Vampire Meetings Are Sucking the Life Out of Your Day (With Christoph Steinlehner)

In this episode of the Product Agility Podcast, Ben welcomes product coach and consultant Christoph Steinlehner to discuss a universal pain point: unproductive meetings. If your calendar is flooded with time-sucking, pointless meetings, you're not alone. Christoph dives into the root cause of this meeting epidemic and offers practical tools to reclaim your time, energy, and focus.

Key Takeaways:

• Multiplying Meetings: Why they lead to more and when to intervene.
  Vampire Meetings: Use the “wooden stake” of visual mapping to end life-sucking gatherings.
  Power of Visual Mapping: Even rough sketches bring clarity, alignment, and actionable outcomes.
  Keep it Scrappy: Stay humble and simple to encourage collaboration and avoid over-preparation.
  Avoiding Tangents: Use visual tools to spot and address off-track discussions.
  Psychological Safety: Create a safe space for collaboration and better decision-making.

Practical Tools & Methods:

• Customer Journey Mapping, Impact Maps, and more: Christoph shares some of the key methods that product teams can use to map out their meetings, systems, and processes visually.
• Mapping doesn’t need to be complex: You don’t need fancy software! Sticky notes on a wall or a whiteboard can work wonders for getting on the same page.
• Tools of the trade: Learn about some digital tools for remote mapping, including Miro, Mural, and Figma, and how to get started with them.

Quotable Moments:

• “Meetings are like vampires, sucking the life out of us. But mapping is the wooden stake we need to slay them.”
• “Start visualising! You don’t need expensive tools. Just a few sticky notes and arrows can transform how your team collaborates.”
• “When people can see what’s in your head, they can point out what’s wrong. That’s when real collaboration happens.”

Links and Resources:

• Connect with Christoph on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/csteinlehner/  
• Want to learn more about visual mapping and how it can help your team? Reach out to Christoph on LinkedIn for his free guide to the Mapper Method.
• Loved this episode? Leave us a review on iTune

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

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Chapters

• 17:21 Visualising Ideas for Collaboration
• 25:59 The Power of Visuals in Communication
• 36:38 Mapping Mistakes: Arrogance and Collaboration

