Mapping the future of UX design with Loren Baxter

Clinton Bonner: The new Jumanji. You got the one dude who could read the map, right? You got, I think it's Jack Black's character, it's like, he's the map reader! (Laughing) He can't do much else, but he sure can read a map.

(CATALYST INTRO MUSIC)

Clinton: Welcome to Catalyst, the Launch by NTT Data podcast. Catalyst is an ongoing discussion for digital leaders dissatisfied with the status quo and yet optimistic about what's possible through smart technology and great people. Be sure to subscribe in your audio feed and help spread the word around these worthy discussions. Today, we're going to expand our minds a bit and do it through a potentially unlikely vestibule: maps. Of course, we humans recognize the historical and social importance of maps, from famed explorers we learned about in grade school to the dotted-line adventures we'd follow of a certain fedora-wearing archaeologist up on the big screen, and through the reliance we now place on Google to provide turn-by-turn directions to a nearby restaurant although we've been there three times in the last four months. Then there's the next generation of mapping technologies powered by satellite imagery and the likes known as GIS, geographic information systems, AKA geospatial data. And to that topic we are bringing on today's guest, Loren Baxter. Loren is the lead designer at Felt, a next-generation GIS-enabled platform, leading a new movement in map making. Felt focuses on providing a platform that is powerful enough for GIS pros, while democratizing mapping technology to everyone by lowering the friction and complication of manipulating mapping data. What I think you'll love about today's conversation is it just might expand your mind and perception of how using what is an ancient tool, the map, can now be used in brand new and surprising ways. Welcome to the Catalyst Studio, Loren Baxter. Loren, how are we doing, man?

Loren Baxter: Hey, thanks for having me. I'm doing great and I'm super excited to be here chatting with you.

Clinton: Alright. So, Loren, I would wager a decent percentage of our audience, you know, they know what GIS is. And of course, we all experience and use geospatial data. However, can you provide a baseline of what GIS data is from your perspective, and how has it been traditionally used in society?

Loren: Yeah, so data is really just information. And we live in a three-dimensional world, and so much data actually has some kind of spatial component, right? You can imagine, like, where am I going? Where are things? You know, what happened where? What's going on with the climate? There's just so much information out there that has a component about where it lives in the world, or what's happening in space. And so GIS is really just about taking data like that and being able to work with it in ways that are interesting. To put things on a map, to analyze things spatially, to see the relationships between things in space, to communicate around that. And yeah, you kind of talked back to the history of mapping and, you know, I'm thinking all the way back to Stone Age humans drawing little pictures with sticks in sand, you know, telling each other where things are. It's just a fundamental technology that we use to understand and communicate about the world.

Clinton: With GIS, how old is it in general? Obviously, satellites have only been up since about the '50s, right? The first ones going up in space. How old is the industry in general and just being able to collect that kind of data?

Loren: It's a funny question because you can go all the way back to the sticks in sand. But, you know, I think it really started to evolve, I would say, in two general eras. You have, you know, especially, like, navigation on paper, paper maps, you know, people exploring the world, discovering the world for many hundreds of years. And then you get into the 20th century and we start to, you know, professionalize and bring in even more complexity. Both to the tools and what you can do with them. I think in the, you know, in sort of our lifetimes, it's been evolving alongside computers. Even when some of the first computers were coming out, people started making, you know, GIS software right away because they knew how powerful it would be to, you know, start thinking spatially with the technology of computers. And that, you know, kind of brings us up to today.

Clinton: You said the word, I think, kind of buzzword there for GIS to date, complex. Like, complexity. So, what has made GIS data cumbersome to manipulate up until now? Like, what are those barriers to entry that people have to have either specialized skills, specialized knowledge, some combination of those things? What does that barrier look like currently, for most folks?

Loren: Yeah. So I think you follow the arc of any of these communication technologies and you see a democratization over time. You know, photography, for example, was something that, you know, we didn't have, and then it got invented with really specialized tools that were expensive and available only for experts. And eventually you get to this world where everyone can take pictures and share them with each other. And it's a new way to think and communicate. In mapping, I think we're following a similar curve, but we're not quite at the level of everybody being able to take and share photos, right? So I think some of the problems that we're facing today is just that, you know, we have a lot of power in the technology, but it's still mostly available for specialists. And I'll break that down a little more. You know, the sort of atlas-type mapping, like, give me directions, you know, to this thing or show me, you know, what's out there, what businesses, what locations... Those are, like, really, really good. I imagine everyone's used Google Maps or Apple Maps. But when you need to create your own map, there's kind of this divide, right? Where if you're a, sort of a beginner or a novice user trying to create your own map, what you see most people doing is, like, screenshotting Google Maps and drawing on it, or just not making a map at all. Right?

