Inside Buildertrend: From idea to product

Zach Wojtowicz:

Welcome to “The Building Code,” special inside Buildertrend edition. Our first of “The Building Code,” where we have Russ Lane with us today. Of course, before I get too far I’m Zach Wojtowicz.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m Charley Burtwistle.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’re really excited to have Russ here with us. Russ, thanks for joining the pod.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We wanted to find ways to kind of get people more information about what Buildertrend’s doing, what’s going out there. Russ, you’ve been at Buildertrend for a long time, you’re …

Russ Lane:

Six years.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You’re a vet.

Russ Lane:

Yep.

Zach Wojtowicz:

You’ve held a lot of different roles. Just give us a quick overview of, where you started, where you’re at, what you do, why we brought you on the podcast. You were on before, so long-time listeners know you hopefully.

Russ Lane:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would, probably a couple years ago at this point. Yeah. Six years ago started out actually on the phones, did a year of that. Had a chance to come over to the product department, kind of test the waters over there. And then, that team has just grown in both size and expectations on how we go about our work. So yeah, it’s been a fun ride for that five years. We were at the old building, new building, seen a lot of stuff come through. It’s been exciting.

Charley Burtwistle:

I’m kind of curious about, so I actually started on the product team before data and research was …

Russ Lane:

That is true.

Charley Burtwistle:

A thing, we were under that umbrella, and I feel like it was only like, I don’t know eight or nine people, like how big is the team now?

Russ Lane:

I mean, if you count just the product team, I think we’re up to 17.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wow.

Russ Lane:

But we also have an ops team that we partner with. There’s I think, four or five folks on that team and then lump in the design team, I think they’re at like eight or nine. So, all told we consider that, the one team probably around 30.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Wow. That’s awesome. And then you guys work obviously really closely with technology. They’re considered a separate department though. So, they have another 40, 50 engineers or is it even that big?

Russ Lane:

Oh, it’s more than that.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Is it?

Russ Lane:

I want to say we were, last I heard we were around 90.

Zach Wojtowicz:

What?

Russ Lane:

And I think we might be over a hundred at this point, but yeah. I mean different team in the org chart, but the second something’s ready to get built, we kind of spin up project teams, right? And they’re really a cohesive group. They’ll kind of see that thing from, from zero to one.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And you guys work, obviously, really closely with each other?

Russ Lane:

Yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Collaborate.

Russ Lane:

For sure. Yeah. There’s the converge and diverge concept. We all come together kind of hash out what we’re doing, make sure we’re not stepping on toes. And then we all go back to our project teams.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Well, we thought you would be a great first guest for our special inside Buildertrend series. These are going to basically air in between our major episodes. They’re a little shorter, so we won’t get too deep into the weeds. You’re a director now in the product world and so, you kind of see the big picture. We’ve done a lot of things in Buildertrend in the last year, and we just wanted to kind of start with, what are maybe some of the things you’re most proud of, or any highlights of the last 12 months going back to 2021 that you think are worth kind of shouting out?

Russ Lane:

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think there’s been probably a couple, either podcasts or videos about the larger React conversion that our tech department took on in 2020, that wrapped up 2021. And what that did for us was, unlock some things that were on an old architecture, an old front end. And there were a lot of things that we wanted to do on behalf of our customers specific to the ease of use and things like that, that we just, were constrained. We couldn’t do it in the old framework. So, we’ve taken a lot of time to look at, what are those modern interactions that we can do now. And as product people we ask ourselves, “Okay, yeah, we can, but should we?” “Is that what’s best for our customers?” So, looking at that, we completely redesigned that first landing page.

So, we think that that’s going to get people. A lot of what we try to do is get people to value faster, like get from A to B, these people have things to do. There’s a goal for why they go into the app, how can we make that faster for them? And that’s one thing that the React conversion app has allowed us to do things like the new landing page, where there’s a lot of action items and feed of content that you can get to. So, that one stands out for sure. Something that we’re rolling out right now that I’m super excited about is what we’re calling global search, right? So, same concept, instead of going to a page filtering for content, clicking on it, we can just negate all those steps. You type in a word, we get you right to it. So, that’s another thing that was unlocked by that migration that we did in 2020 into 2021.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Lays the foundation for the future, makes a lot of other possibilities possible.

Russ Lane:

Totally, totally. Just kind of had to get to that zero moment of it being done. And now we can just kind of use that as a jumping off point.

Charley Burtwistle:

And I feel like we moved past the Jurassic Park reference you had in there, where you, they’re too busy, wondering if they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Zach Wojtowicz:

This is like at every meeting I’m with Russ, he drops a Jurassic Park reference. I’ve started to think that you …

Charley Burtwistle:

I think I did yesterday, yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

So, but I mean, that does raise a good point. Like how do, I mean you talked about it, especially with this new framework, there’s kind of infinite possibilities of where we could go next. How do you and, the product team as a whole figure out this is what we want to focus on, this is what’s going to provide the most value, this is where our time and energy should be spent.

