Mobile app updates for success with Russ Lane

Paul Wurth:

Hi everybody. Welcome to “The Building Code.” I’m your host, Paul Wurth. We are in episode 99, exciting times here, one away from the big 100. We’re very proud of that accomplishment. In this 99th episode, we have Russ Lane, from our mobile app product team, talking all things mobile app. You’re going to love this episode. We get into where their heads are at with our mobile app. How are they thinking about the app, how they talk to our clients, about how they use it every day in the field. And then we obviously talk about what is coming down the pike. We’re going to talk about a great update you’re going to see in 9.0, I believe it’s coming in November. And we’re also going to talk about 2021, what to expect from our mobile app, which is so important to the usage of our program. And so, Russ, does a great job of talking all things mobile app, have a listen. Russ, welcome. Thanks for joining us on “The Building Code.”

Russ Lane:

Happy to be here, first time, long time. Very excited.

Paul Wurth:

Long-time listener. That’s what I’d love to hear. We’re in studio, which is always better. We did months of these Zoom calls and it was just always awkward for podcasts, so happy to have you in the studio. We’re social distancing. We’re following all the rules, so don’t worry about that. Why is Russ here? Well, let me tell you about it. He’s going to talk about our mobile app, and I know if you’re a listener to the podcast, and you’re using Buildertrend, you know how critical mobile app is to our users because we live in an industry that is in the field probably half the time or more. So, Russ, you are the staff product manager in our product team, and your focus is the mobile platform, right?

Russ Lane:

Correct.

Paul Wurth:

So, let’s just start there. What actually is the strategy or what is the focus of the mobile team? I know you have this mantra, I guess it’s called, which I didn’t know until right now, so I’m excited to hear about it, but it’s in, out, back. Alright, let’s talk about that. What is that mantra?

Russ Lane:

It’s just a simplified spin on a portion of our mission, which is to build the best-in-class mobile platform for construction professionals on the job site. We want to get them into the app, out of the app and back to the real work.

Paul Wurth:

Okay, I love that. Because people don’t use our product just, so they could be on it all day, right?

Russ Lane:

No, and that’s something that we’ve accepted, and it actually empowers us to do some really cool stuff. Once you realize that no one’s going to get home, hit the couch and scroll through Buildertrend, we’re not in Instagram. It’s a work app. It’s productivity. It’s got to be fast. It’s got to be efficient. It’s got to be valuable. But getting them in and out these … a lot of the people we talked to, they don’t want the phone in their hands. They want to be doing construction, so we want to get them back to that. We all understand that there’s some documentation side of that, but once you’re done with that, we want it to be quick, valuable, get you back to the real work.

Paul Wurth:

That’s really interesting because a lot of technology companies, again, you brought up the social media platforms, their whole goal is to keep you in the app. They want you on screen time. They want those eyeballs. But if we’re doing our job as an application, you’re in, you’re out, and you’re back to work.

Russ Lane:

Back to the real work, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

I feel we should get our marketing team on that.

Russ Lane:

I know, it’s pretty sweet, huh?

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome. Let’s just take a step back. You’ve been with us a handful of years that we’ve known each other. What brought you to Buildertrend and how long you’ve been with us? Just tell me a little bit about that.

Russ Lane:

Sure, so it’s actually coming up about 30 days, is going to be my five-year.

Paul Wurth:

Congratulations, that’s awesome.

Russ Lane:

Pretty exciting. I think I was employee 104, maybe, which it’s been insane as you know. We’re in here the whole time, but even the past five years, the growth, the change it’s been wild. My background is actually in digital marketing. Took a bit of a leap coming here. I didn’t really love the place I was working at. Knew about this place, knew about this culture, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it. Took a leap, actually started out as a coach. Did my first year in the customer success department, which I personally think everybody who works here should have to do that either periodically or at least start the first couple of months, talking to our customers, getting a feel for the industry that we support. It’s one thing to do digital products and SAS, it’s another to understand what you’re building it for and who I’m building it for.

Paul Wurth:

We’re unique in the fact that we serve an industry that has really low tech adoption, but like we talked about it in the intro, they’re in the field doing things. We’re not serving somebody who’s in the office 100% of the time, so you’ve got to immerse yourself and understand where they come from, that had to help you as you transitioned to product, right?

