Welcome to TGIM - Thank Goodness It’s Monday, your new favorite podcast that celebrates the joy of work, innovation, and the exciting projects that drive us forward. Hosted by the team at Able, each episode dives deep into how AI is transforming mid-market and private equity companies, bringing you inspiring stories, expert insights, and a touch of fun every Monday.
What You Can Expect:
- Innovative Topics: Explore how AI and technology are revolutionizing the business landscape. From AI-driven investment strategies to enhancing operational efficiencies, we cover it all.
- Expert Insights: Hear from industry leaders, our talented team members, and special guests who are at the forefront of technology and innovation.
- Engaging Content: Our episodes are designed to be both informative and entertaining, making complex topics accessible and enjoyable.
- Celebrating Work: True to our mission, TGIM makes work fun by sharing light-hearted moments and celebrating the spirit of innovation.
Why TGIM?
At Able, we believe that Mondays should be something to look forward to. That’s why we created TGIM - to kickstart your week with positivity, knowledge, and a celebration of the incredible work happening in the world of AI and technology. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, business leader, or just curious about the future of work, TGIM has something for you.
Thank Goodness It's Monday!
You're listening to TGIM, the podcast that celebrates the joy of work, innovation, and the exciting projects that drive us forward here at Able. ABLE is a product development and innovation studio for private equity and venture backed companies. I'm your host, Larissa Shaw, community engagement manager. And today, we have Kyle Anderson, director of product strategy and design, and Joel Cook, the human centered design lead. Okay.
Larissa:Great. Let's get started. And each of you introduce yourselves and tell us a bit more about your role at Able.
Joel Cook:I'm Joel Cook. I am the human centered design lead at Able. I joined as a senior product designer, and I've transitioned over into this new role. So I'm really excited about where we can really just dive deep into the early stages of our, partners' projects to get to know the user even better so we can help use that to facilitate the rest of the projects.
Kyle Anderson:Yeah. I'm Kyle Anderson. I am Director of Product Strategy and Design at Able. I've got a background in starting and running small businesses as well as run my own health tech startup. And over the last, say, 5 or 6 years, I've been doing product management coaching and consulting, running product management teams, and also design led initiative.
Larissa:Can you give us a little background about what Able does?
Kyle Anderson:Yeah. I'll start. So Able is a end to end software development partner. So we work with VC firms. We work with private equity firms, and they're operating in portfolio companies through the whole life cycle of the the product development process.
Kyle Anderson:So like Joel was hitting on, we work in the earliest phases of helping to define what your product strategy could be. So anything from going from idea to, strategy testing and and validating that to collect evidence and and make sure that you're making good, product bets and getting to know your users, understanding their context, understand their pain points, and bringing all of that evidence and insight to create a cohesive, product vision and a product feature set that we can then help you develop. So we have full stack teams from, product management design, program management, software engineering, AI engineering, you name it. So we help our partners understand their problems, define what their product could be, and then build and scale their product depending on whatever stage they're at.
Larissa:How about how do you approach working with partners?
Joel Cook:So understanding their partner goals is really crucial within this design process and making sure that we align their creative vision with the strategic objectives of the stakeholders involved. We, can tailor our design solution.
Kyle Anderson:So the ways that we work with partners that's, relatively unique is that we take the time to understand what they what they wanna build. And in doing that, we're really trying to meet them where they're at. So every partner is coming at, you know, wanting to build software and wanting to build a product for different reason. And we have to understand their business context, their user goals, what their strengths and weaknesses are. And, like, 1 of our mottos is that our success is defined by the success of our partner.
Kyle Anderson:So we take that very seriously, and we we don't just try to build software just to, you know, earn the, you know, the next, bill at the next month. What we're trying to do is help our customers build a product that they can build a business on top of. Because if they're successful, they're gonna tell their peers about it. And that's the type of, like, a partnership engagement across the board that we're trying to, always strive to be more than just someone who builds software for you.
Larissa:Right. What really drew me to Able before I started working with Able about last month is how it full of builders, people coming from other background, creating their own companies before, and building within Abel. So I really like that. And I know there's an engineering side and then design side of Able. And how does collaboration between the 2 work at Able when working on a project?
Joel Cook:So working on the creative side of able really involves a lot of communication and collaboration and alignment in terms of what the, business goals are and then what the user's needs are and trying to find that connection to make, both of those happen at the same time is really the magic sauce with our collaboration and hitting all those key business goals and objectives while also aligning with the user experience of the product.
