Internal Enablement and Async Communication | Brittany Soinski, Loom

Ken Babcock:

All right, hello everyone. Welcome to the Tango Podcast. I'm super psyched to share that we have Brittany Sawinski of Loom with us today. Brittany, thanks for joining us.

Brittany Soinski:

Thanks for having me, Ken. I'm really excited to have this conversation. Thanks for the opportunity.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, it's going to be fun. And, uh, just to set the stage for our audience, uh, just a little bit about Brittany, uh, for the past nine years. Brittany's been serving as a trusted advisor to several CS organizations. She has a passion for building, uh, customer onboarding programs from the ground up and that's both external customers that are, you know, starting their use of a product like Loom, but it's also, you know, she has a passion for internal enablement. which we'll talk about in the podcast too. And what I think has been really cool in getting to know Brittany is hearing a lot about her very tactical projects that she's taken on, re-architecting the sales to CS handoff process, creating a comprehensive change management toolkit, and being sort of this voice for what customer onboarding means at Loom, and helping customers just be successful, which I think is sort of the end goal. So I know there's a lot that I didn't mention. I'm excited to kind of share more with our audience and the questions that we have. But before we get into that, we have to start with some really core questions,

Brittany Soinski:

Oh boy.

Ken Babcock:

which, you know, we'll do them in sort of rapid fire fashion. I won't go deeper than, you know, sort of the surface level, but we'll start with. What are the three software products that you cannot live without right now?

Brittany Soinski:

All right, you know, I tried to avoid chadgbt, but I just keep going back to it. It's here to stay. So that's definitely pinned to my toolbar and a favorite. Loom, of course, which is where I work. I could never find myself sending a long email. Again, it's way quicker for me to just send a loom. And I still find myself using a mural quite a bit. Sorry, my nose is running. Can I start that question again? All right, your question.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brittany Soinski:

Okay.

Ken Babcock:

What are three software products you can't live without?

Brittany Soinski:

I am a sucker for chat GPT. I tried to not love it, but unfortunately it's here to stay in my toolkit. So that is a favorite. Loom, of course, I work here, but I am also a huge fan of being able to record videos and avoid meetings. Anytime we can avoid a meeting is awesome. And I previously worked at Mural, which is a digital whiteboard, and I use that a ton, especially in enablement. in order to really effectively visually communicate. So those are my three favorites at the moment.

Ken Babcock:

Love it. Communication is sort of like underpinning all, all three

Brittany Soinski:

True.

Ken Babcock:

of those. Um, this is going to be a great conversation then. And then what's the most underrated ops role or function? I mean, ops means so many different things across companies. Like where do you see ops, you know, maybe not being recognized enough or, um, you know, ultimately owning something that you think might live elsewhere, but it just, it just falls to somebody else.

Brittany Soinski:

I think what I've seen as kind of a theme from working with smaller organizations, mid-stage organizations, and even larger organizations is often internal enablement. It's kind of pushed to the side and undervalued, and I'm excited for us to talk today about why I think it should actually be the opposite and why that is such a important role that's super underrated.

Ken Babcock:

It's so interesting that, and I agree with you, that it often becomes devalued, but it's so fascinating to me because so much of building a company is also about deciding, how are we going to build a product for our customers? How are we gonna approach this? What are all these internal operations that's gonna allow us to deliver a great product experience? And sometimes you lose sight of that. Once you have a critical mass of customers, and you tend to just focus externally, but... how you learn, how you work has such an impact on those customers that I think sometimes really cite of that.

Brittany Soinski:

And I think where people might start to recognize that pain is as the teams continue to grow in scale and you're bringing on new team members and you, the functional leader, is having to train the new hires on how to sell your product or support your product. And I think that's kind of the light bulb moment where it's like, you know, enablement is a special learned skill. It's not for everybody. And it's really hard to kind of change from like the strategy mindset in leadership to like training and enablement and doing so effectively.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah. Scaling yourself, scaling your team. Um, we'll, uh, we'll keep with the sort of rapid fire nature. I know we could go down a rabbit hole with that one, but the last question, which is critical, we ask every tango team member this question in their first week. Where would you go in a zombie apocalypse?