Transcript

0:00

Make like some sense of what's in your head, because often times that's not as sordid as you think. So clarifying your own thoughts, it's the first step always. Did you say not as sordid? Sorted. Sorted. I thought you said sordid like sordid. Interesting words, but because, yeah, do you know what it means? In other words, sordid mean mate, I will. And, and, and listeners, be prepared for this 'cause I'm just gonna Google it,'cause sordid means you're ready for this involving immoral or dishonorable actions and motives arousing moral distaste and contempt. Dirty or squalid. So when you said that might be as sworded as you think I was, like, what about me? Not as dirty or squalid as you think. I'm like, if people are thinking now, they can just kind of empty their minds and all their strange little predilections out in their meetings. So. So what does he used to do next? I don't know, but have you ever about thought about doing this thing with a badger? Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product? It's a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Welcome everybody. How many meetings have you had today? Well, if it's the weekend, pay for if the answer is none, but think back to the weekday. But how many? Shit, pointless painful meetings did you endure? And it's a ratio to that. How many of these meetings ended up in more meetings to discuss the actions from the meeting? Their meetings are like mug wise or gremlins scrambling till you put they just multiply the right conditions, give the right, the right ingredients, the right food, you know they will just multiply. And they are like vampires sucking for life out of all of us. And today I'm joined by Christophe Steinleiner and we're going to drive a wooden stake through the heart of these life sucking vampire meetings. Christoph, welcome to the podcast. And thanks for this nice intro. I really enjoyed it. So thanks for having me here in the show. And yeah, let's talk a little about about this wooden stick killing, Yes, stupid meetings and transforming them into valuable meetings. Yeah, vampire meetings because they're sucking their life out of all of us. Regular listeners will be wondering, well, Ben seems very relaxed. Perhaps he's had a drink or two. It's just been the end of a very long day. And I'm not in the mood for my normal approach to introducing the podcast episode. What I am in the mood for, though, is a conversation and to figure out how we can get rid of some of these crappy meetings. But before we really divulge all the all the answers to the questions, Christopher's, I think is what we're going to be going into. No pressure. I think what would be brilliant is if you could give a short introduction to yourself and tell the listeners they why you're in a good place to share this information with us. Yeah, let's head into it. I'm in the morning here in Washington, DC in the US. So I have the day before me and didn't have a drink yet, just had a coffee. And I'm currently working as a product coach and consultant. So I help product managers and leaders to get out of their insanity of their daily work. But I didn't start my career in this way. So I started out as a lot of people with a long and winding roads until I've been here. So I started as a web designer. I doubled down on design, that interaction design, product design and suddenly moved into product management and leadership roles being there as In interim position. So I saw a lot of different companies, saw a lot of different setups, and one common theme there was like, we hopped from meeting to meeting and it was a drain. So I discovered a few things how to get out of this, and I'm happy to talk about this more. Yes, yes, I want to know. I've not without the old tool in my toolbox to help make meetings better. We had some Dion a number of months ago, a gentleman named Evan Unger who shared lots of tips, shared a lovely metaphor for how a meeting should be like a flight or an aeroplane. And if you don't put attention into how you take off and land and think it's just about the journey won't show up, then you're missing. And a trick. So after this episode, you're keen for more tips. Please do check out the episode of Evan. However, shameless promotion to one side, what is your #1 tip for ending the pain of these awful endless carousel of meetings? So my number one approach is start to map. So start to get visual. I saw a lot of tries with like let's do agendas, let's do talking points and things like that. That sometimes works a bit, but it's hard to do. So what I discovered was that I was in a situation years ago where I had the funny job of leading 10 teams without any authority, as many do. So there was a the client was an educational publisher changing their business models. So that meant they had to touch a lot of places. And in the beginning, I was like, in this meeting held. So it jumped from conversation to conversation. It was like, I thought, it's easy, the whole change. So they wanted to change too bundles and they wanted to change to a subscription model. So not, not that crazy, I thought. But when I talked to a couple of people, it was always like, Oh yeah, we have to talk more. And I don't know exactly about this, so talk to this person. So it just went from easy to complex. It was pretty unclear what's the next step. I got really lost from like all the information. And at the same time, since I have a background in design, I started to map these out. So I had a customer training mapped out and then mapped out like what technical systems need to be there? What teams are involved where and also what we could possible, what possibly needs to be changed to introduce this new capabilities for our customers? But I didn't know that I should share this. I wasn't like in a mode where I'm like, oh, I share this maps because I wrote like, OK, that's my notes. I'm a designer, I'm understanding them, but it doesn't make sense to share them. And suddenly I shared them. So suddenly I was in a situation where I just like put this map out with like, oh, can you explain me here a little bit? And it completely changed how people interacted with me because suddenly they saw like the bigger picture and they could correct my notes, so they could correct what they were seeing and we could talk about a thing instead of talking about each other. So that was a really huge change. So people were able to see what you were thinking. Yeah, exactly. And they were could call out what I got wrong, which was totally unclear before because of course, if you're talking, you're in some form of convincing presentation mode. So