Russ Lane:

For sure. I remember talking to people that were on the site, and it was like can you speak up, man? It’s loud, it’s windy. You got hammers going on in the background. People are asking you questions, just walking by. It’s been crazy. And I was fortunate enough in that first year, there was a product partnership, I think what it was called at the time, and I was one of the first people to come over from the customer success department into product and did well enough to stay on full time and eventually, as of right now, running both the iOS and Android mobile platforms, so it’s been a pretty exciting five years for me.

Paul Wurth:

That’s awesome. That was a really great idea. I don’t know who had that idea, but I think as a goal, as a lifecycle of Buildertrend, we had these amazing set of coaches, we called them back then, and I think they can still be called that, because that’s really what we’re doing. We’re trying to teach you build a trend. So, our customer success division, but what we’d found out because we don’t require construction experience to come work at Buildertrend. Quite honestly, most people don’t have any.

And so, we’ve always looked at how can we get our team to understand what the real life is. That gets their head space into the problems. That allows our team to solve those problems and empathize with our clients obviously. And so, one of those projects we had beyond our education we do, which is very extensive when you get onboarded is, we brought some people from customer success into the product department and so, we wanted to bring some of that real life stuff you heard on the phone, the challenges people had of implementing software into our product. I think that was, obviously, a great program we had, and obviously, a lot of the people in product today started as Buildertrend coaches in the customer success division, right?

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. The majority of them have at least taken calls, whether or not they were officially on that team. And even today, even though we’re not actually taking calls, we’re constantly watching the recorded trainings, we’re scouring chat, any feedback channel that we can find, we’re digging in there as hard as we can to try to really understand the root of what these people are having to deal with on a daily basis.

Paul Wurth:

That’d be funny. We’d just get you guys all on the job site. Maybe we’ll just have our own little team.

Russ Lane:

Man, I got to tell you. You hit a hot button with me and my team. We were lined up 2020, ready to go. I actually, March 11, I was in Baltimore joining an onsite consultant out there. We landed in St. Louis when really the Rudy Gobert thing and all that, that was that big night, so it was pretty crazy having to do that. And we had three or four on-sites that we were going to tag along with. We had some local companies that were going to allow us to come do some field studies, field visits and just follow them around all day. I had a guy, a project manager, I was like, treat me like you are training me to do your job. I’m going to follow you for three days, and I want you to talk out loud about everything that you’re doing. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to do it.

Paul Wurth:

COVID-19.

Russ Lane:

Yeah, COVID-19 ruined everything. But we’re trying to work around it a little bit. We’ve got a good set of customers that we talk with often, really more about the problems that they run into on a daily basis. I like talking to people most often about not Buildertrend. How did you do this 10 years ago? How would you do this if you didn’t have a phone and taking that stuff that as you said, it’s a low tech adoption industry. And a lot of that comes from, it might be the oldest industry in the world. And so, it’s pretty crazy in that way to try to digitize something that’s existed for that long.

Paul Wurth:

It’s a challenge that we take head on with something we love to do, but it definitely has a challenge too. It’s not about typically the Xs and Os of what Buildertrend does. It’s about trying to understand their workflow and then getting our operating system embedded into their workflow. That’s a big challenge. But it’s also, a lot of our clients come to us, and you know as your time in the customer success division, they’re not just saying, how do I do scheduling? They’re saying, how should I be doing scheduling? They’re not just asking how they should do what they do in our app. They’re actually asking us for better ways or to actually guide them on how to do their job. And a lot of that stuff in the field, right?

Russ Lane:

Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

How do I best communicate with my client? Gosh, they’re calling me all the time. What’s my best tempo and should I post a daily log every day? Should I do it every two days? That’s the stuff that we’ve always guided our clients on when they ask, and I think that’s a big part of the job. Specifically about the mobile app, you guys have this in, out, back mentality and you’re leading that charge right now. 2020, pandemic hit. We, obviously, understand that threw a wrench in a few things. But in 2020, can we talk about a few things that have changed in the mobile app, whether they’re updates or insights that you guys had that go, okay, this is how we’re going to do it from now on?

Russ Lane:

The good part about how COVID-19 affected us was the strategy that we were trying to do, the people we were trying to support their jobs to be done is how we call it, their daily jobs to be done, those landed themselves really well to, how are people going to have to change their jobs because of this thing. Heightened communication, efficiency, keeping things on schedule. And when things go off schedule, why? Documenting that why. It’s been an interesting year in that way. And early on, we started to look at our usership and just distribution amongst the different roles and the different features that they were using. And what was really glaring was about 80-85% of our mobile sessions, so the amount of people logging into the mobile app on both Android and iOS were field crew and superintendents and project managers.

