How to Sell Product You Can't See

Suzanne: All right, Andrew Kirchner. Is it Kirchner?

Andrew: That's me.

Suzanne: That's you, and you have a beard now.

Andrew: I do.

Suzanne: How's that beard going for you?

Andrew: You know, I fluctuate on beards. Mustaches too, I'm an avid Movember participant.

Suzanne: Oh, it's coming up.

Andrew: It is. It is. Our whole organization does, actually. Our CTO had what we call the Ambrose Burnside, where it comes down from the sideburns and up into a mustache. He was our winner last year. The beard's coming along well.

Suzanne: Do the people in your personal life cringe when it's the eve of November 1 because they know Andrew as they know him is go down a slippery ...

Andrew: That and because I'm going to hit them up for donations the entire month.

Suzanne: Oh yeah.

Andrew: Which is never fun. Four, five emails minimum. I do challenges. A few years ago I died my mustache jet black because someone agreed to give me $500 for prostate cancer awareness. It gets pretty obnoxious fast.

Suzanne: We'll take this conversation as a warning.

Andrew: Yeah.

Suzanne: Everybody get ready, it's coming. Open your wallets, Andrew's coming for you. First of all tell us your title here.

Andrew: I'm director of product and strategic market development.

Suzanne: Director of product and strategic market development.

Andrew: Correct.

Suzanne: What does that actually mean?

Andrew: It means I have two jobs. One is director of product and one is director of strategic market development. It gets a little bit into how I joined Inspire. I joined with the pretense ... we're a really young company. I was going to be sort of a Swiss army guy who attacked a lot of commercial operation's needs. Whether it was business development, corporate development. Whether it was expanding into new geographies or new product verticals. Worked on that for awhile and that naturally evolved into a product role. I was doing a lot of things that product would do anyway. When we got to the point of deciding we are a product driven organization despite being a MG business. We are going to really focus on that. It was a natural transition for me to take on a bunch of those responsibilities.

Suzanne: You were an early employee. Employee number twelve, is that ...

Andrew: Something like that, twelve, fifteen.

Suzanne: How many employees now?

Andrew: Forty-five, fifty, somewhere in there.

Suzanne: Okay. Did you see that as an opportunity? Do start-ups hit this certain scale and then in your experience you're like I bet they're in pain right now because they're scaling and there are gaps and I'm going to go in.

Andrew: Yeah, I had diverse interest too. I felt that ... My sweet spot when I was looking was five to twenty. I felt that ... Which is the series seed, series A stage. I felt if I got too much later I was going to be asked to have a very specific skill-set. A, I wasn't totally convinced I had a very specific skill-set yet. And B, I wanted to try different things and felt that it had value in a bunch of different areas. I was looking for a role where the actual day-to-day responsibilities weren't super defined and it gave me the ability to go where I could add most value. Over the course of the past year and a half it ended up being product.

Suzanne: I think what's interesting about your story is you came for the company. You didn't come for the role. You love energy.

Andrew: Right, yeah I do. I love something that not many other people love. I love the environment I guess you could say. We do have a really mission driven culture here. It's no BS, we really care about making a big impact on the world. We're a double bottom line company in some ways, where it's profits and environment. I came from ... I went to law school. I had a stint as an environmental prosecutor where I was chasing down people who polluted lakes or tire factories or things of that nature. I realized pretty quickly that I was too backwards looking. It wasn't going to be building a more sustainable future. It was going to be trying to punish people who fifteen years ago committed some ill, which is a valuable task. For me it was how can I make a difference in this mission in a forward-looking way. How can I build the companies of the future that are going to address climate change, that are going to address resource scarcity.

I went to work at a firm that was working with early stage companies who were addressing exactly this need. Everything from clean tech software platforms to bio-fuels companies to a bunch of the big public solar companies. Really got the bug for working with start-ups. Loved being a strategic advisor to two people and an idea. Loved seeing that all the way to fruition, through several venture financing rounds and through exit. Got the bug, wanted to be an early stage company that had that same mission that had been guiding me.

Suzanne: Talk about the difference in experience. One of the things that we talk a lot about on this show is no two product management jobs are the same. That has a lot to do with the fact that ... Certainly, of course, no two companies are the same. There is a very distinct rhythm to a smaller and growing organization versus an organization that still growing, but has spread out a little and rooted a little. You have the experience specifically here at Inspire of having been part of that team of a dozen or so, and now being part of a team that's closer to fifty. What is the difference? The biggest differences?

