Conversation Lab Podcast

Dr. Korey Watkins is a clinical psychologist in Austin, and he has spent more than 15 years doing work where the conversation is the whole job. In this episode, Korey and Jake talk about what it really takes to be present with another person, why silence can be the most powerful thing you say, and how to walk into a hard conversation without dreading it. You will hear how Korey built his conversat...

Master Flavorist Terry Miesle has spent thirty five years building the flavors you taste in meats, snacks, and dairy. Jake sat down with him to talk about why the hardest part of the job isn't the lab work, it's the conversation. They get into turning a vague request like "a little more orangey" into a finished flavor, building a shared language so a team stops describing the same smell five diffe...

The customer's actual words and daily reality are often lost in translation on product teams. In Episode 12, host Jake McKee talks with UX and AI design consultant Erik Summa (formerly of Dell), whose job is to bring the absent user into the room and keep them there. 1 The central question: What happens to that essential user-focused work when AI speeds up development so much that teams skip past...

Episode 11 focuses on Conversation Traction, the fifth and final pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass, which serves as the ultimate test of whether customer conversations actually lead to organizational change. For more information about the Conversation Compass, head to https://jakemckee.com/ And if you'd like to signup for Conversation Lab, you can at: https://jakemckee.com/conversationla...

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

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

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

In this episode, Jake tells the story of the night a whiskey cart rolled into his private dining room at Eleven Madison Park. The staff caught a throwaway joke he made and acted on it. That single moment captures everything Conversation Tuning is about. This is pillar three of the Customer Conversation Compass. It's the skill of asking questions that actually get you the truth instead of the answe...

Most people think a conversation starts when someone opens their mouth. It doesn't. It starts long before that, when the other person trusts you enough to say something real. Larry Glickman is the founder of JCAT Partners, where he trains law enforcement and private security professionals to work more effectively with the Jewish community. His program isn't a checklist. It's a foundation. Before a...

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

What if the best training ground for customer conversations is in a plane at 35,000 feet, or a beginner ski slope at 7am? Martin Drayton has spent decades reading strangers fast and figuring out how to reach them. As a flight attendant and snowboard instructor, that's the whole job. Today we talk about what that actually looks like and what product teams can steal from it. Find out more about Mart...

Most product teams believe they understand their customers. They have NPS scores, research decks, and Slack channels full of feedback snippets. What they often don't have is an actual conversation. In this Exploration episode, I dig into Conversation Debt: the accumulated cost of conversations that never happened. We cover what real customer conversation actually is, how debt accumulates through l...

In this first interview episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, Jake McKee sits down with William Marks, a Navy veteran, former Pentagon spokesman, and congressional candidate in Washington State, to explore what happens when the people responsible for communication stop talking only to the people who already speak their language. William's career has put him in some of the highest-stakes convers...

In this first episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, host Jake McKee introduces himself, the show, and the framework behind his consulting work — the Customer Conversation Compass. Jake draws on 25+ years of customer engagement experience, including building one of the most ambitious fan community programs at LEGO, to make the case that most product teams have lost direct contact with the people...

The Conversation Lab Podcast explores how better dialogue leads to better decisions, stronger products, and clearer thinking. Hosted by me (Jake McKee), this podcast goes beyond surface-level interviews and digs into the moments where insight is created in real time. This episode is a pre-launch trailer, briefly sharing some details about what the show will be and what to expect. If you care about...