Human Centered

Hi, everyone, and welcome to human centered. I'm Nick Brunker, a managing director of experience strategy at VML and your host for the show. Thanks for giving us a listen. Today, we're tackling a challenge many organizations face, delivering a truly seamless and consistent customer experience across every touch point. In an era of high customer expectations, success requires more than just a great app or even a functional website.

It demands a holistic approach. Our guest today is an expert in why business can no longer afford to treat mobile apps, web platforms, in store experiences all as separate entities. And he's here to discuss the critical need for building unified product strategies. I'm so thrilled and thankful to welcome in Eric Haines, our managing director of technology, mobile apps, and product management at VML. He recently shared his insights on this very topic in EXP Magazine, and we are so excited to dive deeper with him.

Eric, thank you so much for taking the time. Welcome.

Thank you, Nick. Appreciate it. Glad to be here.

Yes, of course. As we get into it, we're going to talk about a lot of things that you covered in that article. Great piece. We're gonna link to it in our show notes. But before we dive in, love to hear more about your your background and your product strategy, expertise.

And and again, let's think about your journey and how you got here. What experiences in technology, mobile apps and product management have shaped your perspective on the importance of these strategies?

George, I'd like to think of my career journey in a couple of chapters. You know, coming out of college, I grew up in Rhode Island and went down to Philadelphia for school, Temple University, Go Owls, and graduated from school and was sticking around in Philly and really had the grinded out chapter, mostly in sales and advertising sales like that. You know, an opportunity to thicken my skin, so to speak, right, in that job and series of jobs. Worked for a newspaper, really was a subway rag at that time called The Metro. That was really something that took off in Philadelphia and had some success.

But you know, when that chapter started to close and knew I wanted to move back to Rhode Island, I started what I call my startup chapter in life. So I had hooked up with an investor. He had recently sold a number of industrial parks in the Boston area. And as a side project, had decided to buy the rights for a product of one of his childhood friends. And that product was called Thumb Caddy.

And Thumb Caddy was developed by an old Boston cop of all things and a guy that played golf all of his life. And like most of us who play golf, including myself, fought the course on the right side for us right handers. And so we had a series of lessons. Finally, one day the pro told him that the only way, his name was Walter, said Walter, the only way that you're going to be able to hit the ball straight is if you duct tape your hands to the club. So they laughed it off and

Literally, yes.

They laughed it off. Literally, yeah. So they laughed it off and Walter went home and sure enough duct taped his hands to the club in his garage, took some swings and said, Well, there's something to this. And found an old piece of PVC pipe. And cut the PVC pipe so it gripped his thumb in the right place because his thoughts were, Well, I can't go to the golf course and duct tape my hands to the club every time.

So I got to figure out how to do this consistently. So that's where Thumb Caddy was born. So Ralph, who was the investor, I was employee number two at that point, myself and Ralph and Walter was the inventor and the mind behind the and the passion behind the product. And we had some great success today. It was a fun time.

I think we chose the wrong time to be in the golf business. It was 2008, I think, and signed our incorporation papers just as they announced the recession. But anyways, that chapter really gave me a base in startup and understanding all the facets of any business, regardless of its technology in general or anything. We had opportunity to do some nationwide sort of infomercial shoots with some golf pros in Florida and would run a series of advertising through Boston Red Sox games, which was a big draw for amateur golfers, what we were going through. So that was a fun chapter, but really started my passion for startup overall.

At that time, I was living back in Rhode Island and started to date my now wife, but girlfriend at the time and lost the battle on who was going to move, whether she was coming up to Rhode Island or I was going back down to Philadelphia where she was. And a true gentleman, I lost that battle and moved back to Philadelphia. And had to start overs to an extent because I couldn't stay with Global Golf. And they were sort of getting towards the end of what they wanted to do as Ralph as a side project. So I knew I wanted to be in startup, but I wanted to make a shift out of golf and into technology.