‍Clinton: Right.

Loren: And then there's this chasm in the middle where you kind of can't do more than that. And on the other side of that, you have really powerful tools that are available to people with some degree of expertise. Whether that be, you know, you come from cartography or you have a GIS degree, or you might come from a development background and, you know, you can kind of bring maps in as part of your development stack. But there's just that missing gap in the middle where, you know, regular folks can just use maps quickly, right, to communicate. They can easily make beautiful maps, and they don't necessarily need specialized training to get started. And so that's where we see the divide, and what we're trying to kind of fill in with Felt.

Clinton: Yeah. And that brings us directly to it, right? So, I'd love to give you the opportunity to explain Felt, right? So it's Felt, f-e-l-t, like the fuzzy fabric, right? So Felt.com. Or, the way you might feel something, of course, right? And you start to get at the chasm or the bridge that it brings from those who would like to go play in that space, but then that barrier, and the specialists who actually get to go manipulate that data right now, and they have to have some level of technological savvy, if you will. And there is that chasm. So what is Felt, to start with, and then how is it, how is it bridging it?

Loren: You know, I try to use that short, simple startup phrasing for quickly describing something. You know, I'm a product designer and I use a tool called Figma, which is, you know, pretty beloved in the design world these days.

Clinton: Yeah.

Loren: And so, you know, in my brain it's like, oh, we're going to make something like Figma, but for maps. But, you know, to a more general audience, I also think of, like, Google Docs, right? Like a Google text document or Google Sheets. And, you know, what they've done is, through those products, really brought the software onto the web and made it collaborative. Prior to using Google Sheets, for example, you might have been using Microsoft Excel. You had to buy it and install it. You would save out files. You're kind of working by yourself. And Google really revolutionized working with a spreadsheet, for example, by bringing it into the browser, so that you didn't have to install special software to use it. You know, making it collaborative so that, you know, multiple people can be in there working together on the same document at the same time. And so you're solving a lot of those problems of, you know, tracking which file is where and what version is the right one and so forth. Really, what we want to do is, as easy as it is for anyone now to think with a spreadsheet, or to work with a spreadsheet or a text document, or a design file or a canvas, you should be able to do something like that with a map. And everyone has, you know, more than just the atlas-type mapping, they have their own data, right? Like, hey, where are our customers for our business? Or, where's the route for my road trip? Or, you know, where are the houses we're looking to buy or to sell? You know, in real estate. There's so many things we need to do on a map, and it should just be really easy and accessible. And so, that's what we try to build with Felt. So it's a GIS tool that runs in the browser, and it's just super easy to pick up, and for anyone to use, to use together at the same time. And it has a lot of depth and power for people who are doing a little bit more advanced of a geospatial use case as well.

‍Clinton: That middle ground can be tricky, right? And I hate to call it middle ground, because that almost puts the connotation that it's not somewhere, right, if it's in the middle ground. However, I think more positively, that bridge over to the power users, while figuratively being a land bridge for the folks who would like to use it in some way, but have been prevented to to date. As a product, and that's what you're focused on as the head designer and a product lead at Felt, sometimes you could kind of get caught in that squishy middle, and you're not quite enough for the pros, and you're not, maybe, showing the vast long-tail majority what they possibly can do with this. However, straight away, get the democratization. I understand that it's a little bit of if you build it, they will come, type of thing. So, fully get that. But how are you seeing, like, the true geospatial experts? Are they gravitating to, already, and, like, saying, oh yeah, I could use this too. Or, do they look at it and say, okay, that's... Pardon my words, you're like, oh, that's cool, kind of cute, but I wouldn't use that in my day to day. What are you seeing from the expert side of this equation?