Brittany Soinski:

I don't know why this came to mind, but I am obsessed with the TV show, Lost. I know it's like been a long time, but I just re-binged watched it all seven seasons of it. And each season has like 25 episodes. So it was a commitment, but I just really want to visit the Lost Island. And I feel like that would be a safe space for me to go if the zombies should take over.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, I mean, it was a safe, it was a safe space for, I won't give out any spoilers, I guess, on loss,

Brittany Soinski:

project.

Ken Babcock:

but it was a safe space for those people to be in that moment, because no one could find them.

Brittany Soinski:

Exactly. Lost.

Ken Babcock:

That's great, that's great. So you're, you know, it sounds like you're, you're avoiding the zombies. I will, I will say on the Tango team, we have a lot of people that are like, joining the zombies, which was totally unexpected, but they were like, why, why fight this? Why? live my life with the anxiety that a zombie's coming. Anyway, I digress.

Brittany Soinski:

I like that.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, yeah, it's a good, you know, it's a very matter of fact spirit. But thanks for playing along with those. You know, like I mentioned, I wanna dig into your experience specifically with onboarding, both the internal side as well as the external side. There's a ton that we can dig into here. And you know, what I wanted to start with is, You know, you, you'd mentioned a lot about some of these like sales, CS handoffs, um, the flywheel of feedback. You know, I, I felt like I was learning a lot when we were sort of preparing for this, um, but I want to go to a specific moment in time. So when you joined loom, uh, You sort of identified a need to kind of redo this program altogether. Like how do we create this, this feedback flywheel? How do we make sure that everyone who's got this touch point with a customer? And is, and is feeling those pain points directly can then surface that throughout the rest of the team. And, um, I can speak from our own experience at Tango. It's really hard because you like to pick and choose, you know, feedback based on your own biases. You love the effusive user love. Uh, you love surfacing that to the team, but maybe some of the harder stickier stuff, you're like, Ooh, I don't know if we can actually solve that. I don't know if I'm going to surface that. Um, so talk to me a little bit about your approach. why you, why you realize that was, that was something that needed to be solved, you know, right when you joined.

Brittany Soinski:

So even backing up a little before I joined Loom, something that I learned during my time at Mural, after I went through new hire onboarding, they said to everybody who completed onboarding, now your last task of onboarding is to go back and rebuild onboarding for the next person, which I think is a brilliant idea because it does a couple things. Not only does it have you, take what you have learned and now apply it. And we know in adult education, when we take something that we're just digesting and we're actually now applying it and then ultimately teaching somebody else how to do it, we're like really all of a sudden, now we're retaining like 90% of this information. So I thought that was just a brilliant thing to do. And when I did that at Mural, I had this light bulb moment go off and I said, wow, I really love being able to build onboarding programs and design onboarding programs and being able to step back and think about what do people need to know and in what order do they need to learn these things? So that's kind of how I came to this job at Loom and was really excited to start with this challenge here at Loom of building onboarding. And something that I did right at the beginning of my time at Loom. when you join a new organization and you're jumping in, it's not you know a brand new company, you're jumping in where there's already some processes built, there's already some programs built, people are already doing onboarding and you're kind of coming in day one like how do I not repeat things that have already been done? And something that I love doing is running something called a lightning decision jam. This is a great way to align everybody really quickly. and to gather all of that tribal knowledge in one place and in one hour, you can gather all of this and formulate a super crystal clear roadmap that's going to take you maybe six months to work on. And think of a sailboat diagram. I always love to use some kind of a visual diagram to help people understand rather than these kind of philosophical questions about where should onboarding go. So let's think of a sailboat diagram and you've got the sail in the front, you've got some wind in the back. So we have four quadrants, right? And in the quadrant where like the wind is pushing the sailboat forward, we start collecting sticky notes. We did this in a mural board. What is pushing us forward? What's the wind we need to make this boat go? So this might be things that, you know, we have today that are propelling onboarding to go really well. And we have a sail in the front, you know, what's pulling us forward? So what are the things that we're already doing well that are helping this ship to go? You have an anchor at the bottom. What is holding us back? Let's identify anything that we need to like unhook this anchor from. And the last quadrant is under the water in front of the sailboat. Or what are some things that might lie ahead that we might run into? You take all of those sticky notes and you kind of reframe them as problems and then solutions. And then I had everybody throw them onto a matrix, really simple matrix of impact and effort. I took the things that were the lowest effort, highest impact, and hey, that was the first three months of things that I focused on building.

