Marginally Better

I’ve had the rug pulled out from under my career (at least) twice. This is my survival guide for PIPs, layoffs and pivots, recorded live at BarCamp Philly 17.

Cloudflare and the Crawl Economy

• Cloudflare - Control Content Use for AI Training
• Cloudflare - Crawlers Click AI Bots Training Data
• Cloudflare - Content Independence Day: No AI Crawl Without Compensation (July 2025)
• Cloudflare - Content Independence Day: New AI Options (July 2026)

Search Behavior Research

• Pew Research Center - Google Users Are Less Likely to Click on Links When an AI Summary Appears

Microsoft NLWeb and R.V. Guha

• Microsoft - Introducing NLWeb: Bringing Conversational Interfaces Directly to the Web
• Microsoft - How 6 People Behind Well-Known Technologies Are Shaping AI at Microsoft

Shopify and Google Agentic Commerce

• Shopify - Agentic Commerce Momentum
• Shopify - Agentic Commerce Executive Guide
• Google - Agentic Commerce: AI Tools and Protocol for Retailers and Platforms
• Google - Universal Commerce Protocol Overview
• Google - UCP Merchant Profile Guide
• Google - UCP Checkout Guide

Stripe Agentic Payments

• Stripe - Introducing Our Agentic Commerce Solutions
• Stripe - Agentic Commerce Suite

Measuring AI Visibility

• Adobe - 2025 Holiday Shopping Season Results
• Adobe - Introducing Adobe Brand Visibility
• Similarweb - Generative AI Statistics and Brand Visibility

Johns & Taylor (Internal Spots)

• Experience Helpdesk
• Website Reality Check

For decades, software companies got paid the same way whether you succeeded or failed. You bought the licenses, you paid the bill, and if nobody at your company ever figured out how to use the thing — well, that was your problem.

A new generation of companies is making a much riskier promise. If the software doesn’t deliver the result, you don’t pay.

We’ll look at the support platforms betting their revenue on something they call an outcome — and the surprisingly slippery question of what counts as one. We’ll meet the former Salesforce co-CEO trying to rewrite the business model he helped build. And we’ll visit a 1960s jet engine factory that figured all of this out before software existed.

Sierra and Outcome-Based Pricing

• Sierra - Outcome-Based Pricing for AI Agents
• Sierra - Outcomemaxxing
• Sierra - Bret Taylor on AI Agents, Outcome-Based Pricing, and the OpenAI Board

Fin (Intercom) Outcome Pricing

• Fin - Pricing
• Fin - Pricing Outcomes Explained
• Fin - Pricing FAQs
• Fin - Pricing Metric Update

Zendesk Automated and Verified Resolutions

• Zendesk - About Automated Resolutions for AI Agents
• Zendesk - Announcing Changes to AI Agent Reporting
• Zendesk - Analyzing AI Agent Performance
• Zendesk - Announcing Unified Conversation Statuses
• Zendesk - About Automated Resolution Tiers
• Zendesk - AI Trust at Zendesk

Salesforce Agentforce Pricing

• Salesforce - Agentforce Flexible Pricing Announcement (May 2025)
• Salesforce - Agentforce Pricing
• Salesforce - What Are Flex Credits?

Chargeflow Success-Based Pricing

• Chargeflow - Pricing and Success Fee
• Chargeflow - Chargeback Recovery
• Chargeflow - How Automated Dispute Management Transforms Chargeback Recovery

Rolls-Royce TotalCare / Power by the Hour

• Rolls-Royce - TotalCare
• Rolls-Royce - TotalCare Explained
• SEC Filing - Hawaiian Airlines TotalCare Agreement
• Morgan Lewis - A Practical Guide to Aircraft Engine RPFH Agreements

Metrics and Incentive Research

• Manheim & Garrabrant - Categorizing Variants of Goodhart’s Law (arXiv)
• Thomas & Uminsky - Reliance on Metrics is a Fundamental Challenge for AI (arXiv)
• NBER Working Paper 31353 - Pay-for-Performance in Dialysis (2023)

Johns & Taylor (Internal Spots)

