Meet Puzzle: the App to Help You Visualize All Your Systems feat. Brian Ragone

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris 0:31
Welcome, everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. Thank you for tuning in. And you are going to be so glad you did. Because today I have, I have one of the most instrumental moments, a founder, who has created some software that really hasn’t resonated with me as strongly as I watched, you say it has resonated with me strongly as maybe two other software’s in the past that I still use to this day. So you’re always running across new software and things that can do a variety of different marketing tasks. But this software was so different. So I wanted to make sure that I put it in front of you all in a way that you can see and understand just how long you’ve been waiting for this even if you didn’t know. So our guest today is none other than Brian Regan. And he is the founder and CEO of puzzle puzzle is the app everyone. And he’s helping teams visualize their workflows and systems in a fast and easy way. Can you all see why I was so excited. So everyone can understand how they work. He’s helped visualize over 10,000 workflows to bring clarity and alignment across teams, within organizations, so they can make improvements to their operations, with confidence. And that’s a he’s being very modest on that bio. Because once you can actually see what is happening with your operations, everything unlocks, and I’m not exaggerating, everything unlocks. And in fact, he’s found that organizations use up words to 130, SaaS applications to run their business operations on average, yet most processes and systems aren’t well documented. Right? Listeners, are you saying out yet you’re like, Oh, that’s really I don’t have documentation and watch this in only one person knows how they work. And that’s the person that built them. And I’ll add to it, that person may not even be working with their company anymore. Okay, so I can’t I can’t wait to dive into this. Brian, you know, my affinity for for you and the software that you’ve created. Now, everybody gets to see why I’m so excited about this. Welcome to the podcast, Brian, how you doing? Chris,

Brian Ragone 3:21
thank you. Thank you for that introduction. I’m doing great. I’m doing great. And you said it best. It’s almost like I gave you that intro something.

Chris 3:32
Yes, yes. And I want everybody. So let me tell you, I’m spoiled. I got spoiled. And I can’t take credit for this. I have to give a shout out to one of automation bridge certified partners. Morgan Edwards is the one that found puzzle and said, Hey, Chris, check this out. And it it took one I watched the loom video. And it was it. I was like, Oh, this is it. This is what I’ve been looking for. So I’ve had the privilege to connect with Brian, prior to this, get a demo and walk through the app. I’m now up to I think I’ve got 50 or so objects in my own app. So I started mapping out my own operations. We’ll talk about that in the podcast later on. But But Brian, we, I read the bio, we know that you have seen this problem of visualization. I’m a huge advocate of ensuring that you can see what’s taking place digitally, because often it’s invisible and we just experienced the output of it. But tying this back to day one. Where did where did this come from? At what point in your journey? Did you realize that this was a problem worth solving with software?

Brian Ragone 4:50
Yeah, great question. Chris. In there was a very, very particular moment in my life. And it was actually back in 2017. If I was running the operations for a 15 person, small organization, and I had an anxiety attack, because I was running this 15 person team, with no documentation, no one in the organization understood how the operational big picture worked. And so I was the person to try to stitch together 15 different perspectives, whenever we were trying to change any process, implement any new system or even tweak existing systems. And it led me to the point of having an anxiety attack because your brain is not meant to keep and maintain 15 different perspectives at one time. And, you know, we would have org wide meetings, because we had to get every single person’s perspective on this one small topic or, or change that we wanted to make to the system. And it wasn’t sustainable. And I came to this conclusion that we have to write things down. And it has to be accessible to everyone in the organization. So not only me writing things down, but other people documenting how they do their jobs, so that everyone can understand how the operational big picture worked. And I didn’t know what the product was going to look like, you know, until five years down the line. But from what from 2017, to really like 2022. I named this problem space puzzle. And the problem space is that there was no shared understanding about about how the organization operated. And, you know, after that anxiety attack that I had, I really reshaped my thinking about how organizations are run, I started reading books like holacracy by right, Brian Robinson really made me think differently about how organizations could be structured. I called this thing. I coined this term in my my departmental dependency maps, where I would go into Google Slides, and I would make these department objects and try to show the teams, how they’re interrelated. And what KPIs they share, so that they’re co incentivized to work together towards some some goal. And that’s what an organization is, ultimately is it’s a group of people, which is, which has subsets of groups of people called teams, which have roles which have goals that run processes that hopefully meet those goals. And those are the components of any organization. And so this realization just sent me down really a rabbit hole of becoming a student in this space, reading books, listening to podcasts, and, you know, learning jobs to be done framework and customer journey mapping and design thinking, in through all of these lenses of how people understand how some job gets done. I’ve, I’ve created this product that helps you visualize how your people process and tools work together.

Chris 8:19
And I have to say it, I have without realizing what I was doing. I have tried to do what your app does, in a variety of ways. So I want to talk about some of them. And then just give you the floor and explain why that why you chose not to go that route, per se and what makes puzzles so unique. So in the beginning, my first my first attempt again, Brian, I did not realize I was visualizing a flow. I was just trying to explain something to somebody. And I ended up creating it in it made a big keynote. It was keynote at the time because I Google Slides hadn’t been around and I was just dragging some some some boxes and squares and pointing some arrows. And it did the job. And it did the job. So well the person that I shared it with, they were like, because it was their process. That was the thing, Brian it was their process. And I was confused. So I was really just saying, hey, after this and this is this supposed to happen because this is what’s happening to me. They were like, Oh my gosh, Chris, this is so great. Can you teach it? And I was like no, I’m just a customer. I’ve never done anything online. So I wanted to stay in the dark. So you know you go from the boxes and shapes and arrows, your your your traditional flowcharts whether it is Google Slides or Keynote or we have platforms now whimsical, Lucid Chart. They exists Brian, you can go into these abs draw.io I mean, I can keep listing off many flowchart apps. Why do we need another one? And what is the main difference between what puzzle does because somebody listening may say, Oh, well, that’s just another squares and circles in triangle arrow thing. I use Miro for that I’m fine. I can tune out now, why is what is that differentiating factor or factors with puzzle that people really need to need to understand?

Brian Ragone 10:34
Great question. Great question. And it brings me to this. This idea that I had recently, which is the difference between what I call shallow documentation and deep documentation. So shallow, shallow documentation allows you to look through the lens of like, you know, what, two dimensional space like Miro or whimsical or Lucid Chart where you see squares, and you see connectors, but there’s no depth to the documentation. If you want depth to the documentation, guess what you have to go do, you have to go to Google Drive, open up a Google Doc, which is linked to five other Google Docs, you know, and go through this web of documentation. And then try to look back to the visual perspective of it, and piece things together, and read more information and piece things together and read more information piece things together. And so I came to the conclusion that each of these objects within these builders, what I call Lucid Chart, whimsical, and Miro, everything whiteboards, because you can go in there, and you can do everything with these whiteboards. You can have a coffee chat, where everyone’s putting their stickies in about ideas about what they want to do this weekend. Or you can do you know, product, roadmapping, and stuff like that. Whereas puzzle, we built it with the intention of documenting systems and processes. That is, it’s one use case, you can plan, manage, and build and monitor your systems and your processes in this tool. There are no stickies, there are no places where you can doodle. It is specifically built for this purpose. And so what that enables us to do is make assumptions about what information needs to live on this step. Right. And, you know, there’s finite components within organizations, any organization is a collection of automations, meetings, sequences, emails, delays, SMS is web pages, forms. These are what I call step types. And so we define what those step types are in a process in a system. And then you use puzzle to very easily just select which type of step it is. And then it gets it gets those attributes of what it is. And it makes it very clear in the picture about where does this automation actually happen? Well, you get a nice, pretty picture of the tool at the top, you get a good indicator at the bottom right hand corner that this is a meeting step that happens in Google Calendar, and then a name of the step. And ultimately, what these maps are all about, is getting shared understanding. It’s getting buy in from people who didn’t build the map, and don’t understand the systems. That is the purpose of a diagram is to show it to other people who have no idea what’s going on, so that they start to have an idea about what’s going on. And so what’s the best way to do that? For me, I think it’s creating a notation, a system that kind of puts bounds on how these processes actually work. So that if Chris goes into puzzle and maps out a process, then Brian goes and maps out a process. Then my friend Harrison goes, maps out a process and my friend Max and and Michelle come in and that process, all of our process diagrams, fit the same visual notation, right, they have the same set of information on it to where I’m not reading five different languages. Right, because ultimately, a visual is a language you’re looking at the shapes that you use, and the colors that you use, and what represent what represents what. And so instead of giving people the freedom to kind of go off the walls with how they they diagram, we’ve made assumptions about the best practices to create a beautiful and easy to understand diagram, because that is ultimately the end purpose of creating diagrams for systems.

