Phil Corson (Senior Product Manager at 7shifts)

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Was released back when the Mere Christians podcast was called the Call to Mastery. Now, if you love Mere Christians, you're still going to love these older episodes because the majority of each conversation focuses on how the gospel influences the work of our guests.

With that disclaimer out of the way.

Please enjoy the episode. Hey everybody.

Welcome to the Call to Mastery. I'm Jordan Raynor. This is a podcast for Christians who want to do their most exceptional, their most masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others. Every single week, I'm hosting a conversation with a Christian who's pursuing world class mastery of their craft. We're talking about their path to mastery. We're talking about their daily habits and routines and how their faith influences their work. Today, I am thrilled to share this terrific conversation I recently had with Phil Korson, who's a senior product manager at Seven Shifts. Seven Shifts is a scheduling software for restaurant managers and their staff. It's used by 350,000 restaurant employees in more than 10,000 restaurants in North America. And by the way, if you have no idea what a software product manager does, you're going to love this episode. It's one of my favorite disciplines, basically product managers or entrepreneurs within larger organizations who are CEOs essentially of a particular software product. I've worked with a lot of product managers, or PMs as they're typically called, and Phil is a masterful one. I've worked with Phil before. You'll hear a little bit about that story in this episode. He's just an impressive thinker and a really devout follower of Jesus Christ. So Phil and I recently sat down, talked about the value of literally doing what your customer does in order to cultivate empathy, and how this leads Phil and his team at Seven Chefs to work part time in restaurants to understand their customers.

We talk about how to get deep.

Work done in a really collaborative office environment. So how do you do really focused work when your co workers or your boss are constantly interrupting you? And we also talked about how Phil and his team are literally using software to be the hands and feet of Jesus. You're going to love this conversation. So without further ado, here is this episode with Phil Korson.

So, hey, Phil Corson, welcome. From the frigid North Pole. That's basically where you're living now, right?

Yes, yes. Glad to be here.

So let's give the audience a little bit of context on how.

Right.

So I was running threshold 360 day to day as CEO, and at the time, you were a product manager for GasBuddy. So for those in our audience who haven't used GasBuddy before, can you give the one sentence description of GasBuddy, your former employer?

It's fine. Cheap gas, but now it's get free gas. They're evolving.

Get free gas. Oh, through the rewards program.

Through the rewards program. Yeah.

It's super interesting. Yeah. So if you live in Florida, I know a lot of our listeners live in Florida, you know, Gas Buddy, because that's how we find gas during hurricanes. So you and I. I was trying to sell you, when I was CEO, threshold360 on basically 360 experiences of gas stations, which is still a fascinating idea to me. And you and I. You and I just had a bunch of different phone conversations, and I was super impressed with how well you did your job, with how well you treated me as a prospective vendor. Phil knows a lot of product managers don't treat vendors that well. They don't give you clarity on where you stand in the sales process. It's a very frustrating process. But I flew up to Boston to meet with you in person, and we had some. We had a number of conversations about Threshold and Gas Buddy. And right before we met, I was literally sitting in the gasbuddy little coffee area, like, five minutes before our meeting. I pulled up your Twitter bio, and it said Jesus follower. And I was like, oh, I get it now. This guy cares about me as a human being because of his faith. So I loved it. So since then, that was. That was what, almost. That was probably a year and a half ago.

Yeah.

I've transitioned into a new role at Threshold as executive chairman. Focus on my writing, focus on this podcast. You've transitioned to an entirely different company called seven Shifts, which I've actually had my eye on for a while now. So let's start here. What is Seven Shifts?

Seven Shifts is restaurant scheduling software. So it's trying to help restaurants with their labor management. Labor cost is really, really high for them. A lot of it has to do with scheduling and optimizing their schedule for the demands of the business, whether it's weather, events. So we have lots of machine learning, lots of pieces to just help them schedule and where we just got additional investment. And so now we're looking to grow more into that employee lifecycle of hiring, training, retaining, and paying. So we're mastering scheduling, and then we want to grow out to those other parts of the employee lifecycle.

Yeah, you guys. You guys have raised, what, 20 million or so In. Yeah. And you guys have got 350,000 restaurant workers using the product, which is mind boggling to me.

Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot.

That's a lot. So how does that work? So the restaurant employee, right, has this app on their phone and they pick their schedule or confirm schedules based on what the manager is pushing to their device. How does that work?

It's a lot of employer to employee communication in terms of creating the schedule, publishing a schedule, pushing the schedule, and a lot of feedback from the employees based off of their availability, their time off requests, swapping shifts with other employees, managers approving that. So it's a lot of like one way, but we are evolving the product to be much more two way communication. We do have a really robust messaging solution that allows people to chat with each other, chat with their managers, make it a little bit more fun in their kind of day to day work.

Yeah, that's interesting. It feels more like chat, right, Than an employer employee relationship.

Exactly.

Let's talk about your role. I've always been fascinated by the role of product managers. I think it's one of the most fun jobs out there, but for our audience who has no idea what a product manager does. Can you explain the discipline?

At the highest absolute level, it's building solutions to problems. And it sounds silly, but. And really everyone should be doing that. I wrote a blog about that, about being a problem solution is. But really at its core, you're helping your teams that are tasked with executing your developers, designers, your marketers, and you're aligning them on what the customer needs and you're bringing it to market in a meaningfully quick way. You're not waiting a year to bring it to your customer, trying to get it to them really fast, really iterative, and so that whole process is really exciting. Like you said, I couldn't see myself doing anything else.