Ken Babcock:

That's awesome. You know, and people are probably listening, they're going, well, what does a sailboat have to do with onboarding?

Brittany Soinski:

Hahaha

Ken Babcock:

But it's so valuable to have those, those visual frameworks, because it sort of breaks down these barriers to people sharing. I think that's one of the hardest things too, is you mentioned there's all this process that's established. There's all this inertia of everything that we've already done in the way that we've done it. Um, but without some of these like inviting frameworks or almost like. using the sailboat to disassociate from like the day to day. It's hard to get that feedback from people. So how did you, how did you sort of enable those teams to continue to share that feedback and continue to think about, Hey, this is iterative. We want to make this better

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

over time. Similar to your onboarding and mural. How do we just continue to make this better?

Brittany Soinski:

I think it's really helpful in any sort of role like this where you're going to be building and enabling to anchor in some kind of framework because it can get really challenging to keep organized and be tempted to, you know, move in kind of all different directions. So pick a framework, whether this be human centered design, an agile framework. I personally like the human centered design framework as this is all about empathy, designing for humans. designing for your audience. And the beauty of that framework is that the end, the tail end of that, beyond like ideating and then executing is actually gathering feedback and iterating. You're kind of giving yourself permission from the beginning that, you know, we're gonna ideate on all these things, we're gonna execute these things, but then we're gonna circle back and make sure we're actually solving the issue. And by iterating things and focusing on making it design well for the people who you're designing it for, it creates this really nice feedback loop where people want to share their feedback because they know it's actually informing a program that's designed for them.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah. And I think, I think one important thing too, that, that you touched on is it removes a little bit of the, the pride around, oh, you know, I defined this process or, you know, I defined the way that this thing is and instead it, it just acknowledges, Hey, this is going to change. I mean, I talk about that sometimes internally with our team too. If a meeting isn't working, it's like, okay, great. It worked

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

for a little while. Let's let's like totally revamp that leadership meeting or let's totally revamp

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah.

Ken Babcock:

this like cross-functional meeting. Because. If it's not working anymore, that's probably not a reflection of like what we said it was initially set out to do. It just, it serves a different purpose. And so as soon as you can like remove that pride from

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

the way that you iterate, you just, you iterate so much faster because it's less of like, Oh, that's broken. Let's point fingers. It's more, let's,

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah,

Ken Babcock:

let's just find a better way.

Brittany Soinski:

it's hard to remove that ego, isn't it? But it really just unblocks things if you're able to focus on, you know, no egos and ultimately best ideas win. And let's remove the blockers and just take the best ideas and put them into the next iteration.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, absolutely. Um, I want to switch gears a little bit. You know, I think you talked a little bit about customer onboarding. Um, let's talk about maybe not onboarding specifically, but getting the team up to speed, getting, getting your internal team, that internal enablement, that underrated function of the ops roles. Uh, that wasn't initially your responsibility. Uh, how did that become your responsibility? And then. you know, ultimately like, how did you see sort of common themes across what you're doing for customers, but also what you're doing for the intern.

Brittany Soinski:

That's a great question. And I think it's kind of a tale as old as time and a common thing that you've probably seen happen to Ken where if there's not a person designated to own enablement, it kind of falls to a lot of other people and maybe people who are building the programs. And when I joined Loom, my role was a little open-ended. It was, you know, come up with a strategy redesigning onboarding. And I said, okay, well, is this team going to own onboarding and lean onboarding or is this team gonna design onboarding and then be more of an enablement and ops role and enable the CSMs to run this role? And it was, you figure that out, you know, design a perspective and come up with a reason why one or the other. So I, you know, luckily got to kind of dip my toes in both. And I think kind of how I started doing more and more enablement is, you know, going back to that mural example of why it's so important to learn by doing. And since I was trying to learn these processes myself, I found that the best way to learn them was actually to build documentation for them. If I'm trying to learn a really difficult process that I need to be able to relate to customers or train my team to relate to customers, like setting up SSO and your SCIM provisioning. That can be intimidating to come into and to learn. So I said, you know what I'm gonna do is build a hub for those. I'm gonna build a written hub for these and walk through all of the pieces. And secretly it was actually for me because I didn't know how to do it and I needed to learn. But by doing that, it not only enabled others, but I got to learn it too. And what I love adding to those types of hubs as well, what I think is really important and leans into that human-centered design piece and the, you know, this document might not be final and we're going to iterate on it, is an FAQ section. And you kind of give yourself permission to keep asking questions day after day and as you learn more and more answers and this kind of tribal knowledge, you put them into that hub as FAQs, becomes this kind of living, breathing document. So I think because I was doing a lot of that. I just started leaning into more and more of this internal enablement for others.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, that's awesome. I totally agree with you that the moment you kind of switch from being a student to being the teacher, you're actually going to be learning more as the teacher because