Chris 14:45
Yeah, this this is so good because I had to, I had to really use discipline, right? Because in the past, when you’re using your Lucid Chart and whimsical and everything else, Well, let me let me just talk about my my transition here. I was a heavy Lucid Chart user. And that’s because you could do everything, I could change colors of arrows boxes, and this isn’t. And I needed it, I wanted it to look like a piece of art, I like my flowcharts to be easily legible, you know, and easy to follow, even even to the most amateur individual. And then something happened happened with whimsical, where there’s a simplicity introduced, I couldn’t quite customize everything. And at first I fought it. But then I welcomed it and said, Well, wait a minute, maybe I do need to simplify it. Because the purpose is the process, not you know, getting distracted with how to make it look look nice and everything. So when you say each flow, each build each visualization is a language. I’ve never heard it put like that. But that’s exactly right. And I have I have brought people into my company. And they’ve seen some of the maps that I’ve created these other tools, and they try to emulate it. And it looks like a poor derivative. So naturally, I kind of get turned off, but I hadn’t thought about it as a language. And in a day and age where freedom is everything. I mean, I want to be able to control everything. Brian, don’t, don’t you put constraints on me, I felt a sigh of relief of the simplicity of puzzle. Because no, you’re not going to go in there and change box colors in sizes and and different types of arrows. Why? Because that’s not the focus, the focus is not the design, the focus is get your process down. And we’re going to control the environment in such a way that if somebody else built the same process, you would not even know it would look the same. So now we’re all on the same page, talking the same visual language. I love that I love it.

Brian Ragone 17:08
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. speaking the same language, and and ultimately, like imagine if, you know we had like Google Maps was different from for everyone. Imagine if everyone’s phone showed a different Google map, where where, you know, restaurants look like trees in some other person’s Google Map. And then another person cars look like TV screens. And we’d be like, What is this, you throw it out, you throw it out, because it’s hard to understand you don’t get it, which is what happens with Lucid Chart Miro and whimsical, these charts, these flowcharts they get thrown out, because you just temporarily use them to kind of gather your thoughts and hope that other people that you show kind of understand it. But no one really references back to those maps. And this brings me to my second differentiator for puzzle ultimately, is weebill puzzle as a map that you keep and maintain. So this deep documentation, not only can you you know, click on this step and input details about what type of step it is input contextual notes, embed loom videos inside the step, it can become that visual playbook for your business, it can go even further. It’s also a part of a relational database for your teams, your roles in your tools. So as you map out your process, you’re selecting what tool is used in this particular part of the process. you’re selecting what type it is. And you’re also indicating what roles are involved in this part of the process using the RACI model. Well, you can go to the team canvas, and you can go to the tool canvas and pivot on those pieces of information to then see, oh, I don’t just get this visual where I need to search where HubSpot is used. I can go to the tool canvas and look at the HubSpot card and see a list of all of the steps where that tool is hooked into your process. Same with roles in same with teens. And so it’s truly a platform for change management, where you can pivot on all the components within an organization process teams roles and tools. And anytime you want to unhook a certain part of that, that system, you can very clearly go to one part of the system see exactly where it’s hooked into the rest of the system and make the proper changes to where that transition is smooth. Listen

Chris 19:35
this this this is so important everyone, I’m going to say exactly what Brian just said. And try to like put it in terms in baby terms because I really want you all to get this but real quick. Hey, we’ve got a couple. A few comments live Listen, we stream our podcast episodes live if you want To be a part of the conversation as it takes place instead of waiting for it to release in the app, you can do so by going to automation bridge.com For slash subscribe. Yes, for slash subscribe, and you’ll be able to get our notifications when we go live on YouTube. Kuranda. Carville digital, she said, Lucid Chart mero whimsical, tried a bunch of things. She literally just said, those are everything whiteboards, just throw everything you want, you know, on them. And she was also mentioning how trying to decide on what to visually notate is very overwhelming. And this is why I’m this, this, this tool just keeps growing on me, Brian, it really does. Because what Brian is talking about every one is you go into puzzle, and you just start dropping your your actions on there. And for every action, you can click on it. And then there’s a little slider window for my notion users, you’re probably very familiar with the right Slide out Tray. And then there is where you can select what tool is responsible for that step or tools, you can select multiple. And then when you select multiple tools, you can determine which icon Do you want to display on that action. Now, let’s just pause there everyone, because I don’t know about you all. But when I create my visual charts, my flow charts, I’m I have a repository of logos from a variety of companies. So every time I drag a box, I have to go find a logo and put the logo of that app on top of the box. At the end of the day. It looks beautiful, right? It’s great. But it is so tiresome and cumbersome to make that. So now in puzzle, you just select from the drop down. And you have all the tools there. Brian, I was pleasantly surprised, because you know, I’m taking notes as I’m building. So okay, let me just make sure I if I come across something I’ll share with Brian so we can improve the app. And I said, Oh, my tool isn’t there. Let me let Brian know that my tool isn’t listed. Then I say oh wait, wait a minute. And it says add new tool. You can add the to grab the logo. And now that’s part of your puzzle app is in there. And you can reference that tool throughout your workflows, right? So everybody follow me, you’ve dropped your your step onto the canvas, you selected, which app is responsible for this, you’ve given it a name? And now you can you have this note area where you can put any description, Link anything in there. Even that has become a simple interface. Because you’ve got h1 and h2. It’s not like you’ve got h six up to eight, six, you can do all of these things where people can you give people enough rope and technology, they are going to do everything but tie a knot to help them they’re gonna go hang themselves there. They’re animals that you’re like, what do you do? This was not meant for that get off of that tree, right. So this one, you still keep some nice confines in every place, so that you can truly focus on the process that you’re putting in place. So imagine this everyone, let’s just say you’ve got four boxes, one goes to your CRM software, one goes to Zapier and another one goes to Calendly. Right. For each one of those boxes, as Brian mentioned, it rolls up, it can be connected, I shouldn’t say roll up, it can be connected to a role. This is next level. This is all within the Canvas, one click away everyone. One click away, you can now say, oh, for scheduling, that’s my salesperson. But for the zap that actually sends the information over. That’s my marketer. Right? So now we’ve got actions, tools and rows. So when you go and say, let me pull up my marketer row, it will show all the actions that they’re responsible for, as well as all of the tools that are required for those actions. Now, now, let me say this, some of you have been struggling trying to find help and communicate the tasks that need to be done. Just by mapping out your process with puzzle, half, maybe even more of that is done for you. Because if you’ve got your entire operations mapped out in the roles assigned appropriately to each box, you just go into the roles and say, Oh, if I if I hire a marketer, they need to be savvy in these tools. And they need to know how to do these things. Now Brian, I’m free from just going online carbon copying a a job description of some digital marketer. That sounded good doesn’t apply to me. doesn’t speak to the tools or the operations I have in place. This is next level. And it comes from exactly what you said, when you focus on a app for mapping operations alone. That’s it. Nope, no other distractions. Yep,

Brian Ragone 25:15
exactly, exactly. You know, there’s a few features that I have as a part of a vision. And I don’t share them often because I like to keep my team focus too, on kind of here and now and giving them just enough into the future of how puzzle will look. But this team designer, I have such an incredible vision for how this tiem designer can ultimately evolve. You know, for larger organizations and small, where you know, in the app, I would like to be able to generate a job description automatically. And what information will it use to generate that job description? Well, it will be tied to all the tools that it uses. And not only that, all of the steps, which have notes inside them. So it can reference all of the details, the very granular details of your business and generate a hyper specific job description, that is tailor focused to exactly how that role contributes across one or many processes. And you’d be able to then make that publicly accessible, and get people to apply right on that role card and manage your applicants through a series of steps to where when they come into the organization, they get placed in that role. They get access to all of the steps that they’ve been assigned to which have the trainings in the sidebars. And you know, that’s a couple years out, but I

Chris 26:40
love it. I love it. I sure Khurana mentioned she she finally dove into puzzle the other day, and within 20 minutes, she built out her entire tool library. So I want to that leads me to another statement slash question conversation point. How do you recommend and I’ve asked you this and I want you to share it for everyone. How do you approach the blank canvas? Somebody sign up with puzzle? I found myself here everyone. Listen, let me just let me mortalized myself, some of you in conversation, you look towards me, and I appreciate it. Like oh, man, he’s figuring it all out. He knows everything. I know what I know. And I know what I don’t know. And I’m never afraid to ask for help. So I emailed Brian because I was excited about puzzle. I created my orc automation bridge, right clicking the box, this big canvas with nothing on it. And I just kind of got just like Oh, where do I start? So I emailed you I want you to share with with our audience what what is your recommended way of getting started with with puzzle when you have that blank canvas?