So I had briefly taken a job with a group called the Creative Group, which was a recruiting agency in Philadelphia. Not what I wanted to do, but I saw it as an opportunity to learn the landscape in Philadelphia, the technology companies and specifically sort of the high growth technologies at that point. I was able to do that for a year and landed myself my own job out of a recruiting firm with a company called Rumble. Rumble was an Israeli startup that had a SaaS platform really built on Xamarin of all things at that point for publishers. So a lot of success with the newspaper holding companies like Gannett, right, and those types of things.

So USA Today. But employee number seven, I think, Rumble that grew to just over a 100, but really started to give me an opportunity to work side by side with the development team as we created the product, not only for the apps themselves, but also the dashboard and web interface for the operating teams at the holding companies to execute on. So a love for technology and sort of a technologist in disguise to an extent in those early days, right, is learn to walk the walk with the developers more than anything else and then got a lot of great experience. And that turned into another job with another Israeli startup. This was video focused.

They had a creation tool and would license assets from the APs and Reuters of the world and spent another four years with them. And at that point started a family and decided that the startup space was maybe not the best place to have two daughters that were fourteen months apart and wanted to find a little bit something or something a little bit more beholden to that lifestyle and landed at the time, which was Possible Mobile. So Possible Mobile was under the WPP umbrella and started my career with now VML. So it's been six years and four different names and it's been a blast. So this is what what I would describe as my my stability and and but but technology focused chapter in in my career.

That's awesome. And we talk about the core challenge of of the the theme today, and it is trying to connect all of those dots. You've seen obviously many different, iterations of technology come over the years. And, from your vantage point and all the places you've touched both in like the smaller startup space all the way through, you know, some significantly large organizations, now that you're with VML and and worked with Possible Mobile and others. Why do you think so many organizations still struggle with the disconnected nature of channels and treating those touch points differently and as separate entities?

Yeah. There's a lot of reasons. If I have to sort of generalize in three main pillars of that or three main buckets for where I think folks fail. The first one being organizational, right? Their organizational structure is most companies are still organized around channels or functions, right, rather than customer journeys.

So you have a mobile team, a web team, an in store team. They all have different budgets. They have different goals. They have different success metrics. And so it's not malicious in what they're trying to set up.

It's just how the business has evolved. That's number one. Second is really the legacy systems and technical debt that comes from the journey of transformation. And we look all the way back to, you know, February, things started to take off on how they've adapted. You know, many organizations have either built their mobile apps on one platform, their websites on another, their in stores on another.

And that was opportunistic, probably budget friendly at that time really what they could get to market, particularly when we look at the mobile side and in store for those. Well, website was a bit more mature at that point. But so they were built at different times, right? All of these platforms are built at different times by different vendors and with different priorities. So connecting all of those as a single ecosystem is a significant investment of time, of money, it's tough to wrangle.

And the third, I think, which is most interesting to me, is just the measurement and incentives of all of it. So if the mobile team is bonus for app engagement and the web team is bonus for site conversions and the store team is bonus for in person sales, you know, what behavior are we incentivizing within an organization? So you're literally, quite literally rewarding the silos that exist in in those organizations.

Ultimately, when businesses operate without a unified strategy, when they're on kind of their own playbooks, what are the key opportunities they might be missing in terms of leveraging data and resources effectively?

Yeah. So if you look at that structure alone, right, in those three buckets, just even from an incentive perspective, you're really missing out on is a view of the entire customer journey. Right? One of the impactful things for me as my career has progressed, but really has shaped my thinking about how do we break down the silos is seeing just that how the data flows. Or more importantly, doesn't flow between teams.

So we have mobile developers that are building features based on app analytics and the web teams building based off of site data. And neither has visibility into the customer journey holistically. And that's the missed opportunity. I think that's where folks can and organizations can really capitalize in understanding that consumers are not concerned with their channel or where they're sort of bucketed within your data. They are outcomes based.