Yeah. So I mean, your job is essentially to understand the customer's problems. Right. By the way, interrupt me when I go off track here.

Right.

Your job's to make sure you understand the customer's problems, design kind of in collaboration with the customer, what the ideal solution to that problem might look like. And then once the scope of that product is well defined, or that feature of an existing product, whatever, you to lead a team of developers and designers to actually bring that product to market. Is that right?

Yeah, you nailed it. Yeah.

All right. All right, so give us an example of how this works. Right. Maybe an example from Gas Buddy, which I'm familiar with, or Seven shifts, which I think our audience is now familiar with. Talk us through like a really practical example of a new feature or a new product that you brought to market and kind of what that process looked like.

Like all great things, it starts with an idea. And whether that idea came from a customer or internally, we have a backlog of which is just really a big long list of things we could do. We have a backlog of things that we could be working on. And a lot of it comes and really great product managers have really good prioritization skills. They're able to weed through the noise, they use data to inform their decision making, and they're able to actually say, this is the best opportunity right now. And they start investigating that idea. And a lot of that comes with market research, talking to customers, really, just really trying to understand the problem before you even think about the solution and say, what is the customer looking for a solve here? And so the next phase is really, okay, we've understood this problem. Now what can we do for the customer? In some cases you can't actually solve it with software. Software can't solve everything. It can solve a lot of things, but not everything. So sometimes you go, okay, we can't help with this problem. It's a problem we know about. And it's good to have empathy for your customer to know that this problem exists. But in many cases we can help with that problem. And so then we start to go into a phase of discovery and ideating on what the solve could look like. So that's really where you're kind of tag teaming with your designer to really think about, okay, I have a clear understanding of that problem. And they have a clear understanding of how that user might interface with that solution. And so you kind of brainstorm on what that might look like. And it's really important to bring it to that customer in that phase because it's a lot cheaper to put up some wireframes and show them and they say, I don't want this or this isn't what I want.

Right, right.

Instead of actually developing it, bringing it to them, and then them saying, oh, I don't want this. So you really want to include the customer in that phase. And usually we try and prototype. We've at all the companies I've worked at, we kind of build this VIP group or VIP buddies at Gas Buddy, but we build this group of people that we trust to expose kind of raw ideas to. You want to come off polished to your customer base, obviously, but you also need to get that Feedback. And so you get that trusted group of individuals, whether it's through your network or through a system that your company has, and you bounce these ideas off them to the point where you say, okay, let's build an MVP or a minimum viable product of this feature. And so then you start working with your developers and figuring out how hard this might be. There's a ton of layers that come into can you build this thing? From old technology to can you build this thing and how fast can you build it? And the market needs. There's all these variables to say this is the scope of what we're going to build. And that's also a really, really big skill set of PMs to be able to say this is what I want to do, this big vision of things. And I definitely failed at that when I was early of like, I want to build this grandiose feature, but really, you know, we can solve some of the customer pain by building this small piece and then you just keep stacking.

Yeah. So by the way, for those of you listening that haven't figured this out on your own, although I think all of you have by now. So we have a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs in the audience, a lot of current entrepreneurs, and probably, I don't know, I'd say 40 to 50% of guests on this show are entrepreneurs. If you haven't figured it out already. PMs are entrepreneurs. Like within a startup, the product manager's job most closely resembles, in my opinion, the job of the original founder of the venture. Right. You are doing what the entrepreneur did at the start, after the company's been up and running, you guys are developing new features and new products. But same process. If you're just starting a business and trying to find product market fit. Right. You go talk to prospective customers, you wireframe a solution before you write a line of code, you get feedback on it. It's the exact same thing just done at scale and more mature organizations. Would you agree with that philosophy 100%?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. So how did you get. Well, actually, no, let me, let me ask one follow up question because I think this is, it's a selfish question, but it's interesting. So you talked about how you often have a long list of feature ideas or feature requests that come from customers and usually those are articulated in the form of a solution. Right. So for seven shifts it might be a customer saying, I really wish that, I don't know, I had the ability to have messages pop up in my employees text message app instead of the seven Chips up. I don't know. That's, that's a ridiculous feature request. Right. But that's articulated as a solution, not a problem.

Right.

I think this is good for prospective entrepreneurs to think about. How do you reframe what people are asking for in a solution to try to get to the core of what the problem is?

Yeah, that's a great question because that is a very dangerous space to be in where as a pm, you assume what the customer is asking for is actually what they need or want.

Right.

I'll give you a really good example. We have a lot of people and the employer is asking for the visibility that like read receipts is what they're asking for the visibility that an employee read the message that they sent. Usually there's high value, you know, menu changes or things that are very timely that they need to make sure people read. And this is very, very recent. I've been exploring that one right now. And really what it is, is it's not who's read it, it's who hasn't read it. Right. So it's almost like an anti read receipt. So when you think about the solution, you can't just ship this thing to market that says, you know, this person read it because they don't care about that. What they actually care is who is the people who haven't read this? And can we build them a solution that helps them get that message to them in a timely manner? Right. So when you frame it that way and you think about and you try and undercut, like pull back the layers of what they're asking for and usually that's through really good question asking with customers. A lot of times I just use the word why. It's a good fallback. It's just like, why do you need that? Five whys.