Brian Ragone 27:58
It’s a great question. It’s a great question. And we’re working on a feature such that when you add a new workspace there will always be just one process. And that process will be called Getting Started with puzzle with steps that you can click on with sidebars that have looms of me walking through exactly how you can get started with puzzle. So that’s one one fix that we’re going to deploy pretty soon. The second way is, we do have a template gallery. And that template gallery has one fully baked out process that you can use as inspiration for your processes. And you know that that should serve as how a process should be properly documented. Right, the tools are assigned, the roles are assigned to it. The sidebar has a collection of notes with looms loom embedded or scribe embedded with bullet points and numbers and that sort of stuff. And so those two templates slash resources should be good. The last part of it is we actually offer a complimentary support meetings. So if you ever get scared by blank canvas, and this is this is actually this is actually a pain point for any software that’s out there is the blank canvas. The The last component to this is that we are releasing integrations that help accelerate the build process, right. So building flowcharts it’s, it’s not for the weak hearted. It’s for the people who are dedicated and really want to invest the time into getting proper documentation for all of those benefits that we’ve mentioned her earlier on our podcast on this podcast. But uh, we have integrations now where you can integrate with HubSpot. We’re releasing make in about a week. And then ultimately we’re going to release Zapier. You can integrate with these three systems and they automatically create the steps for you. linked to the Tools link. To the assets in the system. So for HubSpot integration, we can just one click you can get all your HubSpot forms all your HubSpot workflows and all your HubSpot sequences created as steps and then make in Zapier, you’ll be able to pull your scenarios in your zaps automatically. And those steps will be synced with specific zaps with specific scenarios. And you’ll be able to see enrollment data right in the sidebar, about the activities that are going on in your system. And that’s ultimately the direction that we’re heading is we want to have puzzel automatically create synced diagrams that help you monitor your existing systems, and then also be the system where you can plan around what exists to add on to that system over time.

Chris 30:48
This is Listen, everyone, I literally have goosebumps, because I hope this is strongly resonating with you all and I try my best to be objective on these podcasts, you all know that I refrain from saying, hey, go get the software do this, I want you to make the intelligent decision on your own. If you want my strong opinions, you can always join the membership where I give that freely. However, I’m breaking my rule and breaking my rule today on the podcast. i If you are in marketing ops, and operations in any capacity, and and or digital marketing, you absolutely need to be using this tool. I am not exaggerating, and the benefits are so vastly great that I can’t withhold such positive and affirming instruction from you. Okay, and here’s what hear Did you hear what Brian just said, this tool will be able to integrate with the other tools that you’re using, and give you a visualization of what’s taking place in them. And he said the word sync, which Brian correct me if I’m wrong, means if I update something, it will reflect if I update something in make will just say it will reflect in puzzle as well. Yes. Listen, everybody. Just Just follow me. When is the last time your SOP automatically updated itself? wins? Let me ask this when’s the last time you gave an SOP to somebody and was confident that they were a going to read through all of it and be understand every step easily? I don’t know when if that’s ever happened? Because I don’t I don’t believe that’s the true delivery of SOPs. However, maybe people are creative, but this to me, what’s your what’s your saying, Brian, and you’re leading this, you’re the leader? Because I’ve never heard anybody put it like this. This is the benefit of having a universal visualization language. UVL did we just create that just created on the podcast? created that I love that when we’re all speaking the same language. Now, I don’t have to say, Oh, my integration into make.com. Because you map your stuff this way. It needs to map it this way. No, it’s It’s all using the same visual language. And, and you heard it here, first folks up, oh my god, you guys got nostre DOM Chris, you have has arrived, this will be this will be the language of visualization. This is going to be the language, we are going to see many, many apps and platforms mimic this, which Hey, we accept competition, it helps us improve. But I’m just telling you all, in all of my getting and all of my learning, I just have never seen a operations focused app like this that has so much potential, as well as current power. I’m going to read so Brian gave you guys everything to look forward to watch this without any of that without any of that I’m going to read to you what what Brian said to me. And then I’m going to tell you how I how I eliminated the overwhelm. Okay? So you all may never have to deal with this. But at some point what what I’m about to read to you is going to be very, very important. He told me he totally understands the overwhelm. He said, I recommend starting with your most high frequency core processes and then work out onto the edges over time. And I sat back and I thought about I said okay, what’s my biggest, most important? And I said, Well, the thing that’s most important is the thing that’s close to the money. What is the process that’s closest to the money being transacted and deposited into my account? Watch this everyone. So Why start with one of my program enrollment? automations? Brian, I don’t think I shared this with you. This is the first time I’m totally unclosing On this episode. Tell me why. As Khurana mentioned, it took her 20 minutes to map out her entire library. Within maybe 10 minutes, Brian, I identified two critical holes. When when I say critical brain, my definition of critical for me building is that there was no destination after the action. The action took place, information was captured, and nothing happened. I wasn’t shocked. I was like, how did I do this? You know, out of all the people. Chris, how did you do this? Well, Brian, this is what happens when you don’t have a consistent means of visualizing. You’re kind of building on the on the fly, oh, I need to do this real quick. Right? Marketing as you bid, or I should say building as you market. And you just overlook things. It happens. It happens to the best of us. So using puzzle. In your advice, I was able to identify breakage in my operations, which made sense in something that I had been seeing, but I’ve been ignoring. I was like, Hey, I’m getting notification that this is happening. But nobody’s taking the next step. I’ll get to it. I’ll get back to it. So puzzle allow me to understand, oh, that’s why nothing was happening later. Because it’s not connected back into my CRM software. Over 100 People have taken that action, Brian. Wow, that’s incredible. 100 people. So I’m like, one side of me is like doom and despair. How did I leave them hanging, but the other side is like, I know now, and I can send messaging to them now. And I can make sure this never happens again. And I think for anybody listening, that’s one of the strongest promises of an app like this is identify the holes so that you can empower enable your marketing to fix or your operations or your you know, fulfillment. Last thing I know, I’m sorry, sorry, everybody. I know I’m talking a lot, but I just I just have to communicate this. So after I’ve taken that advice with Brian puzzle has now I’ve got multiple monitors in my setup. puzzle has been has become my second monitor companion app. Okay. Second, my s MCA. Just great stuff, everyone. This means while I’m doing something, I just have puzzle up in my other monitor. And I’m going back and forth. I’m saying, Okay, since I’m already in this app, let me grab the URL, put it in my puzzle block, right? Oh, since I’m here in airtable, let me not just link to airtable. I’m using an automation and airtable. Let me go grab the URL to that automation, put it in my puzzle block. Now, once I’m done with the process, because as you all know, you’re gonna jump in a process in your business at some point. So I’m just documenting on the parallel puzzle on the side. And now when I go back to it, guess what, I don’t go in the apps anymore. I go straight to puzzle. I’m like, Okay, what was I doing? And you all I cannot tell you the time it has saved me the clarity I’m not operating in. If I could, the magic thing for me is if I could snap my fingers, and somebody would appear and I can have them for an entire week, and just say let me just tell you all of my processes, then later, it’s all in puzzle. I mean, that’s what I’m working for. Yeah, I wanted to share that, Brian, because that’s been my experience, this is probably going to be an experience very similar to everyone else. Before all of the new stuff that you say, gets put in. And I just wanted to encourage people that that has been working for me very well is doing it documented. While I’m doing it, it’s just we’ve never had a tool to make it as simple as it needs to be, you know,