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ken Babcock:

you're forced to not only communicate what you've learned, but do it in a way that's digestible and concise and consistent. And I think there's absolutely a ton of value in that. Let's go, let's talk a little bit about the documentation piece. You know, you mentioned this like context rich documentation, um, you know, as, as something that was going to, you know, secretly it was for you, but you were building

Brittany Soinski:

Hahaha.

Ken Babcock:

it for everybody else. What was at that moment in time, how would you describe kind of like the culture around documentation internally?

Brittany Soinski:

You know, I think like a lot of other organizations, there's kind of a lot of noise. And it wasn't that there wasn't documentation, but because there wasn't one person focused on centralizing documentation, it was hard to find documentation. And if you have good information, but you can't find it, it's not good information. And that's why I love the idea of a hub. And a lot of these resources I was creating weren't necessarily like net new documentation. They were just going back to, again, this human centered design. How can I make this make sense for somebody? If somebody wants to learn about how customer onboarding is done, what are the high level things they need to know? And in what order do they need to learn them? And it becomes really easy when you break down documentation today. you know, add some bullet points, who leads onboarding, how long is onboarding, you know, what are the decks I use in onboarding? And then you just have to find the information and slot them in. So it really makes it not too hard and allows you to take advantage of all the great work that came before you and just kind of be the organizer of it.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, the trust piece, you know, when people are searching for documentation and they, they find something that could be tangentially relevant, but. You know, maybe it was updated last, like over a year ago.

Brittany Soinski:

Ha ha ha.

Ken Babcock:

Um, maybe it was written by someone who's no longer at the company. Um, you know, and so all of a sudden, like you see areas where within documentation that trust can erode. So, um,

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

I think what you mentioned around ownership. centralization, being very clear about that. It's, it's super critical because like you said, you can have, you can cover all this surface area with your documentation and knowledge, but like, if it's fragmented and if it's not kept up to date, you know, it's almost like not having knowledge at all. Um, which is, which is pretty interesting.

Brittany Soinski:

It's even, I think, a challenge in organizations like ours where you might have internal knowledge and customer-facing knowledge. You know, the way we might talk about SSO to a customer, we might need to know some kind of things on the backend about how it actually works. So I like that in a hub also, kind of two columns and a column of internal-facing resources and customer-facing resources, but having them next to each other, I think is just a really simple. to helping your teams better support and talk about your product.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah. If you, I feel like you hold this pretty unique role, at least that I don't see in a ton of organizations where you're actually sort of straddling both the customer and the internal team and doing a lot of translation in between. I think. Often when you talk about, you know, building teams and orgs, you know, as people will think about things, that's either, oh, no, this is customer facing, or this is, you know, just sort of internal facing, um, in that world where people are sort of treating it as very binary. Like, why do you think that internal enablement, why does that get pushed to the wrong people and, and is the solution creating roles like yours, where there is someone who's sort of doing that translation and straddling the two, uh, the two stakeholders or, or is it something else?

