The Future of Communication at Work with Daniel Foster, Director of Strategy at TechSmith

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, we're talking to Daniel, Director of Strategy at TechSmith. And we discuss how using recorded video as a means of communication is becoming the new norm for hybrid work environments, advantages of recorded videos and annotated screen captures for asynchronous training, and why you should do away with perfectionism and start sharing your ideas with your colleagues before you feel like they're ready. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) So how did you first get started in technology?

(Daniel at 00:00:50) My first introduction to technology was probably at home. We had a personal computer before that was quite common. And I won't give you the full Wayback Machine here, but in first, second grade, when we had a chance to stay indoors for recess instead of going out, sometimes a friend and I would sit there at a VIC-20 in the back of the room, and we'd spend the entire recess coding in all of this basic code line by line. And at the end of recess, if everything went really well, it would make one bleep bloop noise. And then, of course, being a VIC-20 and having no storage on board, it would get flushed and we'd have to start over. But that was early, early on, and it got more fun for sure as the technology got better.

(Daniel at 00:01:34) So in college, I did some media production classes. I didn't really have to, but that was really fun. We were using still a lot of analog stuff. I actually have taken a razor blade to tape and scotch taped a cassette tape back together. Then we were using a big editing suite, but I was such an early adopter.

(Daniel at 00:01:54) I convinced my professor to let me do one of my final projects on the computer he had at the back of the room. He had one Mac back there or something. I think it was a Mac, but it had a very early version of Premiere, apparently. I did all my video editing on there and I went to produce it, and it said thirty-six hours until finished, and I could never get it to finish production.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:15) Oh, man.

(Daniel at 00:02:16) It was pretty rough. But even those experiences, I was there's a lot here. I'm excited about digital media. I'm excited about digital ways of putting content and information together. And really that kind of got me into my first job where I was doing a lot of PR-type things for a software company.

(Daniel at 00:02:35) And then currently where I work at TechSmith, it was my step over to marketing writing, which wasn't just words. It was really deep understanding of the technology and of how to create stories in different media, like digital media.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:50) So how long have you been at TechSmith for?

(Daniel at 00:02:53) I started at TechSmith about fifteen years ago. It was during the economic downturn in 2007, and I was looking to move my family back from the West Coast. We'd been out there for five years. I had a really great start at another software company out there in Northwest Washington. Through the family grapevine, I learned that TechSmith was hiring. Pretty awesome provision that we were able to just land here.

(Daniel at 00:03:25) And I thought, well, it'll be a job for a little while until I find something else. But you know what? I really loved it at TechSmith, and so I've stayed fifteen years.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:33) That's awesome, man. So can you tell me a little bit about what the company is today and, I guess, how it's evolved since you joined?

(Daniel at 00:03:42) Yeah. I often describe TechSmith to folks as sort of a grandfather of tech startups, and I don't mean that to mean we're decrepit or something. You know, what I mean is that before there were words like bootstrapped and before there were sort of the current models of growing a company, TechSmith was doing those things. So the company has been self-funded the whole time. We haven't had to go out and get VC funding and investors.

(Daniel at 00:04:09) We've just basically grown by being profitable at providing a product that people want. And so that's really driven TechSmith's passion around finding really valuable and urgent customer problems to solve and then building a great product to solve those. And so that started very early on. The product that I've worked the most on at TechSmith is Snagit. And the first version of that was introduced in 1991.

(Daniel at 00:04:37) It was actually built as an internal use only tool for consulting work that some of the developers were doing, and then they're like, this is really useful for us. I wonder if anyone else would want this, and started posting it, I think, for free on bulletin boards. And then eventually went to a shareware model, which was, hey, if you really think this is useful, you should pay us some money, you know, like a tip jar, and eventually moved to more of a trial model where you could try it for so many days, and then if you like it, buy it. So that's really powered TechSmith's growth through the years. Over those years, the company noticed, look, people really love using Snagit to take screenshots.

(Daniel at 00:05:16) That was kind of the core of the product, was a better way to take a screenshot, be able to annotate and edit those screenshots. And then ultimately, we added a library so that it would hold on to those for you so you could do more with them later and that kind of thing. And as video started to be relevant online, you know, if you remember back to Adobe Flash, it was not a very good format, but that was the format for really early low-fidelity video. People were asking, you know, I want to not just use a screenshot to illustrate how to use this product or how to do these steps like a tutorial, but it'd be cool if it was like moving pictures, you know, and if it could be a video. So some of that was started in Snagit, but eventually spun off into its own product, which is Camtasia. And it's a kind of a funny word.

