 BR: I’ve said this a number of times before, but in a world where there are so many things that divide people, geocaching is one of those things where everybody is welcome and people come together as a community to raise the bar for everybody and make things better. And so as a company, as a geocacher, as one of the many leaders at HQ, I’m really… I’m excited about the future. I’m proud of how we’ve done so far. And I’m looking forward to getting to a… Whatever that new post-COVID normal is so that we can get back to kind of hugging our friends and shaking hands and really going to mega events and giga events and even regular geocaching events. I think of all the things, that’s probably what I miss the most is getting to see our friends in person and welcoming visitors to HQ. So this won’t last forever. Between now and whenever we can get back to it, everybody should be focused on staying safe, staying healthy, staying active, and look at the person next to you and if they need a little bit of help, maybe reach out, have a conversation or do something to help your neighbors.

22:17 CR: One thing I think we would have been shaking hands and high-fiving over if we were together was this new project that was released not long ago. The new cache owner dashboard. And if people haven’t seen it, you can find it on the website or go to the geocaching blog and read more about it. And it was a really big project and you spoke about collaboration, and I think it was a great example of a team of folks that kept pushing forward on that and getting it done, and the reviews, I think in general, have been really, really positive, what… Why did HQ feel that this cache owner dashboard project was an important thing to put these resources into?

23:00 BR: You know, there’s a lot of different ideas and different projects that either come from the community or come from the lackeys that really feel like things that we need to do. When we consider the game of geocaching, we know just how important it is to have quality geocaches that are well maintained, and to be fair, we haven’t put a lot of effort into cache owner tools in the past. There’s certainly some effort and there’s information there and there’s a number of systems and communication protocols where people can report a DNF or for a needs maintenance and things like that to ideally get cache owners to upload where their caches are or maintain their caches. In this case, and we’ve talked about this in the past, just the concept of keeping the game board fresh and accessible and positive for geocachers so that when a family with kids go out or an individual or a couple and they find the cache, having that be a positive experience is what leads to more positive experiences. Maybe they go become a cache owner. It leads to a better game of geocaching overall. And so when we looked at the list of priorities, we came to the conclusion that it was time for us to do something big for cache owners.

24:30 BR: As you said, this was a… It was a big project that was in the a cross-team collaboration. A lot of research and a lot of really thought and care that went into identifying things that cache owners would like to see on an effectively a dashboard that would give them the information that they want in a quick and easy way and set them up to action things that they need to action and get a good understanding and overview of the caches that they have out there. And so for a variety of reasons among those, the team set out and did a lot of research, worked with a lot of cache owners, worked with a lot of internal stakeholders, and yes, last week was the release, and I dare say that in all of the recent releases that I can remember, this one was received the most positively. And for us, when we do any type of project we wanna make the geocachers happy, we want to make the community happy. Sometimes we get it wrong, sometimes we get it right. Thankfully, it feels like more often we’re getting things right, which is exciting. But this one feels like a real win, and so if you are a cache owner or an aspiring cache owner, please do check it out.

25:47 BR: For a number of you who own multiple caches, I think you’re going to find it to be a really useful and valuable tool, and if you have suggestions, please send them along, ’cause we do wanna know what else we can do to focus on and how we can make it better for everybody.

26:05 CR: You touched on the Adventure Lab App briefly as something that a lot of folks were turning to when they didn’t, maybe, feel comfortable with physical caches, and more adventures are out there. It’s getting more and more use. I’m certainly seeing a lot more talk of it as there are more opportunities for people to play with the app and use it, and as a result, of course, as with any product, there are suggestions and ideas for how to make it better. How does HQ go about trying to take in all of the ideas and the suggestions that might come in for how to make the app better and just things that they’d like to see be a part of the app?

26:47 BR: Well, first of all, I can say that even internally, there’s a lot of ideas for how to make it better, it needs… It’s still an early stage product and project. And we have a number of ideas for things that we wanna add and adjustments that we wanna make. We have a full team that is focused on adventures full-time, and they are reviewing suggestions that come in from the community, they’re reviewing suggestions that come from internally. And then we kind of stack rank them and prioritize them and investigate them and say, “Well, what exactly does this mean? How much effort would it make to build it? Is this a good long-term strategy? Does this make sense to go build it?” Another thing that I would add is that a number of us, myself included, are engaged in some of the Facebook groups around adventures and we are listening and contributing, and when we hear suggestions that make sense we’ll bring those back to the company. Or when we see something that’s really cool, we will bring that back to the company and share it and say, “Look at what this group is doing with the Adventure Lab platform.”