Andrew: The biggest difference to me is process building. When I joined we had clear mandates, we had clear goals. Our mission was more or less formed, but there weren't existing processes to attack a lot of the problems we saw. What's changed most for me is that there are now frameworks for addressing those problems. There are now people we have hired specifically to solve those problems. Over time roles get more specialized, people are hired to do specific things. There's a little less creativity and a little more execution. The creativity has been 50% baked and we have the ideas, our big creative ideas, in place so now it's a matter of sketching them out using the existing frameworks and the existing processes that we've built.

The biggest difference to me is just the way things run on a day-to-day basis is predictable and repeatable. That was one of our big rallying cries for growth. To make that process where we could have a framework for succeeding rather than ... When I joined it was here are the fires, go put them out. Here's the opportunities as we see them, go deliver us some theses on how we can solve customer problems in those areas. There wasn't really a framework for building the products to address those.

Suzanne: I know that you love this company, and you're mission driven. Does it become boring once there's no more fires to put out? There's a beautiful irony to process, bringing it in is this exercise of bringing sanity, of bringing efficiency, of allowing scalability. Oftentimes for a lot of people who found their stride being all over the place and contributing value in that way and suddenly it's oh no. We have an onboarding specialist now. We don't need to worry about that anymore. Your job role shrinks, and it gets quiet.

Andrew: Well, thankfully it hasn't gotten quiet. There are still plenty of fires to put out. I still feel like that is my day-to-day job. Interestingly I was a little worried about what that transition would look like for me, what it would look like for our company. Interestingly we've stayed super vital. We've really maintained a young company mindset and what we call a beginner's mindset at all times. There's not really baked processes where people feel like there's no room for creativity left. The challenge has become much more of a teamwork challenge rather than one person trying to work all night long to attack a problem. It's now about an issue of coordination, getting the right people in the room to address the problem. Putting our design team together with our tech team. Putting our CEO's ideas into practice and bringing those to life.

I've loved the experience. Frankly, it's been an incredible learning experience for me as someone who really hasn't been on the start-up roller coaster before in such an explicit way. It's a different challenge, but I don't find it any less fun or any less vital.

Suzanne: One of the cool things about product is so many of us, I think yourself included, we don't come in the front door. We end up in these roles or we're able to retrospectively go I guess this is what I've been doing, but it's usually the culmination of a lot of desperate working experiences in business domain or in the design domain or in the technology domain. You talked about your past as a lawyer. What are some of the other experiences in your life that you think readied you for this role?

Andrew: Great question. I think just being a junkie for this stuff. I am an avid consumer of podcasts and I play with every new product that I can find. I think just having that mentality of being an early adopter, of being the person who wants to try the new gadget, who wants to be five steps ahead of the curve on the new piece of software that's out there. I tell a lot of people who ask me what is product, what does product mean to you. A lot of it is the passion for being an early adopter, for trying new things before they hit the mainstream, for that tinker mentality. I think that's what in a lot ways, that homework that doesn't feel like homework, but it is homework has really prepared me for this job.

Suzanne: It's interesting about that. I agree, I think I've seen that a lot in product people. There's definitely an early adopter symptom that tends to get us on the side of this line. Ironically that can be a handicap because oftentimes you're selling to people who are not early adopters. They might be part of that late majority on the bell curve. I think that's a little bit true about Inspire. Maybe we pause. Tell our listeners - what's Inspire? Is it Inspire Energy? Is it Inspire ...

Andrew: We go by Inspire these days.

Suzanne: You're dropping the energy?

Andrew: We're dropping the energy I think.

Suzanne: Okay. But you're not dropping the energy?

Andrew: No. We're still the ... That's a good case and point right there. Let's start there. We use what's called retail energy as our means to inner execute and scale our business. What that means is in deregulated states, which the majority of Americans live in deregulated states, states like Texas or New York or Pennsylvania, or Ohio, or Illinois. You can choose who supplies your energy, just like you can choose who provides your cell phone plan. We are one of those companies that actually goes out and sells energy supply. We serve clean power in those markets. You have an existing utility here probably LADWP or Socal Edison. If this was a deregulated market, and California is not, you'd be able to choose your energy provider on the open market. It's also known as energy competition. We serve clean power product in those markets as an energy supplier.

One of the reasons we are dropping the Energy is we are starting to have a broader conversation with our customers beyond just energy. Energy is one input to your home, but there are a whole bunch that have a really key impact on your environmental footprint. Your water usage, that's particularly important in California. The maintenance you do to your house, your building envelope dictates a lot about your energy usage especially as it pertains to HVAC. We're using energy as a wedge to begin to have a broader conversation with our customers around the operating efficiency of their home, about they can both lessen their impact and invest in their home from this point of view.