So whether that happens on web, whether that happens on mobile, whether it happens in store, you have to meet them where they are and where they're looking to, where they're looking to execute, whether that's a sale or or a conversion, and and less about what channel they're in.

How can mobile effectively serve as an anchor for an omnichannel strategy and complement other platforms rather than just existing as a standalone product?

Yeah. So if we think about mobile as as it's not just another channel. It it's sort of the remote control for that customer relationship. It carries the richest behavioral data and enables real time personalization across all those touch points.

And a unified product strategy seems to begin with that deep understanding of the customer journeys. You talked about being outcomes based. What does this involve for teams? For example, mapping out every interaction point, ensuring consistency across touch points like push notes, web checkouts, in store experiences. Tell tell me a little bit more about that.

My challenge frequently to to clients of ours and and in general is is to think of things a differently than most typically do, which is the first step in that typical journey is for them to map their internal process and then try to fit customers into those, right? So a lot of the times that's a square peg into a round hole. So where we've seen success with folks as we create this journey of transformation for them is to start to break it into three areas, right? So the emotional journey for the user. So rather than start with your internal processes, how do we map the customers back into their journeys and then identify around it?

So the first would be the emotional journey. What are they trying to accomplish? To the earlier point, where is the user at this particular time and what are they trying to accomplish? The second is the behavioral. So their behavioral journey is what are they trying to accomplish to that goal, right?

So what piece of their emotion has now prompted some type of behavior? And then the last piece would be the operational journey. So this is where the existing processes come into play from the organization. Think about how or what data is transferred in those moments between the emotional and the behavioral and maybe even the more transactional. But what data is transferred in those moments?

What gets lost and what could be better, both for the user, both both from a a data integrity's perspective, and and start there, rather than the other way around.

You segue perfectly to my next question about what is involved in effectively collecting, analyzing, and acting on data from every channel to tailor experiences at best in real time?

I think this can really come down to the action that we take on the data, right? So most folks are drowning in data but starving for insights, right? So we all know and have encountered any number of clients or friends in the industry or just in general that say, gosh, we have so much and no idea what to do with it. So I'm going to oversimplify a little bit, but I'm hoping this probably makes the answer a bit shorter for you so you have less to edit. But, you know, let's try to collect with purpose, right?

So now more than ever, individuals, customers, users are more careful and far more educated with their data or what they are giving up in exchange. So let's identify context in their flow by or browsing as the example and start with that, right? And justify what that value exchange is with the user for why you're going to request their email address in your app or website and what that unlocks for them, right? So if we take the second step and want to analyze for patterns, we've collected with purpose, we've understood and portrayed to the users what value we are exchanging with them and why we're collecting their data. And let's instead analyze for patterns of their behavior.

So if we're searching for running shoes on the web and move to purchase athletic wear in store, we should signal something, right? That it's not just about a pair of running shoes or athletic wear. What are we unlocking for the user to understand their behavior a bit more? And then the last step would really activate on that data. So we've collected with purpose.

We've analyzed for patterns. With both of those pieces, let's activate in real time. So regardless of the touch point or the location, we go back to the original point on the app team building for app, the web team building for web, in store building for web or in store. Let's remove those barriers and those channels, and activate for the user, in in the moment of need for them and meet them where they are.

Let's shift to operational alignment because a lot of this stuff, to your point, is is not necessarily about doing things, individually in silos differently. It's about reorganizing the culture, way these organizations work together, and then creating a path forward. So let let's start with a cultural shift. Achieving this level of integration is far beyond the tech. And I would be curious, what does it mean for organizations to truly break down the internal silos by fostering the genuine cross functional collaboration you're saying, and I think rightly so, is gonna be required to achieve the outcomes you want?

I'll oversimplify it again, but sometimes or many times, it's simply about taking the first step forward in this journey. So, you know, we rarely have folks that come to us and say, I need an organizational wide transformation. We aren't thinking about our data in the right way. We aren't thinking about our user journey in the right way. It's small incremental steps to get there.