Based on geolocation, we were like, okay, well, these people aren’t at their office, so we know that, that type of person is out in the field most often. And what was awesome was it turned out based on those three roles, the things that they utilize in the app most often they were all the same. They were looking at Time Clock. They were looking at Schedule. They were uploading photos, doing Daily Logs, To-Do’s. We were able to really start promoting those features and establish a core set of functionality for the app specifically. As you know, throughout the time we’ve tried to maintain as much parity as possible. You can do it on the web, you can do it on the app, which that’s still there, but what we’ve done is really elevated and amplified those four or five things that those types of people need to do every day.

Paul Wurth:

I love that. So, essentially what we did, and look, we’re always learning and growing, and we’re looking at our data set and our users, and we’re trying to just continue to evolve. We want to be the best platform as you said, for the construction industry. And so, essentially, what you’re talking about is we started identifying, not every user is a user of Buildertrend. They’re are user, but they’re a foreman, they’re a superintendent, they’re an office person, they do financials. And so, we’re starting to tailor some of that functionality to roles.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

And look at it that way.

Russ Lane:

100%.

Paul Wurth:

I think that’s great because we’re dialing down from the company, and we’re going back to the employee and then that can only help us make their day to day better.

Russ Lane:

You hit the nail on the head perfectly right there. Exactly. That was done on purpose. Thinking about the individual, and how they use it on a day-to-day basis. And right now, we’re still too wide of a swath for my liking. I would like to get a little smarter on maybe not just that group of people, but maybe we could tailor a couple of other things, promote the things that you do, specifically, in the app on a day-to-day basis. That’s the longer-term vision.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, that’s perfect. So, we’re trying to get to a place where we don’t look at every user as user, but we’re actually looking at Peter from Joe’s Custom Homes in Kansas City, and we’re saying, how can we make this really great for this specific person? That’s awesome. So, super tailored. The changes that we have made when we’ve changed that philosophy or evolved our philosophy, which we’re always doing here, have you gotten some feedback from customers on that? Have they said, yes, this is what we want, keep going down this road?

Russ Lane:

Yeah. And a lot of what we’ve done so far is tissue area, I would say. We’ve adjusted the navigation, for example. The five most used things are now the shortcuts. Those are the things …

Paul Wurth:

You can get to those right away.

Russ Lane:

Right away. The release we’re going to come out with very soon, mid-November, 9.0, will be one of the biggest we’ve ever done.

Paul Wurth:

Oh, I’m excited.

Russ Lane:

We’re updating the general navigation, so those four or five things will be on the bottom. You won’t even have to go into what we call the drawer to get there. If you used Instagram, like we talked about, you’re going to be able to get to time clocks, schedule, photos, that kind of stuff in a simple click from anywhere in the app.

Paul Wurth:

Love it.

Russ Lane:

Along with that, another thing that we learned was the majority of the app isn’t actually doing things. It’s not actually creating the schedule, or editing the schedule, it’s consuming. And so, what we’ve done and what we’ve got coming out here again, one of them will be a 9.0, and then really short order right after that, a couple of our other core features will be a view state, which what that means is it’s not always in edit mode, which we’ve traditionally always been. It’s got its benefits. I don’t have to click anything to add something to this field. But if most people aren’t adding to that field in the first place, why am I even seeing it? I can now look at, a daily log is a great example. I know I keep talking about Instagram, but it promotes the photos really high. It’s got the caption right there. Your comments are nested underneath of it. If something wasn’t filled out on the daily log, it’s not shown in that view state.

Paul Wurth:

I love that. So, going back, many years ago, we as a company made a really important decision to invest heavily in the mobile app. And one of those ideas or ethos was, we want the mobile app to be as functional as if you’re in front of a computer in the office, meaning that if you can build, edit a schedule, well, you should be able to do that in the app. That goes down to every single avenue of our 29 plus features, right?

Russ Lane:

Yep.

Paul Wurth:

I think we’re at a place, basically, to summarize what you were saying is that, sure that’s great in concept, but in reality, when you talk to our clients, they really don’t need all the time to be editing a purchase order or something. And maybe that’s a bad example, but you know what I mean? We want to meet them where they’re at and what they’re doing. And instead of making everything super editable and total functionality, if they don’t need that, why are we using the space?