I just had the thoughts. Let me tell you about it, Ben. Is a completely different game that look at the thing I drew. Is it like how you understand? That's really important. It reminds me of a conversation I was having yesterday and this is the how can I put it message to all those people out there who think that they are terrible at drawing. I hate to break it to you. You probably are terrible at drawing. I think I'm terrible at drawing. Yesterday I confirmed I was terrible at drawing. But by drawing terribly, we created some clarity. And it also helped me build a relationship with the person I was working with because then they were able to make fun of me and I was able just to go with it. So not only were they able to see what I was thinking and trying to explain very badly, it also created a lovely rapport between us because my car looked nothing like a car. It was more like a spaceship apparently, and I mean a spaceship, a very bad spaceship at that. It was not good, but it helped to really connect us and to help that person see what I was thinking. I want to track back, though, to something that you were saying, which is you said that you thought it was easy and it turned out as complex. How can people tell if a situation they're in warrants some form of mapping, some form of visualization? And how can we tell? Usually it's as soon as you get in situations where there are a lot of different views on the same thing. So if it's like obvious, what's the next thing to do? It's obvious everybody is talking about the same, then you don't need the extra effort. So I'm not proposing OK start to visualize everything, just to visualize it for me to tool get to a same page. And another thing which is pretty obvious when you start to need another method is if people going down rabbit holes. I think we all notice meetings where you're sitting there and suddenly an engineer is talking about database schemes and how we exactly solve this. Then it's like, OK, but is this the right time for this conversation? We are talking about the bigger customer journey. We're talking about what like the big steps are, but you see people always jump into some deeper conversations, which might not be at this time relevant. And then I'm starting to OK, let's get an overview because that can anchor also your conversation because you can start to point at things can also bring a group back. If somebody's starting to go deeper into this be like, OK, that's interesting. Let's just write it down, make a note about it and then get back into OK, but what's happening from this step to that step and way to see that perhaps the thing we're dealing with is complex is when we go down non relevant or tangential rabbit holes. Yeah. And it when it's not clear, maybe the just to clarify I'm I'm now lose using loosely the word complex, not in the Kinefin sin. Oh, no fair. Like Kinefin, like Kinefin can just whatever. Let's just do like let's not get bogged down exactly. Kinefin right. I want to do because I I'm thinking you're your listeners might be familiar with Kinefin in the agile space. Do you know what if they if they want to come on and talk about Kinefin, then they can find a different podcast. Yeah, because it's I love Dave Snowden. I think he's wonderful. But can Evan just I feel is too, too academic for a lot of people. Exactly. Sometimes it's really helpful. Sometimes I really like it. And sometimes it's just going to the wrong direction for a group of people. OK, but. Back to our conversation. Yeah, complexity. So complexity, yeah, it's like too, too many things to hold in your head. That's another thing. So we are really bad at holding something in our head and at the same time reason about it. So I have like a certain system, a certain journey in my head, but reasoning at the same time about us is really hard. So it's easy to put it on a wall and just look at it and be does this make sense? And another thing is like in my head, I'm easy to betray myself. I'm easy to jump over black spots. So I just like my my mind. And I think that's human is just filling in blanks with like, yeah, there is something, but it's hard to determine if you're clear. So I think everybody knows this. They want to write an e-mail and they're like, OK, I just have to write it down. And then it's like, exactly what how, how should I like this moment? And I think exactly the same when when I'm up with people that they're like, oh, yeah, it's totally clear. Let's me like step one, What's happening exactly there? Then you have to get concrete. You have to have like a perspective on it and a perspective then you could discuss and you can dissect with a group of people. This try and create some clarity between ourselves and the listeners. I was going to ask a question around like, OK, so how do we create some of that focus from the beginning? I thought, no, Ben, that's a secondary question. The big question I think is in people's minds is when you say map, what is it that you mean? I'm pretty agnostic to methods so I use a lot of methods in my work like customer journey mapping, service blueprints, Wadley mapping, impact maps, things like that. But you can also often you start with like just a couple of post its on a whiteboard on a virtual whiteboard. And that's also like how I approach this. Did I first like map for myself or when I'm coaching, ask my coach, he to map for himself? Map down your thoughts and get it into like first a rough sequence. And then you can go either the method way or you can just like put errors between stuff. Just make like some sense of what's in your head because oftentimes that's not as sorted as you think. So clarifying your own thoughts, it's the first step always. Did you say not as sorted? Sorted. Yeah, sorted. I thought you said sordid like sordid. Interesting words, but because, yeah, do you know what it means? In other words, sordid mean mate. I will. And, and, and listeners, be prepared for this because I'm just going to Google it. Because sordid means you're ready for this involving immoral or dishonorable actions and motives arousing moral distaste and contempt. Dirty or squalid. So when you said that might be as sworded as you think I was, like, what about me? Not as dirty or squalid as you think. I'm like, if people are thinking now, they can just kind of empty their minds and all their strange little predilections out in their meetings. So. So what does he used to do next? I don't know. But have you ever about thought about doing this thing with a badger? Like that's too much dirty. I don't want to know what you're doing with Badgers. Let's focus on the user journey