Maybe we understand the goal at the end of the day, but we can't tackle that problem in a single brief or a single scope to move forward. And sometimes it's identifying a single journey. So if we look at in store purchase and say, let's organize ourselves around the in store purchase and understand how we can start to build and start to create efficiency in what we're doing. And then that starts to become a bit more collective to the group. If we can identify success on a small scale and start to expand that out to others and define our ways of working, define communication.

And really that can be as simple as just communication because we have within these silos the constant issue of folks simply not talking to each other. And sometimes it can just be not just picking up a phone, but let's get folks in a room and let's start talking about what we wanna accomplish.

So when we talk about leaders role in all of this and building out the idea of one customer, one experience, how can leadership effectively move things forward and and change the mindset to really foster that cross functional collaboration and encourage teams to share goals and insights and KPIs? Because I would imagine it's gonna take somewhat of a gravitational force from above to be able to to pull all of these largely and sometimes separate organizational pillars together and swim in the same direction. What what have you done with the leaders you've worked with to help coach them on those outcomes?

There's a there's a quote that I I like to think about here, and it it was probably in in everybody's high school yearbook at some point when they signed it off for the end of the summer. It's be the change you wanna see. Right? And I think it rings true here because the the biggest shift is moving from a leadership perspective. And we think about it in the frame of those silos that exist, right?

Whatever those touch points are or those channels is from protecting your turf. So the immediate response sometimes is, well, that's not my problem or didn't originate on app. It's a web problem. And let's shift that mindset to serving the customer. So regardless of where they are in our organizational framework, they're still our customer and it shouldn't matter to us where they are in that journey.

So let's aim to serve them and that starts to trickle down. And that's simply a mindset. It doesn't cost anybody any money. It doesn't take any time. It's just a mindset for how we move forward.

So I've seen sort of brilliant technical integrations fall because still teams will still compete instead of collaborate.

So in terms of some of the the high and hard ones for methodology, how would you say these leaders and ultimately the teams they're they're working with and and working on, to develop the approaches like agile or regular workshops or joint planning sessions. What are the sorts of things that that leaders can do to ensure that there is alignment and give them the space, give the teams the space to iterate quickly on this shared vision that hopefully they're pulling together.

You know, agile works. We all know that. And everybody has heard that word millions of times over the past decade or so, right? But it works because the root of agile in a lot of this is just forcing regular touch points and the opportunity for teams and organizations to share goals, right? So instead of having quarterly planning sessions where everybody and their individual teams put together a roadmap and their quarterly plan.

They come to the session and they present their roadmap. This is what we are going to do as .com, and this is what we are going to do as mobile app. We want to create joint sprints and joint communication and collaboration focused on the customer moments that we've already spent enough time talking about and organize around that. So how are we collectively as an organization, putting the user first and creating a roadmap that will serve those touch points rather than our own structure?

One build or or follow-up question on that. In there, I would assume there's gonna be some tension anytime that you're working through breaking down silos, healthy or unhealthy depending on the maturity of the organization and saying, wait a minute. You're gonna try to to change kind of the the path forward. I'm not gonna be necessarily in charge of my own domain anymore, but it's it's like to make a decision in your own silo is much easier than trying to say, alright, for the benefit of the customer, we need to bring this org together. I need to collaborate with this other organization who as you mentioned earlier, kind of have their own benefits, to go after and the bonuses outcomes to achieve.

How do you wrestle with the tension both in your work on on client side and then now as an agency leader getting through that tension or working with leaders to get through the tension of how can we get out of the mindset of, alright, what's in it for me and pull the groups together so that there is kind of a a collective work forward and a path forward versus that natural, I just gotta worry about my own thing right now. How do you wrestle with that?