Brian Ragone 38:56
Chris, very, very well put in that’s incredible that you had 100 people take that action 100 people. And in the end, this is a bit of a like a life principle of mine, I would say that’s found itself in in, you know, the product is it’s about continuous improvement. It’s not about getting your process right the first time. Because, you know, sometimes you’re in a hurry, you need to get something out and it’s not going to be the best and you just need to roll it out and let people start to use some thing. It’s about continuous improvement. And so puzzle is really like your operational journal. Right? Ah, you know, I’m not having such a good process today. But it’s okay, I’m gonna do this, this and this to improve it, right? The same way that you write in your journal about how you’re gonna start to meditate and like, you know, do breath work and all this kind of stuff. Sometimes you don’t have good days. So you go on your operational journal, and you just write it down, hey, I need to do this, this and this better in this particular part of the business. And there’s commenting on on the on the puzzle, Canvas, so you’re able to make a little note for yourself, Hey, I know I need to improve this, to where when you do get an open day when you do get a cancellation of a meeting, you can go ahead right into puzzle and know exactly which parts of the process you can make small little tweaks to to continuously improve your your business operations. So that you continuously to find those little holes where 100 people will take actions that you that you weren’t seeing, because your mind is not meant to hold information inside of it. And so you need an operational journal, you need a second brain. And in my opinion, it needs to be visual. Because people love visuals, right? Our brains are wired for visuals, they’re not wired for memorization, they are wired for visuals. And so this tool allows you to create that visual and keep your operational journey journal to where you can make those improvements over time. And it sounds like you’re able to do that.

Chris 41:00
I love that terminology. Operational journal. Listen, everyone, we’ve created like three or four sayings here. On this podcast, the one that I am that I enjoyed the most was universal visual language. I think that is, this is what the space has been needing. And once you have that uniform, that universal language, everybody’s speaking and interpreting on the same level with it just opens up so much more. One more thing, one more thing before you go, Brian, Listen, everyone, it’s it’s this is hard for me to stop this conversation because I can keep going for hours on this one. But, um, there was there was something that I found, what was it? Hold on, I lost my train of thought for a second. I wanted to speak on there was a feature, Brian, oh, I got an email. I received an email for you. So from you, you do this tool tip Tuesday or something? Right?

Brian Ragone 42:04
Tool toolkit toolkit Tuesday,

Chris 42:06
toolkit Tuesday. And on this particular day, maybe it was the toolkit, maybe it was just part of the onboarding. But I received an email from you that said, hey, well, how how do I met? Do I do in detail? Or do I do more overview? And so when I read that emails like, Oh, that’s a great question, because I’m trying to figure that out myself. And then you go in the email, and you took a zap for an example. And you’re like, hey, look, here’s how the zaps step by step would look in puzzle. Here’s how more of an overview would look in puzzle. And you gave the pros and the cons of each. What would you say force? What let me say this? What is the method that you found works the best when it comes to puzzle? Is it that real detailed Hey, every if else in weight? Or is it more of an overview, I know at the end of the day is going to be very specific, contextual to the business, right in their needs. But what have you seen in in your experience thus far with? Are? Are you seeing more of a benefit? Doing more top level or or more detail?

Brian Ragone 43:19
Wow, great question. You know, and users, we get feedback around whether you build high level maps or granular maps, they say both and right, they want. They want they want the summary, they want to click click on the summary and for it to expand out to the details. And there’s a few features that we’re working on that will enable some of that expand collapse functionality, so that you can kind of look at your business specifically like automations and workflows that have typically a collection of actions that happen within a given automation, like a Zapier. My, my approach is that you want you want a high level map as the playbook of your business, the thing that people reference to kind of understand how processes work if you are a so and so and so salespeople, marketers, you know, engineers, whoever it is customer success, onboarding specialists, client service account managers can go in and just get the high level. Okay, there’s a Zapier that runs here. I don’t really need to know the exact details of what what happens maybe just the outputs, but I don’t need to know every if then and branch there. And so for the use case of play booking, I think that high level maps is the way to go. If you’re a system engineer, a systems architect, a solutions architect, anything like that, and you are managing, you know, the back end of Salesforce or the back end of HubSpot, and you’re doing property level configurations on you know, whether the automation changes this property to this value or that value, I mean, it’s really granular that’s as granular as a business gets. Yeah, is the options within a field. Like that is zoomed in as you can get. And so for System Configuration professionals that come in all types of titles and role, you know, role names. I think the low level maps are very valuable to really understand how these things are interconnecting there. Yeah, that’s my best practice recommendation. And

Chris 45:28
I’ve lived it in my in my time with the app, I think I’m just under 30 days. By the way, everyone, I’m a paid user, I didn’t play with this Oh, a maybe I’ll test it out. Nope. dove right in did annual I think to Brian was not going anywhere. And I am a both and I would highly recommend starting top high level high level get your, your your main building blocks down. And and what you’ll find is that those who are more inclined to think logically and understand process, you’re just in the process of building, you’ll see that, oh, wait a minute, I want to, I want to show more of this process. And this one, I could just put a box and then in the notes, I can see what’s taking place. And what it is for me is usually if it’s like a page flow, or something more general, that’s fine, I could put a box for the page and WordPress or LeadPages, or whatever, and put in some data in there. But sometimes when I’m passing data between, let’s say air table and click up via mc.com, things of that nature, I want to display like, hey, air table is talking to make and then make his talking to click up. That’s more granular everyone, but it serves its purpose for that specific thing. So when Brian says both, and it’s because you’re going to have both and you need to have the top level, but you also the end, I don’t do it for everything. But there are times where you need to just kind of get granular because that flow of data is critical. And you want to make sure that that’s being accounted for. And and to help you all one thing, listen, you’re just going to have to dive into the app. But the last thing I want to point out is Brian, in this app, there’s things called sections that encompass a whole bunch of actions. And these sections can be anything, they could be a department, it could be a particular flow, it could be a subset of processes, and you can name them. And once you have the boxes encapsulated with a section, you can move that section and everything within it moves around. So you have even a top level of the top level ability to really build it out. Because how puzzle works is when you zoom all the way out, you just see the boxes, the the sections with the name, so you can say, Oh, I’ve got marketing, you’ve got sales, I’ve got fulfillment, I’ve got this, then you start to zoom in the in the action starts to take place and you start to see the the skeleton per se, you get to see what’s what’s the meat. So it’s so much that I will just tell you all if you can’t tell my excitement and my utility, it’s I’m not. I am not very radically excited about this in the promises in one day it can do it’s doing right now for me, I keep it open, I’ve got it bookmarked so that whenever I open up something if I’m in it, let me go ahead and click right here next step is to start to train my team on how to use it. So everybody is populating this stuff out. Brian, people have heard me talk way too much. Wait, I just got excited, man. I’m sorry. I got excited. But I want to give you the floor. They they’ve heard about this application. They’re listening to me and you speak about it. It’s maybe filling a hole that they knew was there. Others are contemplating like, Ooh, maybe this is what I’m looking for. And others just want to try it out. They want to see if my excitement is warranted. Where should they go to sign up or learn? Learn about more for that?

Brian Ragone 49:19
Yep, yep. So you’ll go to puzzles website, which is puzzle app.io puzzle app.io. And there you will see videos that will will kind of walk you through high level what the tool does. You’ll see a pricing page and we have three plans. There is the four individual plan which is our lowest tier plan, but it enables a very low price point so that people can go in and try the app at $19 with a seven day free trial. And then there’s the for organization plan, which is for people who want multiple editors within their organization to go into puzzle and map selectively, and that also has a seven day free trial. And then we have four agencies plan. And the four agencies plan is built for agencies who manage multiple client processes and system diagrams, and also need multiple editors to be managing those client diagrams as well. So those are our three plans. All three of them have a seven day free trial. And of course, you can reach out to me at Brian with an IP R I A n at puzzle app.io. That’s my email and I’ll get back to you there.

Chris 50:37
Perfect, Brian, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast and explaining to us and showing us this amazing tool. I’m so excited and thankful that you got to create this. I hope it’s been extremely helpful for you all listeners and that you dive right into it, everyone. Until the next time we because Brian would be looking for you online to the next time we see you online out of May responsibly my friends. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out on while you’re at it. Please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sale systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis.

