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_scale_models/
https://youtube.com/@emdeescalemodels
https://www.facebook.com/MartinBuildsModels

More information on conversation design at: https://jakemckee.com/compass

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 AI tools are making this problem faster and harder to see at the same time.

One stat that tends to land hard: 80% of executives believe their company delivers a superior customer experience. 8%of customers agree.

That gap has a name. And it's fixable.

Take the free Conversation Debt Assessment at jakemckee.com/compass.

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: military briefings, CNN studios, political campaigns in deeply unfriendly territory. What emerges from the conversation is a through-line most product leaders will recognize, the gap between curated, institutional messaging and the kind of unfiltered human exchange that actually changes minds. Along the way they dig into what the Navy learned about communication after Vietnam, why over-engineering a conversation before you have it is what kills it, how a self-described introvert ended up as a Pentagon spokesman, and why one good conversation is never enough if the system around it doesn't change.

More information: https://jakemckee.com/podcast

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 lazy, but because they've built a system that filters, summarizes, and sanitizes the customer voice until it's barely recognizable. He calls this Conversation Debt, and it's the enemy at the center of everything he does. The Conversation Compass, a five-pillar conversation design framework, is his answer. The podcast, he explains, will bring in voices from well outside the product world: therapists, journalists, negotiators, improvisers, researchers, and others who have spent careers thinking hard about what makes conversation work and what kills it, with the goal of giving product teams a richer, more practical toolkit for the conversations that actually matter.

More information at: https://jakemckee.com/podcast

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, listening well, and avoiding secondhand insight, you’re in the right place.