Loren: Well, you know, when we launched Felt we had kind of an earlier version of the design, where it almost looked like an iPad app. You know, like, super user-friendly. If you've ever used any of those, like, iPad drawing apps, you know, where there's little illustrations of, like, markers of different colors that you can use. That's kind of where we started, because our theory was that the sort of long tail of everybody would just pick Felt up. What we ended up seeing is that, actually, the early adopters are the advanced GIS people, because they also want software that is easy to use and fast and delightful. You know, I think there is mapping software out there that's super duper powerful, and, like, really valuable for that reason. But sometimes you need to make a map quickly, and you may not want to use kind of the, like, big sledgehammer power tool to make something that, really, you're just going to quickly make and share. And so even the advanced folks have really started picking up Felt. And we realized that, since they're the ones sticking around, we actually took the product in a little bit more of a pro direction. Not in a way that we think makes it unusable for beginners, but sort of the way that the product introduces itself to you and speaks to you is going to, you know, assume that as a beginner, it's still really easy to figure out. But as an expert, it's, you know, it's kind of telling you with its design and its visual language, like, hey, there's power here. And so what we're seeing is, the GIS folks have traditionally been pigeonholed a little bit in their organization to be the sort of, like, mapmaker. And everyone else kind of just relies on them. So, they might get a lot of emails or tickets in their inbox like, hey, we need this map. We need that map. And what they want to do is empower their entire organization to make maps. You know, both for themselves and to collaborate with. And so it helps that advanced person, you know, kind of move into this position, or more into this position of being an enabler for the rest of the organization, which can really multiply their impact. So they'll take Felt and get some of their organization's data into it, and then share it and say, hey, everyone, right? We can all use maps now, go ahead. And they'll kind of be there behind the scenes, like, making sure the data's good, hooking things up and so forth.

Clinton: Really love the idea that the pros were the ones who gravitated to it more, and then they're taking it back internally, so that they can become more than just, oh, you're the mapmaking guy or girl. And that's intriguing. On the flip side of it, though, Loren, that bigger aperture, right? So, what kind of folks are you seeing that maybe would never think about using maps that are now starting to come to it and thinking map-first? Or bringing that long tail along? What do you see in there?

Loren: Oh man, we see so much there. I mean, I think, you know, the GIS people already think in maps. And for the rest of us, it's kind of a new thought process to even consider starting there, because you really just haven't had the kinds of tools that would encourage you to do that. But, so, we're seeing, I mean, just so much. We're seeing people come in and do public advocacy, right? Where they might care about the bike lanes in their city. You want to talk about that spatially. You know, they want to talk about bike and pedestrian safety. You can just quickly grab Felt, make an account, like, drag and drop in some data and then share that out on Twitter or, you know, email it to your government officials. We see people doing fun stuff like planning a hike or a road trip, you know, and really elaborate road trip around the country, you know, for months and months and putting all the places they want to go. I remember seeing a guy who was doing a long walk across France with his dog. You know, he kind of put his route and he said, hey, if you're anywhere near this route, leave a comment. If you want to, like, meet up with us. And he got, like, hundreds of comments. And it was all in French, so I couldn't necessarily read it all without doing a bunch of copying and pasting and translating, but just tons of people saying like, hey, come visit us, you know, we're in this town, in this little, you know, this little mountain town right by your route. You can come stay, you know, in our guest room. So I think there's some really fun, like personal usage. Even on the business side, I think there's just businesses that don't think in maps, because GIS feels like such a heavy area. Like, an industry. Like, you have to have a lot of experience or skill or budget just to get started there. And so we'll see small businesses who want to make a map of, you know, where their goods are sold, or, you know, who want to communicate about sales territories across their three salespeople. Felt makes it really easy. And I think these are, you know, the kinds of groups that just may not work with a map in the first place without having something that's easy to get started with.

Clinton: I think there's some great use cases that start to paint the picture. Of course, this is a, you know, an audio podcast, and I would welcome folks to head out to felt.com just to check it out, because you are the lead designer there. The site does a nice job of just showcasing a bit of the, what's possible. Right? Right then and there. Just, you kind of just, you know, go down the screen, it's showing you a couple of ways in which it looks really easy to manipulate, which I think is certainly part of the allure for sure. So, nicely designed. So, as you continue to cross this chasm, you're building a new space, right? You've got the GIS pros who are coming towards it because, again, it gets them out of that corner of, you're just the mapmaker. It's like, no, no, no. Now, like you said, now I'm a facilitator of collaboration on some really sincere projects. I love that. You've got the long tail. Are there other aspirations, you know, like Salesforce, as an example. Like, Salesforce has some mapping features in there. And of course, for reasons like territory maps and routing and getting those efficiencies, you could run Einstein through it and do all those sorts of things. Are there aspirations to also, then, take Felt and then put it into other platforms, like a Salesforce or a ServiceNow, and allow folks to manipulate it at, like, an enterprise level. Is that something you guys are looking and aspiring to grow towards?