The first point is to start small, right, is is because if you try to enact change or or really force down change at such a wide scale that it's very difficult for for any one group to start to achieve success when when you have too many balls up in the air like that, you know, sort of classic saying. And we're just trying to we're trying to juggle too much. And and it can be expensive to do it that way. It can be time consuming it time consuming to do it that way and just doesn't work. So we love to start small in our goals because it's sort of a collective momentum, right?

If we can see a team or a journey that is operating more efficiently and having more success and seeing the level of stress that is relieved when things are going well, it sort of gets the ball rolling and others will become interested and want to understand how we're doing things. We can use this sort of organic momentum to spread through the organization. So it's no longer about you are now doing this, right? It is, oh, we are collectively interested in what other teams are doing and why they're having success and allowing us to move forward, right? So we've seen enough.

The hotter piece over the last couple of years is a safe transformation and scaled agile, right, for large organizations. And where we've seen that struggle while we believe in it and we've been successful in those is the strategy immediately to say, we're making sweeping changes across the entire organization and this is what you're doing without justification as to the why. So it's really about taking a step back on helping the teams understand why seeing this or forcing this change. Suggesting this change is probably a better word. You know, I always think about this.

This may not be relevant, but I love the game of craps in the casino. And so not sure if anybody out there is a gambling person or not, but craps is the only table in the casino wherever everyone is playing against the house, right? So any individual or team win, regardless of how folks are playing, is a win for us all. And I kind of like to look out of it in that mindset. It's like if we are starting to improve even a single journey, that's a win for all of us, right?

Because we can become more efficient and we can create more to our example upfront and in store transactions, right? If that is our focus, that trickle down starts to hit every team. And then we build momentum for folks who want to join this new journey.

I think it's really interesting that that's a great analogy. And the other thing that I think is a wildcard in some of this, a bit of a a sidebar, like, build on that is the, you know, injection of everybody's favorite buzzword or buzz letters, AI. And when you're building these strategies, you know, and getting people together, when we're talking cross channel, in your let's just call it the last eighteen months as AI has really started to to to pick up speed in in pretty much every territory of our marketing lives. How is AI and all of the advancing technologies at which, of course, the speed is crazy? How's that impacting how you think about planning these channels together, working collectively to bring bring everybody together and overcoming silos?

Is it helping? Is it hurting? Is it is it kind of a a combo? What's your perspective on that?

Like any new technology, AI is is different. I remember the days of the first Android phones, I remember the days of Possible Mobile before I was there had started to cut their teeth because I think they were one of the first 10 apps in the App Store when it was released. So we have a lot of great stories of that transition. But when I look at the pace of how quickly that moved and at that time in that window, it felt really, really fast. And Apple and Google did so much for us as mobile developers and as a development team of upgrading their operating systems every year.

It was sort of like a built in scope of work that came laid flat on our table and said, You have to do this or the apps are not going to work properly, which we greatly appreciated back in those days. And it felt really fast. And the difference that I see in AI is that pace is incredible. And it's week to week and sometimes day by day within any week, have massive change and massive releases from any of the big players or the challengers or wherever it is. So I think that the pace is the biggest challenge to me because you have organizations that will always move slow, right?

If we look at the digital transformation over the past twenty years, we still have folks coming out of the fray on that, right?

And

to keep pace with where AI is, I think it's doing some good. And I think it's doing some bad. And it's probably doing some things that we don't know yet because it's moving so quickly that we really understand it. Where I feel the opportunity is and where I think folks are going to succeed in all of this is being able to harness the predictive nature or predictive unlock that AI gives us, right? We talked upfront about the overload of data that everybody has and the ability to cleanse that data, analyze the patterns for how our users are moving.

AI is a huge unlock in being able to do that and do that quickly and will assist us. The challenge is again to a previous point on the protective nature for individuals and how we're using data now. And so the real unlock, and I think where folks are going to accelerate, are the organizations that can properly detail and focus their value exchange with their users for why they're using their data the way that they are, which gives the user the the calm to to hand it over, because it's harder and harder to harness that data or collect that data with with sort of the the wool pulled over their eyes like you could ten or fifteen years ago. It just doesn't happen anywhere. So That's crazy.

