Welcome to Build today.

I have a really special guest, Nate Walkingshaw, from Pluralsight.

He's the chief experience officer at Pluralsight.

He's the author or the co-author of The Book on Product Leadership. Yeah. And super excited to have him here. Yeah, thanks. No, thanks for having me. I'm pumped. Yeah. So there's a lot of stuff I want to get into, especially on your take on products and product outcomes. But first, I would love to hear your story of how you got from being an EMT to a

chief experience officer. Yeah. So long story short is I did never think I would be in product

management. I didn't think I'd be the chief experience officer. Like if you looked at who I was then,

like patient care, even to this day is one of the most important things that I love,

and I loved about being an EMT back in the day. But yeah, I started out as an emergency medical

technician. I worked in the field for five years, full time. And that's just being in the ambulance

saving lives. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, what was crazy is that that's the whole

reason empathy, that's my origin story, is the reason why I feel like I'm a much better product

leader or product manager is because, you know, there's this moment in the back of the ambulance

that is really tender and helps you see things from really affluent to really marginalized communities

and the problems that are kind of each person is faced with that you begin to unpack

and understand at a really young age. It changed my life forever. It sent me on a totally different

trajectory. But that why I ended up here was more about when I was in fire and EMS, there are just a lot of

opportunities to invent things to help us, help the EMTs. So while you're in the ambulance,

we're thinking of ways that you can make it more efficient. There's tons of stuff going on back

there. It's like, man, this industry has not like had any like looks for for 20 30 40 years and essentially like

our ambulance caught was a folding ironing board and like healthy people don't call 911 and so you know

you're going on all these calls you know you do six to 11 calls per day and sure enough a lot of the

partners that I had were going to light duty because of back injuries and that that's where I started inventing products to solve those problems. So did you have a background in R&D or was just like tinkering, just coming up the stuff? Yeah, nothing whatsoever. I mean, literally, I drew it out on a napkin. The cool thing about the fire and EMS space is that, look, you have to work 10 days a month. like it's a Kelly schedule normally. So if you're 10 days or maybe it's 248s or whatever, most of us are working second jobs. Right. And so a lot of the people that I worked with that were working second jobs, landscaping, mowing lawns. But one of these firefighters that I knew super well was actually he owned a machine shop.

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