Russ Lane:

Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

And let’s get back to the, in, out and back, right?

Russ Lane:

Yep. A great example is, something that we do on the product world is we ask a lot of whys to the point that we’re annoying.

Paul Wurth:

To our customers, you mean?

Russ Lane:

Whenever I’m talking to anybody. If somebody says, I need to do X, I’d try to ask as many whys as I can to get to the root of the problem.

Paul Wurth:

If I come to you with a really crazy idea, buckle up.

Russ Lane:

I’m going to ask you why at least five times. And what’s crazy is-

Paul Wurth:

I’ve been in that room with you before.

Russ Lane:

What’s crazy is it works though. We’ve talked to a bunch of people and every time that we hear, well, I don’t like editing the schedule on the app. Well, why? And it always gets down to the fact that I just don’t like the idea of editing something like that on my phone. It’s the device problem. We can make it awesome. How are we going to get over that human of, I actually need to be on a bigger screen and see how this is going to happen versus just changing a date, you know what I mean? And, of course, there’s some stuff that we could do there, and we want people to be able to make that kind of an edit, but right now we’re scaling back so to speak, and really, as you said, meeting people where they are and what they need to do to be as efficient as possible. We define efficiency as getting the most value in the shortest amount of time.

Paul Wurth:

Exactly. We don’t need you on the screen all the time, like we’ve talked about, which is great. I love that. So, you’re constantly getting feedback from our clients. When we release things, we get feedback, obviously. And again, if you’re listening to this for the first time in terms of our product, by no means, are we a company that says, hey, call us if you have an idea and not really mean it, we want feedback. Again, we’re here in Omaha, Neb., and we’re 560 employees, and we’re not on the job site every day. I don’t think that’s even feasible. A huge advantage for our product team is to hear from our clients. Good, bad, ugly, just tell us what you’re feeling. We’re going to ask you why 17 times, but it won’t take all day, but that’s only going to help our product and in turn help you and your day to day, which is really great. You talked a little bit about 9.0, but as we get into 2021, are there any things, and I know product does not like to talk about what’s going to happen because you never know.

Russ Lane:

I’ll talk to you about what we’re thinking about.

Paul Wurth:

Okay, good. So, just there’s the asterix here, is that this is what we’re thinking, this is where our heads at. And I think, this is great for our clients to hear because they always ask this question, they don’t want to be in the dark, nor do we want to keep them there. We’ll tell you exactly our strategy and what we’re thinking, and you tell us if we’re off. So, let’s talk about strategy or just more, what is Russ, and his team thinking about as it relates to our mobile app?

Russ Lane:

Sure, so we’ve actually kicked off 2021 planning a couple of weeks ago. And what we keep coalescing around is two tracks. So, we’ve got digestibility, which is what we just talked about with the view states.

Paul Wurth:

What’s that mean?

Russ Lane:

How quick can I get the information that I need?

Paul Wurth:

If I’m looking at a screen, it’s overwhelming maybe. And so, how do we make that less overwhelming? And I’m in, out, I’m just seeing the things that I want to see.

Russ Lane:

Exactly. The information that I need, whether that’s at the top of the screen, or we stripped some stuff out that wasn’t filled out. Cognitive load is a thing that you’ll hear from our team all the time, let’s reduce cognitive load. I don’t want to have to look through all these things to find the thing that I need. You should know what I need, that’s our task.

Paul Wurth:

That’s a great example there, so like a daily log, we talk about Instagram and Daily Logs a lot in this podcast, it’s fine. It’s a good episode for that.

Russ Lane:

It’s a good feature.

Paul Wurth:

But Daily Logs is a great feature because it’s so versatile, and it works across all segments. We have four main segments that we segment our customers into, and it’s home-building, remodeling and renovation, especially contracting, which there’s a number of different types of businesses there and then commercial. No matter who you are in any of those, you should be using the Daily Logs feature for a number of different ways. It’s a great way to account for what happened on the job site that day internally. It’s a great way to communicate externally to your clients or subs what happened on the job site that day. And just, you have a record of everything.

But not every day the log feature is filled out. In a daily log feature, you can have the general notes, then you can add photos, you can attach files, you can mark the weather, you can see who was on the job site and then, of course, there’s custom fields you can add to it. But not every single person fills out every one of those spaces, so when you’re looking at one, why should I have to look at the dead space? Or things that aren’t filled out? Or things that don’t pertain to what I’m looking for? So, that’s, essentially, what you’re saying is that, we are going to surface the things that are there and everything else you don’t need to know. You can go find it later if you want to. But when you look at it, that’s what you’re going to see.