28:03 BR: Look at this really cool adventure and wow it’s a… ” I think I mentioned this one before, but it’s one of my favorites, but in Turkey, there is a James Bond adventure where you can go to five different locations where different James Bond films were made, and… I’m a James Bond fan. I really like those movies and I would love to go to Turkey to see that… To visit that adventure. And so as I look through the directory of adventures that are being created and even the ones that are being shared on Facebook, I’m looking at these things, and like with really cool geocaches, I’m saying, “How do I get to do all the ones that I wanna do?” And right now with travel completely limited, it feels like that’s ways away. There are quite a few of them coming online in the Seattle area, which is really exciting. But there are Adventure Labs being created all over the world now. We are giving out a lot of credits, and the goal was to keep giving out credit.

29:09 BR: So what I can say about what’s coming next in terms of credit distribution is the first phase that we tested with, we created a list at some point last year, and we said, “If you want one of these and you meet these requirements, fill out a form.” And we took those forms and we started out by giving out a couple hundred credits. And we got someone out in Adventure Labs, and then we said, “Let’s give out more credits and more credits.” And we went through most of that list that we first got, and then after taking that list, we said, “Let’s try randomly distributing them to premium members who meet a set of qualifications.” So I believe you to have found at least two lab caches. You had to be on the promotional email lists for geocaching, so that we could email you and say, “Hey, we’ve given you a credit.”

30:03 BR: The next phase… And this is something that I’ve seen on Facebook, and I know others have seen it, is we see examples of people getting them and saying, “Oh, I didn’t even know I… I don’t know how I got it. I didn’t really… I don’t know what I’m gonna do with it. I may or may not want it.” And other people are saying, “Oh my goodness, I’ve been waiting for so long. How do I get one? I never seem to be chosen,” and it feels like it’s not an ideal result. It does allow us to see sort of what’s the response rate if we do random distribution. At some point in August, and I believe it’ll be towards the early end of August, we are going to put out another sign-up sheet. Similar requirements, again, you have to be a premium member, and that’s the premium members are the folks that are paying for the premium membership and they are… In doing so they are helping to support the teams that build these projects. And so of course, as we promised in 2002, or whatever, we are going to give premium members the earliest access to new features and functionality. So that’s why we are giving these credits to premium members. But if as a premium member, if you meet the other qualifications, you will fill out a form and we’re gonna take those forms and we will be giving out X number of credits per week.

31:20 BR: And if you fill out that form, and I don’t know how long we’re gonna leave it open for, but we’re gonna leave it open for a while, if you fill out that form, you will get an Adventure Lab builder credit. So that’s a way of saying, “Hey, if you’re out there and you wanna build an adventure lab, come fill out the form, you’ll get to do it.” And if you’re not a premium member, we would hope that maybe consider becoming a premium member. It’s $30 a year still, we have never raised the price in 18 or so years. We felt like it was a good value then. As we continued to add things to premium membership, hopefully that becomes more accessible and more enticing to people. Premium memberships are the primary way that Geocaching HQ makes money and allows us to pay for employees, pay for our office space which we’re not exactly getting to use as often right now, but really do the kind of work that we wanna do to support the company now and in the future.

32:15 BR: So for those of you premium members out there who wanna build an adventure, your chance is coming. I would encourage you to get out and find at least a few lab caches because that will be part of the requirements. I don’t know if there’s going to be any other requirements, but when the form goes live, we’ll make that perfectly clear. But the end goal is… Adventure Lab is a platform that allows people to create, share and play a different type of adventure and experience in the real world. We’re seeing some really nice adoption by geocachers. A lot of people are having fun with them, and people are creating some really, really cool experiences. Some with bonus caches, some without bonus caches. If you haven’t checked it out, the app is called Adventure Lab, and you can download it on iOS or the Android store.

33:05 CR: We’ve been talking about the Adventure Lab app now for a couple of years now, I’m wondering, has your… Or not just your, does the company’s vision for the Adventure Lab app evolve over time? And I guess one of the things I’m thinking about specifically is you and I have chatted before on the podcast about how much or how little it would be integrated with geocaching.com, or seeing adventures on the Geocaching app, things like that. Has the view of that evolved at all? Has it changed at all or is it pretty much as it has been?