and let's just focus on that. No, but I really want to talk about that thing with with the Badgers. No, it's too sordid. Sordid makes much more sense. Be a very different podcast. Sorry for being not the native speaker. No, it's fine. Your, your English is about a million times better than any other language I speak, including English. Listening in the US helps, yeah, they're sorted. Yes, they. And what you're saying is when we map, you're not trying to push some acronym on people, You're not trying to sell some approach. You're you're, you're saying it's really important and incredibly beneficial to visualize what it is we're thinking in whatever mechanism, whatever frame, whatever notation that we like. How can we empty our minds so that other people can see them, but in a, in a visual way so we can help sort it rather than sharing some of the more sordid little fantasies that we have? Exactly, exactly. That's the, the, the, the direct leeway then. Because if you have this artifact, you can run around with it and be like, OK, look at this. I think it's wrong. So that's, that's pretty key with like not I'm selling you because that's another like mode. We, we just trained ourselves in meetings that we are going there with PowerPoints with stories and things like that and trying to sell our idea. But at 90% of our intelligence, we want to collaborate. We don't want to have like convince everybody that this is the right thing. There are places and spaces for that, of course. But most of the time I work with my team. I work, I want to get feedback from my leadership. I want to have a collaboration. So I want to go into a situation where I'm like, that's like what I know currently and I how I understand the world, but please help me, please help me to improve this picture and please help me to make decisions. And that leads to a completely different conversation because suddenly. So either we are talking about it or we are even better like continuing the mapping. We could also do this like then in a silent mode first, as we know from many workshops. So everybody writes down a few key points and then we discussed them. Having an artifact and changing the artifact really gets you out of this mode that you're like confronting everybody, that you're like, oh, you said this, but it's wrong or I said that and I have to protect it because it's my thoughts. I put it out there and we can discuss about the thing instead, discussing each other. So many things that have come into Edinburgh. You were talking about that because I think it's really important. One thing I do really want to show is you mentioned impact mapping and before we started recording, we're talking about the accent human being that is called Co Ajit, I think is how you pronounce that. You try to teach about every week, but I think it's Ajit and his episode will be out by now. Talk about lizard optimization. But before lizard optimization and before impact mapping, he created something called Specification by Example, which not many people are that familiar with, but it was phenomenally useful and it was one of the main reasons why approaches such as behavior driven development and people using Cucumber and Gherkin for automated testing. Why that became so practically valuable was because of the what Goricos taught in Specification by Example. But he always said that. It's specification by example. What we want to do is we want to, well, maybe he unless she says it in the book, but when he taught me spec by example, he said this to us. You know, we want to give people something to complain about. We're going to give them something visual. We're going to give them something like some output, something they can see which they can complain about. Because if you can't get feedback from someone ordinarily give them something to complain about. And I think it's really interesting what you're saying about, you know, having a representation of your mind and walking around with it saying like, tell me what's wrong, that this isn't right, but give me some feedback on it. You know, complain about it, tell me what's good, tell me what's bad. But let's kind of work through that because when we look at systems thinking, one of the key tenants, assistance thinking, as articulated by a gentleman called Peter Senge, was the idea of inquiry and reflection. And in order to understand the system in which we are working better, we need to be humble enough to really inquire into what people are thinking and visualize that and then have them and us reflect upon what we're now seeing. And I think what you're saying, it really makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, exactly. So you, you, you said it so well, this like externalizing it and then being able having a critical mind of it is really important because with that you can then also point out what what are the risky pieces? What are your assumptions? What are the things you're not sure about? Because there are always the things where everybody is like quite convinced that it should work like that or it is like that. Also, if you're mapping, oftentimes you're starting mapping like the as is, but sometimes we just don't know exactly how it works. So we had a system which is like 3 years old or five years old and the engineers like, I think it should work like that, but we have to check it out and we have to like done research a little bit and that exactly this point when you have your map. When you have like arrived at a shared understanding and you started to point out like what are assumptions in there? What risks are in there, things like that, then it's pretty easy to come to action point. Before if you're just talked to you, you will get endless into rabbit hole discussions. If you it's totally unclear, you have to repeat yourself over and over again. If you're going from meeting to meeting, you're starting always at like what did we talked last time about, oh, this and that happened. Let's talk about and we all know this. We all know we all be in the situations like last week. Yeah, we, we arrived. We have to do now. And here you, you saved your conversation more or less. It's like if you're mapping, you can time box it and after an hour you'll be like, OK, now we're we have to leave to our next meeting, but you open the next time and everybody's like, Oh yeah, that's that's what our current state is talking about, carrying on the mapping as an artifact. So no need for minutes perhaps no need to have documents shared. If you can continue to work upon the same map. It's a very sort of visual reminder of what you did before. And I suppose when from a