Roger Bikes

Tag: 100 days 2021

  • Enzo like a Ferrari

    Enzo like a Ferrari

    It cooled back down enough here to re-freeze the mud which allows me to take the dogs to the fenced yard. The snow we have now is pretty old. It fell around New Years I think.

    Anyway as snow ages is melts a little and re-freezes until it gets pretty crusty. Crusty is nice if it is smooth and can hold your weight. What we have here is some strange wind shaped old snow.

    Its ok for me to walk on cause I have pretty large feet. Dazey and Enzo’s dog feet are too small and get into the little wind cracks. Dazey kinda gives up and heads towards one of the trees where the snow has melted completely around the base. Enzo on the other hand flies like the wind and skips over the cracks. It’s something to see.

  • What is Customer Experience?

    The most basic definition of customer experience is self explanatory: how a customer experiences your brand from marketing and sales, to onboarding and support, renewal or cancellation, and finally referral or 1-star review. Customer experience is simple: it’s everything. 🤔

    In the last 5 to 30 years the term Customer Experience(CX) has become a major focus in many industries. This 1982 study talks about “the consumption experience as a phenomenon directed toward the pursuit of fantasies, feelings, and fun.” The basic premise is that as business has evolved and customer expectations have grown, companies need to think more holistically about how their customers experience the brand.

    As customers gained more choices for television channels, shoes, computers, and potato chips, their options for changing brands also grew. With the advent of the Internet, customers could do even more research than ever before. Companies have to adapt or die. Adaptation means listening to the customer.

    The Whole Company

    Working across all departments of a company is also a critical component of the CX team. Since the goal of CX is to understand how a customer experiences the entire brand, it is important that all parts of the company are involved. This means showing each department how the CX team can provide useful insights into how customers actually experience a brand. Rather than only relying on intuition and anecdote, the CX team can give data and nuance to ensure the customer’s perspective is understood.

    Understanding your customer’s experience is vital if your brand is having trouble, but it is also important if it is doing well. Just because things are going well now does not mean it will always do well. Understanding how and why customers enjoy your brand today can help you make adjustments later if customers start not enjoying your brand.

    A lot of the time the customer experience department is thought of as the ‘survey people’. The most visible thing that CX departments do is collect customer surveys. This is where many metrics are measured, including the Net Promoter Score(NPS). With the NPS, a company gets an idea of how well their brand is doing from one question: “How likely are you to refer our brand to someone else?” There is a lot of debate about the importance of NPS.

    The Survey People

    While surveys are an important part of the CX process, it should not be all that is done to understand the customer. First of all, there is a lot of evidence that people are experiencing general survey fatigue especially due to the COVID pandemic. Second, a survey it only as good as the goals that it is set to answer.

    Before any surveys can be seen as useful, the CX department needs to understand how customers experience the brand. What is the process for research, buying, using, and cancelling your brand? The result of this analysis creates what is referred to as the Customer Journey.

    Employee Experience

    One part of Customer Experience that may be overlooked is how your employees experience your brand. This is most evident for front line workers like support, billing, sales, and account management but it permeates the entire organization. If you have happy customers, it is more likely that you will have happy employees, and vise versa.

    While examining your customer’s experience, be sure to keep your employee’s experience in mind as well. Your employees have immediate insight into how customers are experiencing your brand. Usually customers are contacting your front line employees because they are having a problem. Regardless of whose fault the problem is, your employees need to resolve it. Are they empowered to resolve problems?

    Tip of the Iceberg

    Customer Experience is a huge concept that requires strategy, buy-in, research, surveying, interviewing, analysis, and implementation. The temptation to boil the ocean is there since it is such a large concept. Starting with strategy and buy-in from the top down seems best. Get a vision written down and then get everyone to agree on it. From there you may need to get more technology involved, but that only comes after strategy and buy-in.

    Understanding how customers experience your brand isn’t necessarily new. What is new is that your competition is probably thinking about it. The arms race to understanding your customer is already started, the question is will you be able to keep up?

  • Mellow Snow Day

    Mellow Snow Day

    We need it to snow really badly. Not only for snowboarding, but because the wintertime is when Colorado gets most of our moisture for the year. We need it to snow in feet, but instead we get an inch.

    Less to shovel I guess.