Chris 0:31
Welcome, everyone to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L. Davis. Thank you for tuning in. And you are going to be so glad you did. Because today I have, I have one of the most instrumental moments, a founder, who has created some software that really hasn’t resonated with me as strongly as I watched, you say it has resonated with me strongly as maybe two other software’s in the past that I still use to this day. So you’re always running across new software and things that can do a variety of different marketing tasks. But this software was so different. So I wanted to make sure that I put it in front of you all in a way that you can see and understand just how long you’ve been waiting for this even if you didn’t know. So our guest today is none other than Brian Regan. And he is the founder and CEO of puzzle puzzle is the app everyone. And he’s helping teams visualize their workflows and systems in a fast and easy way. Can you all see why I was so excited. So everyone can understand how they work. He’s helped visualize over 10,000 workflows to bring clarity and alignment across teams, within organizations, so they can make improvements to their operations, with confidence. And that’s a he’s being very modest on that bio. Because once you can actually see what is happening with your operations, everything unlocks, and I’m not exaggerating, everything unlocks. And in fact, he’s found that organizations use up words to 130, SaaS applications to run their business operations on average, yet most processes and systems aren’t well documented. Right? Listeners, are you saying out yet you’re like, Oh, that’s really I don’t have documentation and watch this in only one person knows how they work. And that’s the person that built them. And I’ll add to it, that person may not even be working with their company anymore. Okay, so I can’t I can’t wait to dive into this. Brian, you know, my affinity for for you and the software that you’ve created. Now, everybody gets to see why I’m so excited about this. Welcome to the podcast, Brian, how you doing? Chris,

Brian Ragone 3:21
thank you. Thank you for that introduction. I’m doing great. I’m doing great. And you said it best. It’s almost like I gave you that intro something.

Chris 3:32
Yes, yes. And I want everybody. So let me tell you, I’m spoiled. I got spoiled. And I can’t take credit for this. I have to give a shout out to one of automation bridge certified partners. Morgan Edwards is the one that found puzzle and said, Hey, Chris, check this out. And it it took one I watched the loom video. And it was it. I was like, Oh, this is it. This is what I’ve been looking for. So I’ve had the privilege to connect with Brian, prior to this, get a demo and walk through the app. I’m now up to I think I’ve got 50 or so objects in my own app. So I started mapping out my own operations. We’ll talk about that in the podcast later on. But But Brian, we, I read the bio, we know that you have seen this problem of visualization. I’m a huge advocate of ensuring that you can see what’s taking place digitally, because often it’s invisible and we just experienced the output of it. But tying this back to day one. Where did where did this come from? At what point in your journey? Did you realize that this was a problem worth solving with software?

Brian Ragone 4:50
Yeah, great question. Chris. In there was a very, very particular moment in my life. And it was actually back in 2017. If I was running the operations for a 15 person, small organization, and I had an anxiety attack, because I was running this 15 person team, with no documentation, no one in the organization understood how the operational big picture worked. And so I was the person to try to stitch together 15 different perspectives, whenever we were trying to change any process, implement any new system or even tweak existing systems. And it led me to the point of having an anxiety attack because your brain is not meant to keep and maintain 15 different perspectives at one time. And, you know, we would have org wide meetings, because we had to get every single person’s perspective on this one small topic or, or change that we wanted to make to the system. And it wasn’t sustainable. And I came to this conclusion that we have to write things down. And it has to be accessible to everyone in the organization. So not only me writing things down, but other people documenting how they do their jobs, so that everyone can understand how the operational big picture worked. And I didn’t know what the product was going to look like, you know, until five years down the line. But from what from 2017, to really like 2022. I named this problem space puzzle. And the problem space is that there was no shared understanding about about how the organization operated. And, you know, after that anxiety attack that I had, I really reshaped my thinking about how organizations are run, I started reading books like holacracy by right, Brian Robinson really made me think differently about how organizations could be structured. I called this thing. I coined this term in my my departmental dependency maps, where I would go into Google Slides, and I would make these department objects and try to show the teams, how they’re interrelated. And what KPIs they share, so that they’re co incentivized to work together towards some some goal. And that’s what an organization is, ultimately is it’s a group of people, which is, which has subsets of groups of people called teams, which have roles which have goals that run processes that hopefully meet those goals. And those are the components of any organization. And so this realization just sent me down really a rabbit hole of becoming a student in this space, reading books, listening to podcasts, and, you know, learning jobs to be done framework and customer journey mapping and design thinking, in through all of these lenses of how people understand how some job gets done. I’ve, I’ve created this product that helps you visualize how your people process and tools work together.

Chris 8:19
And I have to say it, I have without realizing what I was doing. I have tried to do what your app does, in a variety of ways. So I want to talk about some of them. And then just give you the floor and explain why that why you chose not to go that route, per se and what makes puzzles so unique. So in the beginning, my first my first attempt again, Brian, I did not realize I was visualizing a flow. I was just trying to explain something to somebody. And I ended up creating it in it made a big keynote. It was keynote at the time because I Google Slides hadn’t been around and I was just dragging some some some boxes and squares and pointing some arrows. And it did the job. And it did the job. So well the person that I shared it with, they were like, because it was their process. That was the thing, Brian it was their process. And I was confused. So I was really just saying, hey, after this and this is this supposed to happen because this is what’s happening to me. They were like, Oh my gosh, Chris, this is so great. Can you teach it? And I was like no, I’m just a customer. I’ve never done anything online. So I wanted to stay in the dark. So you know you go from the boxes and shapes and arrows, your your your traditional flowcharts whether it is Google Slides or Keynote or we have platforms now whimsical, Lucid Chart. They exists Brian, you can go into these abs draw.io I mean, I can keep listing off many flowchart apps. Why do we need another one? And what is the main difference between what puzzle does because somebody listening may say, Oh, well, that’s just another squares and circles in triangle arrow thing. I use Miro for that I’m fine. I can tune out now, why is what is that differentiating factor or factors with puzzle that people really need to need to understand?

Brian Ragone 10:34
Great question. Great question. And it brings me to this. This idea that I had recently, which is the difference between what I call shallow documentation and deep documentation. So shallow, shallow documentation allows you to look through the lens of like, you know, what, two dimensional space like Miro or whimsical or Lucid Chart where you see squares, and you see connectors, but there’s no depth to the documentation. If you want depth to the documentation, guess what you have to go do, you have to go to Google Drive, open up a Google Doc, which is linked to five other Google Docs, you know, and go through this web of documentation. And then try to look back to the visual perspective of it, and piece things together, and read more information and piece things together and read more information piece things together. And so I came to the conclusion that each of these objects within these builders, what I call Lucid Chart, whimsical, and Miro, everything whiteboards, because you can go in there, and you can do everything with these whiteboards. You can have a coffee chat, where everyone’s putting their stickies in about ideas about what they want to do this weekend. Or you can do you know, product, roadmapping, and stuff like that. Whereas puzzle, we built it with the intention of documenting systems and processes. That is, it’s one use case, you can plan, manage, and build and monitor your systems and your processes in this tool. There are no stickies, there are no places where you can doodle. It is specifically built for this purpose. And so what that enables us to do is make assumptions about what information needs to live on this step. Right. And, you know, there’s finite components within organizations, any organization is a collection of automations, meetings, sequences, emails, delays, SMS is web pages, forms. These are what I call step types. And so we define what those step types are in a process in a system. And then you use puzzle to very easily just select which type of step it is. And then it gets it gets those attributes of what it is. And it makes it very clear in the picture about where does this automation actually happen? Well, you get a nice, pretty picture of the tool at the top, you get a good indicator at the bottom right hand corner that this is a meeting step that happens in Google Calendar, and then a name of the step. And ultimately, what these maps are all about, is getting shared understanding. It’s getting buy in from people who didn’t build the map, and don’t understand the systems. That is the purpose of a diagram is to show it to other people who have no idea what’s going on, so that they start to have an idea about what’s going on. And so what’s the best way to do that? For me, I think it’s creating a notation, a system that kind of puts bounds on how these processes actually work. So that if Chris goes into puzzle and maps out a process, then Brian goes and maps out a process. Then my friend Harrison goes, maps out a process and my friend Max and and Michelle come in and that process, all of our process diagrams, fit the same visual notation, right, they have the same set of information on it to where I’m not reading five different languages. Right, because ultimately, a visual is a language you’re looking at the shapes that you use, and the colors that you use, and what represent what represents what. And so instead of giving people the freedom to kind of go off the walls with how they they diagram, we’ve made assumptions about the best practices to create a beautiful and easy to understand diagram, because that is ultimately the end purpose of creating diagrams for systems.