33:44 BR: I think the view continues to remain the same. It’s really just a matter of us going in and doing the work to have the app and the ecosystem match with that view. So I can tell you, we have a lot of things in mind for what we wanna do with adventures, it just takes development time to build it and test it and release it in the right way. And so we have talked about having Adventure Lab caches on the Geocaching map. That is something that I still believe is going to happen, it should happen before the end of the year, I think maybe when we talked last I might have said August, but we’ve had other things come up, and so it might take a little bit longer. And that’s just the normal course of business. I wish we could do everything as quickly as we aspire to do it, but unfortunately, that’s not reality, and it’s just not practical.

34:41 BR: But in terms… For long-term with geocaching, we do see Adventure Lab as a tool-set that geocachers can use to extend the game of geocaching in different ways. We also see opportunities for other communities out there. So if there are people that are kayaking or mountain biking or they’re bird watching or they’re historians, and they see this platform as a way to create content to engage an audience, that’s something where, I think, we would love to have them come and use the platform and play with it. And we may find that maybe there’s somebody who is an expert at a different field that’s not related to geocaching, and you put the Adventure Lab tool-set in their hand and they go build this really cool experience related to the discipline that they’re familiar with. Well, all of a sudden as geocachers, we have access to this new type of experience that we wouldn’t have otherwise had before. So as with geocaching, it’s a platform for creating, sharing and playing outdoor experiences.

35:49 BR: And geocachers have done some incredible things over the years with core geocaching that has helped people to get outside and have super fun experiences. Well, likewise, as we put maybe a more robust tool-set in their hands that provides for multi-media and different kinds of triggers and things like that, well, then the opportunity to create more robust experiences is available and the beneficiaries of that, the people who will benefit are the community members, are the geocachers. So long-term, we think the platform continues to have a lot of promise. We are continuing to keep it integrated with core geocaching because it makes sense to do that. And I know we’re having a lot of fun with it, the players are having a lot of fun with it, the builders are having a lot of fun with it. Like with regular core geocaching, we wanna do more of it. So some of those… The other things we have in mind from for the vision are things that you will see in the not too distant future. We are excited to bring those to the community, and we’re excited to see what people do with them.

36:55 CR: Alright, well, we’ve covered a lot. Is there anything else you wanna get off your chest?

37:01 BR: I guess I would just say, for those of you who I’ve seen at Megas and gigas and at other events, or if you’ve come to visit us at HQ, from the bottom of my heart, we miss you. We miss seeing you in person, we miss getting out on the trail and playing with you. And those times will return at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later. And until then, we hope that you guys are doing your best to stay safe, stay healthy, stay active, and we’ll see you as soon as we possibly can.

[music]

37:36 CR: So there you have it, Bryan Roth, the president and co-founder of Geocaching HQ, talking about a variety of topics. If you have something you would like to hear us cover on the podcast, you can send us an email to podcast@geocaching.com. That is podcast@geocaching.com. We always love to hear your suggestions and your feedback. So until we talk to you again, for me and for Bryan and for everybody at Geocaching HQ, happy caching.

[music]

Episode 39: Catching up with Bryan Roth

Geocaching HQ’s president and co-founder Bryan Roth drops by to chat about the new Cache Owner Dashboard, the Adventure Lab app, and more!

We recorded this interview remotely, so we apologize if the sound quality is not as crisp as usual.

You can listen to the episode via this page, or on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you use an aggregator to subscribe to podcasts, you can access the RSS feed here.

A full transcript is available here.

InsideGeocachingHQ_Podcast
Inside Geocaching HQ Podcast
Episode 39: Catching up with Bryan Roth
Loading
/

Adventure Lab spotlight: Interview with the creator of MSU’s Native American art and culture tour

In partnership with Geocaching HQ, Montana State University (MSU) recently launched a public Adventure Lab experience that takes players on a journey to locations that honor Native American heritage on campus. Suzi Taylor, director of the Science Math Resource Center worked with MSU’s American Indian Council to create the Native American art and culture Adventure Lab. Read more about what Suzi learned along the way.

Continue reading →