Speak Easy

Ang Jandak
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[00:00:00] Hey there, listeners. We had audio issues on my side in this episode, so apologies for that. Here's the episode.

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Tyler Sellhorn: Hello, everyone. My name is Tyler Sellhorn and welcome to another episode of Speak Easy, the podcast where we discuss communication, productivity systems, capturing our thoughts, and how we share those thoughts with our future selves and others. We believe that managing our brains is core to 21st century work, and we're here to learn how to do it better than we did yesterday.

Thanks so much for listening. Speak Easy is brought to you by Cleft, the easiest way to collect your thoughts. With our cross platform applications, you can simply capture your ideas wherever you are and paste them where they belong later. Today we are blessed to be learning out loud with Ange Jandak.

Ange is a versatile innovation architect with over 20 years of experience driving growth and transformation across diverse industries. As a strategic consultant, Ange has delivered exceptional results for [00:01:00] clients in healthcare, legal, retail, e commerce, manufacturing, and non profit sectors. At Generalist World, Ange spearheads growth in growth strategies, provides strategic guidance on business initiatives, and develops innovative programs to enhance member experiences.

Ange's experience, expertise, Ange's expertise spans brand development. digital strategy, marketing automation, and process improvement. Previously as digital director at Alliance for Safety and Justice, Ange leveraged creative problem solving and analytical skills to advance nonprofit program development.

Ange's track record includes increasing website traffic by 300 percent through micro influencer campaigns and boosting organic engagement by 600 percent via ambassador programs. Ange's leadership extends to roles at school or mentors and in previous roles as a director of operations. Where she consistently improved operational efficiency and client outcomes and his approach combined strategic planning, creative strategy, and data driven decision making to deliver innovative solutions that drive measurable results.

With a passion for innovation and a proven [00:02:00] ability to navigate complex challenges, Ange Jandek continues to shape the future of business and technology across multiple sectors. Ange loves to explore the intersection of strategy, innovation, and human experience. Now Ange, from conversations before this one, I understand that how you communicate and how you manage your ideas is highly context dependent.

What do you mean by highly context dependent Ange?

Ang Jandak: first, Tyler, thank you for having me today. I'm very excited. I am all over the place and it's one of the things that consistently comes up is people say, how do you pull all of these very, Diverse thoughts together to the same place. And feel like everything is connected, and when we talk about business operation structure, for example sales is marketing. Marketing is product, product is project management, project management is operations, operations is user experience. User experience is customer service. And then customer service comes back around to sales. So they're all essentially the same thing. [00:03:00] They have the same core elements and the differentiator is the context of what you need or how you're viewing something. So when I am organizing, for my personal life or for work, first goal is always to understand those different contexts and how they might. Apply to a situation to understand not just the best tools to use, but the most effective way to lay out my thoughts.

Tyler Sellhorn: Okay. So let me. Pull that apart just a little bit. When you're saying that all of these different parts of the business are like one another, but they, have these different contexts or maybe outcomes that they're seeking help us out.

Ang Jandak: if we're talking about a business, right, because that's the easiest way to understand all of this,

Tyler Sellhorn: Sure. Bomba

Ang Jandak: a business that's selling socks. And from the sales perspective, you're going to say whatever you want to make someone buy the socks.

The [00:04:00] thing is, the socks could be really expensive. I think Bomba's socks. I talk about Bomba's all the time because I love them. Not sponsored. Um, but, but

Tyler Sellhorn: Not a sponsor, but could be not a sponsor, but could be.

Ang Jandak: the thing with Bamba socks is they are relatively expensive, right? They're like 14 to, I think their compression socks are like 30 a piece. So they're not inexpensive. There is kind of like a feel goody sales element where when you buy one, they donate one. From a sales perspective, they have to be able to get people to make what's kind of a higher price. So you have to know, you have to know what's the best price point when you know, you could go to target and buy an eight pack of socks for like the price of one pair of socks with them. So sales has to understand marketing, and how marketing has to understand what the customer actually wants. That's one of the big things I always talk about in marketing. You're not selling goods or services. You're selling the intangibles that goods and services provide, right? So marketing has to [00:05:00] know. How to work with sales to get a customer to realize what they're actually buying, which can only be done if they are connected with like customer service and user experience to say, Hey, We are selling these socks. They're a higher price, but one, they're going to last you longer. They have an amazing guarantee program.

You are buying the feeling of comfortable feet as opposed to really sweaty shoe socks, socks that, don't really support you very well. They're very cushiony. They don't stretch out the way that normal socks do. These are all the things that people are buying essentially like when you get home, you want to stay in your socks. And

Tyler Sellhorn: Mm hmm.