Brittany Soinski:

So like we talked about in the beginning, I think that this role is often deprioritized and often misunderstood. Sometimes we think of an enablement role as just somebody to do training. And we're like, well, you know, we can have our PMMs do training or we'll have the managers do training. But there's a really specific skill set in order to effectively enable teams. You have to understand adult learning principles. You have to understand change management. and you have to understand the importance of allowing people a space to take what you're teaching them and execute on it. So I would really encourage teams to hire this role earlier on. Find somebody who has a strong project management skillset and you have to make sure you're giving this individual a seat at the table. And I think that is a key piece that's missing also. A good enablement partner should be sitting in on a lot of different meetings, kind of as the spokesperson for the different parts of the organization. You have to be able to take all of these knowledge and asks from different departments and filter it before you present it down to other teams. And I'll give you an example of, you know, my own role in enablement when I was working at Wrike. I started as a CSM there for several years and then I moved into an enablement role specifically for CS. And they did a really great job of giving me a seat at the table for these high level conversations. And they would say, okay, train the CSMs on this new OKR process, train them on this new product release that you have. You have to be able to project manage and know how to prioritize that. And you have to have, I think the respect. at that table to be able to push back and say, the team is overloaded right now, they're not going to digest this information right now. And making sure that every training and enablement meeting you have is a good one. And good information presented at the wrong time when a team is buried in something else can become lost.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah. Something you said there, which was, which was fascinating to me is like, in those meetings, you want to make sure that they're good, but you also want to make sure that people are digesting them. One thing that I've come to appreciate and building Tango is just both for the internal team and for our customers. It's like people actually process things at different speeds and different formats. And so, you know, when you talk about sort of legacy organizations and the way they approach enablement L and D. It's. It becomes very programmatic. It almost looks like a syllabus. There's all these

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah.

Ken Babcock:

training sessions in the moment, but sometimes that doesn't actually cater to, to everyone, uh, who's consuming it because some people like to say, Oh, I want to take the artifact. I want to spend some time with it before I can actually, you know, apply this. And I think that that's actually kind of an interesting transition to our next topic. We talked a lot about, you know, async communication, obviously loom is, uh, I would call it in the business of async communication. Um, you know, and really what that means is like helping people make better use of their time, helping the time that they do spend together, be more effective. Um, and you know, it's very clear that you and the Loom team have, have a very strong viewpoint on that. And so maybe help the audience understand like, why do people often get this wrong and what can we learn from? Loom and your team and how you spent time with customers to understand how we can fix async communication.

Brittany Soinski:

Oh, that is a really good question and a journey that I've been on myself for the past year working at Loom and truly starting to understand what async work really means and how it can actually be a helpful tool. I think async was kind of this buzzword that came up a lot, of course, during COVID when we are all thrown into our home offices and remote and hybrid. And it was like, okay, how can we make things more asynchronous? And there was this... misconception at the beginning, at least for me, that async work was about, you know, let's not have to have live meetings and let's be able to do things on our own. But that can translate dangerously into siloed work, and that you don't want. And async work should not mean siloed work or soloed work. I think where async becomes an actual helpful and powerful tool is when you are using it to enhance the lifetime you do have together. I think we need to be really clear with async work that async is meant to make your lifetime more productive. And so when customers come to Loom and they say, you know, we purchased this to reduce meetings. We like to dig a little deeper into that and say, you know, it's not necessarily to cancel all of your meetings. If you're in a customer facing role like we are, I wanna have more meetings and I wanna make sure the meetings I have are better meetings. How about instead of canceling the meeting, you send a pre-watch ahead of the meeting and you can infuse your tone, you can talk about the agenda, you can reduce your no show rate by doing this. And same way as in, you know, text based. documentation. Think about how tools like Tango and Loom can help people, you know, digest those better rather than just kind of replacing the live time. I hope live time isn't going away because I don't know about you Ken, but it's hard being remote and separated from people.

Ken Babcock:

Oh my totally. Yeah. I mean, look, we're spending some live time now, which is great. Um, no, it absolutely is. And I think, I think what you, what you talked about a little bit there is like making the most of that live time. We talked a little bit about, you know, when are those instances where you should use the loom and where are the instances where you shouldn't and there's absolutely value in live time. Maybe talk to us a little bit about. Just the frameworks that you use or the frameworks that you encourage customers with loom to use to understand like, okay, is this a moment where we're using loom? Or is this a moment where we're having a meeting? Cause I agree with you. Like the objective should not be. That's completely clear our schedule and just sort of sit alone and stare at our screen.

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah. Ha ha ha.

Ken Babcock:

It should be like, Hey, let's make the time we have together really, really productive.

