Jeff Robbins is a rockstar. A real-life rockstar. He was part of the team that created the world's first commercial website. Signed to A&M Records with his band Orbit. Toured with Lollapalooza. Ran Ringo Starr's website. Co-founded Lullabot, demystified Drupal, worked with clients including The GRAMMYs, Tesla Motors and Harvard University…

And that’s only about half of the crib sheet.

After he and his co-founder grew Lullabot to 60+ employees, Jeff stepped away to found Yonder as a way to advocate for remote work and bring leaders of distributed companies together. Jeff is also in an indie-rock trio called 123 Astronaut, and helps business owners as a coach and consultant.

What’s the secret to all the success? Making passionate work, and helping others to do the same. As Jeff sees it, owners can run successful and sustainable companies without losing their empathy or humanity. Jeff joins us to talk about life as a business owner and why it’s important to enjoy your life and your company while you have it.

Jeb Banner knows a thing or two about turning ideas into companies. Over the past 20-something years, he’s founded, owned and/or advised a number of businesses ranging from ecommerce to web marketing to software. In 2006, he co-founded SmallBox, an Indianapolis creative agency, where he spent 12 years as CEO.

Fast forward to today, and Jeb has exited client services altogether. He now leads Boardable, a nonprofit board management software company he co-founded in 2016. Jeb joins us to talk about his decision to move from SmallBox to Boardable full-time, and the mindset shift needed to do so. Tune in for insights on making the service-to-product transition, and the trouble with trying to juggle two different companies at once. If you’re a services company attempting to evolve into a product company, or you’re considering a big leap of your own, Jeb has some advice.

Clients can be partners, sure. But can they be members? That’s the question Becky McKinnell, President of iBec Creative, set out to answer two years ago. On the heels of her company’s ten-year anniversary, Becky wanted to toss her firm’s lengthy requirements documents and move from hourly/fixed project agreements to something more flexible and service-oriented. She wanted to close the divide she felt fixed cost created with clients, and free up her team to be more creative and iterative. Inspired by ideas from Owner Summit, she set out to implement a membership model.

Fast forward to today, and iBec Creative has found success with the membership model. Clients receive dedicated access to designers, developers and digital marketers, and nothing is out of scope. As you might guess, membership isn’t easy to sell. But with trust and transparency, it’s a sound, innovative solution. Becky joins us to talk about her move to membership, the impact it’s made on her team and her plans for the future.

For many years, nonprofits have faced a double standard. We want them to do great things, but we don’t want to pay them to spend money on branding or marketing or salaries. So they make do with what they have, or seek out pro bono partnerships that often take a back seat to paying clients.

Gratefully, in recent years, there’s been an awakening. Donors understand the tie between brand communications, engagement and impact. Companies recognize the business case for doing good. More than occasional feel-good side projects, shops are investing wholeheartedly in the social sector, building specialized knowledge and expertise to help nonprofits succeed.

Matthew Schwartz, Founder and Executive Director of Constructive, has seen the evolution, and is at the helm of such a shop. He joins us to talk about nonprofits’ impact on the economy, the nuances of value-based business development and the need for a solid book, expertise and focus to win the business you want.

You head to the grocery store to pick up a few things. Subconsciously, you make dozens of tiny decisions: the brands you like, the right ratio of yellow to green in your bananas, how your cart is organized, how your bags are packed. Now, imagine a product takes over all of that for you. What does that even look like?

At Instacart, that experience is what designers are working to solve. More than pretty pictures or screens, the focus is touchpoints, process and what’s important to customers. As Head of Design, Mitch Geere is thinking about communication design, experience design and product design. In his mind, design is a verb. It’s finding solutions. Synthesis, and discovery. Mitch shares his story about getting the right people in place, the gift of design and how designers are partners rather than service individuals.

It takes guts to venture out on your own, admit that things could be better or keep going when everything inside you is screaming at you to stop. In the agency world, on the services side, it’s easy to fault yourself for setbacks. But the inner criticism, the self-doubt and fear are likely just signs of imposter syndrome.

Melanie Chandruang knows the feeling. Venturing out on her own as a finance and operations consultant, she wondered if she made the right choice. Today, she’s helping owners and operations teams silence their own inner critics, and optimize the inner workings of their companies. As she says, “Just keep going…you do know a lot more than you think you do.”

Project management is a unique role, and it takes a unique sort of person to fill it, and do it well. In the digital world, project management is still being defined. Some organizations have a good understanding of what a PM is, and isn't, and others are still figuring it out.

Lynn Winter, a digital strategist, Digital PM Summit speaker and founder of the Manage Digital conference, started her career doing the work that people hated most. Her coworkers sat down and wrote a list of things they didn't want to do anymore, and that became her job description.

After stints at different organizations, Lynn went freelance. She lost 20 pounds, started sleeping better, switched to a healthier diet and saw her marriage improve. Lynn joins us to talk about what it takes to be a project manager, perfectionism and the tendency to put everyone else first—sometimes at the expense of your own health, happiness and relationships.

In product development, many organizations subscribe to the idea of a three-legged stool: cross-functional teams comprised of engineering, product management and design. Each with an equal say to strike a balance and create a stable product. This sounds nice in theory, but in practice, many designers have trouble calling the shots. Design is too subjective, too soft a business case, and so on…

Josh Ulm, an executive design leader who previously led the charge at Oracle and Adobe, encourages designers to step up and be bold. Design can absolutely be objective, measured and argued for. The emotional state of the customer, the EQ of the customer, getting to know their real motivations and drives are all critical to making a product stand out and crafting something that people love. Design solves problems for the customer, and it’s the designer’s job to advocate for that customer every step of the way.

In 2012, Zapier's ranks totaled three. Three co-founders who found success working nights and weekends on an idea to help people automate the boring and tedious parts of their jobs. Today, Zapier is 170+ strong, with a workforce that spans 15+ countries and 13 different timezones. After hiring their first remote worker years ago, they haven't looked back.

So how do you foster culture, communication and collaboration when there are no set core hours, no daily in-person cues, no physical compound? Mike Knoop, Co-founder and CPO at Zapier, joins us to talk about the top two remote challenges, four pillars of communication and how everything at Zapier—from hiring to onboarding, communication channels, retreats and more—is intentional by design.

How do you design for half a dozen brands, across multiple platforms, products and channels, without being paralyzed by the sheer scope of what you're trying to do? Bob Calvano, VP Design at A+E Networks, is in the thick of it right now. Bob is at the helm of a 15-person design team hashing out a design system that will be the core to consistent user experiences across a family of brands that includes A&E®, HISTORY®, Lifetime®, Lifetime Movies™, FYI,™, VICELAND℠ and BIOGRAPHY®.

Located on the same floor in the same office in New York, running a form of agile, A&E Networks designers communicate and collaborate closely to define and develop a cohesive system. Rather than thinking about platform, platform, platform, they now think about one experience, driven by a single system. Bob joins us to talk about his vision for unifying everything, the early stages and how small bites keep his team moving forward.