Speaking
Jake McKee speaks on customer conversations, product development, and the cost of secondhand insight.
With 25 years of experience working with teams at LEGO, Apple, EA Games, Southwest Airlines, and Canon, Jake brings real-world stories and practical frameworks to every stage. His talks help product teams rethink how they listen to customers and what to do with what they hear.
Book Jake to speakWhat Jake speaks about
The Crucial Few
In every audience, a small group of customers matters far more than their numbers. This talk shows how to spot them, earn their trust, and turn what they tell you into better product decisions.
The Cost of Secondhand Insight
Why product teams keep building the wrong things, and how the gap between customer reality and product decisions quietly compounds into Conversation Debt. A keynote built for product, research, and executive audiences who want to stop running on filtered feedback.
Designing the Customer Conversation System
Good conversations don't happen by accident. This talk walks through the five pillars of the Customer Conversation Compass, Debt, Architecture, Tuning, Amplification, and Traction, and shows teams how to build a durable system for hearing customers directly.
From Superfans to Product Strategy
What 25 years of community work, including the LEGO adult fan program that helped save the company, taught Jake about turning your most engaged customers into a real product advantage. Equal parts story, strategy, and practical playbook.
Every talk lands the same three things.
01
A clear way to name the problem
Audiences leave with shared language for what's going wrong, Conversation Debt, secondhand insight, signal vs. noise, so teams can finally talk about it.
02
A diagnostic they can run on Monday
Each talk includes a concrete framework attendees can apply to their own team within 24 hours, not a six-month transformation plan.
03
Permission to change how they listen
Real stories from LEGO, Apple, EA, and others give product leaders the cover and conviction to push past dashboards and back into real customer conversations.
Where Jake has spoken
Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Webcast
Together We Create: Integrating passionate customers in your product development lifecycle
Watch the recordingSt. Louis PDMA
Designing the Relationship: What Star Wars Can Teach Product Managers About AI
Watch the recordingInsights Association Annual Conference
Beyond the Numbers: Redefining Insights Through Human Connection
ProductCamp Austin
The Future of Product Management: Reusing and Reinvesting the AI Dividend
Watch the recordingJake on other people’s podcasts
Speaker kit
Bio, headshots, talk descriptions, and tech requirements in one file.
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