Conversation Lab Podcast

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 h...

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 conversatio...

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 sa...

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_...

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...

In this first interview episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, Jake McKee sits down with William Marks, a Navy veteran, former Pentagon spokesman, and congressional candidate in Washington State, to explore what happens when the people responsible for communication stop talking only to the people who already speak their language. William's career has put him in some of the highest-stakes conversation environments imaginable: mili...

In this first episode of the Conversation Lab Podcast, host Jake McKee introduces himself, the show, and the framework behind his consulting work — the Customer Conversation Compass. Jake draws on 25+ years of customer engagement experience, including building one of the most ambitious fan community programs at LEGO, to make the case that most product teams have lost direct contact with the people they serve, not because they're la...

The Conversation Lab Podcast explores how better dialogue leads to better decisions, stronger products, and clearer thinking. Hosted by me (Jake McKee), this podcast goes beyond surface-level interviews and digs into the moments where insight is created in real time.

This episode is a pre-launch trailer, briefly sharing some details about what the show will be and what to expect.

If you care about building things that matter, listeni...