Brittany Soinski:

think a really simple way to think about it is what I'm saying a one-way dissemination of information. Let's think of an example of an executive business review with a customer. So in CS these are notoriously challenging to get an executive in the room for this. We want to have this 60-minute conversation. We want to present you your metrics and paint this rosy picture. and then open it up for conversation about your account and renewal and things of that forth and so forth. It's hard to get people in the room for 60 minutes to have this conversation. So what you can do instead is ask yourself what part of this presentation is a one-way dissemination of information and move that async. Whether you're sending that in a loom or you're putting together some documentation or a tango, anything that you can just hand over to somebody to review. before the meeting. Now when we get on the meeting, we're already all on the same page. We know what we're here to talk about and we can just dive right into the conversation. We can probably shorten that meeting too and it's a lot easier asked to get an executive in the room for 20 to 30 minutes than it is 60.

Ken Babcock:

So it's really interesting you bring that up. We've been doing this with our board meetings since the beginning. So

Brittany Soinski:

Really?

Ken Babcock:

the deck goes out. Sometimes

Brittany Soinski:

Yep.

Ken Babcock:

it's accompanied with a loom actually.

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

And then the time that we do have together, which is very valuable. Also, I'd say very expensive time, just given

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah,

Ken Babcock:

the

Brittany Soinski:

it

Ken Babcock:

stakeholders

Brittany Soinski:

is.

Ken Babcock:

in the room. We're mainly focused on discussion points. Like here are the key discussion points. We'll tee those up a little bit too, but. Um, we offer the opportunity for anyone in the room to say, Hey, based on the pre-read based on the deck, based on the loom, what are, what should we be talking about? Um, and it, it always makes for a better conversation than, right. Let me pull up the deck. Let me talk at you for a little bit and maybe you can ask questions, but you're going to keep your eye on the clock and make sure that we're like pacing well. And yeah, so we, we stopped doing that all together and, and replace it with, with a loom, which is, which is awesome. Um, Are there moments where, you know, yes, you know, you're using loom to kind of support better use of live time, but are there things where, you know, you might say, okay, that's, that's maybe not an instance for loom. And can you think of examples like in your work and in customer enablement or an internal enablement where, you know, actually maybe that written documentation

Brittany Soinski:

Yes.

Ken Babcock:

could be better than, than just a loom.

Brittany Soinski:

So I have one of these core memories from my first month at Loom. You know, we all have these work moments that keep us awake at night and we think about, but I think this was a really valuable learning. And when I started at Loom, I was really gung-ho about, you know, let's record Looms about everything. And I was creating these knowledge hubs, as I mentioned earlier, and I wanted to share them out. So I thought it would be a great idea to record a loom talking through the Knowledge Hub and then share that loom out. And a colleague of mine said, please don't ever record a loom of you talking through written documentation. We would rather just read the documentation. It's like, you don't want my seven minute loom? Like I spent so much time on this, but it was a really good learning for me. And he said, no, instead, Use the loom to supplement the written documentation. And what you can use it for that you can't do, use it for things you can't do with the text, infuse the tone, set the stage, maybe talk about some learning objectives. Here's why I'm sharing this. Here's what I want you to be actively, kind of reading as you're reading this through. Here's why I'm excited about this. Partner that with the written documentation and allow the people to read.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah, you mean you don't want the podcast to accompany the documentation?

Brittany Soinski:

It was bringing me back to like my fourth grade. I was a narrator in a Shakespeare play. Just was trying

Ken Babcock:

Yeah.

Brittany Soinski:

to relive those times, but it didn't

Ken Babcock:

Yeah,

Brittany Soinski:

work out.

Ken Babcock:

exactly. I always wanted to be the, uh, the, the announcer, the morning announcements in high school, never

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah.

Ken Babcock:

got, never got that. So, so this is why we're here on this podcast today. I'm trying

Brittany Soinski:

Yeah,

Ken Babcock:

to live that

Brittany Soinski:

but look at

Ken Babcock:

out.

Brittany Soinski:

you now.

