How Ted Lasso is helping us build better software
“As the man once said, the harder you work, the luckier you get.”
At the peak of COVID, seemingly out of nowhere, a peculiar show called Ted Lasso debuted on Apple TV. When I saw the first trailers on YouTube, it piqued my interest, but not enough to dish out money for yet another streaming service I would never use. I bit the bullet, though, and added another $5/month streaming subscription to my list to catch Ted Lasso, and am so glad I did. Two years and several rewatches later, I continue to be incredibly impacted by the lessons I learned from that show.
Ok, you know the story — or maybe you don’t?
Ted Lasso follows an American college football coach (of the same name) on his journey to the UK after being recruited by an English football (soccer) club to become their head coach. AFC Richmond is a contending but middle-of-the-pack club looking to change its odds and fight for a league championship. Lasso, known for taking a no-name school to its first college football championship, was an “inspired” choice by the team’s new owner. In reality, this “inspired” choice was a ploy meant to tank the team by the jealous ex-wife of the team’s former owner.
Cutting this exposition short, Ted Lasso found himself in a weird and unfortunate position; a position to fail, with a saboteur boss and players that didn’t trust him. In Ted’s ability to thrive despite these challenges, the writers for Ted Lasso gave us viewers a masterclass in leadership and collaboration. For us at Resultid, it laid the groundwork to understand how to make a better product.
“I shouldn’t bring an umbrella to a brainstorm.”
It’s not often that, in a brand pyramid, you select a fictional character’s voice as your brand voice. Yet Ted Lasso exemplifies all the characteristics of an ideal personality: he is compassionate, respectful of people’s perspectives, and he wants to help collaboratively.
When we started our journey of building our new product, the first thing we did was identify what we thought we were building: SaaS Software.
No thank you.
Suppose Lasso exemplifies all the best characteristics a company should have. Typical SaaS software does the exact opposite:
- The software is hard to use
- Good customer service is gated
- Onboarding is impersonal and condescending
- In the worst cases, SaaS software doesn’t solve what users want
On the drawing board, as we ideated, we wrote a list of things we thought we could do better. We came up with a list of rules that defined what we call the Anti-Platform:
- Building for ourselves = building for others: We should dog-food every aspect of our product — test it on ourselves first — only deeming it acceptable for others if we find that it has significantly added value to us.
- Data belongs to the user: A user should be able to understand, download, and remove their data from our app at any stage in the process.
- All customers get the best service: Whether you’re a regular user or an enterprise user doesn’t matter. You will always be respected and receive the best customer support.
- Don’t pay more than you need to: We have no interest in collecting money from our users unless they’re directly getting value out of our app. We are doing away with seat-based pricing, instead opting for a more fair, usage-based system.
- We don’t do anything in the dark: Black boxes are not helpful. We believe in showing our work, no matter how sophisticated, because we know that the user understands their data better than we do. After all, they are the subject matter experts in their own fields. We are merely helping get through that data quicker.
These are just a few tenants of our Anti-Platform methodology, and they all revolve around what Ted Lasso believes: treating people with respect and working together as a team. As we continue to build our product, we will always focus on creating opportunities for us to work together towards a solution, not just providing a “platform” and waiting for your payment to process every month. That’s why we’re not charging for our beta, and we will always have a free plan for users who will not need to use our app daily.
“You should do a TED Talk, ’cause right now you’re getting a whole heap of ‘Ted listen.’”
Lasso believes in the power of listening. When there’s more you don’t know than you know, why not give people the opportunity to educate you? There’s something precious that you get out of being able to evaluate the perspectives that others are willing to provide.
After closing our seed round in January with our incredible investors TMV and Overline (who, by the way, believe in the same principles we do), we needed to pivot the company. Our target had always been big enterprise companies, but companies don’t use products. People use products. For the next thirty days, we set a goal for ourselves to talk to 150 users, collect their feedback, and use that to help define our product roadmap. Two incredible things happened for us:
- It took us less than 50 user interviews to realize precisely how we could help people
- We ended up talking to over 200 people in 30 days
The best part? It was a team effort. We had everyone from each team — product, tech, and R&D — rotating through every call. The entire company was exposed to our end-user, and you know what? It FUNDAMENTALLY changed the way we approach everything. AND now we have a bank of hundreds of users to talk to if we have more questions.
And we still haven’t stopped talking to people. We make it a point to speak to a handful of users daily. Every Thursday, we invite the most excited ones to our council meeting to dive deeper.
It turns out that talking less helped us build more.
“Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn’t it? If you’re comfortable while you’re doing it, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
We know that what we are building is not a solution everyone is looking for. Qualitative data isn’t typically looked at by most companies; it’s hard to understand and wrangle. Those who do look at it task entire teams of people with researching, analyzing, and distilling qualitative data to undergird their decision-making. We are working to build the best possible app to help you efficiently find the transformative stories hidden in your data. We want to help you clarify what is in your data, align you and your team, and help you make better decisions. The Ted Lasso way.
People are overwhelmed with reviewing information that is difficult to understand while being tasked to find the critical elements for the story they are building. It’s just not possible for one person to create a compelling story quickly and concisely when dealing with a mountain of documents, PowerPoints, and excel workbooks.
“You say impossible, but all I hear is ‘I’m possible’.”
Ted Lasso has a poster he often points to when encouraging his team to go out on the field and give it everything they’ve got. It has one word on it: BELIEVE. We believe we are the ones to disrupt how people deal with qualitative data, and we know the only way we can do it is with your help. It’s what binds our team and our users together. We’re incredibly excited to tackle this problem together and look forward to connecting with even more of you as we continue to grow, using the ways of Ted Lasso.