The five whys, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it's a learning curve definitely for early PMs because they'll just take the customer at face value. And I think that's, in some cases the customer does know the solution that they want and they just really need you to build it. But there are many cases where they don't quite have a grasp of the problem that they're facing and you have to really uncover that as the pm and it's really rewarding. When you ship something, they're like, this is not what I asked for, but this is what I needed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a beautiful thing. How did you get into product management? Right, so I'm just really curious about the story there. Like there's not. I mean, are there product management degrees that you can. I mean most people, most people are getting CS degrees or just business degrees. Like what you go to school for. What was your story and to getting into this discipline?

Yeah, so story. I went to a Christian Bible college that had business and music. So I'm very passionate about music and play bass guitar. Love it. Couldn't imagine doing any other instrument. Actually it's my favorite. But really just took a business degree. You know, it wasn't anything. It was just a straight up business administration degree. What it was though is I started my career in account management and that really builds your chops as a PM to interface with customers in a professional way and understand and have empathy for them and what they're trying to do and really help them with whatever products you're helping them with or that they've purchased. Right. So that's where it started and it was really an offering of some of my skill sets actually was at GasBuddy and they said, hey, I think you might actually be a good fit for this product management role. And at the time I was like, what is product management? I'm like, okay. So like that night I remember staying up and so like wee hours of the morning like googling product management and ironically there's not a lot at the time there was, it was just like all over the map. I'm like, oh, these.

When was this, people? What year is this?

I think this was 2016.

So 2016, and maybe this is still true today in 2020, but like 2016, the lean startup was still like the bible of how to think as a product manager. Is that still the case?

I think it is. For the early product manager, it's a good introductory understanding of what you're trying to accomplish, especially when you think about shipping small and shipping fast. But when it comes to some of the fundamentals of product management, I have yet to find a book that really is able to do that. Maybe that's a niche I could fill. But in terms of like a book being able to say these are the things that divide, you know, really great product managers from kind of the subpar. There's definitely blog posts and articles, but there's really nothing out there that's like, you know, there's some classes and schools that'll teach and get certificates, but I just, they could be good. I just haven't looked into them enough.

So you just teed up my next question perfectly. Like, what's the delta between masterful product managers and their less Masterful counterparts. But first, real quick, if you are an aspiring entrepreneur or if this conversation about product management sounds interesting to you, the Lean Startup really does hold up. I think the book's like 10 years old. Maybe now it's such an essential way. I would argue about thinking how to bring new things into the world as quickly and cheaply as possible. So highly recommended. All right, so go back to that question. What is the delta between great product managers or great entrepreneurs? And they're less, you know, just good ones.

Yeah. So I would say one of the key ones that I found very early on was humility. I think that's like at a high level, a lot of it is soft skills, to be totally honest, that differentiate the really proficient, really masterful product managers over the ones that are maybe aspiring to be so and so those individuals have humility. And I learned that really early on because there was a saying that was around the product managers as CEO of a company. And that's really kind of where you're thought of like you're an entrepreneur. It's a very dangerous mindset because what it says is you have authority, you have actual authority to say you should build these things. And as a product manager, those of you that don't know you're working off of referent power, you actually can't tell the developers build this thing. They're trusting you. Right. And so you have to build that kind of referent power relationship. And so a lot of that is through really strong humility and them knowing that I don't have an ego. I'm not here to showboat. I'm going to elevate the team that's actually building this. And so it's a lot of put your ego at the door. If you have an ego, I would say you're probably not going to be a successful product manager.

Yeah. I remember reading a post of yours on LinkedIn a couple of years ago about this skill of empathy.

Right.

That's one of the most important skills as a product manager. Can you talk about that, why that's so essential? I mean, I think this is related to humility. And I guess the follow up question would be how do you cultivate that? Like, how do you cultivate empathy as an entrepreneur, as a product manager, as somebody whose job it is to build.

Things that customers need building and cultivating empathy, I would highly recommend doing what your customer does. So I did that at Gas Body, actually shadowed a lot of fuel retailers and watched what they were doing. And I went on site. I was very Fortunate to have some. We had an early product that we were building at GasBuddy. Some fuel retailers were open to me coming to their office and watching what they do and just understanding their day to day doing the same thing. At restaurants. We go at seven shifts quarterly, multiple times on site to restaurants. We watch how they work, we go in their back office. We have some really good customers that are willing to let us kind of sit there and be flies on the wall. And so having and cultivating that culture of empathy with your product management team, or if you're an aspiring product manager, is just really being the customer. We actually have some product managers that work in restaurants part time that you really want to be a part of that industry because you, you come to those conclusions much faster and you're able to better prioritize that backlog of is this important right now versus is it important in the future? And so I think that's a big way to cultivate it. But once you understand that customer, then that empathy starts to come more naturally in conversations. Because really the product manager is the customer advocate. The hope is that when you're in conversations, your engineering team says, this is going to be really difficult to build. And you say, I don't care, this is worth it. Right? Yeah. And you know, or this is going to be complicated from your design team, you say, it doesn't matter. This is the complicated outcome that we need to build to actually solve the customer's problem. So really you're trying to advocate for that customer.

I love that. I was reading the seven Chips website and there was a line in it that really stood out to me that I love. It says you guys are quote focused 100% on the restaurant industry, end quote. That's a crazy hard thing for startups to do. As a lot of our listeners can attest, you focus exclusively on one vertical. And I also think it's hard in the sense of your career. Right. So it's just like at a startup you've got lots of different verticals that you could serve in a career. You have lots of different things that you could pursue mastery of. It's tough to focus on one discipline. It's why I wrote Master of One. It's what the book is all about. So like seven shifts, you are crazy focused and have been from like very early on in your career on this one vocational thing of product management. Why that discipline? What is so appealing about that to you?

