Inside Buildertrend: The easier way to search

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s The Building Code’s Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

As always Charley Burtwistle.

Charley Burtwistle:

As always. Has never changed one time. Been Charley Burtwistle my whole life.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s weird how that works.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. Names.

Zach Wojtowicz:

So, we’ve got another product friend on the podcast here. We got Josh Swenson with us. Josh has been at Buildertrend for almost six years, a true veteran of Buildertrend.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Which is pretty impressive. And you’ve been here for quite a bit. So, tell us a little bit. I’d like to hear your Buildertrend story a little bit and let our listeners know before we kind of dive into why you’re on here for today.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on guys. Really great. Love listening to the show. So, I’ve been with Buildertrend for like six years. I had an interesting journey to get to Buildertrend, actually. I was working in product with another organization and heard about Buildertrend around Omaha area, and I was like, “What is this company? Sounds pretty great.” And we were back in the old office, they had just built it out and moved in and stuff. And I started talking to Makayla, at the time was head of our people, and she and I just really started to build a connection. And about six months, a year later, brought me in for an interview, and it was pretty quick moving after that.

So, spent a lot of time in product here though. I’ve been in product the entire time that I’ve been at Buildertrend and worked my way up through things. So, it’s been a crazy ride for the last six years seeing the company grow and change.

Charley Burtwistle:

I feel like that’s … This will be our fourth or fifth minisode, and every person we’ve talked to so far is like, “Oh, I started in CS. I work my way up.” It’s cool that you actually had product experience, or in that role got brought on for that role. I feel like mixing that in with some of the other CS brought up people has to be a good combination. We kind of get the best of both worlds.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. It’s a great dynamic just to see how my experiences are very different from some of the other folks. They have a lot more customer connection than I have historically, but then I have that product background to be able to bring that and bounce ideas off each other and just show that different side of things. So, it’s been really great for me.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Do you know, how many product managers do we have now?

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh, gosh, man. I think it’s like 17?

Zach Wojtowicz:

17. Yeah. Team’s getting pretty big.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. It’s growing quite a bit.

Zach Wojtowicz:

How many are CS based folks and then people like … Is it slanted? I’m just curious a bit?

Josh Swenson:

Oh, it’s slanted. Yeah, for sure. It’s been a great pipeline for us over the years to bring people up through those ranks. And again, that customer knowledge and familiarity is so awesome. I’d say it’s like 80% have them have come up through the CS world.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. So, you are definitely a little bit unique, so I’m excited to get your product perspective based on how things have shifted. Some of our guests talked about the way you guys do things a little bit. We brought you on today to talk about an exciting feature that I know you worked on for a long time.

Charley Burtwistle:

Huge update.

Zach Wojtowicz:

A huge update.

Charley Burtwistle:

I don’t want to overpromise here, but maybe the most exciting, in my mind, update we’ve made.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Really? That’s your favorite?

Charley Burtwistle:

Yes. 100%.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Wow.

Charley Burtwistle:

I won’t …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Josh …

Charley Burtwistle:

I won’t spoil it. Josh, tell us why you’re here today and what we’re talking about.

Josh Swenson:

You know, that’s really the goal. I strive to make Charley happy and excite Charley on a daily basis.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s all we do. This guy walks around the office, if he’s happy it’s going to be a rough day for everybody.

Josh Swenson:

So, no. So yeah, our search feature, our Global Search …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Global Search …

Josh Swenson:

… As we’re calling it, really is something we’re really excited about. It’s a great feature that we’re adding to the platform. And it’s one of those things that it’s never really been accessible in Buildertrend. We’ve had a number of global searches, or different types of searches, throughout the platform over the years, both on the web and the mobile app, but we’re bringing to market a new search for our product specifically where you can really search a variety of things. It’ll let you search most anything from most anywhere in the platform. So, it gives users that direct connection to the data that they’re looking for and be able to answer the questions that they have in the moment versus having to stop what they’re doing, change context, go find some stuff and come back.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I love it. Yeah. Nobody wants the needle in the haystack experience where you’re like, “I’m trying to find this invoice.” And having to dig like, “What job was that in?” Having the ability to just go and say like, “This is what I want. This is what I want to go get”. Right away, is this something that you guys had aspired to try and achieve to a usability update or what was the genesis of why global search was a project that you guys undertook?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah, it’s great. It’s one of those things where, again, coming from a product background, seeing other things, I use so many different tools on a regular basis that I’ve been asking about this from day one. Like, “Why don’t we have this? This should be easy.”