Chris 14:45
Yeah, this this is so good because I had to, I had to really use discipline, right? Because in the past, when you’re using your Lucid Chart and whimsical and everything else, Well, let me let me just talk about my my transition here. I was a heavy Lucid Chart user. And that’s because you could do everything, I could change colors of arrows boxes, and this isn’t. And I needed it, I wanted it to look like a piece of art, I like my flowcharts to be easily legible, you know, and easy to follow, even even to the most amateur individual. And then something happened happened with whimsical, where there’s a simplicity introduced, I couldn’t quite customize everything. And at first I fought it. But then I welcomed it and said, Well, wait a minute, maybe I do need to simplify it. Because the purpose is the process, not you know, getting distracted with how to make it look look nice and everything. So when you say each flow, each build each visualization is a language. I’ve never heard it put like that. But that’s exactly right. And I have I have brought people into my company. And they’ve seen some of the maps that I’ve created these other tools, and they try to emulate it. And it looks like a poor derivative. So naturally, I kind of get turned off, but I hadn’t thought about it as a language. And in a day and age where freedom is everything. I mean, I want to be able to control everything. Brian, don’t, don’t you put constraints on me, I felt a sigh of relief of the simplicity of puzzle. Because no, you’re not going to go in there and change box colors in sizes and and different types of arrows. Why? Because that’s not the focus, the focus is not the design, the focus is get your process down. And we’re going to control the environment in such a way that if somebody else built the same process, you would not even know it would look the same. So now we’re all on the same page, talking the same visual language. I love that I love it.

Brian Ragone 17:08
That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. speaking the same language, and and ultimately, like imagine if, you know we had like Google Maps was different from for everyone. Imagine if everyone’s phone showed a different Google map, where where, you know, restaurants look like trees in some other person’s Google Map. And then another person cars look like TV screens. And we’d be like, What is this, you throw it out, you throw it out, because it’s hard to understand you don’t get it, which is what happens with Lucid Chart Miro and whimsical, these charts, these flowcharts they get thrown out, because you just temporarily use them to kind of gather your thoughts and hope that other people that you show kind of understand it. But no one really references back to those maps. And this brings me to my second differentiator for puzzle ultimately, is weebill puzzle as a map that you keep and maintain. So this deep documentation, not only can you you know, click on this step and input details about what type of step it is input contextual notes, embed loom videos inside the step, it can become that visual playbook for your business, it can go even further. It’s also a part of a relational database for your teams, your roles in your tools. So as you map out your process, you’re selecting what tool is used in this particular part of the process. you’re selecting what type it is. And you’re also indicating what roles are involved in this part of the process using the RACI model. Well, you can go to the team canvas, and you can go to the tool canvas and pivot on those pieces of information to then see, oh, I don’t just get this visual where I need to search where HubSpot is used. I can go to the tool canvas and look at the HubSpot card and see a list of all of the steps where that tool is hooked into your process. Same with roles in same with teens. And so it’s truly a platform for change management, where you can pivot on all the components within an organization process teams roles and tools. And anytime you want to unhook a certain part of that, that system, you can very clearly go to one part of the system see exactly where it’s hooked into the rest of the system and make the proper changes to where that transition is smooth. Listen

Chris 19:35
this this this is so important everyone, I’m going to say exactly what Brian just said. And try to like put it in terms in baby terms because I really want you all to get this but real quick. Hey, we’ve got a couple. A few comments live Listen, we stream our podcast episodes live if you want To be a part of the conversation as it takes place instead of waiting for it to release in the app, you can do so by going to automation bridge.com For slash subscribe. Yes, for slash subscribe, and you’ll be able to get our notifications when we go live on YouTube. Kuranda. Carville digital, she said, Lucid Chart mero whimsical, tried a bunch of things. She literally just said, those are everything whiteboards, just throw everything you want, you know, on them. And she was also mentioning how trying to decide on what to visually notate is very overwhelming. And this is why I’m this, this, this tool just keeps growing on me, Brian, it really does. Because what Brian is talking about every one is you go into puzzle, and you just start dropping your your actions on there. And for every action, you can click on it. And then there’s a little slider window for my notion users, you’re probably very familiar with the right Slide out Tray. And then there is where you can select what tool is responsible for that step or tools, you can select multiple. And then when you select multiple tools, you can determine which icon Do you want to display on that action. Now, let’s just pause there everyone, because I don’t know about you all. But when I create my visual charts, my flow charts, I’m I have a repository of logos from a variety of companies. So every time I drag a box, I have to go find a logo and put the logo of that app on top of the box. At the end of the day. It looks beautiful, right? It’s great. But it is so tiresome and cumbersome to make that. So now in puzzle, you just select from the drop down. And you have all the tools there. Brian, I was pleasantly surprised, because you know, I’m taking notes as I’m building. So okay, let me just make sure I if I come across something I’ll share with Brian so we can improve the app. And I said, Oh, my tool isn’t there. Let me let Brian know that my tool isn’t listed. Then I say oh wait, wait a minute. And it says add new tool. You can add the to grab the logo. And now that’s part of your puzzle app is in there. And you can reference that tool throughout your workflows, right? So everybody follow me, you’ve dropped your your step onto the canvas, you selected, which app is responsible for this, you’ve given it a name? And now you can you have this note area where you can put any description, Link anything in there. Even that has become a simple interface. Because you’ve got h1 and h2. It’s not like you’ve got h six up to eight, six, you can do all of these things where people can you give people enough rope and technology, they are going to do everything but tie a knot to help them they’re gonna go hang themselves there. They’re animals that you’re like, what do you do? This was not meant for that get off of that tree, right. So this one, you still keep some nice confines in every place, so that you can truly focus on the process that you’re putting in place. So imagine this everyone, let’s just say you’ve got four boxes, one goes to your CRM software, one goes to Zapier and another one goes to Calendly. Right. For each one of those boxes, as Brian mentioned, it rolls up, it can be connected, I shouldn’t say roll up, it can be connected to a role. This is next level. This is all within the Canvas, one click away everyone. One click away, you can now say, oh, for scheduling, that’s my salesperson. But for the zap that actually sends the information over. That’s my marketer. Right? So now we’ve got actions, tools and rows. So when you go and say, let me pull up my marketer row, it will show all the actions that they’re responsible for, as well as all of the tools that are required for those actions. Now, now, let me say this, some of you have been struggling trying to find help and communicate the tasks that need to be done. Just by mapping out your process with puzzle, half, maybe even more of that is done for you. Because if you’ve got your entire operations mapped out in the roles assigned appropriately to each box, you just go into the roles and say, Oh, if I if I hire a marketer, they need to be savvy in these tools. And they need to know how to do these things. Now Brian, I’m free from just going online carbon copying a a job description of some digital marketer. That sounded good doesn’t apply to me. doesn’t speak to the tools or the operations I have in place. This is next level. And it comes from exactly what you said, when you focus on a app for mapping operations alone. That’s it. Nope, no other distractions. Yep,

Brian Ragone 25:15
exactly, exactly. You know, there’s a few features that I have as a part of a vision. And I don’t share them often because I like to keep my team focus too, on kind of here and now and giving them just enough into the future of how puzzle will look. But this team designer, I have such an incredible vision for how this tiem designer can ultimately evolve. You know, for larger organizations and small, where you know, in the app, I would like to be able to generate a job description automatically. And what information will it use to generate that job description? Well, it will be tied to all the tools that it uses. And not only that, all of the steps, which have notes inside them. So it can reference all of the details, the very granular details of your business and generate a hyper specific job description, that is tailor focused to exactly how that role contributes across one or many processes. And you’d be able to then make that publicly accessible, and get people to apply right on that role card and manage your applicants through a series of steps to where when they come into the organization, they get placed in that role. They get access to all of the steps that they’ve been assigned to which have the trainings in the sidebars. And you know, that’s a couple years out, but I

Chris 26:40
love it. I love it. I sure Khurana mentioned she she finally dove into puzzle the other day, and within 20 minutes, she built out her entire tool library. So I want to that leads me to another statement slash question conversation point. How do you recommend and I’ve asked you this and I want you to share it for everyone. How do you approach the blank canvas? Somebody sign up with puzzle? I found myself here everyone. Listen, let me just let me mortalized myself, some of you in conversation, you look towards me, and I appreciate it. Like oh, man, he’s figuring it all out. He knows everything. I know what I know. And I know what I don’t know. And I’m never afraid to ask for help. So I emailed Brian because I was excited about puzzle. I created my orc automation bridge, right clicking the box, this big canvas with nothing on it. And I just kind of got just like Oh, where do I start? So I emailed you I want you to share with with our audience what what is your recommended way of getting started with with puzzle when you have that blank canvas?