Suzanne: Let's talk a little bit about customer development. For me this is a fascinating piece. We talk a lot on the show with companies. They're in software, they're in advanced technologies. There's a certain amount of the market, or their audience, is at the same pace more or less. You're talking to home owners across the United States. Some people who skew in a demographic far older than the average age of folks working here in this office. You're talking about relatively new concepts, renewables. What is the experience been like of communicating to that demo of selling your product? What have you guys learned about that?

Andrew: What we've learned is, I would say two key things. One is that education's imperative. It's not really a product that you can sell off the shelf, it's not toilet paper, it's not soap, it's not something where everyone knows what they want. You have to educate people. Why do I want this, why is this important to me? Education is the first thing we've really learned. The second thing we've learned is that it's often more fruitful not to have a conversation about energy. To talk to people about their impact on the planet. To talk to people about the operating efficiency of their homes. To talk about moving away from dirty resources like coal, as just the smart modern decision. Like any other smart, modern decision you make.

The other real lesson, I think, we don't take it as a given that people care about energy, and that we can convince them to care about energy. We have the discussion with them on the terms that are most relevant to them. We've undertaken a pretty robust segmentation process and developed really, really specific personas to the point that I feel that Eric, our key persona, is one of my best friends. I use the name Eric probably fifteen or twenty times a day.

Suzanne: Can you tell us about him?

Andrew: Yeah, I can tell you everything about Eric.

Suzanne: Great.

Andrew: Eric's an early adopter. That's the first thing you need to know about Eric. Eric really cares about being the person that brings to his or her friends, and it does skew pretty heavily male based on our research, the newest and best thing. When someone asks him at a cocktail party, hey have you heard about XYZ. Eric goes yeah, actually I've tried it and here are the three things you really need to know about that product. Eric is a nester. He has a home and he likes to nest in a very particular way. He likes to really focus on comfort and convenience, especially as it pertains to gadgetry and smart technology, and really likes to look under the hood of those things. Not only buy it and install it, but go learn about what the competitors do, how they do it differently. In the case of smart tech, maybe think about the platform implications. Whether it's Apple Homekit or whether it's what Amazon's doing via Alexa. He's really an under the hood person as well.

Suzanne: How many personas ... drafted, documented, pinned to the walls ... How many are there?

Andrew: Three.

Suzanne: Three personas.

Andrew: Yeah. Three key personas that we've understood to reflect our customer base. Two of which we're going to actively be targeting and are really focused on as the customers of the future for us.

Suzanne: Can you share with us a little bit of the process of building personas. One of the things that can come up is oh it would be nice to do personas properly if we had a complete UX team or if we had the resources or if we had the time. There are other aspects, in any product business I think, where you're battling constraints. What has been your process, your team's process of arriving at these really fleshed out, really clear ... I know Eric, he's my best friend and it's on the wall. Talk to us about how you got there.

Andrew: Sure, absolutely. First of all, I would say I think there's a fallacy out there that you need to have someone in house with expertise. You need to have someone on your team or hire someone who's really really good at this. We used a consultant, and she was fantastic and really got us off the ground. I feel like you can lay a foundation and with existing resources, really begin to use personas as a tool to your advantage. I would that caveat on people who thing they don't have the resources for it. It doesn't always take a ton of resources, and I think it's a really worthwhile investment.

How we've developed Eric into our best friend…It starts with a lot of data, it starts with understanding your existing customer base. I think there's a lot of focus, with us as well, on who we want our customers to be. As we take the larger commercial context and say who's going to be the customer of our future if our goal is to have this conversation, and to have that conversation about XYZ product. Who are we really going to resonate with? That was a big part of our process as well. It's also laying out user stories and saying here's the customer problem, here's why we thing we're going to solve it. It's really just a lot of hard work. We did a ton of surveys. We pulled a lot of third party data. We did a lot of focus groups, including internal focus groups.

I think that's one really cool hack that we did. We did a segmentation study of our employees. We said who's an Eric, who's an Robert, who's a Karen? Who doesn't fall into any of those groups. Answer this ten question survey. We got everyone in the company to sit in focus groups based on their persona. Asked them questions, really did a deep dive on the psychology of being one of those personas. I think that's a really cheap hack you can do. It takes maybe an hour, hour and a half for one of these. We had everyone from our CEO on down sitting in these and giving feedback. You wouldn't believe the ah-ha moments. Mike Durst, our CTO, had a hilarious moment where, after this was all over, he goes I just want to know, was I born a Robert or did I become a Robert? We had this huge existential discussion about if you're born a persona, nature versus nurture. I think our process was really a laborious one, where we invested the time in having the conversations internally and externally.