That's crazy. One one but pulling that thread a little bit more too because I think as you you go into the idea of what is really value exchange that somebody's gonna look at and say, yeah, that's worth it. You know, the amount of data that's now available comparative to even well, give me your email and I'll give you this, you know, white paper or whatever it was. I'm make making that up off the top of my head. But the amount of actual, granular level data, the locations data, you think about in the health space biometric data.

As somebody who's of coaching marketers across different areas of business, how do you think about really digging into what's a real value exchange and what are the tier levels of alright. You you want my email, that's gonna be, you know, a a tier zero value versus you wanna measure my biometrics? That's like a a tier seven ten, whatever I'm making up the numbers. But how do you think about when we're working through some of those discussions with with leaders? How should they be thinking about it?

And and how should they be, quantifying the different levels of of value exchange as you move from very generalized data to super, super specific data?

Looking at those user journeys. Right? If we start to organize ourselves around those sort of value creation moments in any of this and meeting our users where we are, I think we need to make a shift from collecting as much data as possible and focusing our view or our goal to collect only the data that unlocks our motivations or our goals in what we're trying to do. Because folks again are tired and there's a great amount of fatigue. And hey, every site you go to now, it's your cookie request, right?

And everybody dismisses those. And now every app you download has to ask you, can this app track you across different apps when you're on your phone, right? And everybody says no to that. So we've seen a natural shift over the past decade of losing track of customers. And it even started before that with anonymizing data to an certain extent, which is easily matched back and forth.

And we found a way to that. So you have to create a small scope for yourselves of what you want to collect and ensure that that data is serving a specific need. And I think when you connect those two to say, I'm going to collect this for this reason, it allows the product or in store reps or whoever it may be that's interacting, whatever that interaction layer is with our users, to detail that exchange much more easily. So in the case of your white paper example, Hey, give me your email. And ten years ago folks were like, Yeah, share your email.

I have enough of love and I never check it. Now it's a main source of communication for folks. So why am I asking for that? Well, I'm asking for that because I want to understand who you are. So if you have questions about this white paper and want to interact more or interested in the product that we're trying to sell or trying to promote, then we have that.

And I think narrowing the scope of what we're collecting to meet the goals that the organization is trying to accomplish allows us to demonstrate that value exchange to the users much easily.

Tying it back to the, you know, purpose of the episode, it's it's getting back to the human need when you're trying to build an experience out across channel and being in a position to say, well, what what are your needs? What are your jobs to be done? What are the outcomes you're looking to drive? Well, here, let me let me show you how I can, as the business or brand, answer those questions for you. And in order to best do that, I'm going to need or would be benefiting by getting your email or whatever.

And I think it comes back to really just again, reframing your mind around what does the customer really need to accomplish their objectives. And are we doing our self a service with all the data we might be able to collect by a gathering it, b communicating the value I'm gonna give you back as a result. I think it's fascinating. Before we run out of time, I'd love to to switch gears and as we do in many of our episodes, switch off the clock a little bit to talk about Eric when he's not doing mobile apps and channel planning and all that fun stuff. So what keeps you busy when you're not working?

Number one, I have I have two daughters and a lovely wife. My daughters are five and six, soon to be six and seven. They're fourteen months apart. So they have the line down of, are you girls twins? Because they look very much like it.

And they say in unison, no, we're Irish twins. So life for us right now is sort of serving their needs. As much fun as I have in navigating technology and navigating transformation for our clients, those two a piece of work and keep me up my toes and keep me busy. And they're hysterical. So we base our lives outside of the office and just creating moments for us as a family that we're going to remember and keep those two laughing and they keep us laughing.

That's the biggest piece for us. But at the same time, have other interests. Like to play golf. I like to read. I like to work out.