Russ Lane:

Totally. Yeah. I mean, everything always starts with the customer. What are we hearing? Obviously, if you try to do one request, one solution, you’re going to be doing that forever. And it’ll just kind of be adding on and that kind of thing. So, we try to take it from a thematic standpoint, connect dots between what one person’s asking for and another person’s asking for. They might actually be asking for the same thing. There’s a framework called the five whys, which I know internally, that’s not super popular, because it’s admittedly annoying, right? Like, “I want this.” “Okay, why?” “Well, because I need to do this.” “Well, why do you need to do that?”

Zach Wojtowicz:

Right.

Russ Lane:

And we get all the way down to the root cause. And that’s where you can really start to tease out some themes and connective tissue between two different requests that seem totally different that’s actually really similar.

So, then after that, we kind of look at things and we ask ourselves. I like to run an exercise where we just toss around adjectives. Like what would we want to hear a customer say when they’re describing this, once this thing is, once this problem’s solved. Do we want them to say, “Wow, that was powerful” or “Wow, that was fast or super efficient or easy?” Like what do we want them to say. There’s a whole range of things that they could say.

And then let’s say we want it to be faster. We start to look at actual data, run tests with actual customers and say, okay, well, right now it’s taking them six minutes to achieve this task. How can we make that faster? And if we did make it faster, let’s say we cut the time down by three. Well, how often do they do that throughout the week? Take that, times it by 52. And now we’re talking year, time, savings, time money. So, we’re just always looking for ways to make things more efficient. And we try to quantify that by actually like looking at the data and saying, it took them this long. Now it takes them this long. So, it’s much better.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. The measurement framework obviously is something that, I’ve been a little bit involved in talking before and me and a guy on my team, Brooks Coleman, shout out Brooks. He was doing some, yeah, he’s a great guy. He was doing some work today. He was showing me about how long it takes people to add their first job in the system. And can we, you know, the kind of the most basic solution or the most basic feature in Buildertrend, everything starts with a job. How do we make that first step into the platform as easy as possible? And then you look at do customers that do it right away. Stick with us a long time and get more value out of the system. And the answer is obviously yes, but I just thought it was really interesting that we kind of zoomed clear back out and we’re like, what’s the first thing that people should be doing and how do we make that experience the best experience possible.

Russ Lane:

Totally. Yeah. That, entire initiative’s been super exciting. Because it’s opened up the door for us to question some strongly held beliefs that we’ve all had for a long time that at face value, they seem pretty obvious, but you start asking, well, why are we sure and asking those kinds of questions and we’re uncovering, especially on that early customer stuff. I mean, we’re trying to set people up for success. That’s our number one goal. Whether they’ve been using us for five years or one day. But on that first day through that first month, two months, there is a concept of too much, too fast and that’s not setting people up for success. We want to be able to, there’s a concept of a progressive disclosure where you kind of give people just enough. They can master it and then they expand, and they become experts in it. And that’s kind of the approach that we’re taking with that early customer journey perspective.

Zach Wojtowicz:

That’s, you know, when we talk about, we get a lot of feedback …

Russ Lane:

Oh yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

From Buildertrend.

Russ Lane:

Sure do.

Zach Wojtowicz:

No shortage of feedback. We welcome it. Obviously in CS and even across multiple, the platform itself has a place to do all that. What’s that process of taking all that information that we receive and like making it usable or you know, how do we prioritize it? Or what essentially, I wrote down, like how’s the sausage made on the front end of like making sure that we are attacking those right things. It starts with the customer because you just shed light on like maybe some of our auxiliary things that we do when we get the feedback, what happens or what’s that look like?

Russ Lane:

Totally. Yeah. I mean, I, we, have a fantastic customer success department, but I always like to say customer success is all of our jobs. That’s priority one across the board. So, we try to live that for sure. And we talk to our CS folks and ask them, what are you hearing? And see if we can tease out some of that, why that root cause and themes. Thankfully, we’ve got a team of incredible data people and user researchers who can kind of help us put that through the right lens. Right. Cause you don’t just want to take it at face value and make snap decisions. So, how can we in a scientific way sort of quantify what people mean and that kind of helps us prioritize. And then also going back to the time savings, like if we got one thing that’s going to save people 30 hours a month and another that’s going to save them two, we’re going to go with a 30 hour one.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Right. Yeah. It’s definitely something that as you kind of grow in Buildertrend, you start to learn more about the product process and you know, you kind of have to be very, very aware of that. They’re already working on projects too. It’s not like, oh yeah, that’s right. You can’t just this new idea that comes up. You can’t just be like, “Well, let’s put this up at the front.”

Russ Lane:

“Cool, let’s do it,” yeah.

Zach Wojtowicz:

“Let’s do it”. Yeah. Right. And that can be a struggle to kind of work through it. But you know, there’s, there’s a method …

Russ Lane:

Totally.