coaching perspective as well, that's very useful because one of the questions you often get asked when I'm teaching coaching is how do I remember what the coach she said last time. And I said, well, actually it probably isn't really your responsibility to remember what they said or agreed to last time. If they can't remember that, then that isn't really on you. That's on them. But I understand where the people are coming from. So I always say to them, well, why don't you ask them what they've done based upon the what they committed to do last time, What progress have they made? MMM. But actually, if you're asking people to create a model, some visualisation during that coaching conversation and you have that lovely token to then carry on. It's, it's a nice visual reminder for, for both sides of the party. If I then think to. They're setting up of a meeting and you begin it, or even before you begin, I suppose. And those first couple of minutes when I think it's really important to make sure that you've got that clarity and you know what you're there to achieve so you can have that focus so you know when you are on or off track. Do you have any tips, tools, techniques for how to create that necessary alignment at the beginning of a meeting or maybe even before a meeting? Yeah. So especially if you, if you're not, if you and your surrounding especially are not used to work visually, I say like start before the meeting, get your own perspective and model down. Because with that you have something concrete to discuss. You can go into a conversation and can be like, OK, let's look at this. This is like how I'm sending. And you can also call out questions there, things where you're really unclear, and then get the feedback, be like, OK, I think this is a little bit like unclear for me. I'm not sure how this has worked. I maybe made also possible versions of this, how I think it could work. And then ask for that. Instead of going into the conversation and trying to explain everything, go into a conversation and show something, ask questions about it. And you really get easily into rocking mode instead of a meter discussion mode. But would that be a list, like a bullet point list? Or are you thinking diagrams like how, how would you do it? Christopher? I really would like I'm coming in there with like for example, a customer journey map, a really simple one with 10 steps and and mark probably were there are questions I have in memory. And the nice thing is that because it's visual, because they see everything. People will also automatically point out what you're not addressing, what you're completely unaware of. And they're like, yeah, it's like this. Everything is OK. But upfront here, you have to kid me. It's like completely wrong. You're completely off the charts here. And this is these are things which wouldn't be, like, even possible because people don't know what's in your head. You can't look into other people's head. We can, but it's it's a bit sordid. You don't see, like, what you want to see. No, it's rather surprising. I remember the first time I did that, it wasn't what I expecting at all. Don't worry, listeners, I haven't been looking inside people's heads. It was a dad joke. Yeah. And so we, we're talking now a lot about visuals. And I know it's a little bit hard to talk about visuals. It's a little bit abstract. I think it takes an average about 1000 words to describe a picture. I heard it was a guideline that there's like, yeah, there's like this handbook how to describe a picture, right? Yeah, yeah, it's like 1000 words, always 1000 words. So every, everybody who want to learn more, they can, can reach out to me. I have a small guide for the, for the mapper method. So what we're talking about now I call the mapper method. So you listeners can also get like a visual example that it's not that abstract anymore. Is this free? That's free. That's free. You just have to write me Ben on LinkedIn is the easiest way. Also e-mail is fine, but maybe people should just like take a moment, look in the show notes, you'll find Christophe's LinkedIn address. You click on that because you haven't used a link before. You click on it and then you'll get to LinkedIn and from there you can connect with him and ask him a question. If you're too scared, then contact me and I'll introduce you. That's fine too. But please do. I'm don't, I'm not biting that much. So not that much. It's getting sorted again. It's getting sorted again. Let's move on, let's move on, let's move on. It was a story that I experienced because it was part of my life when I was a very, very young. I wasn't very young. I was younger than I am now because it was in the past and I was in the first proper software delivery team that I'd ever worked in. And I was playing the role of a business analyst. Well, those were the skills I brought to the party. But we were, yeah, supposedly using Scrum and. But we weren't using Scrum. It's kind of smoke and mirrors, however. It was a great team. I met some awesome people on that team, and I was working really hard as a team and with the stakeholders to pull together some process flows. I was a big fan, and I still am secretly or not secretly, a big fan of UML. I forget the notation of the real kind of dogmatic approach to it, but it was always about remodel to have a conversation, and there was lots of great techniques to help you articulate certain things. And I loved UML for that. So I was a big fan of putting together activity diagrams, that kind of thing. And we had a piece of software go live, which then went wrong at like 3-4 in the morning. And because I was effectively by second line support, I would get the calls in the morning. And that's always the best way to make sure the software gets better when you make the people who built it responsible for then maintaining it. And so I went into the office after a couple of days of like these calls, and I sat down with a guy called Matt, Matt Gornell. If you listen to Matt, hope you're well. And I was trying to explain to him like what was supposed to happen. And he was like, I don't understand. I said, well, look at this. And I showed him my my activity diagram. And he was like, oh, that's perfect. Can I just have that? And at that point I was like, wow, in all my training to be a business analyst, in all the years I've worked across JP Morgan, the Royal Bank of Scotland and all the mentors I had, no one had ever said to me, why don't you consider, given that map that you've created to the people that are gonna support it 'cause it might be useful. And it changed my opinion. There was so much in that moment.