Russ Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. That’s a perfect description of it. Let’s take away all those times that our eyes have to go back and forth or up and down to find the thing that we need. If it’s not filled out, it wasn’t filled out for a reason. You can see it if you go into the actual edit mode of the thing and refill it out, if you’d like to, but as of right now, it’s just, here’s all of the content related to this thing that was actually satisfied. Another part of the digestibility side is, as good as in, out, back is as far as a mantra, we’re questioning whether we have to get you in, in a lot of cases. Can we leverage, I don’t know if you know, Apple just came out with widgets, which all of the Android guys on my team would yell at me if I didn’t mention that Android’s had them for 12 years.

Paul Wurth:

Everybody says that about, whenever iOS or Apple comes out with something, inevitably, Android’s like, we’ve had that for years.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely, and in which Apple is like, yeah, thanks for doing all the heavy lifting for us, all the testing, and we can just do it now.

Paul Wurth:

They do everything, and if people like it, then Apple does it.

Russ Lane:

Exactly.

Paul Wurth:

It’s a good business model.

Russ Lane:

Something cool was at the 2020 Hackathon, which is a fantastic event here at Buildertrend.

Paul Wurth:

Well, hold on. Let’s just explain to the listeners what that is.

Russ Lane:

Sure. And I might be off on the amount of days, but I think it’s about two days, right?

Paul Wurth:

Mm-hmm.

Russ Lane:

It’s a Thursday, Friday, once a year, anybody from the company can spark up an idea, can grab a team. If they need devs, they grab devs. If they need a designer, they grab one of those product people. They can come from anywhere. And then they basically try to build whatever they wanted to in two days. And this year I think it was, what could we get actually into the system? What are some of those high-level ideas that no one’s really touched.

Paul Wurth:

Those crazy ideas.

Russ Lane:

And there was actually a team that built a widget. This came right on the heels of the Apple event earlier this year where they announced them, and so that’s pretty close to done. And it’s a Time Clock widget. We’re actually kicking off trying to get that thing across the finish line here in the next couple of weeks, and we’re pretty excited about it. Again, do we even need to get you into the app? Can you see if you’re clocked in right now? Can you take a break right now without having to even get to our app?

Paul Wurth:

My kids will know this because when widgets came out, they just did a ton of stuff with it. I still don’t know what that means. So essentially, if I’m looking at my phone, today, I go into the Buildertrend app, I tap on it and then I go navigate, where I want to navigate. I clock in, I clock out, I do all those things. What you’re saying is, a widget would be just on the home screen and you can just see information right then and there without having to go into the app?

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. There’s some differences between the two platforms. Android allows you to actually take action on the thing. You could literally clock in and out from that widget on your home screen, don’t even need to get into Buildertrend. iOS it’s more of a redirect, so it’ll save you some clicks getting to the Time Clock page basically.

Paul Wurth:

Which is good.

Russ Lane:

It’ll give you a count of, you’ve been clocked in for X amount of hours, here’s your break time left. All that kind of stuff will be visible right on your home screen. We like lofty goals and we want to take over entire page of people’s phones with Buildertrend widgets.

Paul Wurth:

I like that. Okay, cool. Buildertrend takeover on your phone. In a good way. Well, that brings into a question which is, or I guess just a statement is your job’s got to be difficult and also great because your platform is the Android and iOS, and they’re always coming out with updates. And so, when they come out, our team is like, oh gosh, we can do this now.

Russ Lane:

For sure.

Paul Wurth:

It’s more constant than our other full app developers when you’re on the computer, like, yes, there’s always new technology and code coming out that allows you to do stuff. We’ve been doing a rewrite all year, which is really going to open up a ton of great stuff we’re super excited for. But that’s more long-term stuff. You actually see stuff as the iOS and the Android platforms update and that happens more often.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. It happens at least a year. And that’s been, the widget concept has sparked this other conversation that we’re constantly having about what does mobile technology have that we could leverage to help our customers? And that’s our second mission, is efficiency. We talk a lot on the product side about, and this is a great example of going back to talking to customers, and they’ll say something like, hey, I need to be able to change the job this daily log was uploaded to. Because copy, pasting is really hard. I have to download all the photos and … so the conversation immediately starts to, how could we get them to easily change that job on that daily log and get it to the correct one where my job, and my group of people, our job is to really ask, but why was it in the wrong job in the first place?