Zach Wojtowicz:

Right.

Josh Swenson:

It’s not. It really turned out to be pretty difficult. But it came of a Buildertrend here as an idea out of our hackathon and credit due to some of the folks on our architecture team Adam Knodel and Dan Patton and Sam Kirkland, Andy Bayer. They proposed an idea to use some new technology, or new technology to us, that’s kind of been around for a while, to power this and build this thing up and really be able to take advantage of that and leverage that ease of use and ease of access for our customers. So, the idea came out of that and really took some support to do some research and a lot of effort on their part to figure out exactly what this would take, and then we spent a ton of time building it out from there. So …

Charley Burtwistle:

I love you bring up the hackathon. That’s a competition we do at Buildertrend once a year, where everybody in the company can put their name in the hat, work with someone in product or design and engineering, and actually come up with like, “Hey, this is how we should change the program.” We all present it. It’s a 24 hour code sprint. The reason I bring it up is I’ve never won, and I feel like I’ve been robbed at least a couple times.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, there’s some hackathon gate scandals that I dive into right now. I’m a little salty.

Charley Burtwistle:

Zach, I’ve seen your presentation.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I won best sales pitch.

Charley Burtwistle:

Oh.

Zach Wojtowicz:

But yeah …

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s just like the participation award.

Zach Wojtowicz:

I still have the trophy on my desk. If you’re able to come to Buildertrend University, you’ll see my little trophy.

Charley Burtwistle:

That’s the award they give to people they feel bad for.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That was my participation trophy.

Charley Burtwistle:

You’re great at PowerPoint.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Sorry. This is turning into … If you listen to last week’s episode, this is the same day, we’re recording them both, so the roasting we were doing of Zach last episode is continuing onto this episode.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah, just last episode.

Zach Wojtowicz:

So, Global Search … Sorry. I got to rein it back in here. I have it on my demo account now. I’ve been playing around with it. I was surprised by this isn’t just searching the title of a feature. I searched for something that popped up in a text box in a comment of a line item of a feature that I was looking at. This thing is really global. So, obviously it helps people find stuff faster. What are some of the other benefits that you’ve seen builders experience or that you were kept trying to solve for when building out this feature?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah, no, we really wanted to take a really wide approach to global search. We’ve been teasing some language internally that we use, we’re calling it wide and shallow. We wanted to search across everything that we can in the platform that makes sense to our users. But we also have to balance that with the technical difficulties of rolling it out and not taking five years to build this thing. So, we started by trying to cover as much ground as we could, covering a number of different features, extending beyond just the title. Right? We need to touch a couple other things. So, there are notes fields and some different things there that you can search by depending on the different type of data you’re looking for. And that was really key to us to make sure that we could provide that deep functionality.

Based on the feedback that we’ve seen from our users that goes a long way, and that does meet most of our users’ needs. But there’s some outliers, so we wanted to make sure that we can continue to build on that. We were cautious in not going again too far, too fast with it. There’s some really, really cool and really powerful things that you could do with it, but we don’t know if we need to do all of those things. So, we struck that balance really, really nicely, I think. And I think we’re solving for a lot of the problems that users have today and trying to find that data.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Right. It’s that iterative approach. I feel like a few people on the product team have talked about this. Let’s get the best thing out there as quick as we can, and then build on that instead of trying to do everything all at once and having it take five years, like you mentioned.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah, it’s exactly right. We have a number of different phases of this project. We’re through several of them already, but there’s more work coming down the pike in terms of adding additional functionality, validating some functionality, some ideas that we have for it based on customer feedback, from what we’ve rolled out already, extending to additional features and additional depth in the platform. So, one great example that is, we rolled it out and you can search Selections and different things like that, but you can’t quite search a selection choice yet, the content of a selection choice. That’s coming down the pike. Users have already told us they want thatc, and it’s fantastic to validate those ideas because …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Right.