Loren: Oh yeah. Absolutely. We don't want to replace people's entire GIS stack. You know, a lot of organizations have invested a huge amount over many years in having really good mapping capability, right? We want to bring, like, more. We want to sort of expand the value of that investment. So examples of ways that we plug in now. You know, if you go to Google, the first time I ever encountered GIS software, I went to Google and I typed "free map making tool," and I came across an open-source tool called QGis, which is really powerful, very cool, free open source software. We love QGis. But you know, QGis typically works with, like, files on your computer, and you may export, like, images or PDFs to kind of get your deliverable or maybe a data set. So we made a plugin, right? So you can have your QGis project and just say, export to Felt with one click, and it will make, you know, bring your whole project into a Felt map and sort of empower it with all these extra tools, right? Now you can share it because it's on the web. People can come comment, they can draw stuff, right? So we've just added a whole new layer of value to the work you're already doing. We have an API, so people can, you know, take their internal workflows and push data into Felt. And we're going to keep investing in stuff like API, enterprise integrations, integrations with people's databases and all that stuff. So we really want to say, hey, you know, Felt isn't here just to replace everything that you've done before, but it's really to just add more value to what you're already doing. And I think it's going to be really great for organizations that pick it up and kind of try it out.

Clinton: I think a great indication of a successful or a healthy platform is the amount of experimentation that's happening on top of it. And those kind of surprises that you would not have thought of, potentially. But then it's open to the marketplace and you get these curious people, and they start manipulating it in a way, you're like, oh. Well, we didn't think about that use case, but that's pretty cool. And then of course, then you make it a case study, and you feature on your site, and invite them to your, you know, your podcast. So, in the Felt world, has there been, you know, one or two use cases where you just looked back and went, huh. That was a really curious way to think about using this. And how did it pull through for you?

Loren: The first one that jumps to mind is this really cool project in Australia. They have a river basin there that kind of spans sort of the eastern half of the country, the Murray-Darling river basin, and there was a group trying to get legislation passed to add protections, like environmental protections. And so, what they did is they ran a campaign where they gathered stories and photos from people all over that told, you know, the history of their personal relationship, their family's relationship to this river, how they spend time on it, why it's important. And they threw all those onto a map. And, you know, one thing that's a little different with Felt is we kind of made it very web-first. So you could just, like, paste a photo on there and it pastes a photo on there. You know, which in the world of GIS is kind of not how you think about mapping. But of course, in, like, a web canvas product, it's like, why not, right? Or why not be able to paste a link to something? So this map just became covered with photos. You know, old photos, right? Like, people's scans of their, you know, kind of faded pictures from the 1980s of themselves and their family on the river with this, like, beautiful story. And the map just became this really human artifact. That, I just had never seen anything like that before on a map. You know, it was really inspiring and cool for me to see, and I had not expected something like that to happen. And so they, you know, the legislation, I think, was successful. So that was one that was really cool to see. I think another one that we thought might happen, but we were really surprised by how much it's happened is dealing with disasters. Or kind of, like, these real-time coordination. You know, if there's a wildfire, or if there's a natural disaster, like an earthquake, you know, stuff like conflicts... All of a sudden there's this really important and kind of urgent spatial need, right? Like, what's happening where? Where is it safe to go? Where should people gather? You know, what homes have been destroyed or which roads are closed? Like, there's a lot of information that you need to get out there really quickly. And that information may need to come from a lot of different sources, right? Because it's all happening so fast, in real time. And so, Felt ends up being, like, really useful for that case. Yeah, just to see the amount which people have adopted it for that, and used it for that, in a really urgent time, has been very, you know, very inspiring to see. And it, you know, it makes me feel like... I love the kind of things where we feel like we're having a positive impact in the world. That's very important to me. And so, seeing Felt get used for, like, helping out with disasters, for, you know, dealing with climate change stuff. Yeah, I really enjoy that.