Zach Wojtowicz:

In a process.

Russ Lane:

Well, and yeah, I talked about the thing that would save them 30 hours versus two, but maybe we can get the thing that solves the two-hour problem out next week versus the 30 hour one that’s going to take us a month. Now, that’s a new variable in that entire prioritization process. Like what is the thing that we can get to them the quickest and still be valuable regardless of how valuable compared to everything else going on.

Zach Wojtowicz:

And you may hear from one of our user researchers or product people who reach out or, our UX team, so if you ever get the call from one of us at Buildertrend, that’s a great thing because you’re actually going to help shape what it looks like and how it goes. So, look, return our emails.

Russ Lane:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. There’s generally most of the time, some sort of maybe a nice little $20 Amazon card, so little incentive for you, but absolutely, especially going forward this year now that the react conversion’s done, the world’s really opened up for us. So, we’re going to be out on sites with people we want to talk to them as often as possible. I’d love to have kind of a nice core of people that we just, I kind of just want to talk about their jobs. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like my dream is to take three days and have some project manager train me. Right. Like I’ll just shadow you, pretend I’m taking your job by the end of the week and let’s dive in.

Charley Burtwistle:

Man, that could be a cool series. We’ll bring the cameras, Zach and I will come, we’ll interview Russ on his journey to become a …

Zach Wojtowicz:

… on a construction job site. Just like a table with lights.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. We’re like all …

Russ Lane:

Right in the middle of it. Make people walk around us

Zach Wojtowicz:

Production team, just like, “If you mind, we’re trying to record here” and they’re like …

Russ Lane:

“Can you stop hammering please”

Charley Burtwistle:

Trying to put up drywall. Yeah, maybe not one of my better pitches for …

Zach Wojtowicz:

They’re all great. You know, don’t ever hesitate to shoot those shots Charley, one of …

Russ Lane:

No bad ideas.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. Thanks guys. Well, Russ, I appreciate you coming on. I kind of hate this, this idea of a mini episode. I want to keep talking for another 40 minutes, but I know …

Russ Lane:

We can stay, we’ll just not record it or something.

Charley Burtwistle:

Yeah. Oh, b-roll and then …

Russ Lane:

Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

We can tease it …

Russ Lane:

That’s a nice. Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

We can tease it after …

Zach Wojtowicz:

For the Gram.

Russ Lane:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charley Burtwistle:

Absolutely.

Zach Wojtowicz:

Yeah. Russ, thanks for joining in.

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. Guys, thanks for having me.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We’ll probably have you back.

Russ Lane:

Appreciate it. I’m always happy to talk about this stuff and especially going forward in the year, as things start to coalesce a little bit more, we can get a little bit more detailed from time to time.

Zach Wojtowicz:

We can’t reveal too much.

Russ Lane:

No.

Zach Wojtowicz:

There’s some exciting stuff coming.

Russ Lane:

Definitely. Like I said, global search, is kind of in a rollout right now. So, we’re trying to validate that, make sure that’s meeting and in some ways exceeding expectations. And then another one that actually just went live this week that I’m very excited about is offline capabilities for the mobile app.

Charley Burtwistle:

Ooh, wow.

Russ Lane:

Kind of a good, I know we’re wrapping up, but a good lens into kind of how we think we looked at that, and we were like, okay, well we could spend two years making the entire app offline capable, or we could look at the things that people need the most, get those things out one by one. And this is another good prioritization problem. Time Clock, number one requested thing, obviously most valuable would take the longest and is risky. We don’t really know how to do this yet. So, Daily Logs was our first swing at it. And there are people right now that are submitting daily logs without cell service while we’re building the Time Clock functionality, while learning from what we did with the first iteration of daily logs. So, that’s kind of that balancing act that we do. We try to get the right amount of value to your hands as fast as possible, but we don’t necessarily want to spend all the time trying to guess on everything, get it into your hands. We want to hear about it.

Charley Burtwistle:

I was telling Russ the other day, I’ve had the beta version of the new summary page turned on, on my like demo account for a while. Because I loved it. And I was like, and I don’t care if there’s some bugs, I want to start using it. Right.

Zach Wojtowicz:

All right, we’re at our time limit on the “minisode”. So, let’s wrap it up.

Charley Burtwistle:

Wrap it up. If you’re listening to this, it’s the first day of IBS. So, if you’re at IBS, go check out the booth, right?

Russ Lane:

Absolutely. I’ll be there. Let’s talk.

Charley Burtwistle:

Geez. This is the second episode in a row. Everyone that comes on the podcast is going to be at IBS, including Zach.

Zach Wojtowicz:

It’s a sore subject there Russ. Yeah. So, the best apologies. We’re ending on a low note with that now for Charley. Yeah. It’s never a low note here on “The Building Code.” Thanks for joining us, everybody. See you guys.