Josh Swenson:

It’s something we’re building right now. So, those things have been really fantastic to see.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. And one thing we always like to get into is the use case of what these features are able to do. So, I’m glad you touched on a specific example of workflow. They log in, they’re looking for a selection choice, because that’s an urgent … Like I need this decision. You can go pull it and actually get a user to say like, “Oh, they haven’t done it yet.” Now, you could move on with your day and follow with that customer directly. Is that typically your exercise when you’re making these decisions? Is to establish those use cases and actually dive deep into like why we’re doing this?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. There’s a lot of validation and research that goes out or takes place on the front end of these projects. And we spend a lot of time, especially with this one, trying to figure out exactly how far to go and why we need to go that far. So, trying to understand those use cases. We actually did a month long study with some users, and we had them logging into the platform and giving us direct feedback in terms of what did they try and do that day? What did they try and find that day? And so, we did that last year and tried to get a really, really solid understanding of exactly a mobile user would be looking for when they’re using mobile app because it’s the use cases are very, very different. Right?

You have somebody working at the office, the office manager, and they’re trying to find content, maybe an invoice or a PO or something like that. But in the field, you’ve got somebody trying to find something very, very different. You’re looking for a note on a daily log or whatever the use case is. And so, we spend a lot of time trying to understand all those different pieces and making sure that we know specific use cases, and we can address those things. And the key purpose of that is saving users time. Right? That’s what the search is. It’s a ubiquitous feature that just exists everywhere in the world. There’s a sea of platforms and tools and apps that we all use, and they all have a fairly robust search tool. Again, Buildertrend just hasn’t had that for a long time. So …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah, I think those customer expectations, although they’re not like the guiding principle … We don’t just take ideas because other systems have it, obviously. Right. But I talked about QuickBooks in another episode where I poke fun at their UI a little bit, but what they do have on QuickBooks online that I love is the search function to be able to be like, “Hey, I’m looking for this invoice.” And I did some work with bookkeeping companies for a while and had to use that, and now having a Buildertrend, it’s like, “Wow!” That aligns to something that they’re already using and the learning curve is so short. You don’t really need to learn how a search bar works and it can absolutely enhance how you use the system though.

Josh Swenson:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, people have told us for a long time we just need a Google for Buildertrend and need to be able to use something that of depth to find my content. And again, it comes back to the number one thing, which is saving our users time. Time is money for them and if we can make that easier for them to use Buildertrend, remove a lot of those steps throughout the day …

Charley Burtwistle:

Josh is answering our questions … I was about to ask you, before I can even ask, what are the other benefits?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

It saves you time. Is there anything else that …

Josh Swenson:

That’s exactly it. It is 1000% just about saving the user’s time and helping them get the answers for the questions that they have much, much more quickly. So, one of the things that we took into account with this was trying to a look at some napkin math on what we think we could do in terms of time savings for users. And it really boils down to we can cut that, or we think we can cut that by 50 to 75% in terms of how long it takes them to get to a piece of information. That’s invaluable, especially when you’re in the field. You’re doing something. You want to get back to building the darn house that you’re building.