• Experience Helpdesk

The Stopwatch

• CMS Provider Data Catalog — Hospitals: Timely and Effective Care (public reporting of ED time measures)
• The Joint Commission — ED-1: Median Time from ED Arrival to ED Departure for Admitted ED Patients (specification manual)
• Thompson DA, Yarnold PR, Williams DR, Adams SL — “Effects of actual waiting time, perceived waiting time, information delivery, and expressive quality on patient satisfaction in the emergency department,” Annals of Emergency Medicine, Dec. 1996 (1,631 respondents; actual waiting times not predictive of overall satisfaction; perceptions, information delivery, and expressive quality were, P < .001)
• Sonis JD, Aaronson EL, Lee RY, Philpotts LL, White BA — “Emergency Department Patient Experience: A Systematic Review of the Literature,” Journal of Patient Experience, 2017 (107 studies; staff–patient communication cited 78 times, wait times 56, staff empathy and compassion 45)
• Rick Evans — “Healthcare’s communication puzzle is getting more complex,” Becker’s Hospital Review, May 21, 2026 (“At its heart, improving the patient experience is all about communication.”)
• Mattson C, Bushardt RL, Artino AR — “‘When a Measure Becomes a Target, It Ceases to be a Good Measure,’” Journal of Graduate Medical Education, Feb. 2021 (Goodhart 1975; Strathern phrasing; GME examples)

The Feature: Sven Gierlinger and Northwell Health

• Becker’s Hospital Review — “3 Questions with Northwell Health Chief Experience Officer Sven Gierlinger,” Dec. 5, 2017 (Ritz-Carlton background; “First came a tingling in my fingers and toes; and within days, I was paralyzed”; “for 90 days and nights, I was 100% dependent”; “crystal chandeliers” quote; gratitude reflection)
• Sven Gierlinger — “‘Hospital food not fit for a dog,’” Northwell Health Insights, July 7, 2023 (2000 hospitalization: three months, intubated, feeding tube; 2014 CXO start; verbatim patient comments; 9th → 84th percentile food scores; Bruno Tison; 10M+ meals/year; budget-neutral overhaul; Dowling letters; originally in MedPage Today)
• Barden A, Kalman J, Gierlinger S, Baker D, Giammarinaro N, Rousseau N — “From Monologue to Dialogue: The Pursuit of Relationship Centered Communication Across a Large, Integrated Healthcare System,” Journal of Patient Experience, Jan. 2024 (2015 baseline 29th percentile; RCC design; 46 volunteer faculty; COVID/Zoom pivot; June 2017–June 2023: 3,300+ providers trained; doctor communication 36th → 58th percentile rank vs. Press Ganey national peers; “Listen” +24 points; likelihood-to-recommend 42nd → 64th; adult hospitals at/above median 4 → 8; authors’ caveat that RCC “may not be the only factor”; faculty quote)
• Khan A, et al. — “Patient safety after implementation of a coproduced family centered communication programme: multicenter before and after intervention study,” The BMJ, Dec. 2018 (Patient and Family Centered I-PASS; seven North American hospitals; harmful medical errors down ~38%)
• Harvard Medical School Division of Sleep Medicine — “Study Finds Harmful Medical Errors Fell 38% Following Implementation of a Multicenter Program to Improve Doctors’ and Nurses’ Communication with Families”

The Counterweight: The On-Time Machine

• Forbes SJ, Lederman M, Yuan Z — “Do Airlines Pad Their Schedules?”, Review of Industrial Organization, 2019 (1990–2016: schedule times grew more than actual flight times; recorded delays fell while flights take longer; DOT 15-minute on-time definition; airlines speed up flights near the threshold, per Forbes, Lederman & Tombe 2015)

Background Reading

• David Maister — “The Psychology of Waiting Lines” (1985; the classic on perceived vs. actual waits)

Products Mentioned

• Experience Helpdesk
• Johns & Taylor

The Season You Saw Coming

• TIGTA — “The Internal Revenue Service’s Readiness for the 2026 Filing Season” (memorandum, Jan. 26, 2026: staffing down ~19,000/19% to October 2021 levels; key processing inventories at ~2.0 million items in Dec. 2025 vs. 871K pre-pandemic; phone level-of-service goal lowered to 70% from 85%; last time LOS was ≤70% was the 2022 filing season, at 18% — “fewer than one-in-five incoming calls”; Accounts Management onboarded 2,300 of 3,500 approved hires, with new hires trained only to screen calls and answer basic refund questions; $2.6B in interest paid to individuals in Processing Year 2025)
• Journal of Accountancy — “About a quarter of callers to two IRS lines got poor service, TIGTA says” (June 16, 2026; TIGTA June 10 report: 26% of a 200-call sample on two lines, Feb. 15–May 15, 2025, did not receive quality service; extrapolated to ~1 million of 3.8 million callers)
• TIGTA — “Taxpayers Continue to Experience Customer Service Issues…” (Report 2026–10–0030, June 2026 — underlying report for the above)
• Federal News Network — “After missing hiring goals, IRS dials back taxpayer phone assistance targets,” Jory Heckman (Jan. 2026; National Taxpayer Advocate: LOS metric covers only ~a quarter of total call volume, and the IRS exceeded the 85% LOS metric in fiscal 2024; ~35 of 360 Taxpayer Assistance Centers closed as of Dec. 2025)
• BCG — “How Retailers Can De-Risk the 2025 Holiday Shopping Season,” Alex Barocas and Shilpa Sharma (Sept. 17, 2025; “beautifully wrapped disappointment”; reshape the plan to demand / execute with excellence / tune and scale with agility; holiday command center)
• Retail Dive — “Smaller retailers face their toughest holiday season in years,” Daphne Howland (Oct. 14, 2025; Xero research: 37% of small business owners worry about Black Friday traffic, 32% about holiday inventory, 30% about burnout; Astrid Vigeland of Folly 101, Portland, Maine)
• Xero — U.S. Black Friday survey (media release cited by Retail Dive)