I like to fish. Those are, you know, those are all things that that I enjoy. Growing up in Rhode Island, if if I didn't love the ocean and I didn't love to fish, I don't I don't think they let me back in the state.

Do you have any good fishing stories? Everybody actually had one or at least two.

You gotta have you gotta have one. Right? Right. We can we could make up We could make up a number of them, but this is a true story. So I was down, we used to vacation in Florida when I was a kid.

And I was the youngest out of all my cousins. So my dad and my uncles and my older cousins, we'd all take a day in those weeks. We're in Siesta Key, Florida and go out to the Gulf Of Mexico and do some fishing for the day. And that particular day, everybody caught so many fish in the morning that by lunchtime, they said, well, our arms are tired. I'm ready to go home.

And me as a rational 10 year old boy burst into tears because I had caught no fish. And so my dad had to navigate with my uncles and my cousins who are, at this point, the cousins were at least 16 or 17. And my uncles and my dad had probably having beer since 8AM when we left the dock. And instead of going home and celebrating at lunch, I got to let my 10 year old have a few more casts so he can hopefully catch a fish. So they let me have a couple casts and we got out there and and got hooked up on a fish.

And we had the captain that ran up to the tuna tower, and he's looking over. And he starts to get really excited and putting a lot of pressure on 10 year old Eric to be careful with this fish where, you know, that wasn't really concern for anybody up until now. Yeah. And finally gets closer to the boat and he's like, oh, it is. It is.

And it's a it's a blackfin tuna. So we were there in April. Yeah. And apparently, blackfin tuna don't run there in in April. Newer do 10 year old kids catch, you know, a 36 pound black fin tuna.

So I held held, and I haven't checked that in a long time, but I held a Florida state record for under 16 of the largest black fin tuna for for quite Now some

this is me showing my my ignorance in terms of fishing. So shame on me for one, but pardon me for two. Did you get to eat the fish? Did you actually, like, reel it in and make food out of it? Or was it, I got it all

Funny on the you asked because I I was actually just talking about this with my dad the other day. You know, it's my dad's my dad's 75. So one of his favorite pastimes is sending around pictures of of us when we were kids. And he happened to send this picture to me last week. He's like, You know, the biggest mistake we made in that was we got the fish in, took it on boat.

We agreed that we were going to get stuffed, so I was going to be able to take it home, right? And never asked for the tuna meat So from the I realized we got home that night and everybody's telling the story. And they're like, Well, where's all the meat? And we're like, Oh my God, we never asked for it. So the guys at the dock had a had an absolute buffet of of free tuna, on on on the backs of a 10 year old Eric.

Yeah. And and, hopefully, at that we haven't checked yet, but a still record holding 10 year old

We'll see. You know? And that was a that was a long time ago. So I I I can't imagine that it still exists, but but it's, I'll I'll be curious to check it out.

The fact that you held a record at any point is is impressive, especially considering you were, like, what, minutes away from just being off the boat entirely. Like, I'll just go back to the dock. That's great.

That's right. It it the day really could have ended in me just crying for an hour on the way back to the dock. But luckily, I have a a decent family member group, and and they allowed me a few more casts.

That is fantastic. Thank you so much for the fantastic discussion today. I I think it's a challenge back to the the topic du jour that a lot of businesses have top of mind. And, I know it was a really fascinating read in eXp Magazine and, and a great conversation today. Thanks a lot.

Appreciate it, Nick. It was great to be here and and enjoy the time as well.

To our listeners too, you can read more, as I mentioned, Eric's insights in that article on eXp Magazine. We've put it into the show notes, so the link is there, and you can check it out on vml.com where you can also learn about our process and our approach to the work and technology and product strategy. Great stuff on there, and we certainly hope that you, give us a look there. We'd also love to hear your feedback on the show. Please rate us wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Amazon, and more.

If you have a topic idea or just wanna connect with us, you can reach out to me on social media at Nick Brunker, or you can email the show. The address is humancentered@VML.com. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Hi.