It's just a very rewarding job. You get to work with really smart and amazing people. And it's really a job where you can empower other people. And it's kind of like it's a bad example, but when you're a parent and your kid does something and it's really, really awesome and you're like, oh, you feel really proud. You know, the same feeling happens when you get a team together of developers and designers and marketers and you align them on this problem. And when you bring that solution to market and it solves your customer's problem, it's just this kind of euphoric feeling of empowerment, of energy, of reward. So it's a really fun thing to be doing, but it's also challenging. And I love a good challenge. And so it's something that you're not going to be falling into and finding it be easy. It's something that you have to be passionate about and realize, this is something that I want to be good at and really invest your time and energy and practicing and learning. Because a lot of product management is failure. You mess up a lot, but because you're moving small and iteratively, you're going to fail. And it's not the end of the world. Now, as a startup, you only have so many failures, right? And so early on, for seven shifts, it was kind of like they were going in all the directions and they found restaurants are really using their solution and they honed in on it. Even from just like a marketing, positioning has actually been pretty beneficial for them to just position themselves as where the restaurant scheduling software, which we do have people that are not restaurants using us, but positioning it that way, can really, really help by just saying we're here for restaurants and restaurants will come.

I love that story.

I mean, listen, 7 Chips is a great success story. You guys have raised $20 million from some of my favorite VC firms, including Team Worthy Ventures in New York, who I'm a big fan of. But I think a lot of people expect that at the start of a company, you're super focused on one industry, but you really quickly, as quickly as possible, and expand all these other verticals. But seven shifts, I think is a more common story. You start by experimenting with a bunch of different verticals, find the one that's working, and then ignore everything else. And as I'm saying this, I'm realizing this is also master of one, right? Like, experiment widely in your career, find the thing that's working and pour all of your water onto that thing and maybe expand in the future, right? But like, you guys are nowhere close, right, to like owning the Restaurant market in North America or global. You guys have a ton of customers, 10,000 restaurants. But like there's a lot more market for you guys to go after. Yeah, I want to ask a really selfish question because this is something that I am like currently actively wrestling with, with Jordan Rayner and company, right? And it's this, right? So we have a very, very big mission, very broad mission, which is to help every Christian do their most exceptional work for the glory of God and the good of others. And there are a million different products that we could bring to market in order to do that, right? So I have my master collaboratory for founders, this high end mastermind group that's like 1300 bucks a month. That's one product. We have this podcast which is free to all you the call to mastery. But like I want to do a Netflix series, right? I want to do a YouTube series for kids that takes them into the day to day lives of people, of Christians serving in all different lines of work. There's a million different products I want to bring to the world. When you have seemingly limitless opportunity like you guys do it seven chips like you guys did at Gas, buddy, how practically do you assert the essential from the noise? How do you pick the best opportunities from the nearly good ones?

A lot of it is the testing. So you try all of them, like you said, and you try and get an understanding of which one makes the most sense right now. Because you can have a really good idea. And we've had one. For example, over a year ago we had this idea to build kind of tasks or checklists for customers. And we started with that idea and it felt good and it felt right. I wasn't there at the time, but it ended up being the wrong timing in terms of the company, in terms of. And it takes a lot of, I would say clout, I guess, or wisdom to be able to say, you know, this is valuable, but not right now. And we just brought it to market in December, so we still got to it. It was just a matter of saying this isn't the most important thing we're doing right now. And a lot of it has to do with timing. So when you're thinking about any opportunity, whether it's a faith based opportunity, business opportunity, which I would argue are almost one in the same. But when you're weighing those odds, a lot of it comes down to, okay, how can I try this without diving in head first? Because the trying will usually reveal some of those insights you wouldn't get by diving deep in and Then by then it's too late.

Yeah, yeah, it's good. We had a really simple spreadsheet when I was at Threshold, our feature scoring spreadsheet, to evaluate new features, new products. And it was just really simple, right? We had a couple of different grading criteria, right? Like, what's the sales value of this thing to existing customers? What's the internal value of this thing? How much time is it going to save us? What's the strategic value? And just assign different weightings to those things. And that was a really helpful framework for us to think about feature prioritization. Do you guys use something similar to that? And if so, like, what are those criteria that you're evaluating for each new feature, each new product?

So at GasBuddy, we used a Rice score, which is reach, impact, confidence and effort. That can be really advantageous for companies that are quite large. We had a very large customer base. And so your, your risk of what you decide to build was quite high. And so as a pm, you had to really sell your executive team with data using those scoring metrics to say, this is why I think this is the opportunity. Because the reach is high, because the impact is high, our confidence is high. And you get that confidence by doing those tests, like I mentioned, doing those prototypes, getting that feedback, and then the effort is a big one as well. You know, you might have this grand idea, but if it's going to take your development team six months to build, probably going to get tabled or tell you to make it smaller, right? So, you know, really using that was helpful. And we're evolving that at seven shifts because we went from when I started last year, we only had 70 people and now we're 140 plus. So we're really growing fast. And those growing pains are starting to show in our ability to effectively prioritize as a product team and say, this is the best market opportunity we have. So we do have a loose metric that we're working on, but that's one of our 2020 goals as a team, is to come up with a really strong score that says this is the right thing we should build. And there's data to back this up as well.