Ken Babcock:

Give me now, look at me now. Um, you know, it's interesting. I actually feel, I feel like there are similar instances of that with, with Tango too. I mean, you know, I see customers all the time using Tango and Loom in conjunction. Um, And with Loom, it's always, we need to infuse that tone. There needs to be voiceover. There needs to be some translation. That's why I'm using Loom. Once we get into like, this is hyper standardized codified. I need you to replicate it. That's where Tango works really well. And, um, we've had some customers kind of turn on both the Loom and Tango Chrome extension at the same time, which,

Brittany Soinski:

That was bad.

Ken Babcock:

you know, my, be a little. I'd be a little more of what you were talking about with the, with the loom to accompany the documentation. But you know, for us, the key distinction, you know, cause, cause people, our customers, like their heads jumped to like, Oh, we use loom, like should I just use tango now, but we always say is like use tango for the things that you want people to replicate as soon as they get it for the things that infuse that, you know, the tone, infuse the narrative, help people understand things, talk about, talk through objectives. There's still obviously a place for that with loom.

Brittany Soinski:

I wish I had Tango when I was designing, new hire onboarding at Mural or doing the exercise of redesigning it and then coming to Loom and creating the documentation from scratch because it's so much easier if you can just actually do the thing and then how nice would it be if it's just documented for you? It's not easy to translate the doing of the things into documenting the things. It spent, I spent so much time on that. So I wish I had used Tango.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah. And then, and then to call back to what we talked about earlier, when things change and iterate,

Brittany Soinski:

Mm-hmm.

Ken Babcock:

it's so much easier. You know, you don't feel like there's this like sunk cost of like, Oh, I already did this once before I created this documentation. It took me forever.

Brittany Soinski:

Oh, yeah.

Ken Babcock:

It's like, no, I'll just turn on, I'll just turn on Tango again and I'll just go through it in a new way. Um, so no, I really appreciate, I appreciate you sharing that. We're coming sort of the end of our time together. I did want to ask, you know, sort of one last, this is a little bit more philosophical, we've been super tactical throughout, which I'm sure, you know, our audience appreciates, but let's imagine you're, you're running a Ted talk and that Ted talk is on the future of onboarding and training. What's the title of that Ted talk and what does the future look like?

Brittany Soinski:

So this is a, it's so funny that you asked this and it's a very timely question. And, you know, I do love to do these kinds of visual exercises. And with my team last week, we were doing for professional development. I said, let's make vision boards. I don't know if everyone loved it, but I was like, let's make vision boards for like what we want. Cause I'm big into the manifestation and stuff. And I put a Ted talk on mine. You know, you said you wanted to do your high school announcements. I'm like, I want to do a Ted talk one day. I'm going to be like a Brene Brown up there. So right after I put this on my vision board, I got this really exciting call asking me to present on this topic exactly at a conference called CS 100 next month. So

Ken Babcock:

Amazing.

Brittany Soinski:

this is actually really top of mind for me right now and thinking about, what do I want to share with people that feels like fresh and new about the future of onboarding? And... You know, I love an analogy, the sailboat analogy, but I live in a house of all boys over here, got two sons and they're obsessed with cars. So I just, that's the thing

Ken Babcock:

Naturally.

Brittany Soinski:

that came to mind naturally.

Ken Babcock:

Yeah.

Brittany Soinski:

So hopefully it resonates with some of the audience. But you know, the working title right now is the Road to Excellence Engineering and Scaling High Impact Onboarding Programs. And gosh, my wheels are turning about. all the car analogies. First question, we're

Ken Babcock:

Which,

Brittany Soinski:

on

Ken Babcock:

which,

Brittany Soinski:

a road.

Ken Babcock:

good pun by the way with the wheels are turning in the car.

Brittany Soinski:

oh yeah

Ken Babcock:

I

Brittany Soinski:

I'm

Ken Babcock:

see

Brittany Soinski:

gonna

Ken Babcock:

what you did

Brittany Soinski:

use

Ken Babcock:

there.

Brittany Soinski:

that Ken, I am gonna use that. I didn't even think about that. So if you're thinking you know about onboarding and I'm going to be describing how to build onboarding you know it's a road trip right? What is the destination? Where are we going? Who's driving the car? Are you an onboarding meant to be the driver? Are you the passenger? Are you trying to teach your 16 year olds how to drive the car? Or are we on a bus trying to drive a bunch of people? You need a special license for that. I as the mom am typically, you know, the front seat passenger, aka I make the music playlist, I pass out the snacks, I keep everybody entertained. I want to avoid my kids asking the whole way, are we there yet? And enjoying the journey. And I think with customers too, right? How do we make them enjoy this journey to the destination rather than just wanting that value instantly? So now I'm thinking maybe of retitling it like, are we there yet? hails from the front seat of onboarding.