(Daniel at 00:06:03) A lot of people are like, how is that again? So it's C-A-M like camera and then Tasia like Fantasia. Apparently, it was really hard to name the product and that's what they came up with. So that's what we've got. So Camtasia is like a full-on video editor with, you know, multi-track editor, able to layer in sound and music and different things happening on the screen at the same time.

(Daniel at 00:06:24) But it's a bit more approachable than, say, an Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. So those are sort of our bread and butter products that, you know, like I said, Snagit introduced 1991, Camtasia introduced, I think, the first time in, I want to say, like, '99. And we've obviously developed those and added to them and expanded them in response to the market and customers, but those are really the core of the company to this day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:50) Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. If you come out with a screenshot before screenshots are easy to do, everybody's gonna want it. So I'm curious, how have you stayed ahead of the OEMs? As Apple and Microsoft add their own capabilities, how do you stay relevant and better than what they're doing?

(Daniel at 00:07:14) Yeah. That's actually a perennial question. I'll meet people at a barbecue or something, and they'll be like, wait. Snagit, screenshot. Like, isn't that just built into Windows?

(Daniel at 00:07:22) And so that's actually been a challenge, you know, with a company that started with a lot of engineers thinking about the technical side and what can we build. How do we really elevate the story around the product and help people understand that? I mean, first of all, the functionality and capabilities literally are more than just what's built into your OS. So there is differentiation there. What we've done is find niches of people who really need to communicate technical information very quickly, whether that's internally to their coworker colleagues, people across the company, or creating content for their customers. Right?

(Daniel at 00:07:59) Like, hey. I need to be able to make all the tutorials and documentation and train people in the software. So those were some of the early users and early adopters of Snagit and Camtasia, where we were able to offer a lot more value than just the screenshot, just the screen recording. Part of that is in the editing. There's a lot of editing capabilities.

(Daniel at 00:08:19) I'll just give you one example. Again, this one's very much for kind of that technical communicator, people who are driving software adoption of their products. Snagit has a feature that no other software that I know of really has, which is you can take a screenshot and then abstract out the details of text and buttons and make it look kind of like lines or shapes. And you've seen this effect. It's called Simplified User Image.

(Daniel at 00:08:44) We actually helped create that terminology because there wasn't a name for it when we were getting going with this idea. What it does is it allows people who create this kind of content to get rid of some of the extraneous noise, right, of many interfaces that you're taking a screenshot of. Maybe a little bit, there's just a lot going on. Right? And you don't need all that in your instructions.

(Daniel at 00:09:06) So you can you can reduce that kind of visual clutter, focus attention of the viewer. But also, there's some really gnarly challenges around things like localization. So I'm gonna make the training or the documents for six languages. Do I have to take screenshots of my product in six languages to do that? So this is just an example, right, where we found a need.

(Daniel at 00:09:27) We really got in touch with, okay, what are these users struggling with? What is difficult for them in this space? And how do we dive deeper than the platforms and those built-in features are ever gonna go? Because that's not the set of problems they're trying to solve. You know, they're just trying to create a super basic capability.

(Daniel at 00:09:44) But as we can, you know, deeply understand those needs, find out what people are willing to pay, we've been able to very much differentiate our products in the marketplace and differentiate from free and have a great sustainable business model around it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:59) That's awesome. And I gotta come clean. I'm asking you questions about the product, but I do know about it because I've been using it to make tutorials. We recently made a new hire, and, traditionally, I train new hires on Zoom calls because we're a fully remote company, and that's been the easiest thing. But this time, I just made a video of one process that we have to get done daily, you know, and sent that over to our new hire.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:27) And he watched it, figured out what to do, and started working on that. So then while he was working on that process, I was able to spend time creating the next tutorial so that we didn't have to both stop what we were doing at the same time to be on a Zoom call. It's like being able to train asynchronously has been amazing for me because training usually is pretty difficult in my schedule.

(Daniel at 00:10:52) Man, I love that story. That is fantastic. I have so many questions for you, but that, I think, really illustrates so well what's happened, especially over the last couple of years. Right? A lot of us had developed patterns of communication with our teammates or new teammates or onboarding people or, you know, just even working on projects together, that were really grounded in an assumption that when I need to, I can get together in the same room.

