About
Jake McKee
More than 20 years helping teams stop running on secondhand insight and start having real conversations with customers.
The short version
I built the Compass because I kept seeing the same problem.
Even the best product teams were making decisions based on summaries. Bullet points from Sales. Ticket data from Support. Feedback filtered through three layers before it got to the people building the product.
By the time they heard from customers, the real signal was gone. They were building on assumptions about assumptions.
The fix wasn’t more data. It was better conversations. Direct ones. Designed ones. The kind that actually change what gets built.
I started doing community work in 1996, before most people knew what that meant. My first big win was helping LEGO connect with its adult fan community, which turned out to be worth close to $85 million. That community helped save the company during one of its hardest periods. Wired Magazine wrote about it.
From there, I spent years helping brands like Apple, EA Games, Southwest Airlines, and Canon figure out how to listen to customers and bring them into product conversations.
“Jake isn’t the community guy, he’s THE Community Guy. He might be one of the first to recognize the power of connecting and empowering a company’s biggest fans.”
The method
The Customer Conversation Compass is the five places customer insight breaks between a customer’s mouth and your product decisions. The whole model lives in one place.
See the five pillarsGet in touch
Tell me what’s getting in the way of your team hearing from customers directly. We’ll figure out if I can help.