Paul Wurth:

That’s what I was going to say is, how do we solve that issue?

Russ Lane:

Exactly. So, that’s another lofty goal is, solve problems before they happen. People are forgetting to clock out. Well, can we use location services to say, hey, you just got to the Jones’ job. You normally clock in here. Do you want to clock in? Or you go to upload something and we know you’re on the Jones’ job. We can say, hey, do you want us to flip that? Or can we get you there right now?

Paul Wurth:

I love that.

Russ Lane:

Let’s solve those problems before they happen. Keep those jobs on schedule and on budget that way.

Paul Wurth:

Listening to you, if I’m a listener and it’s like, I’m envisioning the product team in a dark room at all times, with coffee, and it’s just talking about the problems and …

Russ Lane:

I wish.

Paul Wurth:

That’s all you guys do. No, I’m just kidding.

Russ Lane:

I almost bought a whiteboard for my house to put on an entire wall, and I missed my whiteboard here man.

Paul Wurth:

That’s right. There’s a lot of scribbling on a whiteboard in the product department, but there …

Russ Lane:

Moving things on columns, writing on white boards.

Paul Wurth:

A lot of sticky notes, talking about personas and things like that. Well, the listeners should know that you guys are literally 40 hours a week thinking about how to make their experience with Buildertrend better, and that’s what’s great. You can hear it from what you’re talking about is like, that’s always on top of your mind.

Russ Lane:

Oh, yeah. 40 hours should be a light week. I lose some sleep about some of this stuff.

Paul Wurth:

Your wife’s probably like, Jesus.

Russ Lane:

I’ll start talking about some stuff, she’ll be like, I know about three other words that you just said.

Paul Wurth:

That’s how I am when I’m in a product meeting. I love it, you guys are great. What else in 2021? These are really great insights into what you guys are thinking. I think they should be really exciting for our listeners and our users to listen to. What else do you got?

Russ Lane:

Really, that’s the high-level concepts that we have right now, are that digestibility, that efficiency, solving those problems before they happen. What I’m really excited for is the growth of our team internally when it comes to keeping things tight scope. And what that means is not constantly thinking about, let’s re-imagine this whole thing. We’ve got this thing, it’s obviously valuable to some people, so let’s amplify it in these short, quick column experiment ways. Can we get fewer daily logs to be uploaded to the wrong job if we do this, and let’s try it one time, maybe a small group, see how it works. If it works, let’s go. If it doesn’t, let’s rethink it, V2 that thing. So, that’s what I’m most excited for is, you’ll see in 2021, a lot of small tweaks that will change people’s daily lives and in a lot of ways that I don’t think they’ll recognize, which is kind of …

Paul Wurth:

Consciously, that’s a really good thing. They’ll just feel overall good about it. I think sometimes, and this happens in every technology company in the world is when you’re in product, you’re always focused on solving things. But sometimes you just sit, and you just go back and forth where you’re never really taking action because the problems can be so big, and there’s so many ways you could solve it and so, you just keep talking about it. And I think again, every company has some of that stuff because people really care, and they want to solve it. But what you’re saying is, let’s pick a couple of them. We know there’s some things out there. Let’s go attack it in a small group, idealize on it and then, let’s just see if that works.

Russ Lane:

Let’s do something quick. Let’s find a way to measure it, which that’s always really one of the funniest things for us is, I don’t know, you think about this productivity software. And one of the reasons that people buy it, we consistently hear this is, I’m tired of having to manually do this. So, if you buy software and all of a sudden after the first month, you’re manually reconciling a bunch of Time Clock entries because they were coded the wrong way or someone forgot to clock out, why did I buy this? I was doing this anyway.

Paul Wurth:

We’re back to where we were.

Russ Lane:

You know what I mean? And that’s what’s funny is, some of the stuff that we try to measure is, well, how many phone calls do we think we saved that person? We can’t measure it. That’s the dream is that someone out there, they adopt our system and a month later they’re sitting there and they’re like, man, I haven’t had to edit that thing, or I haven’t had to talk to so-and-so every week like I used to. It won’t be something that they feel at the time. There won’t be like this, aha, you know what I mean?