Ang Jandak: the product and operations, they have to be able to understand that. So if suddenly operations was saying, Hey, think that we could be more profitable by shifting our manufacturing to another location or making this one tiny [00:06:00] change that, You know, who really needs to know if on the interior of the, of a Bomba sock.

When you pull it up, I don't know what that's called, like the sock hole, the hole that your foot goes into, they have it

With not just their little slogan, but also it has the sock size on it, which is super helpful if you have other people in the house of the same color. So like my.

Husband and I are constantly mixing up each other's socks. And Hey, that's really useful for us. If they got rid of that for an operations, increase it could save them money. It doesn't really impact the quality of the sock, but because it would be something that would impact their users because they use the same colors for everybody, that could be detrimental.

And that's something that all of these parties need to know. What it boils down to is so many companies. Silo everything and in reality, they're all doing the exact same thing just with a very different context. That's the business standpoint when it comes to me personally, am [00:07:00] I ideating? Am I brainstorming? Am I absorbing information? Am I collaborating with someone else? What part of my brain is active will dictate how, what platform I use. It will dictate how I get the information out of my brain and into the universe. So all of them are essentially the same thing is just defined by the context of that moment.

Tyler Sellhorn: Okay. Thank you for blowing that out for us because I take it as read now that everything is everything Right. And that really when operations is mulling over a potential change or cost savings, there needs to be a driving energy towards efficiency, but not without understanding the trade offs that will be made when those changes are made.

Right.

Ang Jandak: act like everything is a zero sum game, you know? If we try something and it doesn't work well, you know, we're a baseline. No, you can [00:08:00] actively harm your brand. You can actively harm your image. We see all these companies all the time who create cost cutting measures or things that they think will give them access into a new market and betray the users that have gotten them to where they are now. And so you need to have that understanding. At every level of your business and not just understanding of the consumer, but also the understanding of all of the other people in your company across departments. I mean, there's jokes that, everybody hates marketing because marketing will say, all kinds of ridiculous things and then product has to make that happen.

Tyler Sellhorn: Mm hmm.

Ang Jandak: that I frequently do is I act as a neutral third party where I'm essentially translating and products speak so that each party can understand what the other needs from them and understands this is a heavy lift. This is a really low level lift. Something I think is really fascinating is if you're in web development, could build the most intricate, elegant, nuanced backend that's dynamic and makes your [00:09:00] life so easy. And people will not care. But if you change a hex code and change colors across the website, everybody's so impressed because that's a visual thing that they can see. Hey, this is actually really easy lift. And this thing that you think is simple is really difficult. And here's all the elements and here are the potential roadblocks. And this is what it means, coming down the road. These are all the impacts of other people are doing. Are focusing, on themselves, understandable. And this is how, what your focus impacts ripple across the company. And this is how, what you want to do will impact those ripples. And. Moving forward with that in mind. So that I want to do, how is this going to impact everyone? I worked with a hospitality company that started a new project management brought on a new project management software.

And I was really excited cause I'd worked with the software before. And the problem that they had was they were, Bringing all of their clients in from NetSuite. So if they've signed on a new client, the [00:10:00] very first thing that would happen is they would get added into NetSuite for billing purposes, you know, cause got to get the money.

I

Tyler Sellhorn: Mm hmm.

Ang Jandak: Problem is is NetSuite would append randomly generated customer number, customer ID number in front of every single entity. the issue with that is this is a hospitality company. They deal with hospitality management. There's all kinds of management

Tyler Sellhorn: Hard. No.

Ang Jandak: thousands of listings that all had a random number in front of it. And then

Tyler Sellhorn: No.

Ang Jandak: Had multiple teams that, had their own little corral of clients that they worked with. Right. So the only way. And I'm trying to truncate this, but the only way

Tyler Sellhorn: Sure.

Ang Jandak: find a customer to search for it. And because there were so many people in there, so many groups, you could literally walk away.

It's like the old days on the internet. You could walk away, have a sandwich come back and it still hadn't rendered your result yet. And it was obviously impacting productivity numbers [00:11:00] and management was confused. They're like, we just built this amazing product management system. Why is it not working?

Why are you? You guys wasting all this time and approaching it instead of, okay, what do all of these groups need? How can we create this in a way that doesn't impact the inputting still make it easy for not just end users to be able to find their clients, but also to collaborate with other departments. And I ended up building a internal kind of spaces, because if you're familiar with Wrike software at all, you'll understand this, but essentially linking to all of these different, you'll have to search the one time, but then once you have the client, you can link to that product. Personal space and then everybody can not just access, but they can access the way that it makes sense to them. So development can access based on where something is in a pipeline, is it in progress? Are we doing Q. A. That [00:12:00] sort of thing? Service management can break down by not just what group they're in, but what products they currently have, because upselling was a part of the process. And so understanding what people need. And then how to present it to them in a way that is flexible, that's contextual, that helps everyone in the way that they naturally work is a much more elegant solution that helps everyone in the long run.

