Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives

Safety, Clarity, and Urgency: The Pillars of Culture with Jason Rome and Cory Voglesonger

Method Episode 7

In this episode of Build What’s Next: Digital Product Perspectives, host Josh Lucas is joined by Jason Rome and Cory Vogelsonger, the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aaron's, Inc.

Join them as they discuss:
• What culture in an organization means and how it can drive success
• Physical and psychological safety and how to nurture that in a working environment
• Best practice for improving clarity among your workforce
• Why you should encourage an environment where workers feel able to speak up and take risks
• The importance of engaging directly with customers and users
• And more!

Jason is, the SVP of Digital Strategy & Customer Experience at Method, Cory is the Chief Product & Technology Officer at Aaron's and a progressive digital product development leader with a career built on leading large, enterprise-scale transformation efforts.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Google Podcasts, instructions on how to do this are here.

Episode Resources:
• Cory on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cory-voglesonger-81907628
• Invoke Website: https://www.aarons.com
• Jason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-rome-275b2014 
• Method Website: https://www.method.com

Episode Highlights:
• [00:02:10] Defining Culture in Modern Product
• [00:07:40] Safety, Clarity and Urgency
• [00:24:46] Writing One-Pagers
• [00:26:11] Types of Safety in the Workplace
• [00:43:12] Facilitating Intrinsic Motivation Through Immersion in the Customer Experience

Quotes:
• “One of the techniques that I use and try to teach on my team is we write a lot of one-pagers, just like a single page document when we start out an initiative that really highlights clearly what we're trying to do and why, in an outcome oriented way”
• “There's this concept of psychological safety, which I think most probably have heard of. But in general that is this true feeling of organizational permission, to be candid, to say what's on your mind, to take risks and not feel all the potentially negative consequences that can come from that.” 
• “There's a lot of learned helplessness, frankly, in corporate America where, like, I can't do this thing because they said so or that would be risky. And so a lot of what I'm trying to do is just go as strip away as much as we can to where the entire value stream and how work is created. They own by and large and can influence directly. That's why I send them into the store so they can feel what their customers feel in the crappy experience that they thought was a good trade off and sitting down.”