Suzanne: It's an interesting way to approach that challenge. Like we talked about, sometimes being on the inside of the product team can be a handicap because you're used to seeing the world the way you see the world. The way you see the world is more advanced and more knowledgeable about certain types of things than perhaps your customer. At the same time, just by playing musical chairs you may still have that handicap, but somebody inside of the company can step over and say I am that person.

Andrew: This is so true, and especially as an early adopter. You have this mentality of oh I know this, I've studied it. We have this huge internal tech testing process for smart technology. We're getting a lot of really cool devices and trying them out in our own homes. You develop these really strong opinions on why something is good or bad, or works or doesn't. To put yourself in the shoes, and we have a really diverse set of employees, put yourself in the shoes of one of them, and see it from their perspective is really enlightening. You come to these really firm conclusions as an early adopter at what's good, what's bad, which you'll never touch with a ten foot pole. You see pretty readily that people just attack the questions in a completely different way, and come to completely different conclusions as a result.

Suzanne: When we talk about software as a service, which we're all very familiar with. We have come to accept that service is product if the service is coming to us in the form of automation. We accept that software is product. What's interesting, I think, about Inspire is even though you're a technology company you're not a software company. What is product actually? What are your products?

Andrew: That's a ... what is product is a question we've had to answer, and has been a key part of my job as one of the general managers here. Part of my role is just being an evangelist for product and product processes. Say hey, here's what product does, here's an example of how product works. Here's what shipping an MVP looks like. Here's how we learn from that. Here's how we iterate based on those learnings, and take that to all corners of our organization. Say, what do you think? Give me feedback. Is this going to work? How do we make this our own? How is this different in our context where we are? Serving an energy product as opposed to shipping another feature for an education software tool, which might be the more standard context you'd see as product.

What it means for Inspire, I think, is still evolving. I would tell you that the fundamental assumption we have is how do we get learnings quicker and more efficiently. If we're trying to launch a whole new suite of products, if we're expanding our existing product suite as we are, how do we know what works and what doesn't? How do we have those learnings as quickly as possible and with the least amount of investment as possible? That's really the mandate for product. Getting as much knowledge as cheaply as possible, and not throwing good money after bad and putting a lot of money into something before you know whether it's going to work. That's the core mandate for us.

What it looks like in practice is ... We have a head of product. We have me as the product leader, the general manager of product categories. We have have three product managers who sit beneath me. We have pooled tech resources and design resources. We have a really strong CTO and a really strong senior designer who ... it's not, in some organizations they write requirements and pass them off. Then set a meeting a week later to see how it went. We're talking about it's we all sit in a room and write the requirements together. It's a design product and tech collaborative experience. We're working on one moonshot product right now where in order to write the requirement set we literally took two days. We all flew to the east coast, sat down, and just wrote it together.

Suzanne: Why the east coast? You needed to be colder in order to ...

Andrew: We're dual headquartered. We have an office in Philadelphia. We just went there to hole ourselves up and not be distracted. It's a really collaborative process. In other words, we aren't the typical shop where you have PM, PMM, four, five engineers, a QA engineer, and an ecosystem that all reports up to a head of product. We are really collaborative and have a lot of shared resources, and are really focused on being, we think, the first product driven organizations in energy.

Suzanne: Is there big sales force as part of the company?

Andrew: There is. The majority of our employees are in sales. We're an omnichannel company. We do everything from intercepting you at a retail store, like a Home Depot, to really robust digital campaigns. We have a lot of folks in sales that are trying a lot of different channels and really trying to innovate on that experience as well.

Suzanne: It strikes me that because your products are the packaging of different services and that what you're selling is, in some ways, a lifestyle and a mission, that a lot of your work as a product manager, the work of the product management team where so many people are interfacing regularly with devs and facing into Pivotal Tracker, Jira, and watching the icebox. A lot of what you're doing is interfacing with that front line team more directly. Standing up experiments right on the ground and saying okay let's grab up these ideas and try them. Is that how it's working?

Andrew: Absolutely. That's exactly right. A lot of what I do is scientific experimentation, I like to think of it as. A lot of it is vision based. A lot of it is actual boots on the ground testing. It's our sales team to have this product in these controlled circumstances. Here's the cohort that we're going to use as a control group. If that doesn't work we'll expand it in X, Y, and Z ways, and that'll be our new experiment. A lot of it is just arming the sales team with what they need to succeed.

