Podcast
Balancing Technology and the Human Element in a Tech-Enabled Service
Key takeaways from our interview with Sally Reasoner, VP of Talent Identification at Ascend Indiana
This week’s episode of Better Product was with Sally Reasoner, VP of Talent Identification at Ascend Indiana. As a nonprofit organization with a mission of fueling Indiana’s talent ecosystem, it may not be immediately clear how tech fits into their organization. After all, their differentiating factor is their people — they take the time to get to know each and every candidate one-to-one.
But as the lead of product development for the Network, Ascend’s digital product that allows them to scale and empower their team, Sally is very aware of the value of tech in every industry, even non-tech ones. Here are the main takeaways from Sally’s episode:
1. Customer feedback can improve all aspects of your business, not just product.
You’re constantly collecting feedback and insights for product (or at least you should be!) so why not get more bang for your buck? At Ascend, Sally applies product feedback all across the business to make user-informed improvements.
“Product is more more than your creative vision and your pathway, it’s responding to the market and how users use it.”
2. Find the balance of tech while still appealing to the personal, human aspect.
Instead of looking at tech as something that replaces people, Sally looks at tech as something that can scale the Ascend team and make the personal touches easier to execute. The Network was created to amplify people, not replace them.
“I thought I would have this grand vision and that would be what the Network is, and that it’s your vision as a product owner or manager. But what I learned very quickly is, that’s not the role at all. The role is to be responsive to the users.”
3. Tech can be the great differentiator for a non-profit.
Tech and non-profit may not sound like they mix, but Sally talks all about how tech has elevated their effectiveness and made them better at solving for impact, not profit.
“One of our product principles is to always solve for impact, not profit, because we have the luxury of being a non-profit where we every thing that we do is: How are we going to get more students connected to more jobs? And that drives our enhancements and features, everything is driven through what will connect more students to more jobs.”
Listen to the full episode on iTunes, Spotify, or Google.
Innovatemap is a digital product agency helping startups, scale-ups ideate and launch digital products.