I love that practical takeaway, the Rice Score. So reach, impact, confidence and effort. Do you weight all those equally?

No, they have their own kind of scoring. So your reach is the number of people your impact can be accustomed to calculation based off of different weightings. Your confidence is a percentage and your effort is just a point value. So for those that don't know developers Use points to kind of estimate how complex or how big something might be.

Yeah, I love it. All right, so you're pursuing mastery of this craft.

You're also married.

You got a lot going on in your life. What does your day look like from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to bed? What does a typical day in the life of Phil Korson look like?

I wake up, let the dog out, because that's important, Very important.

Don't forget the dog.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got to take care of the dog. It's a coffee and I like a light breakfast and dive into some devotions. I really like the Bible app. It just gives me that kind of 10 minutes that I need while I'm eating breakfast. So I usually use one of those devotions to go through. Went through yours actually, last week. Your master of one. Really, really good. Really enjoyed it. And I'm off to work. I walk to work, so it's about, you know, 15 minute walk. It's cold when I walk. Like I do have to bundle up when I walk in the winter, but when I get there, it's almost like you have a switch that you have to turn off of. Like I now need to be in work mode and you know, get your coffee. And you're essentially at the demands of your teams. Really your role is to unblock your team and so you're there to serve your team and what their needs are in the day to day. Right? When I'm not thinking about what's our next big project, but I'm thinking a month out, I'm thinking day to day, people will come, developers will come to me and say, hey, we're trying to solve this thing. What's the best fit here? And I provide advice and then work with product marketing and work with design and work with all the different cross functional teams that are needed to execute. And really you're there to connect those people because sometimes this person's blocked and this person's blocked and you and your unique role are able to say, okay, you two should talk. Because there's a moment here that you guys need to have that will just unlock both of you, right? And so a lot of it is those moments of helping other people and a lot of meetings where you're talking about what we should be building, planning ahead for what we should be building. So there's a lot of meetings in your day. And so I end up blocking off kind of deep work time in my day because if you don't, you get bogged down in Those small unblocked conversations or in those meetings, you hit five o' clock and you didn't really get actual long tail work accomplished. So usually I'll block off a time of deep work, which is hard because it's hard to force yourself into deep work and to be able to dive in and think long term and think strategy about how you want to take and where you want to take those features and those products for your customers. So it's like two channels of thought really. It's that short term, how do I unblock my customers long term, how do I continue to add value to the overall kind of enterprise value of 7 shifts for our customers?

So you leave work. What does your afternoon and evening look like?

Usually I'm trying to network with Saskatoon because I'm new to the city, so I've gone to some young adults groups. I've connected with the church here, so I'm trying to connect with them. I do play on the worship team, so usually in the evenings I'll go there. We're having more meetups now, so I try and go to meetups and usually after work I'll end up going, you know, for wings or for beers with people at work. There's a lot of restaurants near us, so it's pretty dangerous when you're done work. A lot of people are like, oh, let's just go for wings and a beer, right? So, you know, that's usually what it is. And then when I get home, it's kind of the wind down period. I'm always thinking, and you're totally right on the entrepreneur I'm always dreaming of, is there something that I could build with a group of people that I know? And you kind of do that dream of maybe there's something there. So far there isn't. But, you know, it's fun to dream.

It is fun. Well, I'm curious, is there a problem that you see kind of consistently throughout the world that you could envision a solution for?

I don't have a problem that I would see out of the gate. A lot of it comes from my day to day life where I end up applying my job to, you know, the normality of life. And it's really just the nuance of like, there's definitely a better way to do what they're doing. And you're like, I could totally build this. You know, lately it's been my wife works in galleries and art communities and the software that they use for managing their inventory is old, very old. And it's not Web based and it's not fast and it's not. There's so many slick solutions. But you know, you kind of have those ideas and then you start to do the market fit and you start to think about market cap and then you're like, maybe not, you know, and that happens a lot. That happens a lot.

Market size is everything. Art galleries isn't the right table to be sitting at restaurants, however, that's a good table. Hey, you mentioned deep work, which I'm a huge, huge, huge proponent of. We talk a lot about deep work when people are talking about their daily habits and routines on the podcast. But you work in a pretty unique environment, right? I mean, tech startups, when you're going from 70 to 150 people in a year, are chaotic. It's organized chaos, but it's chaotic. It's also hyper collaborative.

Right.

So what are some practical things you do to stay in a block of deep work when you need to get really focused work done?

We've actually done a good job at seven shifts. We actually have these little tags that you can put at your desk that say, like, don't bug me. I think that's really important, especially in that hyper collaborative space where you're only a desk away or a couple desks away from someone. And that rule has worked out well for people honoring that system as well. Headphones in usually means, you know, you need to honor that space and use a messaging service to message them and say, hey, when you got a second, come find me. And then it's on their own time. And that way it gives you more control. But I found that sometimes even people break those barriers. And so sometimes it's just a matter of finding a place to hide and, you know, locking yourself into an area where you're harder to find. And I don't usually go to a same spot because then if people know I usually go there, then they go there. And so I kind of just like, you know, seven shifts office. As you can imagine, many tech offices have really great places to kind of sit and have quiet spaces and beanbags and wherever. And so I'll just find a spot and kind of corral myself for that deep work time. And usually people are very honoring of that. You know, if you're in a space, we do have a quiet room, but it's like if you go in there, you just don't bug anybody. And so it's usually leveraging what the culture has provided as a way to actually get that deep work done.