Suzanne: This term minimum viable product has devolved. As it's been more and more readily embraced, the core understanding, people have moved further and further away. People use it a lot of the times interchangeably with minimum releasable feature set, or even beta-built. They're calling a beta platform an MVP. MVP as it was originally defined, that experiment that teaches you the most about something with the least amount of output and effort. Is there an experiment that you have conducted recently that you can share with us? Just to give us a flavor for that true MVP that says all right, we have an assumption.

Andrew: We're conducting one right now that I think is really fascinating. It's goes back to this notion of the operational cost of your home. We've been delivering to our customers in a variety of different packages, insights about how they use energy and insights about their home. Right when someone becomes an Inspire customer we get information about them. What their average annual usage is, how their consumption patterns change over time, where they live. Basic things like that to be able to serve them. We have a really incredible data analytics team that takes that data and parses it. Works with other data sets like existing data sets about your area, whether it's the property characteristics, the fuel type. Whether it's the weather trends in your area, and produces really particular insights about how you can save money. About how you lessen your impact, and uses that as a launching pad to further the conversation into other inputs to your home.

We're running experiments right now about how to deliver those insights. Whether it's via email. Whether you're going to want it via SMS. Should we package it as a home investment piece? Should we package it as a way of lowering your environmental footprint? Is it a way for you to save on energy bills? We've been conducting a series of experiments around this notion of having a more efficient home and a more modern home, and using our data analytics team as a vehicle for that.

Suzanne: Are you relying on those early adopters to spread the word? Is it right now ... because it's such a complicated product to sell, right now we're effective if we can sell to people who want to embrace new technologies or are mission driven, the Erics as you described them. Are you thinking about how you're going to have to repackage and reeducate and rethink delivery for that next tranche of customers that maybe wants to save money?

I'll sidestep for a moment. One of the examples I use a lot in class when I talk about customer segmentation is Prius. LA is a good market to talk about Prius because it's done so well.

Andrew: We call Karen our Prius person.

Suzanne: Here's Prius and Prius comes into the market and says I know you're all car drivers, but keep your hand up if you also care about the environment. A ton of people put their hand down and hand-full of people remain and they're like okay I'm going after you. You imagine that as Prius gained traction over time, the people that started to come into the fold of that weren't necessarily people who cared about the environment. They don't hate the environment actively, but it's not a primary motivator, saving money on gas is. Getting my family comfortably to the soccer game, or being able to park easily. These other, secondary benefits of the product start to become that value proposition that lures new segments in. Do you guys know how you're going to approach that next group of people?

Andrew: Yes and no. I say no because we're always open to the latest data point, and we don't want to fully bake any process before we have the opportunity to learn more. With that caveat, I think we do. Right now we're in the process of parsing out who in our user set is that early adopter, really figuring out who the Erics are, why they're Erics, why they came to us if they are an Eric. How we leverage them to be the megaphones, the microphones for our business, the amplifiers for our business. I think it's our belief that if you can get the early adopters on board, get them raving about your product there will be a natural uptick in uptake for the product. I think, as I shared with you before, the way you expand this product beyond just energy nerds, beyond people who just look under the hood, is to not necessarily have a conversation about energy. To tell a bigger story about we're here to make your home more operationally efficient.

You have a lot of ways of seeing the value of your home. Whether its Zillow or Trulia or Redfin, they can tell you a lot about the trends in home value. There isn't a lot of information out there about why your home costs as much as it does on a monthly basis. Which can be, if anyone's a homeowner, a really really sneaky source of expense. If we can have that broader conversation with our customers and say one way you can do that is to power your home with clean energy, to allow us to source you a clean energy product. I think that can be a really powerful message that gets you beyond the people who have raised their hand and say oh I'm going to do this because I'm an environmentalist. The solar industry's a great example. They call it the solar coaster because of all the ups and downs in the stock market. You see in the news about Tesla and Solar City. They're really in that death valley between early adopters and people who are mission driven and the houses that are really inefficient and it's real easy to save, and are trying to find that solution. We think our business is positioned to avoid that because we don't require that sort of construction. We've wired ourselves to think beyond just energy, beyond the early adopters from day one.

Suzanne: What I think is fascinating and exciting ... Talk about mission driven. Part of my personal mission is a lot around access. Especially when we talk to women on the show, when we talk to people who are underrepresented on the show. We tend to talk a lot about your experiences. Unfortunately those experiences sometimes come in the form of yeah some guy told me I wasn't smart enough to know how to do that. I get boxed out or technology gets thrown at me as a way of deterring me from participating.

Andrew: I heard that on a Beachbody episode.