Brian Ragone 27:58
It’s a great question. It’s a great question. And we’re working on a feature such that when you add a new workspace there will always be just one process. And that process will be called Getting Started with puzzle with steps that you can click on with sidebars that have looms of me walking through exactly how you can get started with puzzle. So that’s one one fix that we’re going to deploy pretty soon. The second way is, we do have a template gallery. And that template gallery has one fully baked out process that you can use as inspiration for your processes. And you know that that should serve as how a process should be properly documented. Right, the tools are assigned, the roles are assigned to it. The sidebar has a collection of notes with looms loom embedded or scribe embedded with bullet points and numbers and that sort of stuff. And so those two templates slash resources should be good. The last part of it is we actually offer a complimentary support meetings. So if you ever get scared by blank canvas, and this is this is actually this is actually a pain point for any software that’s out there is the blank canvas. The The last component to this is that we are releasing integrations that help accelerate the build process, right. So building flowcharts it’s, it’s not for the weak hearted. It’s for the people who are dedicated and really want to invest the time into getting proper documentation for all of those benefits that we’ve mentioned her earlier on our podcast on this podcast. But uh, we have integrations now where you can integrate with HubSpot. We’re releasing make in about a week. And then ultimately we’re going to release Zapier. You can integrate with these three systems and they automatically create the steps for you. linked to the Tools link. To the assets in the system. So for HubSpot integration, we can just one click you can get all your HubSpot forms all your HubSpot workflows and all your HubSpot sequences created as steps and then make in Zapier, you’ll be able to pull your scenarios in your zaps automatically. And those steps will be synced with specific zaps with specific scenarios. And you’ll be able to see enrollment data right in the sidebar, about the activities that are going on in your system. And that’s ultimately the direction that we’re heading is we want to have puzzel automatically create synced diagrams that help you monitor your existing systems, and then also be the system where you can plan around what exists to add on to that system over time.

Chris 30:48
This is Listen, everyone, I literally have goosebumps, because I hope this is strongly resonating with you all and I try my best to be objective on these podcasts, you all know that I refrain from saying, hey, go get the software do this, I want you to make the intelligent decision on your own. If you want my strong opinions, you can always join the membership where I give that freely. However, I’m breaking my rule and breaking my rule today on the podcast. i If you are in marketing ops, and operations in any capacity, and and or digital marketing, you absolutely need to be using this tool. I am not exaggerating, and the benefits are so vastly great that I can’t withhold such positive and affirming instruction from you. Okay, and here’s what hear Did you hear what Brian just said, this tool will be able to integrate with the other tools that you’re using, and give you a visualization of what’s taking place in them. And he said the word sync, which Brian correct me if I’m wrong, means if I update something, it will reflect if I update something in make will just say it will reflect in puzzle as well. Yes. Listen, everybody. Just Just follow me. When is the last time your SOP automatically updated itself? wins? Let me ask this when’s the last time you gave an SOP to somebody and was confident that they were a going to read through all of it and be understand every step easily? I don’t know when if that’s ever happened? Because I don’t I don’t believe that’s the true delivery of SOPs. However, maybe people are creative, but this to me, what’s your what’s your saying, Brian, and you’re leading this, you’re the leader? Because I’ve never heard anybody put it like this. This is the benefit of having a universal visualization language. UVL did we just create that just created on the podcast? created that I love that when we’re all speaking the same language. Now, I don’t have to say, Oh, my integration into make.com. Because you map your stuff this way. It needs to map it this way. No, it’s It’s all using the same visual language. And, and you heard it here, first folks up, oh my god, you guys got nostre DOM Chris, you have has arrived, this will be this will be the language of visualization. This is going to be the language, we are going to see many, many apps and platforms mimic this, which Hey, we accept competition, it helps us improve. But I’m just telling you all, in all of my getting and all of my learning, I just have never seen a operations focused app like this that has so much potential, as well as current power. I’m going to read so Brian gave you guys everything to look forward to watch this without any of that without any of that I’m going to read to you what what Brian said to me. And then I’m going to tell you how I how I eliminated the overwhelm. Okay? So you all may never have to deal with this. But at some point what what I’m about to read to you is going to be very, very important. He told me he totally understands the overwhelm. He said, I recommend starting with your most high frequency core processes and then work out onto the edges over time. And I sat back and I thought about I said okay, what’s my biggest, most important? And I said, Well, the thing that’s most important is the thing that’s close to the money. What is the process that’s closest to the money being transacted and deposited into my account? Watch this everyone. So Why start with one of my program enrollment? automations? Brian, I don’t think I shared this with you. This is the first time I’m totally unclosing On this episode. Tell me why. As Khurana mentioned, it took her 20 minutes to map out her entire library. Within maybe 10 minutes, Brian, I identified two critical holes. When when I say critical brain, my definition of critical for me building is that there was no destination after the action. The action took place, information was captured, and nothing happened. I wasn’t shocked. I was like, how did I do this? You know, out of all the people. Chris, how did you do this? Well, Brian, this is what happens when you don’t have a consistent means of visualizing. You’re kind of building on the on the fly, oh, I need to do this real quick. Right? Marketing as you bid, or I should say building as you market. And you just overlook things. It happens. It happens to the best of us. So using puzzle. In your advice, I was able to identify breakage in my operations, which made sense in something that I had been seeing, but I’ve been ignoring. I was like, Hey, I’m getting notification that this is happening. But nobody’s taking the next step. I’ll get to it. I’ll get back to it. So puzzle allow me to understand, oh, that’s why nothing was happening later. Because it’s not connected back into my CRM software. Over 100 People have taken that action, Brian. Wow, that’s incredible. 100 people. So I’m like, one side of me is like doom and despair. How did I leave them hanging, but the other side is like, I know now, and I can send messaging to them now. And I can make sure this never happens again. And I think for anybody listening, that’s one of the strongest promises of an app like this is identify the holes so that you can empower enable your marketing to fix or your operations or your you know, fulfillment. Last thing I know, I’m sorry, sorry, everybody. I know I’m talking a lot, but I just I just have to communicate this. So after I’ve taken that advice with Brian puzzle has now I’ve got multiple monitors in my setup. puzzle has been has become my second monitor companion app. Okay. Second, my s MCA. Just great stuff, everyone. This means while I’m doing something, I just have puzzle up in my other monitor. And I’m going back and forth. I’m saying, Okay, since I’m already in this app, let me grab the URL, put it in my puzzle block, right? Oh, since I’m here in airtable, let me not just link to airtable. I’m using an automation and airtable. Let me go grab the URL to that automation, put it in my puzzle block. Now, once I’m done with the process, because as you all know, you’re gonna jump in a process in your business at some point. So I’m just documenting on the parallel puzzle on the side. And now when I go back to it, guess what, I don’t go in the apps anymore. I go straight to puzzle. I’m like, Okay, what was I doing? And you all I cannot tell you the time it has saved me the clarity I’m not operating in. If I could, the magic thing for me is if I could snap my fingers, and somebody would appear and I can have them for an entire week, and just say let me just tell you all of my processes, then later, it’s all in puzzle. I mean, that’s what I’m working for. Yeah, I wanted to share that, Brian, because that’s been my experience, this is probably going to be an experience very similar to everyone else. Before all of the new stuff that you say, gets put in. And I just wanted to encourage people that that has been working for me very well is doing it documented. While I’m doing it, it’s just we’ve never had a tool to make it as simple as it needs to be, you know,