Yeah, I love the headphone. Rule. That's one that we had at threshold360. But, you know, I do think it's important to first and foremost, like, make sure everybody within the organization values deep work. Right. Because I found that once everybody's on board with the idea that I need totally focused, uninterrupted time to do my best work, they respect it and they don't interrupt you much. Just love your neighbor as yourself.

Right, Right.

So, hey, I remember after we met in Boston, I sent you a copy of my book. We went to lunch. We were able to talk about faith and work. So I sent you a copy of called To Create. And to my surprise, you actually read the thing, give a lot of books and honor when people actually read it. And you mentioned in an email shortly thereafter that it changed some of your perspectives about work. So I'm really curious to know how specifically, like, how that and maybe other content, other books have helped you think about this intersection of faith and work.

Yeah, I actually gave away all my copies because I thought it was such a good book. It was really groundbreaking. Especially learning about people that I did not know that were Christians, which is, you know, a bad and a good thing at the same time, but didn't know that they were. And it makes more sense now that you read through that. But from sharing that book and learning from it, one of the things I was struggling with early in my career is diving into mastering product management and being able to be the best product manager. And I found that it was competing priorities between enriching my faith and growing closer with God, but also becoming a better product manager. And I found that it was pulling in different directions. It was a very frustrating time in my faith, in my faith walk, because. And my wife can attest to that. You know, being a couple, you kind of hear everything from each other. And so. So it was a really struggling time. But once I read that book, it almost unlocked this thing in my head that said it's not that they're competing, it's that they're the same. And when you're mastering being a product manager, especially in that role, serving other people, you're building solutions to make their lives better, to have better versions of themselves, whatever you're building. Right. And so that just like opened up my eyes to realize by me being a better product manager, I'm actually enriching my closeness with God. Right. That was mind opening to realize that. And it unlocked something that said, you know, I still need to find time to dive into his Word and to, you know, devotion and get connected with a church community and really disciple others. But really it didn't feel competing anymore. And that was the kind of unlock moment that I had after reading that book. It was really spiritually changing for me.

I love it. I mean, yeah, our faith, our work, the work that we do is one of the practical ways in which we live out our faith.

Right.

So yes, we should continue to study scripture to remind us of the Lord's command to love our neighbor as ourselves. But how do you love your neighbor as yourself? You go build great products that make that restaurant manager's job easier, right?

Like, absolutely.

You are loving your. And I mean, Phil, you know this better than anyone. This is the essence of product management and entrepreneurship. Because if you don't do that well, if you don't love your neighbor as yourself, you're gonna fail.

Right?

Like you're gonna fail in a role, the venture's gonna fail. So, you know, it's just a great example of biblical principles at work in the real world. Whether or not the founders of 7Shifts are like conscious of that. Right? Yeah, it's a really beautiful thing. I'm curious, do you think your faith causes you. We talked about empathy, we talked about humility, right? These obviously Jesus like values, right. Are there other ways in which your faith causes you to approach. Approach product management maybe a little bit differently than a non Christian might?

So I think one of the ones that I learned actually in school, and this is probably one of the things that set me up to be where I am today, is I went to a school that taught business with a Christian context. And that helps you understand a little bit better some of those Christian principles and how they might intersect with your work. And that happened earlier on in my career in terms of my faith. Working as just a student, you know, part time jobs, I would get lots, you know, there's something different about you. And that really opened people up to have those conversations. And that's when I could really share with them, you know, my story and my testimony of who I know and hopefully that they can come to know. But in terms of me and my drive for wanting to be a better product manager and aligning that with my Christian principles, I would definitely say stewardship is a theme, I would say, and understanding not only that you're here to serve others. Right. Is a really kind of steward mentality, but also when you think about, and I don't have a lot of people that I've talked to think this way, but you're a steward of your company. Right. They've entrusted you with money. Right. Salary to say, I want you to build me value. Right. And so when you're thinking about becoming a product manager or you are a product manager and thinking about the time that I spend has a value, it has a dollar value because people are paying me. And when you think about doing the best that you possibly can and being a steward of 7 shifts time of their money, when you're thinking about buying third party vendors, even you are a steward of their money. And I see a lot of business people taking that for granted and they're willing to throw money in different directions. And really that's like you should treat that money as if it's your own money. And that's what being a steward is. Taking that and realizing I need to execute at the performance standards of 7 shifts or of our heavenly Father. Right? Either or. It's almost one in the same.

Yeah, there's, it's. So it's. You mentioned. I think that's wise advice for anybody, whether you're a product manager or wherever you work, especially for those people who are in a job right now that they don't love. Right. Remembering that you are still being a steward of something that God has entrusted you with and resources that he's entrusted others with. Your employer, primarily. I remember, I've always said that like one of the best advantages for the Christian for raising capital is I think it makes it more concrete and understandable that like you did not produce the resources that your venture had been given, which is always true whether or not you raise capital. God gives us all these resources. But when you're, when you're taking money from investors, that becomes real practical and really visible. It's like, oh no, we have $5 million in the bank because somebody has invested this and entrusted to us. It helps you think in that stewardship mentality, which I think is really productive. Hey, so seven shifts, you guys are in a space with a lot of minimum wage workers, right? I mean, the people, the 350,000 people using your product are some of the most marginalized oftentimes in our communities. So I'm really interested to hear your perspective on like, and I know you're not speaking for seven shifts. I'm asking for Phil's opinion here. Do you see a redemptive storyline to what seven shifts is doing? Like, is there something that the product actually does to, in the words of Mr. Rogers, help us be repairers of creation?