(Daniel at 00:11:16) We can talk through things. And then we took all of those assumptions when a lot of us went remote, you know, and some people were already remote. But for our company, we went remote in 2020 in March, and we really hadn't been before. But our tendency is just to take all those same assumptions and be like, okay. I'll do it all the same way, and then we'll just replace in-person with Zoom.

(Daniel at 00:11:37) And then there's kind of this moment where you're like, what if instead of that, I could record that video once and then share it with the next five people that I onboard? Like, why did I think it was all that efficient in the first place to do it that old way? So I'm guessing, and I'm curious what you think. Will you be able to onboard the next two or three folks to that same position using some of those same assets that you've created?

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:57) Yeah. Yeah. I'm throwing them all in a Dropbox folder, and I'll just share that folder. And that should be pretty good onboarding after this. I'm really excited about that, personally.

(Daniel at 00:12:08) Yeah. And I think, you know, the other thing I run into, because I'm not, I don't have a training title. Right? But all of us are probably the most expert person in our company about something, and you're the go-to, right, for something. So for me, it's we use a platform to gather anonymous usage data like telemetry.

(Daniel at 00:12:25) And I happen to be one of the people who know it the best. So if you have a question about that, you're gonna come to me. You know, the other thing that I've realized in making people a quick video or marked-up set of screenshots as that how-to is that they can also reference it multiple times. So, you know, when you feel like I only have one chance to learn this from you during the Zoom call, I gotta ask all my questions. I gotta think of what I don't know.

(Daniel at 00:12:50) And then, you know, I get one chance. Whereas, if you record that and give it to me, then maybe later I'm like, wait, I got the first three steps, but step four and five were a little difficult. I can just go hit replay on that video and watch it again and watch it as many times as I need to. And the video never tells me, like, oh, man. You're kind of dull.

(Daniel at 00:13:08) It's taken you a really long time to learn that. The video is just there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:13) That is a good point because I had to get trained originally, and I remember being a little nervous to ask the same question a couple times. You can just go back and hit play again, which is really cool. So today, you're Director of Strategy at TechSmith. What do you spend most of your time on?

(Daniel at 00:13:31) So I spend a lot of time as Director of Strategy on things like looking down the road to say, what should we be thinking about next? Right? And so we have these multiple event horizons. You're kind of always looking right away. What are we doing to respond to things in the moment, or what's happening in our revenue, or what competitors are doing?

(Daniel at 00:13:49) But then really also long term, what's the vision for where we're taking each product and the company as a whole? How are we evolving our value proposition over time? How are we evolving our ways of competing in the marketplace and even our business model? So I've been spending time lately on thinking about that because, you know, our products are still purchased in a perpetual model, which means you pay once and you kind of have access to them forever. Obviously, you know, you won't get updates forever.

(Daniel at 00:14:18) We have another way of doing that through a thing called maintenance contracts, but all of that really factors into, from the customer point of view, how are we gonna serve their needs the best over the long haul? How do we have different products in our portfolio that really appeal to different customer segments and solve particular problems for them? And then how do we tell really good stories around that in the marketplace so that more people will find them and we can continue to grow? We've grown for all these years, I guess, thirty-plus years, but it's not taken for granted. Right?

(Daniel at 00:14:50) We have a great machine. We have a great flywheel that keeps customers loving the products. They tell other people. I mean, that's really a big engine of our growth, but we can't take it for granted because the situation's always changing and the competitive pressures are always changing. So, you know, when the pandemic hit, it was really a chance for us to, for example, dig deep into those things that we were just talking about with asynchronous use cases.

(Daniel at 00:15:14) So thinking like, okay, a lot of folks in an organization already have Snagit. Many of those people are using it kind of individually as a silo. Like, hey, this is my secret weapon. We'll hear that a lot. This is my secret weapon, and it makes me way more effective, and I can communicate clearly.

(Daniel at 00:15:30) But in the midst of all this change in how organizations think about communication, how teams have to reshape their norms of meetings, their meeting culture, their meeting cadences, because either they're all remote or now they're going back to some kind of hybrid model. That's a huge opportunity. So how do we make sure that people who may understand or hear or know the name Snagit are now associating it with all of these great use cases that are extremely relevant to help teams collaborate better and work more effectively and quickly across all these new challenges?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:09) So what are some of the new use cases that are emerging from a hybrid work structure as opposed to fully remote?

