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 this episode, Jake and Josh talk about why community keeps getting stuck in the "nice to have" bucket, how to speak about community impact in the language the rest of the business actually uses, and why showing confidence in your work is more effective than drowning stakeholders in metrics.

Find more about Josh:

• Book: https://www.amazon.com/Community-Code-Strengthening-Go-Market-ebook/dp/B0GNJBXCPR
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshuazerkel/
• Substack: thecommunitycode.substack.com

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 through the fourth pillar of the Customer Conversation Compass: Conversation Amplification. That means getting the real customer voice, not a cleaned-up version of it, to the people inside your organization who need to hear it most. Jake covers the five blockers that stop insight from spreading internally and what to do about each one.

Find out more about Jake's work with the Conversation Compass at: jakemckee.com

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 was doing.

In this episode, Jake and Lee go back about 20 years to talk about how it all started, why simple beat slick, and what it taught Lee about explanation as a real skill people can learn.

Find out more about Lee at https://commoncraft.com

Find out more about Jake and the Customer Conversation Compass at: https://jakemckee.com/

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 answer your customer thinks you want to hear.

Jake walks through the three biggest traps that wreck customer conversations, plus a quick pre-flight check you can run on your questions before any customer call.

For more information on the Conversation Compass, visit https://jakemckee.com

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 anyone can have a quality conversation, they need to understand the language, rituals, and cultural context of the people they're working with. Without that, what you get isn't a real conversation. You get surface-level compliance and a lot of missed signals.

In this episode, Larry and Jake dig into what it takes to build the conditions for honest conversation, and why product teams skip this step more than they realize.

More information at: https://compass.jakemckee.com

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 design work that happens before anyone says a word.

Find out more about the Conversation Compass at: https://compass.jakemckee.com

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 Martin at:
https://www.instagram.com/emdee_scale_models/

https://youtube.com/@emdeescalemodels

https://www.facebook.com/MartinBuildsModels

More information on conversation design at:

https://jakemckee.com/compass

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 layers of secondhand insight, and why AI tools are making this problem faster and harder to see at the same time.

One stat that tends to land hard: 80% of executives believe their company delivers a superior customer experience. 8%of customers agree.

That gap has a name. And it's fixable.

Take the free Conversation Debt Assessment at jakemckee.com/compass.