Suzanne: Yeah, exactly. I think ... you said your demo skews heavily toward male and I think what's interesting is there's probably some of that residual piece. Nobody understands energy. Not a lot of people do. Part one of what you have been doing successfully, it sounds like, is just bringing the idea of environmental consciousness and clean energy and cost savings and renewability into the home with these new forays into data. There's potentially an opportunity to educate a lot of us about the fundamentals of energy and how we can participate. There's a movement there, this goes beyond just adopting the product and making the sale. You can empower people. There's a good pun in there. You can empower people to have these dashboards themselves, and drive it with you.

Andrew: Yeah. I think that's exactly right.

Suzanne: I think I just caught up to what you guys were doing. That was my ah-ha moment. You're like yeah Suzanne, that's what I've been trying to tell you for an hour.

Andrew: No, I think you're exactly right. I think we're trying to take a lot of the complexity out of it, and give people ... we have used that phrase, dashboard for your home, before internally. Give you something that isn't this wonky, this appliance is using this much at this time and you should be aware of that. More just a more relatable and more human way to understand energy and the impact on the world around us. How you can make decisions for your home that are more inline with the decisions you make everyday. Whether it's taking an Uber instead of a cab or using Airbnb instead of a hotel. We see ourselves in that next generation of why are you taking the utilities dirty power? Why are consuming power without being thoughtful about it? Why are you making these decisions for your home without considering the multi-faceted elements that we can set forth in front of you? Hopefully you do catch up, I think ...

Suzanne: I can't get Inspire in LA or ...

Andrew: Not yet.

Suzanne: It's coming?

Andrew: It's coming.

Suzanne: You guys are going to disrupt ...

Andrew: We're developing ... yeah, you bet.

Suzanne: LADWP better watch it's back essentially.

Andrew: Don't say that. Those LADWP guys. I've seen Chinatown, I know how powerful those folks are. Yeah, we're developing products that are national in footprint and we're expanding new geographies on a monthly basis. Coming soon.

Suzanne: Amazing. Let's talk about your Swiss army approach to getting in here. Have you used that approach to success in other ... are you the kind of guy that you see a thing and you're like if not through the door then through the window. If not through the window then through the ceiling?

Andrew: Yeah, I think so. More than that I think I'm just willing to go where I can provide value. That often isn't what you expect when you come into a company. I'm not sure if you've had that experience in the past. You come in with a specific mandate and it turns out that actually where you can add most value, just because of the complexities of the organization, is someplace completely different. I embrace that and think look ... obviously that's extremely vital to the product as well. You may come in with development chops and think you're going to be the guy who sits next to the CTO and is that PM, you're going to get in. Really the need is for someone to work really closely with the design team. That's my thesis. Go to a company where I think I can add a ton of value and then go where the value is and see if I can't drive the company forward. I think that's really served me well, and that is a thesis. It's a good substitute for what product really is too. Especially in a company of this size. Maybe if you go to a place with 500 engineers and 50 PMs it would be a different experience. A company of this size, I think that really is what product is supposed to do.

Suzanne: We recently published an article on the site that was five unconventional tips for getting a product management job. One of them was ... It's always amazing to me when people are out looking ... I understand there's pressure when you need to find a job. Oftentimes people forget to think about themselves in the equation. I think you're such a great testament to know if I'm going to get up everyday and be a part of something, I want to be a part of something that moves me. You're passionate about the environment. You're passionate about energy. You're here, not because there was an opening for a product manager role. In fact there wasn't, you just jammed yourself in. Also because you found a company that was doing something that aligned with you. How do you ... Sounds like you would validate that approach of go where you want to go, follow your personal why.

I'm wondering if you have any advice for our listeners? This is on our how to get the job. Let's say we've got listeners out here that are like you. They're passionate and they're thinking, man I love basketball. I just want to be involved in something basketball. I love beer. It doesn't matter, it's whatever I love. I don't necessarily have the on paper skill-set of a product manager. How do I go and get in there? What would you tell somebody?

Andrew: It's such an important question. The first thing I would say is let that passion seep through. Work your network, take every meeting you can get your hands on, and just let that passion be clear. Moreso than skill we’re focused on culture. In this organization we have a mission driven culture. We call ourselves climate avengers and we're extremely focused on delivering on this promise. We, generally speaking, won't hire people if they don't exude that same mentality and don't have our core beliefs, and reflect our core tenets about the business we want to build. You have to just exude that. If you are really that passionate go have that really geeky ... if it's basketball, go have that really geeky conversation about advanced statistics. If it's beer, brew it your bathtub and bring that experience to the interview. Say yeah, I'm actually working on a lager right now in my bathtub. I'm having this problem, how would you fix it? Here's the framework I'm thinking about. I think that's ... If I had that interview I would be thrilled. If someone was like I'm trying to solve the problem and here's how I'm thinking about it. I'm doing it in my bathtub because I just care that much about it. I think letting that passion seep through is extremely important. Frankly we're reticent to hire anyone who isn't able to show that in our interview process.