Brian Ragone 38:56
Chris, very, very well put in that’s incredible that you had 100 people take that action 100 people. And in the end, this is a bit of a like a life principle of mine, I would say that’s found itself in in, you know, the product is it’s about continuous improvement. It’s not about getting your process right the first time. Because, you know, sometimes you’re in a hurry, you need to get something out and it’s not going to be the best and you just need to roll it out and let people start to use some thing. It’s about continuous improvement. And so puzzle is really like your operational journal. Right? Ah, you know, I’m not having such a good process today. But it’s okay, I’m gonna do this, this and this to improve it, right? The same way that you write in your journal about how you’re gonna start to meditate and like, you know, do breath work and all this kind of stuff. Sometimes you don’t have good days. So you go on your operational journal, and you just write it down, hey, I need to do this, this and this better in this particular part of the business. And there’s commenting on on the on the puzzle, Canvas, so you’re able to make a little note for yourself, Hey, I know I need to improve this, to where when you do get an open day when you do get a cancellation of a meeting, you can go ahead right into puzzle and know exactly which parts of the process you can make small little tweaks to to continuously improve your your business operations. So that you continuously to find those little holes where 100 people will take actions that you that you weren’t seeing, because your mind is not meant to hold information inside of it. And so you need an operational journal, you need a second brain. And in my opinion, it needs to be visual. Because people love visuals, right? Our brains are wired for visuals, they’re not wired for memorization, they are wired for visuals. And so this tool allows you to create that visual and keep your operational journey journal to where you can make those improvements over time. And it sounds like you’re able to do that.

Chris 41:00
I love that terminology. Operational journal. Listen, everyone, we’ve created like three or four sayings here. On this podcast, the one that I am that I enjoyed the most was universal visual language. I think that is, this is what the space has been needing. And once you have that uniform, that universal language, everybody’s speaking and interpreting on the same level with it just opens up so much more. One more thing, one more thing before you go, Brian, Listen, everyone, it’s it’s this is hard for me to stop this conversation because I can keep going for hours on this one. But, um, there was there was something that I found, what was it? Hold on, I lost my train of thought for a second. I wanted to speak on there was a feature, Brian, oh, I got an email. I received an email for you. So from you, you do this tool tip Tuesday or something? Right?

Brian Ragone 42:04
Tool toolkit toolkit Tuesday,

Chris 42:06
toolkit Tuesday. And on this particular day, maybe it was the toolkit, maybe it was just part of the onboarding. But I received an email from you that said, hey, well, how how do I met? Do I do in detail? Or do I do more overview? And so when I read that emails like, Oh, that’s a great question, because I’m trying to figure that out myself. And then you go in the email, and you took a zap for an example. And you’re like, hey, look, here’s how the zaps step by step would look in puzzle. Here’s how more of an overview would look in puzzle. And you gave the pros and the cons of each. What would you say force? What let me say this? What is the method that you found works the best when it comes to puzzle? Is it that real detailed Hey, every if else in weight? Or is it more of an overview, I know at the end of the day is going to be very specific, contextual to the business, right in their needs. But what have you seen in in your experience thus far with? Are? Are you seeing more of a benefit? Doing more top level or or more detail?

Brian Ragone 43:19
Wow, great question. You know, and users, we get feedback around whether you build high level maps or granular maps, they say both and right, they want. They want they want the summary, they want to click click on the summary and for it to expand out to the details. And there’s a few features that we’re working on that will enable some of that expand collapse functionality, so that you can kind of look at your business specifically like automations and workflows that have typically a collection of actions that happen within a given automation, like a Zapier. My, my approach is that you want you want a high level map as the playbook of your business, the thing that people reference to kind of understand how processes work if you are a so and so and so salespeople, marketers, you know, engineers, whoever it is customer success, onboarding specialists, client service account managers can go in and just get the high level. Okay, there’s a Zapier that runs here. I don’t really need to know the exact details of what what happens maybe just the outputs, but I don’t need to know every if then and branch there. And so for the use case of play booking, I think that high level maps is the way to go. If you’re a system engineer, a systems architect, a solutions architect, anything like that, and you are managing, you know, the back end of Salesforce or the back end of HubSpot, and you’re doing property level configurations on you know, whether the automation changes this property to this value or that value, I mean, it’s really granular that’s as granular as a business gets. Yeah, is the options within a field. Like that is zoomed in as you can get. And so for System Configuration professionals that come in all types of titles and role, you know, role names. I think the low level maps are very valuable to really understand how these things are interconnecting there. Yeah, that’s my best practice recommendation. And

Chris 45:28
I’ve lived it in my in my time with the app, I think I’m just under 30 days. By the way, everyone, I’m a paid user, I didn’t play with this Oh, a maybe I’ll test it out. Nope. dove right in did annual I think to Brian was not going anywhere. And I am a both and I would highly recommend starting top high level high level get your, your your main building blocks down. And and what you’ll find is that those who are more inclined to think logically and understand process, you’re just in the process of building, you’ll see that, oh, wait a minute, I want to, I want to show more of this process. And this one, I could just put a box and then in the notes, I can see what’s taking place. And what it is for me is usually if it’s like a page flow, or something more general, that’s fine, I could put a box for the page and WordPress or LeadPages, or whatever, and put in some data in there. But sometimes when I’m passing data between, let’s say air table and click up via mc.com, things of that nature, I want to display like, hey, air table is talking to make and then make his talking to click up. That’s more granular everyone, but it serves its purpose for that specific thing. So when Brian says both, and it’s because you’re going to have both and you need to have the top level, but you also the end, I don’t do it for everything. But there are times where you need to just kind of get granular because that flow of data is critical. And you want to make sure that that’s being accounted for. And and to help you all one thing, listen, you’re just going to have to dive into the app. But the last thing I want to point out is Brian, in this app, there’s things called sections that encompass a whole bunch of actions. And these sections can be anything, they could be a department, it could be a particular flow, it could be a subset of processes, and you can name them. And once you have the boxes encapsulated with a section, you can move that section and everything within it moves around. So you have even a top level of the top level ability to really build it out. Because how puzzle works is when you zoom all the way out, you just see the boxes, the the sections with the name, so you can say, Oh, I’ve got marketing, you’ve got sales, I’ve got fulfillment, I’ve got this, then you start to zoom in the in the action starts to take place and you start to see the the skeleton per se, you get to see what’s what’s the meat. So it’s so much that I will just tell you all if you can’t tell my excitement and my utility, it’s I’m not. I am not very radically excited about this in the promises in one day it can do it’s doing right now for me, I keep it open, I’ve got it bookmarked so that whenever I open up something if I’m in it, let me go ahead and click right here next step is to start to train my team on how to use it. So everybody is populating this stuff out. Brian, people have heard me talk way too much. Wait, I just got excited, man. I’m sorry. I got excited. But I want to give you the floor. They they’ve heard about this application. They’re listening to me and you speak about it. It’s maybe filling a hole that they knew was there. Others are contemplating like, Ooh, maybe this is what I’m looking for. And others just want to try it out. They want to see if my excitement is warranted. Where should they go to sign up or learn? Learn about more for that?

Brian Ragone 49:19
Yep, yep. So you’ll go to puzzles website, which is puzzle app.io puzzle app.io. And there you will see videos that will will kind of walk you through high level what the tool does. You’ll see a pricing page and we have three plans. There is the four individual plan which is our lowest tier plan, but it enables a very low price point so that people can go in and try the app at $19 with a seven day free trial. And then there’s the for organization plan, which is for people who want multiple editors within their organization to go into puzzle and map selectively, and that also has a seven day free trial. And then we have four agencies plan. And the four agencies plan is built for agencies who manage multiple client processes and system diagrams, and also need multiple editors to be managing those client diagrams as well. So those are our three plans. All three of them have a seven day free trial. And of course, you can reach out to me at Brian with an IP R I A n at puzzle app.io. That’s my email and I’ll get back to you there.

Chris 50:37
Perfect, Brian, thank you so much for jumping on the podcast and explaining to us and showing us this amazing tool. I’m so excited and thankful that you got to create this. I hope it’s been extremely helpful for you all listeners and that you dive right into it, everyone. Until the next time we because Brian would be looking for you online to the next time we see you online out of May responsibly my friends. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts new episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed so that you don’t miss out on while you’re at it. Please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value of goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com Thanks again for listening. And until next time, I see you online. Automate responsibly my friends