Tyler Sellhorn: I'm hearing, some of what you're describing there in, in your custom build out about this idea that I've heard you speak of before. You've used the phrase radical understanding before. I feel like that just rhymes with this idea that we're going to have the correct things linked together.

That they're the each, users needs are centered and presented back to them in a helpful way. Can you expand on that idea where we're building this radical understanding?

Ang Jandak: So radical understanding. I think people are familiar with the idea of radical candor, right? Where, you know, it's.

Tyler Sellhorn: Shout out Kim [00:13:00] Scott.

Ang Jandak: gonna say the thing that needs to be said, even if it's not the way that people are used to hearing it. Right. That's basically the

Tyler Sellhorn: Right.

Ang Jandak: of it. And so I think that's how we have to approach understanding. Something that I say very frequently is from the moment we are born. We assume that everyone is exactly like us until we're given evidence to the contrary, right? So, babies, when they're six months old, they start to freak out and they get really, really clingy.

And the reason is, is up until that point, they literally think that they and their mom are the same person. This is ingrained in us from as early as you can possibly get. then just all of these things that we take for granted, of course, people have happy homes. If you come from a happy home, you're going to assume that someone came from a happy home. You're going to, you see all of these huge rifts that we have in society that honestly are built on the concept of, obviously you can do this, I can do this, so obviously that's your experience and we have the same experience. And what would it look like, instead of saying, okay, yeah, I get [00:14:00] you. Let's move on. Our pursuit was about actually understanding all of the underlying reasonings and causalities that bring someone to a situation. So when we talk about, for instance, that knowing what these departments need, knowing how they work with the client, knowing how that feeds into the greater structural system. Because you have to understand what these people are being judged on their output, right? If development understand where something is in a project their numbers are going to get behind. If they can't collaborate on something effectively, the metrics that they get judged in are going to fall behind.

If customer service representatives are getting low scores from their customers, Clients because they don't know what they have because they can't pull up their file because they know what's working and what's not working. These are going to lead to low personal scores for them, the things that they're judged on. that's from a business context. But then let's look at it in a personal context. And I'll do that by telling another business story. worked with a [00:15:00] company an agency, and we had a client come in who was in the elder care space. And essentially what their product was is, If elderly person was not going to be in their home anymore, either they were moving to assisted living, or they were downsizing, or someone had passed away, they would offer a service where they would take care of everything.

They would clean the house out, they would do the estate sale, they would put it up for listing, tours, everything. And, The majority of their clients, people who paid for the service were from out of state, I was working with other people who were really ingrained in their families, right? Their family to the family home was like the safest, best place in the world. And so when we were talking about branding concepts, that is the direction that they came from. And realizing, a lot of their customers are coming from out of state. These are the people who want to [00:16:00] pay to make the problem go away. These are not, if. The family home is being sold, and the family home means everything to you. You're not going to let some person you don't know handle that. You are going to fly up from wherever you are, and you're going to want to handle that personally. You're going to want to be directly involved. the idea

Tyler Sellhorn: hmm.

Ang Jandak: this solved a problem that they were so unfamiliar with very foreign to them.

And it was this huge learning curve because they had never had to be confronted with that experience before. And think of every interaction that you have in your day to day life. I'm sure there have been times where something's happening Oh, I guess that person's having a bad day, but realizing what all these tiny little aspects of what make us human, what make our experiences, what they are. If you understand. Not just what they are in a base level, but like on a deep resonant understanding of what all the little micro impacts of that experience are, going to fundamentally change the way that you [00:17:00] look at everything. So that's what radical understanding is to me is understanding, not just where people are coming from in a moment, but everything that led up to that and how to address that before it needs to be addressed, how to see people who being heard. Who aren't being considered in a situation. If, we can talk about spaces where people. Have been smacked on the hand for speaking up and if they're in a situation where they're uncomfortable They are not going to want to speak up because in their heads they are going to be penalized for that saying here, you can do anything you want aren't going to necessarily take you up on that if they've been put in a position where when they've tried in the past, they've been punished for it. However, people who haven't had that, who've always had the ability to pursue things that they want and have a safety net, they are going to obviously take advantage of it. And so then we get this over representation. of people who [00:18:00] already have that confidence, who get to be louder and heard more because they haven't had those barriers.