Suzanne: This is perhaps a little tangential, but you've got me thinking about it. For people who want to be part of a radical idea ... I think a lot of us are sitting around, we're looking at the world, we're watching it transform. We're aware that shit's getting messy, and bad.

Andrew: I watched the debate.

Suzanne: Yeah. Forget politics, that's definitely something else. We're looking at the environment, we're listening to the discourse around climate change. We're also thinking is the best that I can do this service or this product that's not necessarily advancing humanity, that's not making the world better. I don't know how to get connected to that. I'm rambling a little, but I guess my question is if I'm a person who wants to contribute to making the world better in a meaningful way, but I don't know how to start, how do I start?

Andrew: Wait six months and use Inspire's product. No, you just described the exact consumer problem. We know we sit at this odd intersection. The thread that seems to connect it all is that people really care. They want to make a difference. They don't care about the nuts and bolts, they don't care about the commodity, but they care about the overall movement. Our mission is to make that really easy and really simple and really straightforward and really seamless. That is exactly the thing we're working on, and will have a lot of products to address exactly that in one main moonshot product. What I would tell you is people make a series of decisions every day. People get in routines, they don't think about them. Driving somewhere as opposed to biking, checking to see if there's a public transportation option. Going to sleep and leaving the AC on because you weren't thinking about it. Switching to a new apartment and not asking those basic questions like what's the insulation like? What are the doors and windows like? When were they replaced? Am I going to lose all my heat through there?

There's tons of companies that will give you a free energy audit. They'll tell you how you can make your life more efficient. There are these really little decisions that people make on a daily basis that have become so ingrained and so automatic that we don't think of them as an opportunity to make a difference and they are. I think it just takes elevating in people's consciousness that those daily decisions do matter.

Suzanne: You need a likable blogger persona who can be the voice, the direct voice, to all of those people I just described. Who are sitting around going is there a website I can go to that can teach me. Post, stop using paper towels immediately if that's what you're doing to wipe your counters. Post, riding your bike to work blah, blah, blah. It's like I'm looking at you in your beard and I'm thinking some likable guy with a beard just telling you this stuff.

Andrew: Yeah. We're really focused on content for that reason. You go to our website, we have hundreds of articles on ... maybe not hundreds, dozens of articles on hey five tips for cooking in a more environmentally or a way that has less impact on the environment. Six tips for smart tech products and if this then that formulas you can program to help you save energy.

Suzanne: That's cool.

Andrew: Yeah, we're really really focused on producing content that's the highest quality. The quality that's really trustworthy and relatable that addresses this. I think eventually that as people get hooked on that and it actually works for them and they see it works for them, that elevates to a larger conversation about the bigger changes they can make in their life to address those problems.

Suzanne: It does raise the reality of your market position influences your marketing strategy. That's the obvious part, but what I mean is in a market that's new, you're selling a new kind of energy and a new approach to it. In a lot of ways you are a new company in a new market. When you enter into a market and there's competitors you can spend a lot of your time re-positioning against competitors. You can bypass the education expense entirely because somebody else did that hard work for you. You get to swoop in and just be the smarter better, faster, cleaner interface, cheaper, whatever the thing. You guys have to build the whole story out. That's a significant investment, and probably a long sales cycle too.

Andrew: Yup.

Suzanne: It's no, give them those hacks. Give them those tips. Show them how the world is changing. Remind them that we'll be here and ready to help them take the next step.

Andrew: That's exactly right and so much of what we do is investing in long term relationships with our customers. We call them members. The way we see this is the utility's relationship with you is disposable. There a government monopoly. They're not going to invest a dollar in furthering that relationship, in developing your trust. When you move to town they're the default, they get your business no matter what. So why would they invest in making you happy, and having them trust you. That is really the foundation, hey we are a trusted advisor in your path to making modern decisions, on your path to investing in your home so that it's more operationally efficient. Your path to just making those day-to-day decisions that impact both your satisfaction with your contribution and feeling like you're part of a mission and impact the planet as a whole. We are taking a really, really long cycle approach. We anticipate it'll take years to position ourselves as this really trusted advisor. We take a lot of pride in that. It comes at great expense, but it's something we're really delighted to do. We hope it's reflected in our customer relationships.