The Feature: The Puddery

• Houston Public Media — “The Puddery in Pearland temporarily closes due to ‘Keith Lee effect’ that prompted spike in customers” (Dec. 7, 2023; one-woman show; Nov. 28, 2023 review; 9/10, “immaculate,” “absolutely insane”; lines within hours and for ~10 days; shipping suspended; urgent care visit and strained chest muscle; “Usually I would just thug it out”; closed until Saturday, Dec. 9)
• CultureMap Houston — “TikTok food critic Keith Lee awards $50,000 to Pearland dessert shop,” Eric Sandler (Mar. 25, 2025; Toast partnership; food trailer purchase; move to larger space in the same shopping center; best banana pudding he’s ever had)
• KHOU — “The Puddery owner talks life after TikTok food critic Keith Lee’s visit”
• Click2Houston — “Pearland dessert shop The Puddery closed for days after going viral due to ‘Keith Lee effect’” (Dec. 7, 2023)

The Counterweight: Fireworks Stands

• Freakonomics Radio Network — The Economics of Everyday Things: “Fireworks Stands,” Zachary Crockett (Phantom Fireworks VP Alex Zoldan; ~1,500 pop-up tents; consumer fireworks = $2.2B/year; “80 percent of our entire year sales are one month”; “90 plus percent planning and 10 executing”; typical stand grosses $25K–$60K, ~20% net considered good; ~1,000 California stands run by nonprofits; six-week shipping from China, next year’s orders placed by July)
• Marketplace — “How much profit do fireworks stands make?”, Janet Nguyen (Dec. 2022; PyroSpot’s Craig LaFleur: 20% margin is “a great job”; BU economist Jay Zagorsky: ~3x wholesale markup; ~10 weeks full-time work plus ~6 weeks part-time prep for a seasonal stand)

Company Mentioned

• Johns & Taylor — blog and newsletter

The Cost of a Bad First Window

• Fenergo — “Global Financial Institutions Struggle with Rising Client Losses and Compliance Costs as AI Adoption Increases” (2025 survey of 600 senior decision-makers; 70% lost clients to slow onboarding, up from 67% in 2024 and 48% in 2023; onboarding abandonment averaging ~10%; U.K. corporate banks averaging 6+ weeks)
• Crowdfund Insider — “Global Financial Institutions Are Losing Clients Due To Inefficient Digital Onboarding Processes: Fenergo” (Oct. 9, 2025)
• FinTech Global — “70% of banks lose clients due to slow onboarding” (Oct. 8, 2025)
• OnRamp — “2026 State of Customer Onboarding: Key Findings from 161 Leaders” (Feb. 2026; companies that cut onboarding investment mostly saw churn rise within six months; 57% tie friction to revenue)
• Business of Apps — App Retention Rates data (average app loses ~three-quarters of users within days; 30-day retention in the low single digits)

The Feature: Slack’s “Magic Number”

• First Round Review — “From 0 to $1B: Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy,” featuring Stewart Butterfield (Feb. 27, 2015; 8,000 invite requests day one and 15,000 in two weeks; more than 90% of teams that sign up never invite anyone or start using it; the 2,000-message threshold — “any team that has exchanged 2,000 messages… has tried Slack — really tried it… after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack”; find your own “magic number” and engineer onboarding toward it)

The Counterweight: Super Mario Bros. World 1–1

• Game Developer (Gamasutra) — “How Miyamoto built Super Mario Bros.’ legendary World 1–1” (Sept. 8, 2015; World 1–1 as wordless tutorial; “learning through play”; “it becomes their game”)
• Wikipedia — “World 1–1” (design breakdown: the opening Goomba as low-cost first lesson, the coin as reward, pipes of rising height teaching variable jump, pits with floors; sourced to Miyamoto’s 2015 Eurogamer interview and 1UP.com)