Charley Burtwistle:

The cool thing, too, is we just had the landing page redesign. And so, that’s a lot of things that what Brad talked about is you get there, you don’t need to go click into a feature, click into another thing. Everything’s right there. Save time. And now we, on the landing page, we also have the Global Search feature. So, people are able to log in, the first thing they see, and you’re pretty much your one click away from anything that you can do. Gone are the days of having to click around, navigate to wherever you’re trying to go to. It’s either right there on the brand new landing page, or you can search for it in the brand new global search. So, I feel like a lot of things are coming together all around this idea of saving time and making things easier.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. We spent a lot of time over the last year or two years, really focusing on usability. Just general usability on our platform and making sure things aren’t hidden. For a long time, there’s been a lot of functionality that’s just hard to find. But to your point, on the web app, you log in, and it’s right there. It’s right in your face. It’s in a familiar place where you expect to see it, again, across every other tool you use. And that is something we take into consideration. All of our users use different apps and tools through the day. Ours needs to be familiar when you look for something like that and the mobile app follows that case as well. It’s right there when you log in. It’s right on the homepage or the mobile app. So …

Zach Wojtowicz:

I think users, when they’re using the product, they remember they worked on something, but they don’t always necessarily remember how they got there. And it’s easy to lose track of where things are stored away within the system. And now you have an even time to value aspect to be able to go find that thing and pick up right where you’ve left off. And it just alleviates some of those pain points from just a navigation. When you’re new to a system, or you’ve been using it a certain way, and you feel like there’s too many steps. Right?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. You’ve got users that have five, 10 jobs going on at once.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. Their busy.

Josh Swenson:

They’ve got a daily log or a schedule item stored off somewhere with some note in it, and they can’t remember exactly which job it was on or what it was for. We hear all the time that people remember the address of the job, they don’t remember what they called it in Buildertrend. They just know where it’s at. So, being able to go out and find that information is really critical. Contracts and other documents are the same thing. Those are key items that people need to find. They don’t know what folder they put them into. They don’t know which job it’s on. You want to be able to go and find those. So, we’re helping solve those.

Zach Wojtowicz:

So, you mentioned that obviously this is something that you’ve been working on for a while. Originally, a hackathon idea finally coming to fruition. What’s that process been like or timeline? For non and product folks out there, how do you take this crazy idea that some devs put together in a hackathon and actually turned it into a feasible product that we can use?

Josh Swenson:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, our pipeline, our gauntlet, as we call it, really started … This one started back in like 2020. The hackathon idea was brought up back then, and they put together a proposal on what kind of tech we could use and how it might work, and we really started to have some conversations.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And we just deployed it.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

The end.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. It just took a few days. So, we spent a lot of time, like I said, validating the tech, doing a lot of research. Those tech folks that we mentioned spent a lot of time getting really familiar with the back end technology for this and trying to help us set the baseline for what exact we would need to do. We like to call that work enablement work. Right? A lot of foundational stuff that you have to do to build a house. You got to lay a foundation. That’s the same thing for us.

So, that really started to happen. To understand what that would take and then we started to put it through our product gauntlet to understand what’s the value, time savings and money savings for our users. How do we start to move that forward? How do we break this apart in terms of not going too far too fast? How do we make sure that we can be iterative with it and deliver smaller pieces of it within a reasonable amount of time? And then starting to get a release plan put together. So, we started to go through that and then you really start to figure out, “Okay, when’s the right time to start building it out? Do we already against other things?” So …

Zach Wojtowicz:

Love it. Have a very important question. Is this your favorite feature of Buildertrend?

Josh Swenson:

This is my favorite feature in a long time. We’ve done a lot of really cool stuff, but I think you guys just had Austin Eilers on recently talking about the offline mode on mobile. I spent a lot of time with the mobile app over the years, and that was, I think he mentioned, one of the most commonly requested features that’s been asked for. That’s massive for Buildertrend and for our users. This one I think is right up there with that though. So …

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s awesome. Well, congrats on a go live. Congrats to all of our builders out there that now get to use this feature.

Josh Swenson:

Yeah. We’re excited to just get as much feedback as we can from our users on this one. We’re listening to that on a regular basis. So, I really can’t wait to see more information rolling in about how users are using it and taking advantage of it.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Absolutely. We’ve always got more coming down the pipeline on “The Building Code.” Thanks for joining us. Check us out next time. I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m Charley Burtwistle. See ya.