Suzanne: What is an example ... and I agree entirely. Companies that ... it's like oh this is where you have to go to get that. They don't embrace the customer experience. What are some examples of things that Inspire does for it's customers that immediately showcases the difference between working with the energy company and working with you?

Andrew: I love telling these stories. For one we have ... actually I heard on the last podcast that it was cool feature that people actually called customer service ... Well people call us all the time. We have college educated, mission driven, people who have studied this industry, know it cold, are able to make recommendations for you, how to optimize your home. That's just our customer service force. That's the people who answer the phone when you call our 1-800 number. I think that's a key moment of delight. You're used to calling AT&T or your local utility company and you're going to be on hold for 30 minutes. You're going to get someone who's unhappy to be working for the local government monopoly. Our hold times are like three seconds on average. You talk to someone who's super knowledgeable and wants to help and is armed with a lot of training, and a lot of investment on our part to make them an advocate for you. That's right off the bat what comes to mind.

The next thing is that within a month or so of becoming a member we're going to start delivering these insights to you. We're going to say hey here's how much you used, here's why you used it. Here's how much you used relative the people around you. Here's some tips to really change that. We're going to link you out to all this content I've been talking about that we've been developing, and are really really proud of. That's another way. We have a surprise and delight campaign. We'll just send people smart tech. We just sent people LED light bulbs and said here's a bright idea, put this in your home. It's for free, it's because we love you as a customer. We do a lot of surprise and delight things of that nature. The list goes on, but those are a few good examples.

Suzanne: I'm one foot out the door to Philadelphia right now. I'm not a big Flyers fan or winter fan, for that matter, but ...

Andrew: Winter's overrated.

Suzanne: I like what you guys are doing.

Andrew: Yeah. It's one of those things where people have taken it for granted for so long that they had to work with the utility. They had to have this terrible experience. They had to not have any transparency into why they're using energy and it's surprising and refreshing that someone's thinking about a different option.

Suzanne: Tell us about a time where you really messed up or you had to learn the hard way about learning on the job. You thought oh, okay that's what product management is, oops.

Andrew: That's a great question. I don't have a specific example in mind, but the symptom that comes to mind is when product tries to eat the rest of the organization. Product feels like look, we have all the answers, we're the vision people. We're the roadmap people. Line up behind us to do your jobs. I think that in a lot of organizations it works that way. Inspire, being such a young company and being such a complex market and having such strong technical capabilities, and such strong data analytics capabilities, the process is truly more collaborative than I think you'd see elsewhere. I think a huge learning experience for me has been, as we develop product processes and really re-position ourselves to be a product driven organization, has been this isn't going to be the product show.

This is going to be product humbly working in the background to get the right people in the right room to have the right discussions. To arm the right people with the right data and the right resources to get the job done. Being a product driven organizations industry was a big, splashy, new idea. At the end of the day, the product's role is set a vision, set a roadmap, be thoughtful about that, develop that in coordination with the right stakeholders. Then get out of the way and let people do their jobs and be the oversight in coordination function, by and large. That's been the learning curve for our business. I think it's ended at a really or has evolved to and is continuing to evolve to a place where it's extremely collaborative. I think everyone feels a great deal of ownership. That's super important to us as a product organization, and to us as a company.

Suzanne: Humble product management.

Andrew: Yeah. I think so.

Suzanne: From your friends at Inspire.

Andrew: Yeah. You read about places like Facebook, in the early companies they were really product driven and we're really empowering their engineers to run the show. You can get this sense of wow, product is it. Product is the future. Product is the big ideas. Yes and no, sometimes maybe. In reality, I think, at Inspire at least, it's a facilitator for a broader collaboration.

Suzanne: Right. I can't tell if what we do is really really cool or really, really boring. Maybe it's okay.

Andrew: It's okay that it's boring, embrace the boredom. Embrace the slide decks. You just have to there's no way around it. I'm not technical. I don't come from a technical back ... I come from a sort of technical energy background, but not a software development background. I've had to eat humble pie a lot on hey can you please tell me what this thing means. I'm trying to help you build a data product, but you're going to need to inform me about the basics. I can't write SQL and you're going to have to give me a helping hand here. There was a lot of ... I think it's informed by the people you have in the company too.

Suzanne: What's inspirational as well about that is for anybody who's listening, certainly for anybody who's listening and thinking I love energy. They should probably come and talk to you about getting a job.

Andrew: We have a few jobs open for sure.

Suzanne: Okay. I think also, for anybody who's listening in and doing a little self audit about their skills to know that there are companies out there where product is absolutely a role. And that that role can look very different. That that role can embrace you if you're not technical, and if that's not even what drives you. There's a place for you.

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