(Daniel at 00:16:17) A big focus for us has been on this idea of meeting culture. It's one of those areas where everybody knew that meetings were pretty broken before, but it just became very, very obvious when we went remote or now as many teams are coming back to kind of a hybrid new norm. And hybrid just means in any given meeting or set of interactions, some people are present physically, some people aren't. There's a lot more flexibility, right?

(Daniel at 00:16:46) Some people are working exactly the hours of eight to five. Other people have shifted their schedule a bit for one reason or another. So all of that flexibility in calendar and physical space goes into the hybrid model. And so collaboration has to take on a different look than it did before. I think it's an interesting question to think, if I say, what does collaboration look like? What's the picture that comes into your head of a team collaborating? I'm curious, Adam.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) I guess classic whiteboard. Bunch of people up writing down ideas in a room. Whiteboard, yeah.

(Daniel at 00:17:24) Yeah, whiteboarding. I often think of sticky notes, and I love doing affinity mapping and put the sticky notes on the board and all that. But yeah, that's kind of the picture in our head of what collaboration means. But in more of a digital workplace where you can't be physically all standing at that whiteboard, it starts to look differently. And so for us, that means instead of the impulse or the trigger being, okay, I need to get some feedback on this project, so I better get some people in a room, it's like, okay, I need some feedback on this project. I better record a video and send it out to the people that I need feedback from. I should probably tell them a little bit about what I want feedback on to make sure that they don't go down some rabbit trail because I won't be there in person to say, no, no, no, I meant, you know, I really want you to tell me is the text compelling, not is the topic the right topic because we already picked the topic. Whatever that is, you just got to structure and guide it. So make that video, is often what it is, and then invite people to start to comment at points in time in that video. So we have some capabilities in our cloud offerings that make that possible. So that as those teams come together, as your team comes together around that artifact, you're getting really valuable, useful input from them, but you didn't have to create a meeting and get everybody on the same calendar at the same time to do that. And so that's really inclusive because someone who works different hours can participate, somebody who maybe came a day later because they were on vacation. Also, if you work across time zones, your team is maybe distributed across time zones, can more easily participate. So all of that is just a little bit different way of working. So it's a great use case. We often give each other feedback. We're often asking for feedback in collaborative spaces.

(Daniel at 00:19:13) But now we can do that asynchronously through creating these little videos or even send a screenshot and say, hey, here's what it looks like at this point. You know, do you want to give any input on this? So that's one of the core use cases that I think has really evolved. And then our goal is to really think beyond those very frequent but basic interactions to think what other kinds of meetings do people have. And you think about maybe folks doing agile teams, taking an agile framework. There's certain kinds of team stand-ups, ways of sharing your work, ways of demoing your work, and ways of interacting that don't have to be in person, don't have to be synchronous over Zoom. And we're building tech that enables teams to do more and more of those things asynchronously when they feel like that's the right choice. We're also doing some stuff internally to play around with finding what the right mix is, right? Because not everything needs to be asynchronous.

(Daniel at 00:20:13) Some things still should be live in person or on Zoom. But we're doing some experimentation as our own company coming up in the next couple of months to really get radical about that and ask which things should be a meeting on the calendar, recurring or ad hoc, and which things can we tackle using other forms of interaction.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:34) So in trying to figure out all the different types of meetings that can happen, obviously, you're not having every single meeting possible within TechSmith. You have your specific business, and you meet for things that you do. So how do you get in touch with customers and interview them, have the conversations, whatever, to figure out what types of meetings and interactions you might not think of based on your experiences?