Right. Yeah. No, that's really good. Honestly. It's part of what drew me to seven shifts in the first place. This was not a move that I made lightly. I was asked to come work for them. It wasn't me looking for work. And so I had to weigh a lot of those pros and cons to moving to seven shifts. But one of the big reasons was that this software genuinely is helping people, like, it's very, very clear in terms of making their work life a little bit easier, making them a little bit happier, and how they communicate with work or engage with work and whether or not that's the manager and we're helping them really just saving them hours and hours. You know, when you're thinking about building a schedule without seven shifts and Excel spreadsheet and people are asking to swap shifts and people are text messaging you and it's just chaos when you're trying to just like, just schedule your restaurant, right? Like, you're just trying to staff it. That's it. Right? And when we come to market with this solution that uses machine learning that on one click can actually build the schedule and reduce hours and hours and hours of time scheduling, that is a really great feeling. And that's what really called me to seven shifts, not only for the employees and them having a really good solution. Because there's probably employees out there that are thinking the same way I am, and there has to be, like, something better out there than this Excel that's getting pasted to a bulletin. And yes, there is. It's seven shifts, right? So, like even helping the employee and giving them a little bit of joy and belonging and community within their workplace. Those were really big callings on both those sides, right? The employee and the manager.

That's a really beautiful way to say it. I'm just envisioning right now, and I'm sure there's a lot of these stories in those 350,000 restaurant employees who are using the product in North America. I'm envisioning the single mom who is working at a restaurant who's using your product. She's also got another job. And because of your. I mean, this is such a small, seemingly small thing, but because of your product, she doesn't have to respond to eight text messages about the shift tomorrow. Going back and forth with her manager and other employees about taking her shift so she could stay at home with her sick child. Right? Like you're making that seamless and easy and making her more present and more fully engaged in her home, in her life. And that is if that's the only thing you did for that one Woman, your work is important. It's eternally significant and meaningful. And what a beautiful, beautiful way of being. The hands and feet of Jesus with software.

Right?

Like that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. So, Phil, three questions I like to ask everybody who comes on the Call to Mastery. Which books do you recommend or gift the most to others?

As of late, it's definitely been the call to create. I'll be honest, I love it. I bought more and shared more because especially with folks that are either teetering with their faith or are very deep in their faith and just want to better understand how their work applies to it. I was not the only person that was thinking that right between my kind of network and the second one was actually that I've shared more recently. I moved into a role that's more growth based and it's more like growth hacking at seven shifts. Yeah, yeah. And I'm not going to go into that. Google growth hacking and you'll find out what that means. But a lot of it has to do with the psychology of humanity and how they think. And so that was one of the first books that. So it's why We Buy by Peiko Underhill. Yeah, yeah. It's a really good book and it talks about the psychology of critically thinking about yourself when you walk into a store or when you're making a purchase decision. And some of the factors that go into there, some of them are conscious and some of them are subconscious. And so that actually unlocked a lot of kind of questions for me that's, I think, really helped me now in this kind of growth hack mode at seven shifts, thinking more about how people think and how they're wanting to buy our product. And so that's been a really, really good book. So I've been sharing that one. Really. It's. It's a little older too, but it's a gooder.

Yeah, I've heard of that one before. I got to check that out. I haven't read it. All right, what one person would you be most interested to hear talk about how their faith influences their work on this podcast?

So I've been following this guy for a while, but James Kelly at Faith Tech, he's built a. A tech incubator out of Waterloo in Ontario. And it's an interesting concept because it's a tech incubator just for kingdom based tech companies. So it's building software for churches, which I'm passionate about. But I know that I don't feel called to go there, mainly because it's a very difficult place. Building software for not for profit organizations.

Incredibly difficult. Yeah, that's a good answer. I got to look this guy up. James Kelly.

Yeah. All right.

I got to check it out. All right. And finally, what single piece of advice would you give to somebody who's pursuing mastery of their vocation, whether it's product management or entrepreneurship? We talked about a bunch of different things in this episode, right? But one piece of advice to leave us with.

Listen to God's calling, I think in terms of being attentive to what you're doing in your career and being open to being called in different directions, I think is really, really big. And then once you find that and you feel that calling, go head first, dive right in. Right. And just be amazing at that thing that you're doing. And passion is a big one in, you know, being a master of something. And I've never seen someone who's not a master of something that's not passionate about what they're a master of.

Yeah, no. And it goes in line with what I write about. Master of one. Right. Like passion follows mastery. Passion grows with mastery. As we get better at what we do, we grow to love it more and more and more. So, hey, Phil, I just want to commend you for being masterful at your craft. I firsthand got to see this, by the way. Talk about a practical way in which you're different at your craft than your non Christian counterparts. I always felt that you cared about me as a vendor, even though you guys never, you never ended up buying from us. I always knew where we stood and you just treated me well. You treated me like a human being. So thank you for being masterful at your craft. Thank you for being the hands and feet of Jesus with soft and meeting the needs of your customers and your users. Thank you for the ministry of excellence that you minister to your employer, to investors, right. To vendors, and again, customers and users. And hey, thank you for, thank you for talking about empathy today. I want to commend you for your humility, your empathy, and just doing your work really well.

If you want to connect with Phil, you can easily find him on LinkedIn.

Or Twitter P C Courson. Phil, I think you do a terrific job blogging.

