Sublime support, product and an HR TECH presentation

Riverside.fm take a bow. Ambidextrous organizations. Virtual HR Tech event is a go.

I’m an all the gear no idea person, whether it is bicycles or electronics. In order to improve my audio and for the occasional podcast, I went all in with Australia’s finest gadgetry, the Rødecaster pro and podmic. I use about 1% of the features, but it looks magnificent.

Riverside is a podcasting / recording tool. I’ve seen thousands of software products but I can’t remember even one where an in-product support feature makes me giddy and awed. It happened the other day with Riverside.fm.

I connected my set up with Riverside to test everything an upcoming event. When I opened up Riverside it popped up this message.  

“In order to record correctly make sure that you have selected etc…” it then explained exactly how to make the setting change inside the Rødecaster menus, so providing help in a 3rd party product!

The Rødecaster has so many features I’d never have figured this out myself, or it would have taken hours of googling, switch fiddling and finger pointing between Riverside and Røde. I expect it saves them 1000s of support calls. This is context driven, preemptive help of the highest order.

What this shows me is that the support folks and the product folks are in lock sync at Riverside. Most PMs spend a lot of time triaging and juggling feature demands from sales, understandably as they are the noisiest, and there is a direct link to current deals. But many products can be dramatically improved by doing robust discovery work with support. Support knows what sucks in your product better than anyone else, and they often have great ideas on how to delight users. Spend time with them. It is often the smallest details that have the most impact.

I was so impressed with Riverside’s attention to detail, I upgraded immediately to a paid version of the product. Whoever designed that feature at Riverside is a genius. Give them a raise. Help as PLG. Sweet.

I’m a big fan of considering documentation and help as part of the definition of done in product.

HR TECH Virtual

Speaking of presentations, I’ve been invited to give a talk at the HRTECH Virtual event. Looks like a good lineup of speakers and sessions. Thanks Jeanne for asking me along.

My session is on 2nd of March (17h00 German time). I’ll be doing a live Q&A too.

In this talk I rely a bit on one my favourite business books: O’Reilly and Tushman’s Lead and Disrupt.

I’m using their concept of an ambidextrous organization to help large enterprises structure their HR technology strategy. Do come along and have a listen. Here is Charles O’Reilly explaining the concepts from the book. But you still need to read it.

I’m getting out a bit more on the interwebs, for instance, I’m going to be having a chat about workforce demographics and the future of work with an old mate of mine, Filip Misovski at Semos, and I have some evil plans to do more with the Rødecaster. Watch this space.

Speaking of great electronics, I’m a fan of LCD Soundsystem.