(Daniel at 00:21:05) Yeah. Some of that is reading a lot. So, fortunately, there are some folks who have much deeper pockets who are also really interested in these questions. So the Slacks, the Microsofts of the world are spending a fair bit to understand and research workplace practices and how they're evolving. So that's been really helpful. I would recommend that your listeners, if they haven't already checked it out, Microsoft Work Trends Index is one that's really good. And there's a, I think it's called the Future of Work Forum. I think Slack puts the bill for that or whatever you want to call it. They're the mastermind behind it. We do study ourselves some because we reflect in some way our user base. So that's another good input. We intentionally go out and survey and interview folks that are either customers or non-customers to understand how they've changed, how their communication is adapting and evolving, and what those new pain points are. Yeah, it's a mix of inputs for sure. Just conversations with folks like yourself, like the one we had today, hearing anecdotes of like, yeah, I tried this new way of doing this and this was really successful. Well, cool. We can package that up. We have a great customer education team who can package those things up and tell other customers, you know, if you want to replace this type of meeting, if you want more options for how to work flexibly, here are some use cases that you should explore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:27) So on the topic of market research, we actually recently, so I say that and then I'm going to get into a little story that's not about market research, but I'll bring it back. But we recently had a company on the show called Code Climate, and I was familiar with them because they do automated code review that catches errors while you're working and is really nice. But their founder came on and told us all about this new thing they're doing that aggregates all of the data that your software developers create as they're working and is able to, like, how much time they're spending on certain tasks and aggregates that to then make data-driven management decisions for your teams. And everybody talks about making data-driven decisions, and that was an area that I didn't really think about before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:18) So as we're talking about how you're able to gather all of this qualitative data around how people are working and how to improve workflows, I'm curious how do you turn that into something quantitative, or what's your process for applying it to tangible results in your product development processes?

(Daniel at 00:23:44) Yeah. And I'll maybe broaden the question a little bit, sort of the relationship between qualitative and quantitative analysis and data, right? And it does change a little bit depending on the situation. One of the nice things, I referenced Microsoft and Slack, they are sharing some quantitative data too about shifts in hybrid work patterns or remote work patterns. So that is helpful because that's a little bit tough for us to go out and get. They have access to, let's say, all the users and their data of using Slack or Teams, right? And what time of day and all of that. So those are very helpful for us, and we're building an application on Slack. So we know that they're a partner, not a competitor. But, yeah, just more generally, thinking about our own data practices and pulling in customer insights. So we do instrument the products. I kind of referenced that earlier. We collect passive analytics. It's anonymous. So people who are using the product are generating a stream of events that are telling us a little bit about what's used, a little bit about what order, and then kind of those shapes of usage. And then what we'll often do is intersect that with the qualitative. So one of the loops that I like to go through the most is, and I'm actually working on a survey right now that's qualitative. The qualitative one is built on some things I already know, some things I know from data or just talking to customers, right? So it already has some assumptions and some intuition built in. It's highly trained intuition because I've been doing this for so long. But that qualitative survey about, in this case, reasons why people convert or don't convert to a paid user of Snagit is going to help inform then some data-driven, more quantitative analysis.

(Daniel at 00:25:29) So we'll be able to go into the data with some ideas of what we think, hypothesis one, two, three about what these factors are. And then can we really validate that at scale with the quantitative analysis? And so that's how I often think of the two. Qualitative helps shape my hypothesis and make my time in the data more focused. And then the quantitative stuff is going to help me have more confidence that whatever I'm finding actually scales. And then the other thing I'll say about quantitative that I love is when you have enough data and you can also start to segment it. I think it's Avinash Kaushik who has worked at Google. I don't know if he's still with Google, but he's one of my blog mentors. I read his blog when I was early on in marketing, and I believe the quote is attributed to him that all data in the aggregate is crap. And that's obviously a little bit overstated for the point, but I've just found that every time I can start to segment out data and really understand, like, what are the groups that are represented here, why is this group different from that one, I'll learn so much more than I do if I just accept the kind of aggregate average data point, which often doesn't tell me all that much. It's those differences and those comparisons that start to be really meaningful.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:46) Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I do really like that quote. I think I'll use it in the future. So, obviously, you're really forward thinking on company strategy. What's the thing you're most excited for for the future?

(Daniel at 00:27:02) I feel like we've been on a long, long journey toward, and I've mentioned video a few times. I think images and annotated images will continue to be very relevant in the workplace, and GIFs actually. Our products produce those. But I think video as a normal means of communication between people in the workplace, we're finally getting close to crossing over from the super early adopters to maybe an early majority or maybe we're starting to get even beyond that. We've had products in the market for so many years that have enabled this and made it pretty easy, but there's just a lot of things about both culture and the way people work and then even some of the things about sharing and storing video and making it accessible to people inside an organization that weren't quite in place. I think those things are all really coming into place in a new way. And so I think that over the next few years, we'll see a transition to where, you know, there were times before email was normal, right? It was memos. And then eventually people started writing each other emails, and that became a normal way to communicate in the workplace. And I think that's what we're getting to is a transition where just like we would send text messages or we would send emails, we'll be sending back and forth quick video messages and being able to collaborate and communicate on information really efficiently that way. And I think that we're just in the early days yet of all the value that we can drive that way. And so that's why I'm excited. There's a lot of folks that are working on this, and it's okay. That doesn't bother me at all, right? Like, I'm glad that Slack has a way to make quick videos inside of Slack. Because the more people that start to participate in creating video at all in their normal everyday interactions at work, then the more that our differentiated products are there, are kind of finding our niche, finding what we really serve and provide that's different than the others, the more that we'll be able to grow and acquire customers too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:08) And it makes sense that the adoption is finally coming and coming fast because if you think, like, 10 years ago, the bandwidth just wasn't really there to super easily share video files just because of their size. Now everybody can easily send and receive a two-minute clip from their office setup.