  • Recent media diet

    Pivot – Joe Rogan-Spotify-Anti-Vax, Canadian truckers, and the US Supreme Court

    Interesting discussion about the recent kerfuffle with Joe Rogan, Spotify, and a recent episode with anti-vax conspiracies. There is a freedom of speech aspect here but there are also consequences for spreading misinformation. Rogan can say whatever he wants but there will be consequences if people die because of what he says. Spotify cannot hide behind Section 230 here since they pay Rogan for exclusivity. One host plans to take his podcast off of Spotify. Relatedly Canadian truckers recently went to the capital to protest vaccine mandates. Even though 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated a vocal minority is getting outsized coverage and ended up getting a lot of people to show up and protest. Finally they talk about the US Supreme Court and the upcoming nomination from Biden. The court is very conservative at the moment and this nominee will be very important for balance in the decades to come.

    Fresh Air – Dir. Guillermo del Toro

    Excellent discussion about del Toro’s recent movie, Nightmare Alley, starring Bradley Cooper. The film centers around the Carnival and the cons run to separate people from their money. Cooper’s character escapes to the Carnival to hide from his past. The film sounds great and also has William DaFoe, which automatically means its entertaining. The conversation goes into del Toro’s childhood experiences and is a great listen. Terry Gross is a treasure and has been hosting this show for over 45 years!

    ReWork – Building to Flip is Building to Flop

    This episode discusses the concept of building a business with the intent to sell that business as soon as it makes sense. An analogy is made to spec homes, or a home that is built only with the intent of selling it. The builder does not consider this to be their home, nor is there anyone involved who will live in the home. Anecdotally the hosts bring up a spec home being built in their neighborhood and how the sub contractors mention how cheaply it is being built. The same happens with businesses where corners are cut because the builder/developer will not have to live with those decisions down the road. The hosts also draw from their experience of building Basecamp into the apps that is had today.

  • Chillin like Villans

    Chillin like Villans

    There was a quiz at work the other day. It asked what type of dog breed would I be, and I said ‘Lazy’.

  • Lazy Sunday Organization

    Lazy Sunday Organization

    My goals initially today were to clean up the garage and tune up Kate’s bike. After breakfast I was ready to spend the day on the couch watching movies. Fortunately the lack of anything worth watching got me back into action with my initial goals.

    The main mission today was to get Kate’s bike working a bit smoother. In order to do that though I needed to get a dedicated workbench setup for bike maintenance. The main goal would also get the second goal accomplished, organizing the garage.

    For the workbench itself we have a bench that Kate’s dad had built, out of leftover wood, a couple of years ago. It had been outside of the cabin just collecting junk. After relocating some extra wood from construction I had a good spot setup. I cut up some leftover boards and built a second shelf to store bike specific tools and supplies on.

    Once that was done working on Kate’s bike was a breeze. The main part of the tune up was re-waxing the chain. I started waxing our bike chains a while back and it really makes the bikes shift much smoother and quieter. The process is much different than just splashing oil on your chain. Having a dedicated workspace for doing the waxing is invaluable.

    Once I had all that done I watched Mission Impossible, the first one. Such a great movie.

  • Great day for a bike ride

    Great day for a bike ride

    It was wonderful weather for a bike ride today. I should have worn warmer gloves but I made it home in time to jump in the hot tub. It had been a few weeks since our last ride so we took it easy and just went into Mancos for coffee and a cherry tart. Not a cloud in sight and drivers we all super cool and gave us a wide berth.

    Yo! Selfie with the La Platas.

  • Diving into Indoor Rowing

    Just before Christmas I got an indoor rowing machine. The goal of getting the rower was to give me a way to exercise aerobically during the winter months. My left knee has no meniscus since it was removed surgically 4 years ago. This means that running is over for me, unless I want to accelerate and exacerbate arthritis. Riding a bike in sub freezing temperatures can be done but its not exactly fun. Then there is the chance of snow and ice which can be perilous at 20+ mph.

    So I got the rower with the intent of using Apple Fitness+ rowing workouts to get my morning workouts in. I prefer to workout in the morning because my brain isn’t totally turned on and distracted yet. This lets me get into the flow of a workout much more easily. Then I have the after glow benefits of the workout for the rest of the day. This helps me stay focused and comfortable while I am doing work or just relaxing on a day off.

    I quickly learned that the Apple Fitness+ rowing workouts are mostly anaerobic workouts with pretty high stroke rates. These types of workouts are useful for building strength and getting faster, but they do not build your aerobic fitness. Aerobic fitness training means that the body is using oxygen as fuel and has been shown to have a myriad of health benefits, both physically and mentally. Basically aerobic workouts are slower and easier than anaerobic workouts.

    So I needed to find an alternative for rowing workouts. I have found that having some type of structure for working out helps me stay committed to working out, lets me see progress in my fitness, and it reduces the chance for injury. Over the years I have followed a lot of different workout plans for a variety of exercises and goals.

