On his third day at realestate.com.au, the speaker missed a machine-learning book meeting because he didn't communicate his delay. He rates tasks on a 1-10 scale and the meeting fell below his threshold. Later, he and colleague Adam pitched REA's new paid placement product by focusing on user benefits rather than hard-selling, a lesson from his time at Apple.
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Oh hey, didn't see you there. It is day 2, or day 3, the third day I'm actually in Melbourne, and I'm going back to realestate.com. But I know yesterday or last night, I'm not sure how it worked out, it might have been last video or something, something. I said I was going to meet someone for a book writing proposal on machine learning and whatnot. They were from another company that works on these sort of techniques and whatnot, and they reached out to me and wanted to see if I was interested. But I've got a confession to make. I pulled out of that because I finished late at the experience I was having at realestate.com, and I didn't communicate that well enough to the team I was supposed to be meeting up with afterwards. And now it's completely my fault. All problems really come out of a lack of communication. And I know I say, I preach that, I went against my own advice that I give all the time, is to communicate well, is to build relationships and whatnot. And I just didn't step up to the plate. I should have let them know that I was gonna be late or tried to reschedule. And then I was still going to the place to meet up up, and then I realized on the way there, hey, I— whoa, where you going? I realized on the way there that I rate things on a scale of 1 to 10, right? And if something— I can't use the number 7, and if something is below 7, I don't really want to do it. And if something is an 8 or above, well, then it's definitely worth doing, right? So I thought about it, and I was like, oh, where does this rate on the scale? And it didn't— at the time, it didn't pass because I I've got so many other exciting things on, I think they rated above that. So instead of saying yes to something that I wasn't really going to be 100% interested in and not exactly— like, my actions didn't match my ambitions, you know. I love riding, I love all this other stuff, but if I loved it that much, I would have been on time, I would have been there. So it's completely, completely my fault, and that's just an example of how you can miss such great opportunities through a simple lack of communication. So that's a lesson from my failure. So you might not have to do that in the future, but I'm sure we're all learning. It's all gonna happen again. But I think the best thing is going forward, you can never over-communicate. So note to self, you can never over-communicate. I'm gonna go have some coffee and breakfast and do some writing at this cafe I went to yesterday morning. It was amazing. So I'm going back. Just finished up some, some experience with, with Adam on the road. So shout out to Adam, thank you so much, mate. We left from the main office of REA, the building went out to a suburb about a 40-minute or so drive away, and what we were doing was Adam was educating an estate agent or an agency— that's the right terminology, I'm not across all the terminology yet— educating an agency on a couple of the new products REA or realestate.com.au have built. And one of them was main page. So essentially you can pay if you're an agent to get on the front page of the website or the front page of an app. And I think I've got a demo somewhere, some kind of demo video where you search for an agent's name in a specific— oh no, search for a property in a specific area, and the next time you come back to the app, if you're an agent and you've paid for that front page placement, you'll appear on the front page. And what I loved about it is, is rather than sort of go straight hard and traditional salesy, it was more of an educational piece, just, just letting the agency know what, what the features, what the benefits were of that, of the new product, of the new feature. And I think that's a really big point. Rather than going straight up— and I mean, there's a place for all of this in every kind of sales— but rather than going straight up and saying, you should buy this product, or you should use this, or you should spend X amount of dollars, it's really important that when you, when you go to somewhere, people aren't really going to understand what exactly the product is, and that's okay. What matters most is what benefits can that product give to that person. And that's, that's a lot what we talked about at Apple when I used to work there, is rather than telling someone the iPhone has 12 megapixels in the new camera or the sensor's this big or something like that, what are the benefits to that person? So I think that's a really good takeaway. If you're going to explain a product or a service to someone, put it in terms that that explains the benefits to that specific person. Give them an example of how it can help them. That's, that's a key lesson that I, that I learned from that. And I think I've been slowly learning it over time as well. Now I think I'm getting a phone call from my brother. Let's see what he wants. What's happening, my man? Um, I need a— Yeah, well, here's, here's what you got to say. Here's what we're going to do. It's no one's fault, right? But it's, you're going to take responsibility for it. Okay. You say something along the lines of, alright, I didn't know. It was my responsibility to communicate with you effectively that I didn't really know what was going on. I probably didn't communicate as best as I could have. In the future, here's what I'm gonna do to rectify this, but at this stage, the job that I did last time remains in this state. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's all you can do, I think, really. There's no other way to do it. Just say, it's my responsibility. Here's the action I'm going to take next time. Yeah. That's it. Just always, always bring it back on you, right? There's no point, there's no point trying to externalize the excuse onto something else. Yeah, I know. Yeah, I agree with you, and that's the way I was like taking the email before I like contacted you to make sure like that was all right. Yeah, just own it. Own your L's, bro. Own your losses. Alright, back on another train. I just finished up some time with Peter, who's a UX lead manager, user experience manager at REA, and I learned some valuable insights on how they approach UX problems, on how you can approach UX problems or user experience. I'm using this acronym like I know it. User experience in a systematic and patch, and then you can apply it to other, other requirements, not just real estate or real estate.com. But it's home time for me. I got a flight to catch. Thanks. Thank you. When I get home or when I'm on the plane or something like that, I'll, um, I'll concise everything that I've learned, so all the main principles and takeaways that I've learned over the past 2 days and do a little segment or something like that. And I'll also write them down so you can read them as well, but some valuable takeaways over the past 2 days.