I stopped getting the calls at 4: 30:58

00 in the morning. They were able to do their job better. I was able to do more things. But just the power of being able to share, you know, and effectively, you know, a, a diagram of a visualisation of lots of conversation, lots of inquiry, lots of reflection. And then which was a picture of how the system was working. Just sharing that picture saved me, got well, saved me. It let me sleep longer. Yeah, yeah. For me, it's so fascinating because I so I see many teams. Who start to visualise and it's like so natural if you started the like a lot of great teams I I encountered where I learnt this stuff where like they had whiteboarding sessions. They just like put stuff out there and everybody was on the same stage, same page. And that's also what I did a lot when I was in active product management roles. So when engineers try to like explain some complexity to me, some system, I was often times like, OK, I'm not sure if I'm understanding this encryption thingy. So I drew it out and was like, do I get this correctly? Can you can you tell me what I'm missing here in my process flow or something like that? And it really helps to just have a conversation where both people can look at the thing and be like, yes, yes, we are both sure that this model, how we drew it down is how it should work. And imagine getting explained encryption 20 times over and over again. And you're like, I think I understand it. And then you're going out and coming back two days after and saying something in the engineer is like, what? No, man. Yeah, not encryption, but I've definitely been in less situations. So it's all been very positive and lovely and I'm not looking to talk about negative stuff per SE, but what I am interested is what makes it go wrong and what are the pitfalls that people should be watching out for. If I listen to this and thinking this sounds banging, I really want to embrace this. I'm going to contact Crystal from get some information on the mapper method. I'm want to go for this but I'm scared I'm going to get it wrong. What are the pitfalls that we should be looking out for? Yeah, the So what? One pitfall is to stay into presentation mode. So map that out and then bring it to your team and be like, OK, that's the thing. So you it's a tool to bring also a little bit of psychological safety, but you have to bring it with that. You can't enter in there with like the perfect picture and be like, Oh yeah, please now say something to that. But you be humble. That's also why why I really dislike this customer journey maps and things like that, which are like in perfect design, hanging printed out on a wall and be like somebody points at it. That's our customer journey map. Please read it and understand it. It's like, OK, maybe it's a little bit helpful to understand how it's working, but nobody will even come to the idea to look at this deeper and start to critique it because it's finished, it's polished. If I see something finished and polished, I'm expecting automatically that somebody really thought through this, that it's really perfect picture and I won't come to like even the the idea. I'm starting now to critique it because probably I'm hurting feelings. Probably I don't understand enough. So one thing is like don't over Polish it. Stay scrappy, stay open, stay in a mode where it's obvious that it's not done, where it's obvious that it should be challenged. Another thing is like it's not for every situation. If you want to convince your C level, don't come with a scrappy map and be like OK guys, let's talk like for the next hour about what we can do there. You can extract portion for that. You can prepare like to have your story straight for an important presentation with mapping, but probably you don't use this artifact in there. If you want to go into a convincing mode, if you need to sell something, obviously it's not the right tool, but you can't prepare for the situation with this tool. So what I'm taking away from that was that one, bring the psychological safety to be humble. What you're saying about framing it, it was interesting. So I was making some notes. So I wrote, I said don't frame it and then like frame it because I went to frame it that people think that it's dumb. And so you're saying don't ever Polish it, keep it scrappy, keep it open. And also that it's not for every occasion. But there are some situations where actually taking a mapping style approach would be isn't the right thing to do. So with all that in mind, what's been the biggest mistake that you've made when it comes to mapping? Biggest mistake? So on on. One thing was being quite arrogant that just. I understand the stuff because I learned it and I'm a designer and I'm like so good with it and I read all about this techniques and stuff like that and I was yeah, too arrogant with it. I walked around and was like, and it's my stuff and don't look at it. I think that was like a huge mistake because I totally dismissed the power of the collaboration