(Daniel at 00:29:31) Yeah. There are so many factors, right? And I think you're right with that technical one for sure is an enabler. I think that creation in that mode, in that format is a little bit different for folks. Sitting down to type an email, like, I kind of got that, create a doc, like, I understand that. But what do I do when I hit record? Like, how do I structure my thoughts? It's really not that different from a presentation, but presentations, we often spend a lot of time preparing for, whereas a quick one-off video, how much time should I really prepare? So those are the human factors that I think are starting to come in place. More people have made a video in their private or personal life, for example, so they at least get something about that and how that experience felt. More people have watched some common workplace videos from their teammates, so they start to think about, oh, I know how I would say it or how I would start it or how I could make it a little bit better than that last person. And then I just think that even viewing video as a way to get information, so it's become super normal now, right, to just be like, I need to know how to do something, go to YouTube. And that really wasn't true. I mean, it was a little bit true five years ago, but it wasn't really true 10 years ago, that there just wasn't there. So I think a lot of those things are just really coming together to make this a very useful and widespread, just something that's very broadly used in the workplace in ways that it hasn't been previously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:59) Yeah. Absolutely. So before we wrap up, I do want to get into a couple of leadership questions with you. Is that cool?

(Daniel at 00:31:07) Yeah. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:07) So I saw that you have a background in education, and I feel like that's kind of probably some of the best experience for not just leadership, but also leadership at a company where a big focus of what you're doing is enabling education. How do you think being an educator in the past has impacted you today as an executive leader?

(Daniel at 00:31:32) Well, I would say that my past experiences in education definitely have factored into how I approach leadership. So one is I actually went down a path in grad school where I thought maybe I would be an academic, and I was a TA for one semester for a professional presentation class, like doing speeches and presentations. And I was just scared to death. Like, I would write out so many longhand notes for every session because I was just worried that there would be dead air space and I wouldn't know what to say next. And so one of the things I learned over the years is it's better to just plan kind of the basic outline of what you want to say. And if you're familiar with the content, you're going to go a lot further and it's going to be a more conversational kind of interaction than having it all scripted out. And so I've taken that with me, just investing anything I can in written communication and verbal communication and particularly persuasive communication, putting together a really good case for something. Those are base skills that I learned in grad school and really honed there and then had to practice in some of those early years in educating folks that have really helped me through my career.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:47) So I'm curious, how can we make it actionable for maybe people that are in their career and they haven't had much experience, particularly with the persuasive communication? How do you think people can get that experience if they're already done with school and at work and it's not a big part of their job, but they want to get good at it?

(Daniel at 00:33:13) This is maybe a hack that actually bridges a lot of different things. But when I was a marketing writer, I started realizing that I needed to notice what moved me as a reader. And I would be a better writer when I would just be self-conscious as I was consuming any information. Why did I start reading that, and why did I keep reading it? What was it that kept me moving through it? And so I would say develop a similar habit with persuasion. Why do I think that thing convinced me that this was true? You know, let me take it apart a little bit just to understand, was it the language used? Was it they gave this kind of evidence and this much evidence, but didn't go too deep into the evidence? You know, they just gave you enough to kind of satisfy the brain. I think there's a lot of things there, just noticing yourself and what works on you or noticing what works on the people around you and what sort of gets them to nod and assent and go like, "Yeah, I think that's a great idea." I think those are all really just helpful inputs, the more you can kind of take those apart and understand them. Certainly, there are some books too. You know, I love Cialdini's book, the one on persuasion. I can't remember the title right off the top of my head, but it's sort of one of those that's very much out there. It's sort of behavioral psychology. And these aren't—it's not that there's tricks in manipulation. It's just understanding that when you present someone with information, if you didn't answer the "why" question or the "what about that" question, then it's going to be really hard for them to go along with it. And so figuring out when you've satisfied those kind of psychological itches, if you will—you know, have you scratched that itch?—then you can move on. But if you haven't, you really need to go back and work at that some more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:03) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I find that when I'm trying to be intentional about making mental notes of things, like you're saying, like when something moves you, remember that. Mental notes don't work for me. I have to always make sure I put some structure around it and have a note ready on my phone that I can just keep adding to. And I have to be diligent about adding to it regularly so that it stays at the top of my notes and doesn't just fall down into the oblivion of the thousands of notes I have. So that's just the bit I would add to that about making sure that you remember all the things you want to remember when you're trying to improve.