Kyle Anderson:Yeah. I love the collaboration here because a lot of our our engineering professionals are in Latin America, and we're pretty disparate remote company. We have people in in North America, Central America, Latin America. Even when we're separated by 1, 000 of miles, we work very closely. And and it's really great how Able is bought in on the whole theory of shifting left, bringing engineers, closer to the problem space, bringing designers into strategy.
Kyle Anderson:Because the more we do that, the better the results are. And it also just helps that team have, like, context and continuity. And a lot of those principles end up resulting in a better product as just because of that type of collaboration.
Larissa:And I know our CEO, Andy, is trying to incorporate more AI into what we do. I know it it could be pretty in-depth, but could you give a high level overview of what we're doing to incorporate AI?
Kyle Anderson:I'll start, and then, Joel, maybe you can talk about what we're doing with AI assisted, like, rapid prototyping. So, you know, holistically across the company, we see the value that AI can bring to just improve our speed, improve our efficiency, and improve our effectiveness. So, you know, in every 1 of the disciplines, you know, I think engineering was definitely leading the charge using AI tools to do code reviews and, all kinds of different aspects of coding and QA ing and testing long before, the rest of our the disciplines were. But now we've all made a concerted effort to incorporate AI tooling to increase our, efficiency. And what we're finding is in addition to that, we're enabling, like, extra creativity by using AI tools.
Kyle Anderson:And not just when we build products that have AI embedded in them, but every type of partner products that we're working on. And, Joel, that AI rapid prototyping offer seems like prime example to talk about that.
Joel Cook:Yeah. So kinda like Kyle was touching on, think AI can really assist us in getting a lot of some of the more tedious time consuming tasks fed up so that we can really focus on the meat of the project a lot more efficiently and get to there faster. This rapid prototyping we're testing out is being able to use prompting to generate some concepts. So if we can generate 10 concepts in an hour where maybe the 10 concepts would have taken us a full day, we can then take those apart, figure out what works, what doesn't work, and kinda move on it a lot faster than it would have been beforehand. So we're looking at AI as a tool to help enhance not only our speed, but our quality, as well as just getting to the best product faster.
Larissa:Nice.
Kyle Anderson:And it doesn't replace professionals either. I think that's kinda like a misconception. A lot of people are like, we all are kinda worried about it if you work in in knowledge work, a t AI is coming for your job type of thing. But, like, the the way I see it, it's increasing our output. I think we're gonna have more work and higher quality work coming from the same amount of professionals, especially in design, product, and engineering.
Kyle Anderson:There's obviously areas where, like, there's job loss from AI, and there will continue to be. But we see it as a as a huge gain, and I I hope other people are looking at it that way too. Because if you're not trying to, augment your staff or your team with AI, you're probably missing the boat.
Larissa:What about centered design? So, Joel, what does human centered design mean to you, and how do you apply it to your projects at Able?
Joel Cook:Yeah. So here you're centered design to me is all about putting the people at the heart of the design process. With my projects, human centered design means conducting user interviews, user research, surveys, usability testing, and really getting a deep understanding of who the user base really is. And then once we have those insights, we can move those, into ideation where we start actually testing some of these with the users and getting, data on how they're interacting with it into the prototyping. And then it just kinda starts this loop, right, where we get to know our users.
Joel Cook:We make a product for them. We test it. We get their feedback, and we keep that cycle going until we land on something that really sticks. But the whole purpose of human centered design is really making sure that we are keeping them in the forefront of all of our decisions, and we're not just basing things off of assumptions or what maybe internally we think might be the best options, but really understanding them and making the best solutions for real humans.
Kyle Anderson:I could talk about feedback loops, and I also liked how you were mentioning, like, you're using the word we. You know? Product building is a team sport, and it's like a team activity. And it's not just, a designer's responsibility to make sure that they're prioritizing the needs of the users and and the customers, but proactive. We had the whole team doing that.
Kyle Anderson:And I I see Joel doing that and other designers and and product managers just doing that on our teams. And it's always best practice to pull in the team members to review some of that documentation or come along with the interview process or understanding, just talking about like, hey, this is what the customer is looking for. This is what the partner was trying to solve for so that the team can problem solve around that. And it goes back to kinda like that collaboration piece you're talking about, Larissa.