When you do, you need to be blogging more, man.

On LinkedIn. But yeah, PC Courson on LinkedIn and Twitter to find out more about Phil.

And product management and everything he's doing at seven shifts. Phil, thanks again for joining us today.

It was a pleasure. Thanks, Jordan.

So who wants to be a Product manager. Pretty great gig. You basically get to be an entrepreneur on someone else's dime with a lot less risk.

Right.

Since you're a part of a bigger company. Thank you again to my friend Phil Korson for that terrific conversation. Hey, before you go, I've got another shorter conversation I want to share with you guys. As you guys know, every week in my weekly faith and work devotional emails that go out on Monday mornings, I recommend a book that I've added to my personal reading list. And I recently sat down with one of the authors of one of those books books on my reading list. His name is Doug Gieman and he's.

The author of a book called before.

You quit where he's basically sharing the story of dozens of people, ordinary people like you and me, who have done extraordinary things for the kingdom of God because they simply kept going. They didn't quit. They pushed through and persevered in their vocations whatever God had called them to do. So I loved the concept of this book.

I think of lot.

A lot of us struggle with that temptation of quitting what we're doing now so we can move on to the next thing. So I'm really grateful for this book. And I sat down recently with Doug to ask him just a couple of questions to wrap our heads around what this book is. So please enjoy this conversation with Doug.

Hey Doug, greetings from the other side of Florida.

Florida.

How's everything in Pensacola?

It's raining today, but other than that it's beautiful. I love living on the coast.

I can't blame you. I love living on this coast. So Doug, I got really excited when I read the title for this book, before you quit. It's a topic that I've talked a lot about, my devotionals and just finding joy wherever you are in life and pushing through and persevering through tough times. So tell us, you know, at the highest level, what is this book about?

It's about perseverance. It's really about for a Christian. It's about getting a God given vision and then having the grit, to use Angela Duckworth's term, to have the grit, the determination to see it through and not quit until your dream is realized. That's really the essence of the book. It goes broader than just our aspirations. It deals, of course, with when you go through a hard time that's not voluntary, you know, a crisis, what I call moral courage. The Bible is replete with examples of people who had to have moral courage or difficulty not to quit on your vision, not to quit on your faith, not to quit on your covenants, you know, your marriage, your loved ones, the people around you. Say it through God has a purpose for your life. So that's what the book is really about.

How much did Angela Duckworth and Grit influence this and what other books influenced your own book?

Angela Duckworth's book, of course, is written from a business perspective, from a secular perspective, but it was actually recommended to me by one of the editors at Moody as a good book on the subject of perseverance. So it was greatly influenced, and I quote her a lot in my book. I think she really dug into an important component that is missing in a lot of ways in our modern culture, where people. It's kind of a cliche, but they're looking for instant gratification. And entrepreneurs and business people can fall into that same trap of thinking that I will have an idea, I will bring it to the market, and it'll be successful within a short period of time. And that really is just not true for 90% of the people.

Yeah, that's exactly right. So there's a lot of value in discipline over time, which Angela Duckworth talks a lot about. Who is this book, your book before you quit? Who's this book for?

Well, Moody wanted me to write it to the younger audience, the young adult audience. You know, the popular term, of course, is millennials, but I chose not to use that term in the book and not to write, especially with a guy my age. I didn't want to write with any kind of a patronizing tone towards a younger audience. So I chose to write with a tone that was more timeless and deal with more timeless principles. I use examples from when I was a young man in my 20s, and having just come to Christ and what was going on in the culture at that time as an example that things aren't really as different today as they were then. And so I tried not to make it too focused on one group, but yet write it with that younger audience in mind.

So we get a lot of people listening to this episode who are passionate about following Christ. They're also passionate about doing really masterful work for the glory of God and the good of others. But a lot of them don't feel like they can do it in their current role.

Right.

They're discontent. Maybe they're having a hard time finding joy in the work that they're doing today. How is this book going to serve that person?

I think everybody, young people included, have to come to terms with the fact that anything we learn to do well is going to take time. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, says that it takes 10,000 hours to become good at something. So you're a pianist. I've been enjoying your book, by the way, called Create. Yeah, I read it once. I'm going through it again. I could spend a lot of time just diverting to that subject because I love the subject of creativity and it actually goes hand in hand with perseverance. And Gladwell deals with that in his book and Duckworth deals with it in hers. That 10,000 hours, you think about that. 10,000 hours. That means if you practice the piano one hour a day, 365 days a week, it's going to take you 27 years to become a master. If you double down and do it two hours a day, it'll be 13 plus years to become a master, a virtuoso. So why do we think that suddenly we're going to wave our hands around on a desk and create something and we're going to be successful in three weeks?

Yeah. So for those of you listening who have read my new book, Master of One, you're reckon you understand why I'm so excited about Doug's book. You're preaching my language here. Not just 10,000 hours, but 10,000 hours of purposeful practice, which I unpack in Master of One. So, Doug, hey, thank you so much for writing this book. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. And thank you for spending a few minutes with me today.

You bet. Great to be with you, Jordan. Thank you.

Thanks again to Doug for giving us an overview of before youe Quit, which is out right now. Came out yesterday, so you guys can go pick up a copy of that book. Hey, if you're enjoying the Call to Mastery, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, write a review wherever you review podcasts. I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for the work that each of you are doing out in the world world this week right now. For the glory of God and the good of others. Thank you for following the Call to Mastery. I'll see you next week.