The customer's actual words and daily reality are often lost in translation on product teams. In Episode 12, host Jake McKee talks with UX and AI design consultant Erik Summa (formerly of Dell), whose job is to bring the absent user into the room and keep them there.1

The central question: What happens to that essential user-focused work when AI speeds up development so much that teams skip past the step of truly understanding who they're building for?1

Listen as Erik explains why the value of a project was never in its speed, but in the human connection. We dive into topics like "vibe coding," talking to AI in the car, and the irreplaceable human moment of an older patient whose call to the dentist might be their only real conversation all week. Ultimately, you must speed up the parts of a project that can be rushed so you can slow down on the parts that can't—and the one part that can never be rushed is understanding who you are building for.

For more information about the Conversation Compass, head to https://jakemckee.com/

And if you'd like to signup for Conversation Lab, you can at: https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab

Episode 11 focuses on Conversation Traction, the fifth and final pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass, which serves as the ultimate test of whether customer conversations actually lead to organizational change.

For more information about the Conversation Compass, head to https://jakemckee.com/

And if you'd like to signup for Conversation Lab, you can at: https://jakemckee.com/conversationlab

Josh Zerkel has spent 20 years building brand communities at companies like Asana, Evernote, and CBS News. He just published a book called The Community Code. And his argument is one that a lot of community professionals have been trying to make for a long time: community isn't a support deflection tool. It's a go-to-market engine, and most organizations have no idea how to treat it like one.

In this episode, Jake and Josh talk about why community keeps getting stuck in the "nice to have" bucket, how to speak about community impact in the language the rest of the business actually uses, and why showing confidence in your work is more effective than drowning stakeholders in metrics.

Find more about Josh:

• Book: https://www.amazon.com/Community-Code-Strengthening-Go-Market-ebook/dp/B0GNJBXCPR
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuazerkel/
• Substack: thecommunitycode.substack.com

Most product teams have one or two people who actually talk to customers. Everyone else makes decisions based on a summary of what those people heard. The problem is that a summary of a conversation is not the conversation. Tone disappears. Specifics get flattened. Surprises get buried. What's left mostly confirms whatever the team already believed.

In this solo exploration episode, Jake walks through the fourth pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass: Conversation Amplification. That means getting the real customer voice, not a cleaned-up version of it, to the people inside your organization who need to hear it most. Jake covers the five blockers that stop insight from spreading internally and what to do about each one.

Find out more about Jake's work with the Conversation Compass at: jakemckee.com

Lee LeFever started Common Craft back in 2003 with a simple idea: technology only spreads as far as people can understand it. His "In Plain English" videos broke down everything from RSS to Twitter using paper cutouts, hand-drawn art, and a whiteboard that lived on the floor of his house. Millions of people watched. Educators licensed them. A whole genre of explainer videos grew up around what Lee was doing.

In this episode, Jake and Lee go back about 20 years to talk about how it all started, why simple beat slick, and what it taught Lee about explanation as a real skill people can learn.

Find out more about Lee at https://commoncraft.com

Find out more about Jake and the Customer Conversation Compass at: https://jakemckee.com/

In this episode, Jake tells the story of the night a whiskey cart rolled into his private dining room at Eleven Madison Park. The staff caught a throwaway joke he made and acted on it. That single moment captures everything Conversation Tuning is about.

This is pillar three of the Customer Conversation Compass. It's the skill of asking questions that actually get you the truth instead of the answer your customer thinks you want to hear.

Jake walks through the three biggest traps that wreck customer conversations, plus a quick pre-flight check you can run on your questions before any customer call.

For more information on the Conversation Compass, visit https://jakemckee.com

Most people think a conversation starts when someone opens their mouth. It doesn't. It starts long before that, when the other person trusts you enough to say something real.

Larry Glickman is the founder of JCAT Partners, where he trains law enforcement and private security professionals to work more effectively with the Jewish community. His program isn't a checklist. It's a foundation. Before anyone can have a quality conversation, they need to understand the language, rituals, and cultural context of the people they're working with. Without that, what you get isn't a real conversation. You get surface-level compliance and a lot of missed signals.

In this episode, Larry and Jake dig into what it takes to build the conditions for honest conversation, and why product teams skip this step more than they realize.

More information at: https://compass.jakemckee.com

In this solo episode, Jake introduces the second pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass: Conversation Architecture. He opens with a real story about a virtual support group for parents of kids in a mental health crisis, and what happens when the organization running it never bothered to design the space.

Jake breaks down the seven dimensions of Conversation Architecture, the intentional design work that happens before anyone says a word.

Find out more about the Conversation Compass at: https://compass.jakemckee.com