Larissa:Or can you give an example of a project that we did human centered design around? Is there 1 that we could talk about?
Kyle Anderson:Well, I don't think I can give their name, but, you know, specific project we were working on, I'll I'll pretty in-depth discovery effort for a company that was looking to fix part of their product that was broken. And they're in this position where they had, you know, hundreds of users. They had a pretty good market penetration, but they had this product that was 20 years old, growing through mergers and acquisitions. And they had some assumptions that the the reason they were in the stop sell was because the technology just wasn't working. There were things in the code that that wouldn't allow it to do certain things that they needed it to.
Kyle Anderson:Onboarding was taking forever. Like onboarding 1 customer was, I think, multi month project. To get 1 customer in their system, it took several months. 1 of the designers on our team, instead of just accepting that as a truth, saying, oh, okay. Well, the software's broken.
Kyle Anderson:Took the initiative to understand and start peeling back the layers of that onion, started interviewing the customers and mapping out what that actual process was between all of the different stakeholders, whether that be folks at this partner's company that had to help onboard that customer, And all of the other team members that had touched that built out an entire service model blueprint to show the onboarding process from start to finish and why it took so many months was not necessarily because of the technology. There were problems and things to solve within the code, but they had a broken promise. What their product was doing was not meeting the process that the customers were going through. So by just taking that extra time and investing to understand what that customer journey was and all of the touch points, we're really able to elevate the the the parts of not just the the technology that needed to be fixed, but the overall process. And as a result of doing that and taking that time and investing that energy, they're able to just, you know, revamp that and get get their product to a point where, you know, they weren't running at full capacity, but they could get out of that stop sell again.
Larissa:Oh, I like how that was it an able engineer didn't take that as truth and really dug down to figure out what the core problem was. But, like, it was a collaborative effort between Abel and this partner, but then it's also a testament because I know a lot of our partners have been working with Abel for years, like, on multiple projects. We have build long term relationships with who we work with.
Kyle Anderson:Yeah. I mean, this particular partner was not the case, but, yeah, we have those long standing partners where there's already that trust and credibility built into the way we work. So when we don't, we have to build that trust quickly, and we have to show the reason and the why we recommend anything. You know, we're not just trying to go up adding billable hours when we're we're recommending something, and it's because we see a roadblock or there's a challenge that needs to be unblocked. And in this case, part of that challenge was not just fixing some code.
Kyle Anderson:I was also unpacking the whole onboarding process and giving them visibility into that.
Larissa:Do you have anything agile? Yeah.
Joel Cook:I can add to an another project that we worked on here at Able. So there was a client that we worked with and it was crucial that, we understood their user base because it was an older demographic. And so part of human centered design is making sure that your designs are accessible to everyone and understanding that the user base of this particular product were were an older generation, making sure that it was meeting all the criteria for accessible design, but as well as using terminology that they were familiar with and being able to navigate the the product more efficiently. And so that was really crucial and played a huge role in how that product ended up rolling out.
Larissa:Some personal insights. So both of you, what do you enjoy most about working at Able?
Kyle Anderson:I love the diversity of thought. I love the diversity of of people. I love the diversity of of projects and partners. And, you know, all of all of that turns into, a whole lot of fun for people that love, you know, building and solving problems. You know, I think it's attracted, very unique people like you were mentioning, Larissa.
Kyle Anderson:Like, we're all builders, and and I think we we lean into that pretty hard. And there's this kinda, like, able spirit that you feel like that not a company of people that say, like, no, we can't do that. Like, this is a company of people that say, yeah, we can do that if or, yeah, we could do that, but we'd have to do this first. So, like, there's there's always an answer or a a solution. So I just really enjoy the people and the problems and the and the partners we get to work with.
Joel Cook:Yeah. I'd I'd echo the, the We Are Builders mentality where I feel like Abel has really assembled a solid team who are not afraid to to, 1, try new things. And Abel is a company that's open to try a new thing where, there are so many agencies or companies I've worked at before where, they're very set in their ways. They they feel like their their process is the best process. Enable's not like that.
Joel Cook:We have a very open mind. And while we do have some rock solid, you know, processes in place, we're open to improving, and we have an open mind to that. And I think the team we have, we really build on each other's strength, and we support each other to to make that happen.
Larissa:Well, thank you for both of your time for our first ever able TGIM podcast.
Kyle Anderson:Let's get back to work.