Ken Babcock:

I like that. That's great. I think I love that topic because again, if we go back to your last task that you had to do at mural for onboarding, if we go back to what we talked about with iteration, if we can articulate that journey as like, yes, we want to get you to a certain level, but honestly, this is our best attempt at knowing what it takes to get you there. You're going to uncover things throughout this journey that might actually make this better for the next person. And so putting some value behind like, why are we doing these things to get to this point and helping people understand that they can play a role in it too. Um, I love that. I think that's, that's super valuable. And I mean, yeah, an opportunity to bring in car

Brittany Soinski:

Hahaha

Ken Babcock:

analogies. I mean, your sons are going to love that. My

Brittany Soinski:

Oh, thank

Ken Babcock:

son

Brittany Soinski:

you.

Ken Babcock:

is, is really into horses right now, which I mean, we could, we could work horses into there too, but

Brittany Soinski:

Hahaha!

Ken Babcock:

as you can imagine, I don't know if you saw the Barbie movie, but. The

Brittany Soinski:

I

Ken Babcock:

Barbie

Brittany Soinski:

sure

Ken Babcock:

movie

Brittany Soinski:

did.

Ken Babcock:

was tough for people named Ken, which I was reeling a little bit. It was also tough for horses. And so

Brittany Soinski:

Yes.

Ken Babcock:

my household was like, oh man, like how do we translate this? And so that brings me to my last question. What are you reading, listening, watching right now that you'd recommend to the audience?

Brittany Soinski:

Oh, these are all too embarrassing to share again, because I feel like my creative energy goes into working and then after work, it's gonna be all romance novels and love is blind, the ultimatum. I'm not sure these are great suggestions for the audience.

Ken Babcock:

I mean, these are great suggestions

Brittany Soinski:

I'm sorry.

Ken Babcock:

because I mean, if nothing else, like these have already been validated. Like people love, love

Brittany Soinski:

He,

Ken Babcock:

is blind.

Brittany Soinski:

it's, my husband and I were talking about this last night where we're watching the ultimatum right now, which is done by the same people as, as Love is Wide. And we're like, this is brilliant. They've come up with this like repeatable formula for, for like the new era of, I would say the bachelor watchers, cause that's kind of phased out. And now we have this like new TV show and they've got it down. I think there's something like, I don't know, like six seasons. Have you watched it?

Ken Babcock:

Oh yeah, I've watched it.

Brittany Soinski:

Okay,

Ken Babcock:

It's,

Brittany Soinski:

okay, I feel better.

Ken Babcock:

it's, no, it's truly unbelievable. The leaps that these people make. I mean, I can't picture myself ever doing it, but

Brittany Soinski:

No.

Ken Babcock:

yeah, I agree with you. Like, The Bachelor kind of started it all. My, you know, my sort of like spirit animal back in the day, I don't know if you remember Bob from The Bachelor. He was like the really funny, goofy guy from like the second season. I was like, that's the guy

Brittany Soinski:

Wow.

Ken Babcock:

I want to be. So The Bachelor played a big role in my life. Do not be ashamed of Love is Blind.

Brittany Soinski:

Okay

Ken Babcock:

And you know, for those,

Brittany Soinski:

I wasn't expecting

Ken Babcock:

I can endorse

Brittany Soinski:

that question.

Ken Babcock:

it. No, yeah, it's all good. For those who haven't watched Love is Blind yet, you're getting two solid recommendations on that one.

Brittany Soinski:

two

Ken Babcock:

So

Brittany Soinski:

thumbs up. Yep.

Ken Babcock:

give it a watch. And with that, I just wanna thank you, Brittany, for being on the show, sharing all the amazing learnings that you've picked up along your journey. And hopefully this has been helpful to... to all our listeners.

Brittany Soinski:

Thank you, Ken. This was super fun. And thanks, everyone, for listening.