Paul Wurth:

Yeah.

Russ Lane:

But over time, the fewer things you have to do that aren’t construction, you’re going to feel better about construction. People got into this for a reason.

Paul Wurth:

It’s not to do paperwork. I love that. I love that, that’s where your head’s at. You guys have a great team up there. Like I said, you’re constantly just thinking about ways to improve the lives and the day to day of our users, which is really, if you just take it back to the top level of what we’re trying to do at Buildertrend that’s it. So, you guys have done a great job.

Russ Lane:

Appreciate it.

Paul Wurth:

Kudos to you the Product team in general. I know you’re just in the mobile part of it, but again, that’s so important to our industry so, thanks for coming on and talking about that. I know our listeners love this one because they always are listening or only wanted to hear from us where our heads are at when it comes to new development, so 9.0 is coming out.

Russ Lane:

Yeah, be on the lookout. It’s going to be a forced upgrade, so you’re going to have, to have it. That’s cool, I always like doing that. Not having to support five different versions, so 9.0. And then, like I said, short order after that. We’ll have some dot ones coming out. I know you love our numbering system.

Paul Wurth:

It’s hard to keep track.

Russ Lane:

I did say, hey, if we’re going to do something this big, we got to flip to nine.

Paul Wurth:

I like that. We’re into the nines now, which is great. Look out for nine point one, two, three, four, five. And then we’re going to get to 10 maybe.

Russ Lane:

Yeah, who knows?

Paul Wurth:

10 is the big one.

Russ Lane:

Maybe we’ll X it.

Paul Wurth:

I like that. Apple did that. Well, watch out for version X coming out in 2021. So, what’s the best way? We’ll end on this. If you’re a user, and you’re a listener and have an idea or you have some feedback, which again, we totally encourage, I know there’s a couple different avenues. What’s the best one for you and your team. How do we get directly to you guys?

Russ Lane:

First, UserVoice. There’s a mobile-specific section on there. If it’s something specific to mobile, we want to see it. All four of us are constantly looking at that thing, pulling insights out of there, reaching out to people that have posted on something.

Paul Wurth:

UserVoice you can actually find in the platform, where do you find that app?

Russ Lane:

If you’re on the desktop, it’s up in the top, right under the question mark under give feedback. And if on the mobile app, it’s in the side navigation, toward the bottom.

Paul Wurth:

Does it say, give feedback in the mobile?

Russ Lane:

Yeah.

Paul Wurth:

Okay. So, go to the give feedback. Post in UserVoice. UserVoice is basically our feedback forum. There’s a number of topics in there already that you could up or down vote, if that’s similar to what you’re already in there for, or you can post new things. This is something we absolutely monitor and then you said, we’ll reach out to people and actually hear from them.

Russ Lane:

100%, it’s actually pretty simple. We can just send out a blast to anybody who’s ever said, I like that idea, or we can get a little bit more focused with it. And then outside of that, I always recommend talk to your coaches, man. Great, great people and like I said earlier, we do monitor that stuff. If there’s a mobile training, we’re watching it, and we’re taking notes. And we have reached out to people that we’ve watched one, we heard something from them and we contacted that person to get some more context, as to why five times?

Paul Wurth:

Buckle up, if you put something in there, that’s a good why questions coming at you. Otherwise, they’ll just call you personally?

Russ Lane:

Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Wurth:

Anytime, 24/7.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. I don’t answer numbers I don’t know thou, so leave a voice note.

Paul Wurth:

Alright. We’re going to put his email address, his home address and his phone number on the show notes. Russ, thanks for joining us on “The Building Code.” Great guest. I know people are going to really be into this topic. We’re going to check in with you and your team in 2021. We’ll see what the progress is. So, there’s your measurable. We’re coming back to this.

Russ Lane:

I’ll have a presentation with metrics and there will be …

Paul Wurth:

I like that. Alright, man. Thanks again for coming in. Thanks for listening to everybody. You can always learn more on our website, buildertrend.com/podcasts. Russ, thank you. Appreciate you.

Russ Lane:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Paul Wurth:

Alright, everyone. Thanks again for listening to this episode of “The Building Code.” Remember to rate, review and subscribe wherever you listen to the podcast. Help us grow this community of listeners. Tell your friends, tell your family. We do appreciate it. And if you’ve heard anything that you want to learn more about on today’s episode, head out to the show notes website buildertrend.com/podcast. As always, we appreciate you.