It's a self repeating process. We tell people, look, here's the situation. Why are you not taking advantage of it? But we never address the issue that's holding them back in the first place.

Tyler Sellhorn: I do think that is A radical perspective to stop holding on to our own experiences. So tightly and allow others to teach us about their own internal worlds. I know for myself in a previous career, I was a secondary teacher and I am very grateful for all of the students that I've had who are willing to trade roles and teach me about them and teach me about their experiences that very often, most often, almost always were different than my own, right?

And it, it had impacts on their ability to learn and to contribute and [00:19:00] feel safe enough to, as you say, speak up when it was appropriate.

Ang Jandak: It's not it's not a fight. It's something that, I've said before is when. Every, I'm going to try this again. Everybody has privilege, some semblance of privilege. And the reason I say that

Tyler Sellhorn: Yeah,

Ang Jandak: somebody out for having privilege, they get really defensive because they read that as you dismissing their experience.

And that's not what it is. It's literally, if you can hear what I'm saying. And you understand me right now. You have some semblance of privilege. 56 percent of all the information in the world. So globally is in English. So being able to have access to the majority of information on the world in the world is a huge privilege over people who do not have it. Obviously there are systemic privileges that are much more powerful. But. I frame it that way so that people understand saying that you have a privilege is not an accusation. It's just something like be aware and [00:20:00] try to come from a place of understanding. even systemic issues like gender, the society is primarily gendered against women. However, if you're a guy trying to eat lunch in a playground, all of a sudden that privilege gets turned on its head. So of saying, everything is always the same way all the time, this is what this thing means. Look at it from, again, the point of context and look at it in a situational standpoint and understand what it means. What that means when you're trying to see viewpoints other than your own, it's painful. It's uncomfortable, but it's necessary in order to grow and improve.

Tyler Sellhorn: I definitely agree there. You have some very advanced thoughts and very mature ideas about things that are not simple. And I guess I'm curious to learn how you use your own tools or your own thinking to be able to take ideas. from the very first [00:21:00] beginning, right?

Like, how do you capture those ideas in a way that you can then iterate on them and bring them to the point where you can have a very nuanced, subtle and complex set of ideas that are meaningful in this conversation. How do you build on your own thoughts to be able to create these ideas? Radical understanding and you know thinking about how everything is everything inside of a business How do we come to understand these things?

How do you get started with you know building up ideas and sets of ideas like you are doing right?

Ang Jandak: So when we talked earlier about context and, how individuals brains work I have. Different tools for different situations. So when I'm in the ideation process, there's one of two ways. There's deep thinking where there's something itching at the back of my head I need to beat on it until it's out. And then there's torrent of ideas. [00:22:00] A lot of them are bad, but I just have to purge all of them to get a starting point. if it's that case, I have a Google document that's literally just called and just bring dump and. Everything is there.

Tyler Sellhorn: Shout out to previous guest angela beerman. She's also a brain dump person and I like Your alternative phrase, torrent of ideas. That's definitely a preferred phrase for me. Cause I, dump always brings up trash and things for me. So but brain dumps work for some people.

So like, go for it. If that's your word.

Ang Jandak: necessarily as a dumpster, but essentially if put this down and deal with it later. And you just dump it somewhere you, or you could call it unloading. uh,

Tyler Sellhorn: Yep.

Ang Jandak: doc, if you prefer, and then it means doc means two things

Tyler Sellhorn: Angela taught me that brain dump is okay. So thank you for having your own way of expressing it. That's the same. Mm hmm

Ang Jandak: that my brain is just way too fast for any method of. Getting things out there. [00:23:00] So if I get into a place where I'm just unloading ideas, I need to ensure that I don't have any interruption and I can just, bang them all out and have this giant list.

I can come back to it when I'm in a place where I feel that I've exhausted what needs to be exhausted. Then there's ideas where there's something in the back of my head. I haven't wrapped my head around it. I like to say my brain is a time traveler. it catches glimpse of things that I just haven't found the appropriate way to examine properly. for that, I'll have a pen and paper. I take, notes the old school way. I draw diagrams. I try to wrap my head around what's there, coming at it from different angles. You know, and I have a whole little kit that I carry around with me with little pad of paper, super high quality paper.

So I can scribble on it markers. It doesn't bleed everywhere. And then I have a little case with [00:24:00] different colored pens and markers and rulers and stickers and all this stuff to help me kind of make sense of something that doesn't exist yet. The other things, they exist. I don't know if they're good or bad, but they're there.

They're solid. This is for very nebulous concepts that I want to play with. And even if I don't get everything out, I can curate together. so that's always the first step. And then the second step is depending on what it is. Do I If I revisit something from my big long list of ideas, does it tell me what it wants to be?