aspect there. Just thinking about another mistake like a situation where this. Yeah, I think like to the last point I said before I, I was in a situation where I, I was really new. I started to map things out and I was invited to AC level meeting and I was jumping in there and was like, yeah, look at this stuff and here's everything here and and I'm working here. And then everybody was like, OK, what's your point? So being in the right mode, being in the right really position with your tools is quite important. So it's not a one-size-fits-all. Of course, thinking of tools and I'm going to I'm going through some little quick things in succession here because I never haven't got a lot of time left. What technical tools? Technical tools. Is that the right term to use interactive digital products do you use for mapping? Yeah, so I I use like the crazy high tech called sticky on a wall sometimes. But of course now being with a lot of clients remote. I personally use mural, but mural Figma fixture. I think Apple also has now free form. Things like that are totally fine. There are some which are probably a little bit like advanced like mural, mural fixture. Others are more basic, but start with whatever you have. I also mapped in PowerPoint. So yeah, I mean, I love Miro, but I don't use any of its features really. I always keep it really, really simple. I find that just for post it notes and arrows and collecting some forts, it can be rather excellent. I do like some of the lovely templates that people have designed. There was one that I've been using recently called a midnight sailboat Retrospective and I have to admit it's it's very beautifully designed and I got to embellish it with my own sworded little fantasies around sharks, which was quite, quite a lot of fun. So if anyone's interested in the sailboat retrospective, I can't remember the lady who did it, but then a fantastic job. Then we've covered a lot of ground in the last 40 minutes. I can't quite believe actually how quickly it's gone. If I was going to try and surmise it, it'd be really hard because you know what I mean? This was so much that has been covered and I think that for me, the idea that we are here to create shared understanding through having people look at the same thing, to expose our own thoughts, to be open and humble and have them challenged. To not think that something going to produce has ever, ever done. That we are here to evolve things and to make things better, to create that shared understanding to get that alignment. I think a fantastic. Take away some all of this. If there is one thing through everything that we've spoken about, but you think, do you know what people, If you're going to take one thing away, there's one message from this whole conversation. What in your opinion, is that one thing people should be taking away? Dark mapping. It's so simple. It's just dark for yourself. You don't have to make a big thing out of it. You don't have to like think, oh, how how do I bring this to my team and things like that. Just like start do it for yourself, get your clarity for yourself and then like sharing it and things like that will come naturally. Usually just start like putting things out there, moving a little bit of stickies around and stare at it. That's also like live with it, Stare at it. That helps also to reflect. That's what I do sometimes in my coaching. So just let people map out and get started. Just do it. It's so simple. I you don't need to buy a tool, you don't need to like learn a technique. Just like a couple of stickies, a few errors between. What are your user steps taking currently? Pretty straightforward. Love it. And it's like with anything, which is a skill, it takes practice. Exactly. And we can fill some knowledge gaps. We can motivate people. And unless we practice and unless we get support on that practicing journey, we're never going to get better at. So what I say, if you're listening to this and you're going to give it a go, share a map with us, share something on LinkedIn, share something to us individually. Ask for feedback. Ask for feedback from the community, your friends, your peers, whoever it may be. Because unless we start doing something different, nothing's going to change. Crystal, thank you so much for coming onto the show and putting up with me in my reasonably funny mood today is I hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you so much, Ben. It was, like, amazing to be here. Really had fun. And I learned a new word. Yeah. It's a yeah. It's a good one. It's a good one. Thank you so much for coming on. And everyone, thank you very much for listening. Please do go to iTunes. That's my request of the week. Go to iTunes. Leave us a review. People have been doing that. And as a consequence, it means that we get more listeners. It's funny how these things work. But if you like us, tell the world have a great day. And until this time next week being Thursday, this has been the Product to Jersey Podcast. Thank you for listening.