    One of my goals with rowing is to do a marathon distance row of 26.2miles or 42.195 km. That will be a multi hour effort that will be best approached with a solid base of fitness and experience on the rower. I am not aiming to compete with anyone except myself to try and complete the distance. I want to do it prepared so that I can finish it and avoid injury.

    So I started searching for marathon training plans and found this thorough guide, which is a bit on the intense side of what I am planning to do. However it starts off by recommending that anyone new to rowing should start by focusing on a shorter distance first, like 2km. So I searched for 2km training plans and found this one. Its pretty straight forward and would give me a solid base to then move onto training for the Marathon later.

    Just before our Mexico River trip I did the first week of the 12 week short distance program. I am really glad I did because we did a lot of rowing on the trip due to there being a lot of flat water. The immediate difference to notice in this short distance training program is that there are a lot of interval workouts.

    Interval workouts are anaerobic workouts focused on getting you faster and stronger. This may seem confusing since I said that I wanted to do aerobic workouts. However to build a strong base when first starting a new exercise it is helpful to mix things up. The mixing things up is something that the Apple workouts did not do since there is no long term defined work out plan. With this 12 week short distance plan I do pure aerobic workouts 2 times a week. Then 4 times a week the workouts have an aerobic warmup and cooldown with interval training in the middle.

    The intervals are hard but they are helping me improve my form and understanding of rowing metrics significantly. They are also making me feel much stronger. My upper back, the lower half of my biceps, and my upper forearms feel especially stronger. This makes sense as I don’t do a lot of regular exercise that focuses on those muscles. In biking they get used but just to hold my torso up. They are not propelling me down the road, that is done by the legs.

    When I started rowing last month my form was not great and I didn’t know about strokes per minute and pace per 500m. Now I feel that my form is pretty solid and I have a much better grasp of how strokes per minute and pace work based on my goal with the workout. The metrics is one thing that I am really enjoying about rowing. The rowing machine has a surprisingly sophisticated computer that measures almost everything happening when you pull the handle.

    One of my favorite metrics is the average and peak force metrics. These tell you how hard you are pulling and it means that the rower is a power meter. For non sporting people a power meter may not mean much but in the last 10 years of so power meters have taken the sports training world by storm. Usually they are installed on a bike and allow for a more refined measurement of effort than the traditional heart rate meter.

    Measuring effort only with heart rate is problematic for a few reasons. The main one is that it is a measurement of effort after the effort has been applied. There is always a delay between the muscular effort applied and the resulting raise in heart rate. Another reason that heart rate measurement is less than ideal is that your heart rate changes based on a lot of factors besides the exercise. Dehydration, lack of rest, and the stress of daily life all affect our heart rates and therefore can make it difficult to get a good idea of what your effort actually is.

    With a power meter all of those issues are removed since the measurement is force applied to the machine and displayed as a force curve. The force curve lets me see in real time how much force I am applying and when. I can see if my transition from using my legs to my back and then arms is a smooth process or if I need to transition better.

    Yes the display looks like a graphing calculator from high school but I kinda love the simplicity of it. Maybe there is some nostalgia too. There is also an iPhone app for my rower that lets me see even more data while I am rowing. Its partially a nerd fest and workout session in one and I am kinda hooked. More to come.

  • Review: Counterpart (TV Series)

    What if there was a door to a parallel universe that you could visit just by walking through it? What would happen if you met yourself in that parallel world? Would you get along, or would you feel threatened/jealous/envious/afraid? Now consider that everyone else in your world has a double in the other world and consider the complexity of that situation.

    The TV series Counterpart centers entirely around this premise and the writers take it to eleven. Through the course of 20 episodes and 2 seasons we the viewer follow Howard Silk as he learns about a world he also had no idea about, even though it was under his nose at work and living in his home.

    It took me over a year to complete the series mainly because I got lost with the complexity of it all. One world of characters is generally too much for me to stay interested; unless there are spaceships like in The Expanse. That show got off to a slow start but then had me sucked in; until its lackluster conclusion. With Counterpart the world is just the world we live in today; except there is a parallel world, and a government agency setup to keep the peace.

    All that said the show is brilliant with great writing, acting, and photography. JK Simmons is the main character and there are 2 of him so its even more entertaining. It is set in Berlin with mostly english actors so everything and everyone looks and acts super cool.

    If you like sci-fi you will enjoy Counterpart. If you like spy thrillers you will enjoy Counterpart. If you have trouble keeping track of names then this show may infuriate you as there are a lot of people, then remember to double them. However, it’s just a TV show so don’t feel stressed if you don’t understand everything. Its a mystery as well as sci-fi, and cloak and dagger show. You are supposed to be lost at times. By the end you should have a decent grasp on what happened, or not.