Clinton: When you were talking about the disaster relief, what came up for me was when Twitter, you know, X, when Twitter, pun intended, caught fire, I think it was the San Diego fires. It was some fire out in California, right? And Twitter kind of had that moment of like, oh, this is where you go for real-time information. That is, at that point, you know, the most accurate you're going to get. And it's... It is a extremely powerful communication platform, especially for real-time data. Have you seen mash-ups in that regard, too? Can it go into a database like Twitter and go pull real-time things in and then plop them on maps? Has anybody kind of, uh, you know, hacked that together just yet?

Loren: I haven't seen it from Twitter. I feel like I haven't seen it as, you know, in the last year or two, I haven't seen as much, like, real-time crisis stuff happening on Twitter as I used to. I remember signing up in, gosh, I think it was 2007 during an earthquake in San Diego. Um... 

Clinton: Oh, that might have been, it might be the earthquake. Yeah.

Loren: Yeah, I signed up that day, so I remember. But in general, yeah, you see geospatial information getting loaded into all kinds of places, right? Like, it might wind up in a CSV or a spreadsheet. It might wind up in a data file on a government website. It might wind up in a database somewhere. And so we've worked really hard to make it super easy to just plug any of that into Felt. And by super easy, I mean literally, you know, drag and drop or copy and paste.

Clinton: Yeah.

Loren: We want you to not need to know about stuff like what projection is this data in, you know? I remember opening QGis for the first time, you know, with sort of some hubris thinking, like, oh, I need to make a map, I'll just figure it out real quick. And... I mean, it's an amazingly powerful tool, but for a complete novice, like, you definitely need to watch a few tutorials to kind of get up and running and to know a few things about stuff like projections and, like, data formats and all this. And, you know, at Felt we've worked really, really hard to make you not need to know about that. So you can just grab stuff, copy and paste it in, or like, put the URL to the data and Felt will just suck it up and figure it out. Even to the point of, you know, we do use AI in our pipeline, where you might put in a spreadsheet that doesn't have, you know, latitude, longitude data for, like, where stuff is, which is really what you need. That's like the x/ y coordinate in space. But you may just have a column with, like, addresses, right?

Clinton: Right.

Loren: And the address is not yet an x/y coordinate, you have to run that through a process where something figures out, like, where is this address in the world? So again, we've just done a huge amount of work in that data processing import, and just the user experience of putting stuff in to make it, like, super dead simple. Whether you're a beginner or an expert, it just feels delightful. It shouldn't feel like clicking through a million menus to kind of get started with anything.

Clinton: Yeah, it has that, it definitely has that whimsy and magic feel to it. And I think that address example... Everybody knows what an address is. I mean, we're sitting at different spots in the world. However, I never really thought that, yeah, that address with my zip code and the whole jazz, does not contain latitude, longitude. And that it has to go into something else, traditionally. Something else has to understand, okay, that is this on a dot, right? And then you can put that onto a map. And it's things like that, that kind of middleware of magic that Felt is thinking through. Are there any other like, you know, like call them, like, nooks and crannies like that, that are... Like, the average person wouldn't think is actually fairly intricate and then Felt is able to, you know, just make it smooth, make it magic on top.

Loren: Yeah. I mean, one that you kind of feel but you don't think about when it works well is just speed. Like, you can drag and drop a four- gigabyte file onto your browser window in Felt and it will pull it in and like, visualize it, which is kind of fun, right? You don't think about being able to work with stuff of that size. But you can't have four gigabytes of stuff loaded into your browser tab to view, right? It would be really heavy. It would be really slow. So there's a lot of work that also goes into just making it quick, responsive, you know, to make the zooming in and out feel nice. You know, to make the drawing and commenting, even when there's multiple people in there at the same time. It's a huge amount of work to make that snappy and fast and delightful. But hopefully, if we do it right, people just don't notice. They're like, cool, this just works the way I want it to. So I think that's a big one.

Clinton: Because at the end of the day, you're using, in this case a web application, but you're using an app. In a good way. We've been spoiled by great applications that are lightning quick. Like you said, people might not think about the heavy lifting that's actually happening to take a file in some format and then be able to display it in, you know, close to real time, with whatever you're asking it, you know, the different colors, the different topography, whatever it is you're kind of querying against that, that Felt can handle, which is really, really cool.