(Daniel at 00:35:45) You're going to say, "Oh yeah, typical product guy out here promoting his wares." But I want to bring this to Snagit just for a second, because it's not like the core use cases we talked about are communicating information and sharing stuff with other people, but there is a real value in just capturing stuff for yourself. And so I actually have this habit now when I see something, because I'm often on my computer, right? That's my digital work world, is on my laptop. So when I see something that persuades me or moves me or I think, "Whoa, that's an awesome way that they helped bridge this onboarding," or whatever, introduce this idea, I just capture it. And in the Snagit library, you can apply tags, and that's the secret sauce, right? Because you're like, "Okay, I have an onboarding tag." So every time I notice some really interesting onboarding pattern, I just capture it, tag it. And then later when I'm thinking, "I want to give some examples of this," or "What was that one I saw?" it's there. So anyway, that's a plug.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:44) Nice. Excellent. Relevant plug. I'll try and check that out. So before we wrap up, I want to ask you one more question I always like asking. If you could give yourself one piece of advice the first time that you moved from individual contributor to manager, what would that be?

(Daniel at 00:37:03) I would say put your stuff out there before you feel like it's ready. I think that even as an individual contributor, I felt a lot of pressure that I needed to have it really perfect or really well done before I could share it. And for some weird reason, it almost feels like that's more so when you move into a leadership role because you think, "Well, I'm probably expected to have it more together and to appear smarter than before." It's, you know, it's just our vanity, whatever. But I think that engaging with others before it's fully baked—you know, maybe it's not even quarter baked yet, but you just sort of get that crummy first draft. I have a coworker—he uses a different language, I won't—but anyway, just that crummy first draft, and get that out there and get people engaging with it, get that feedback on it. And that's going to help make the idea better. That's going to flush out some of those things we've talked about in terms of persuasion. Like, "Oh, there's this weird hang-up you have about this, but maybe you just didn't understand what I was saying, or maybe I need to really address that with some other data or research." But the faster you can do that before trying to have something you present that's fully formed, the better for everybody. So it's risky. You have to have kind of some psychological safety. I think you have to have something that's feeding your personal confidence so that you feel like you can, because it is putting yourself out there, right, and having that confidence. But I think being able to just say, "You know, it's okay. It's not criticizing me. It's helping make the idea better. Let's make this idea better together." And the earlier I start on that, the better it's going to be.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:43) Amazing. Yeah, I totally agree because you have to give feedback to improve. You can't just be stuck in your own bubble and never hear what other people have to say. But fantastic, dude. Is there anything that we didn't get to touch on that we want to make sure we hit before we wrap up today? Any extra shout-out you want to make here?

(Daniel at 00:39:03) I think one of the things that people really think when they think about remote work or hybrid work or going to more asynchronous forms of communication at work is what we're going to lose. And what we're going to lose is the humanity, the personal touch, the personal connection. It's going to feel really isolating and not human. And I think that's a real challenge. I mean, that's real. I just had a meeting earlier this week, two days ago, where we were back in person with a group for the first time. We're actually hybrid, so some people were on the TV and some people were in the room. It is a challenge, but I think that we have to be open to evolving our view of what those human connections can look like. And so one of the things that we're really focused on is figuring out how do you have that fun and human connection even with an asynchronous video that I recorded for you and you're watching at a different time. And so that's some technology that we think—we're working on that we believe will help solve that—and some evolution of just cultural factors and human factors as well, and just sort of rethinking things. But anyway, that's one of those things I want to acknowledge because a lot of folks, when they hear this talk about asynchronous forms of communication, that's what they immediately jump to is, "It's going to be cold and clinical, and we won't know each other anymore as humans." And I don't think we have to give that up. I think we can have both within measure and reason, but we can actually hold on to both those things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:31) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.