    Counterpart is available on Amazon Prime.

  • Review: Sid Meier’s Memoir!

    For the amount of time I have spent playing Civilization and its various sequels and offshoots I had to listen to Sid Meier’s Memoir!. For nostalgia’s sake it was fascinating to learn how Sid had become a games developer and then one of the greatest of all time. My other reason for listening to this particular memoir was that I figured understanding game development better might help me understand customer experience better.

    Overall I think that Sid Meier’s Memoir is a great book to either listen to or read. I did the audiobook and the narration by Charles Constant was excellent. When I can imagine the narrator as the author him or herself then I rate the narration as excellent. The details shared in the memoir seem honest and in some cases expose Sid as a human like the rest of us.

    If you haven’t played Civilization I don’t blame you. It’s a complicated game that takes a while to get going and then lasts for hours and hours and even days, weeks, months, and years. There are sub charts for technology, politics, and religion. Winning the game takes patience and dedication that goes well beyond Super Mario Brothers or Pac Man.

    If you have played Civilization and enjoyed it though then you probably understand my reverence for Sid Meier. Here is a person who managed to put all of human history into a video game and make it entertaining. The technology chart is a marvel for any kid who liked to read the Encyclopedia, like me. The economics of building cities, managing armies, and destroying or cooperating with your competition is endless.

    My first exposure to Sid Meier games though came with the F-19 Stealth Fighter flight simulator game. As a kid I was obsessed with flight and planes and the military. The game came out in 1989 and I played it religiously for at least a year. Before then I had spent most of my time playing games on the Nintendo NES which were fairly basic. With F-19 there was a manual that detailed various types of aircraft, armaments, flight dynamics, and stealth strategies.

    I was not great at F-19 mainly due to its complexity, but the game stuck in my mind. It was the most complicated thing I had ever experienced. Unfortunately I did not have many friends in my area who were into complicated video games. I fell back into playing less complex console games and then even stopped playing those before I went to University.

    It was at University that I was reintroduced to gaming. During my Junior year, 1997/98, I studied abroad in England. My dorm was full of Computer Science majors, and each room had a 10Mbps Ethernet outlet. Not only was I reintroduced to gaming, but to online gaming. That was also the year Quake 2 came out and I spent a good amount of time blasting demons. I was also introduced to an ‘older’ game called Civilization which had come out in 1991.

    While Quake had the best graphics, Civilization had complexity and intelligence. Quake was pretty simple: kill or be killed. Civilization was not as clear cut. Sure, you could play aggressively and attack everything in sight, but when you came up against a stronger civilization or multiple civilizations which had banded together you got wiped out. To win Civilization you had to think more high level and consider many parts of your civilization. If there was a food shortage workers would revolt and stop building. If you were a democracy your population would tire of war more quickly than a more authoritarian form of government.

    The sheer complexity of the game made me revere Sid Meier as a higher level being who was able to simplify so much of human history. In his memoir Sid recounts getting into gaming and how various parts of his childhood helped him later in life. He also recounts getting into business and creating his first games.

    The chapters about creating Civilization and its subsequent and ongoing success are intriguing in many ways. Naturally the executives at his gaming company were against it. They wanted to get back into Arcade gaming which Sid saw as a dead end. Once the game was released users started modifying it which Sid was unsure of how to approach that. Eventually they embraced the mod-ers and realized that they were improving the game as well as building a rabid fan base.

    He also talks about managing other developers and handing over the reins of Civilization so that it would continue to be improved upon. This part of the book intrigued me the most. Since Sid’s name is on the game I always imagined that he was the main developer of each release, but this is not the case. 5 years after Civilization was released Civilization 2 was released with a different developer leading the project. Sid was still involved but had stepped aside to let someone else build on his creative vision.

    From a customer experience perspective Sid Meier’s Memoir gives insight into how to balance customer needs and expectations with the businesses capabilities and options. Similar to how Steve Jobs is quoted as saying “Customers don’t know what they want till you give it to them.” Sid would start projects based on what he wanted and enjoyed. Then as the creative process progressed he would work with other developers and users to make sure it was enjoyable and fun.

    That said Sid’s games history is littered with failures like C.P.U. Bach. Sid was obsessed with Bach and wanted to create a game that would let users learn to appreciate the music. Unfortunately the market disagreed and the game was a total failure. Sid picked himself up and kept going.

    Even if you aren’t much of a gamer I think that Sid Meier’s Memoir! is an interesting read about a pioneer of the gaming world. The business lessons are relatable to most companies and the developer and programming lessons are high level enough that non-developers can follow without much effort. I enjoyed the book very much.