It's very much the, chipping away the rest of the stone to release the sculpture type of thing. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it's really easy. And I can, like to think in outlines and then fleshing everything else out later. You know, having infinitely nestable things always makes me very happy. Uh, um, We'll go through a doc. I will usually I try to not sit in something for too long. I try to mix [00:25:00] it up. So I'll have one of my favorite products that I use is Toby again, not sponsored, but you can go to get toby. com, for your own account. And it's this wonderful tabs browser. bookmarking tool, where it not only allows you to sort tabs, but it also allows you to keep notes. I keep all of my AI prompts in Tobii Notes, I will, I have multiple different kind of elections that are essentially, brain scrubbing And it could be something like, Hey, here's archival botany illustrations, or it could be something like this is the science of how you get good versus bad maple syrup. Like things like that, that are just so far out of left field, that kind of, Keep me from running in those ruts. And that's like my big fear is I. hate repeating the same thing and not being able to get any form of momentum. It's something that when I'm talking to someone and I know that [00:26:00] this has happened with you, or I've said, Oh, did I say this already?

I'm so sorry, even if I haven't said it, but that's my nightmare is to make someone listen to something that I've said over and over and over again. So

Tyler Sellhorn: Okay, full disclosure for the listener ang and I are friends away from this conversation So that's why she's brought that up a couple times. Yes, we well, no, no, no No, it's it's the reason why we're friends and the reason why we're talking is because of you know These mature ideas that you're presenting to us

Ang Jandak: thank you. Yeah. It's once. have a grasp on something, and if it knows what it wants to be, it's very, very simple to an outline from that outline, build a notion documentation. I'll use AI, either ChatGPT or Claude or I recently started using Poppy AI, which is phenomenal. Again, not sponsored. But what I love about Poppy is it's very visual.

You can bring all kinds of stuff over into it and make connections. You can do audio recordings. I find that [00:27:00] some of the stuff that, I say in conversations with other people resonates more, but the problem is I forget it almost immediately. So I've recently started recording all of my conversations with other people with permission, obviously, so that I can come back through and trace that follow through line. once the ideas are out there, If they have any sort of semblance of cohesion, or they deserve essentially to be on their own I will create a Notion doc. I might create their own folder in Google Drive, depending on what needs to happen. And then sometimes I'll just start curating things that I feel are tangential, almost mood boards. And, If I have a mood board, if I feel like something is right, if something fits, then I have a circle of people that I just ask for their input. I put out an MVP and I get input back on that. Does this resonate? Am I the only one who feels [00:28:00] this way? That does happen on occasion. But I find that a lot of it is just very, very quiet things that the universe does. that other people say that if you learn to read. It can tell you everything that you want to know.

Tyler Sellhorn: Well, thank you for giving us permission to record with you today Ange. I guess maybe I'm curious, you've mentioned a few different tools and even some artificial intelligence, AI, LLM based tools. I guess maybe I want to invite you to conclude with us. You talked about one of the ways that you store your prompts.

You talked about some other new tools you're giving an attempt. I guess maybe I'm curious, like how do you use AI in, in your idea workflow?

Ang Jandak: AI is my thought partner and I say that because everybody sees what they want to see. And so my goal with AI is always, I want you to show me the stuff that I'm missing. want you to pull up the things that I'm not noticing. If I have a bunch of [00:29:00] disconcordant thoughts and you can make sense of them, even if you're wrong. It's going to give me a starting point. It's going to give me a jumping off point. So I that's how I use AI. I recently did. An AI session someone where they gave me all of their work, their resume projects that they've worked on testimonials that people have told them said about them. put them together and through of very curated, high quality prompts, we're able to use it to explore. Not just the skill sets that they have, but the ones that are kind of invisible that they don't notice. And then how those can translate into other careers that they'd never thought of. Because again, we only know the stuff that's in our sphere of influence, right? We don't know anything that's happening outside of that. So using AI to get outside of that bubble and that sphere of influence and then saying, okay, then what would my next steps be? So, AI is a thought partner, AI as [00:30:00] mapping out things that I don't necessarily want to dedicate the time to investigate myself, and AI will tell me if it's worth investigating or not. I don't take anything at face value. Think of it as, you have this person who make sense of things that don't make sense to you, but then you trust and verify. And so that's kind of how I use AI.

Tyler Sellhorn: Well, Anang, I can't think of a better place to end than to invite you and the listener to. Treat Cleft as their AI thought partner, right? Which Cleft is a sponsor of the podcast. Thank you so much for learning out loud with us, Ange. We appreciate you.

Ang Jandak: Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.

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