Product Mentioned

• Website Reality Check — Johns & Taylor

The Gym: Paying Not to Go

• DellaVigna & Malmendier, “Paying Not to Go to the Gym,” American Economic Review 96(3), 2006, pp. 694–719 (members on flat monthly contracts averaged ~4.3 visits/month, >$17 per visit vs. a $10 ten-visit pass; monthly members slower to cancel than annual)
• Full working-paper PDF (UC Berkeley)

Loyalty Programs: The Forgotten Member

• Bond Brand Loyalty — The Loyalty Report 2023 (U.S. consumers belong to ~18 programs, active in about half)
• McKinsey — “Next in loyalty: Eight levers to turn customers into fans” (programs built around top-tier customers; active members spend ~10% more, redeemers ~25% more than inactive)

The Design Principle: Perpetual Intermediates

• Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design — most users are “perpetual intermediates”; interfaces neglect the majority in the middle

The Office Ribbon: Jensen Harris

• Jensen Harris, “The Story of the Ribbon” (Microsoft Learn archive of his Office UI blog)
• Jensen Harris, “No Distaste for Paste (Why the UI, Part 7)” — command-usage data from the Customer Experience Improvement Program (Paste ~11%; top 5 commands ~32% of all usage in Word)
• “The Most Frequently Used Features in Microsoft Office” — summary of Harris’s Word 2003 command data
• Harvard Business Review, “Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word” (2009) — customers kept requesting features Office already had, just buried; the Ribbon was built to surface them

Product Mentioned

• Website Reality Check — Johns & Taylor Services

The Research: Why Perfect Doesn’t Sell

• Northwestern University Medill Spiegel Research Center — How Online Reviews Influence Sales (purchase likelihood peaks at 4.0–4.7 stars; “five stars is too good to be true”)
• PowerReviews & Northwestern’s Spiegel Research Center — Five-Star Product Ratings Are “Too Good to Be True”
• PowerReviews — How Fake Reviews Destroy Consumer Trust (only 6% of shoppers say a perfect 5.0 is ideal)

The Trust Crisis

• Pangram Labs — Three Percent of Front-Page Amazon Reviews Are AI-Generated
• Bazaarvoice — Shopper Experience Index 2025 (authenticity as the top shopping frustration)

The Law

• FTC — Final Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials (August 2024)

The Fashion Nova Case

• FTC — Fashion Nova Will Pay $4.2 Million to Settle Allegations It Blocked Negative Reviews (January 2022)
• FTC — Finalizes Order with Fashion Nova Over Blocked Reviews (March 2022)
• FTC — Sends Refunds to Consumers Affected by Fashion Nova’s Deceptive Review Practices (January 2025)

The Amazon Origin Story

• Inc. — Jeff Bezos on why Amazon allowed negative reviews: “we make money when we help customers make purchase decisions” (quoting John Rossman’s Think Like Amazon)

Product Mentioned

• Experience Helpdesk

The Cost of Disengagement

• Gallup — The World’s $8.8 Trillion Workplace Problem (State of the Global Workplace)

Employee Experience Drives Customer Experience

• Glassdoor Research — The Link Between Glassdoor Reviews and Customer Satisfaction (Chamberlain & Zhao)
• Harvard Business Review — Engaged Employees Create Better Customer Experiences (April 2023)
• Harvard Business Review Analytic Services — The Impact of Employee Engagement on Customer Experience (report PDF)

Costco Case Study

• CFO Dive — Costco raises minimum hourly wage to $19.50
• Macrotrends — Costco (COST) Market Cap
• The Motley Fool — Jim Sinegal on Costco’s “Promote From Within” Strategy
• Yahoo Finance — Nine Out of Ten Costco Members Renew
• A-Z Quotes — James Sinegal: “When employees are happy, they are your very best ambassadors”

Products Mentioned

• Experience Helpdesk
• Website Reality Check

• Forrester: US Customer Experience Index 2024 — A Quality Crisis 
• Fast Company - CX scores hit a low, Forrester reports 
• Sonos app redesign timeline 
• Sonos warns of app remediation costs 
• Baymard Institute - 49 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics 
• J.C. Penney’s “Fair and Square” Pricing Strategy  
• Understanding J.C. Penney’s Risky New Pricing Strategy  
• Was Ron Johnson right?  
• NPR — His Makeover Strategy In Shambles, J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson Is Out  
• J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson out after troubled tenure 
• 5 Critical Errors That Triggered Ron Johnson’s Removal at JC Penney 
• Washington Post — J.C. Penney files for bankruptcy (May 15 2020) 
• Domino’s CEO Patrick Doyle: Tech with a side of pizza (Kai Ryssdal interview, Sep 25 2015) 
• Restaurant Business Online — How Patrick Doyle changed Domino’s, and the restaurant industry 
• J. Patrick Doyle (career summary, with cited sources) 
•