Loren: I was just going to add one other thing that I think about from a design perspective, is that, you know, if you get in there and make a map, it should just look good. By default. Right? And so that is also a huge amount of work, where we build this stack, right? From the bottom up, you think the base map is the bottom, right? That's the land and the water. On top of that you may be loading data, which you want to, like, stand out on top of that a little bit. On top of that, you may be adding annotations, right? Like, drawing stuff, putting comments, adding new, you know, polygons and pins. And we want all of that to, like, sit nicely in this stack that has the appropriate visual hierarchy, right? So the things in front feel like they're in the foreground, they stand out. The things in the back feel like they're in the background. But when it all comes together, you could, you know, export an image of it and feel like, this is professional, right? This is professional-grade work. And there's a huge amount that goes into that. You know, from just choosing good default colors to saturate and luminance kind of goes up as you come up the stack, to using shadows. And, you know, again, it's a lot of work just to make it so that anyone can make a map, but it looks quite professional just from the start. And we feel like that is a really good way to help people who aren't experienced with maps, or even with just design in general, be able to make something. You know, we don't kind of, like, send them down the wrong path by default by having bad colors or, you know, stuff like that where you have to do a bunch of extra work to make it look nice. So again, I think the design of it is something we think quite a bit about.

Clinton: And again, I talked about, you know, folks are kind of spoiled nowadays because we've had iPhone for now, geez, whatever it is, 15 to 20 years. We know what great apps feel like and we know what great experiences are. And more importantly, we know when we don't have them, and the frustrations they cause, whether they're warranted or not. We know what that feels like too. And then also, with mapping, you have an entire generation. I'm mid-40s, my son's 13, my daughter's 16. They both play video games. But they're playing these expansive games where the map is almost everything. Or it's such a crucial element of the game. And they know what they expect in kind of really crisp and complex maps. So I could really appreciate the layers of care that go into the product. And then, like you said, even if you change a shade one way or another, you might just signal the wrong thing to a whole bunch of humans and then they're down the... They're going down the wrong path in a river because of that. So I love the care that goes into that. And then I also wanted to ask you about, as the lead designer, what's that process like? I'm sure, in any given quarter or a year, and you're mapping out what you're going to go try and accomplish, I'm sure there's no shortage of things you want to go do. How the heck do you go through the process of saying no to, really, things you probably would love so that you could clear the plate and focus on the ones that you're ultimately going to get done to progress the product?

Loren: Yeah, the product roadmap is an arcane art form I think everyone, you know, ends up dealing with at some point. I mean, it is an art in saying no, right? We're always saying no to things that we want to do. The list of things we want to do is endless. To bring it together, we're really synthesizing a few things. One is, what do we believe? Like, what is our vision for the product? This one I really like because not every company operates this way, or doesn't operate this way forever. You may be looking at just some metrics and saying, like, okay, well, what do the numbers tell us we should do next? But with a product like this, we really think that vision actually comes in at the foundation. We want to be going towards that at all times. And that's one of those things is, you kind of... Like, you inform it with metrics and research and all of that, but it also does come from within a little bit. We're going to merge that vision with what we're hearing from people, right? Our customers today, people who might use Felt, who want to, but it's missing something that they need. So we're going to look at, you know, the requests we're getting. How many? How urgent are they? And then we're also going to look at our, kind of, like, business. Right? There's a strategy over time of, what do we add when? And how does that, you know, ladder up and help us succeed as a business? So, you know, what's going to be kind of aligned with and helpful with what we need to kind of have happen for the business in the next quarter, right? Like, what kinds of customers do we need to sign up and so forth. So, for example, if you look back, we launched Felt and we made it free for the first year. It was a free beta. And that's a really intentional choice because we wanted to see, you know, before we had it out there, it was like, well, who knows how people are going to use this? Like, we have a hypothesis, right? We have a dream. But we can only learn by putting it out there. So we often follow that, you know, pretty typical, like, MVP-style release process where we try to put something out there that is the first iteration of something, so that people can start using it, start playing with it, and we can start learning from what they're doing. But from a design perspective, we hold a really high bar. So, you know, when we say MVP or minimum viable product, it doesn't mean that we launch a crappy version of something, right?

Clinton: Sure.

Loren: It's that we launch the smallest possible thing, at a bar of excellence that we really believe in. And that definitely applies both to the design and the development of that feature. We want to launch things that absolutely meet our bar of quality. Even early on in the company. So it's a bit of an art form, but we synthesize, kind of, those things together, and then we make a big roadmap and we, you know, kind of duke it out a little bit internally. We have different people, everyone shares their opinion of what should be higher, what should be lower. And really, through that collaboration - which we do on a Felt map, of course. (Laughs)

Clinton: Nice.

Loren: We kind of do use Felt like a whiteboard software internally because it, you know, is helpful for us to dogfood the product. But yeah, we do that and we kind of hash out our roadmap, and of course it will look forward a year-ish, but we're always revising it as we learn more.

Clinton: For Felt, we're into 2024 now, I don't know if you guys have a calendar year, however you regulate yourselves that way. But goals-wise, what's Felt trying to get done, let's say in the next 12 months, that's important to you and the team?

Loren: One thing is, you know, we just turned it on so that you can pay for Felt, right? It was free up until 2024. And there's a huge amount that goes into, even just like, making sure that the model is right. What people are paying for, how much, on what frequency, and like matches up what people need. And of course we also want to succeed as a business, right?

Clinton: Sure.

Loren: We want Felt to exist. We want this tool to be available to people, you know, in perpetuity. So just figuring out the business and making sure that we have that set up in a way that allows us to be growing and sustainable is obviously really important. I think in terms of the product, we want to continue to invest in making Felt extend the value that businesses have, right? So we want to make sure Felt integrates with all kinds of things. One thing I'm working on right now, for example, is what we call live data, right? So right now you can pull data into Felt, but when you do, it kind of becomes a static snapshot of the data at that point. Of course, a lot of businesses have data that lives in a database and changes over time, right?

‍Clinton: Sure.

Loren: So we're making it so that you can hook your database up and Felt we'll track that and kind of keep your data live. As an example, I think also we invest in these projects that we call... I think it's called Small but Mighty, that we do in an ongoing way, that I really love. It's an internal process where we make sure that we aren't only focusing on big feature launches, but then we're also just making sure to take care of all the little things that pop up in the software. Like little bugs, you know, little things that just could be slightly better. People who already pay for Felt... They may not pay more because we, you know, added some of these niceties, but we feel like it's really important to keep the software feeling extremely tight, extremely thoughtful and delightful. You know, we spend a good amount of time just shipping small fixes like that. Or, you know, shipping small little feature requests that people have, where they say, hey, can you add this little measurement tool, or can you make sure that this does that? And, again, we just continue to invest in that stuff. So, we love when people reach out to us and ask for things. But I'd say those, you know, are kind of two key focuses for us this year.

Clinton: That small but mighty's also, I think, a nice recipe for driving loyalty, right? Driving community around your product and keeping people... Just like, oh, they're listening. I think that goes a long way. And gives people a sense of, it ties people to a product along, as you're building out this journey together. So I think that's a smart move for sure, which is super cool. So the site is Felt.com. I would say, I mean, I went on there, just played around looking at it too. If there's anything else more than that, Loren is like, hey, just get to Felt.com, check it out. And I would hope that this conversation... Because for me what it did was, I already was curious of maps. I already understood them, of course, and I really understand their importance. But it opened up for me, like, oh, that could be used in some really interesting and compelling ways. So, any other advice for people, besides go to the website, check it out? Like, bring it to some colleagues? Any other parting words for Felt, man?

Loren: Yeah. Well, I would just say in checking it out, you can check it out for free. That's something else that's really important to us.

Clinton: Nice.

Loren: And you can use Felt for free for personal use cases. So, you know, make an account. You can get it up and running in a couple minutes, and you can be making a map. You know, there's some features you might run into that start to look like business usage that cost money. But generally speaking, you can also make really impressive, super cool and useful maps in Felt right now for free. So, you know, definitely give it a try. I'm the kind of person where, you know, it's one thing to kind of see the website, you know, to hear someone talk about it, but I love to just get in there and play with something and get a feel for it. So I would just say to try that, and if folks have any thoughts or feedback, questions, you know, please reach out because we love chatting with our community, our users. I love hearing from people. So yeah, just give it a try. Let me know how it goes.

Clinton: So, a huge thanks to Loren Baxter for helping us expand our minds and to think about maps, hopefully in some brand new ways. I know it has for me. And folks, remember, in this studio, we believe in shipping software over slideware, that fast will follow smooth, and aiming to create digital experiences that move millions is a very worthy pursuit. Join us next time as the pursuit continues on Catalyst, the Launch by NTT Data podcast.

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