This Feature Will Save Us

This Feature Will Save Us is the podcast for product leaders building the future of health, fitness, and wearable technology. Hosted by Marco Benitez and Jonas Dücker of ROOK, each episode goes inside the roadmap decisions behind the apps, platforms, and biometric systems shaping the next generation of health products. Built for CPOs, CTOs, and the teams shipping real health tech.

This Feature Will Save Us is a business podcast hosted by Marco Benitez and Jonas Dücker, with 6 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Marco Benitez and Jonas Dücker hosts This Feature Will Save Us, a business show with 6 episodes published.

Our AI reads these to draft pitches. Use them as grounding for a pitch that cites a real guest and a specific topic.

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  Episode #5

  Brian Shoemaker - What Life Time's 190 Clubs Taught Him About Killing Features

  Aug 5, 202640 min

  Brian Shoemaker started as a developer before he ever had a product title, and ten years later he's running Life Time Labs and the company's new Innovation Hub. His background shows up in how he talks about product decisions: less about the pitch, more about what survives contact with 190 clubs and real staff on the floor. It also means he's got a running list of the ones that didn't make it, and a few that got shelved only to come back around years later once the technology caught up. He joins Marco and Jonas to talk through the Apple Watch feature that took eighteen months to kill, and what Life Time is trying next. Brian breaks down: → Why LT Connect's Apple Watch integration made sense on paper and fell apart in practice → Building live streaming across 40 Life Time locations in a month during COVID, and why it later scaled back down → How the Labs team decides whether a pilot is ready to scale past a few clubs → Why a failed facilities-intelligence pilot from years ago is worth revisiting now → How the Labs team stays small by borrowing people from other teams for a few months at a time → What the Innovation Hub does with 190 startup applications and a 20,000-member beta pool → Where agentic coding tools are becoming a multiplier, and the new bottleneck that creates → What changes for Life Time once iOS 27 opens Siri up to booking classes directly Follow Brian: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianshoemaker/ Life Time: https://www.lifetime.life/ Follow Marco Benitez and Jonas Dücker LinkedIn Marco: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcobzg/ LinkedIn Jonas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonas-ducker-37460bb3/ Get in touch with This Feature Will Save Us Podcast LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/this-feature-will-save-us Website: https://thisfeaturewillsaveus.com/ Powered by ROOK: https://www.tryrook.io/ 0:00 - Welcome and rapid fire questions with Brian 3:20 - Brian's path from developer to leading Life Time's Labs team 4:10 - Cardio, strength training, and the shift toward hybrid fitness 6:00 - Favorite AI tools for research, coding, and legal drafting 9:00 - The most underrated metric in product: L28 10:40 - A pilot that looked great in one club but never scaled 12:20 - Face recognition check-in, and why it never stuck 14:00 - Reviving a failed vibration-sensor pilot as a facilities intelligence platform 17:30 - When cost actually enters the product decision 19:20 - How big the Labs team is, and borrowing talent 21:00 - Life Time's squad structure and two-week sprints 22:40 - Launching the Innovation Hub and rehydrating the old beta program 25:30 - How 190 startup applications get vetted 29:40 - Agentic coding as a multiplier, and the new bottleneck it creates 32:30 - Structuring a day around constant stakeholder input 34:20 - Building live streaming across 40 clubs in a month during COVID 37:00 - Why live streaming scaled down once the world reopened 38:40 - LT Connect and the Apple Watch integration Brian was sure would work 41:30 - What's next: Siri, iOS 27, and whether the app is still the product

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  Episode #4

  Ernst de Neef - Why Funxtion Walked Away From Its Own AI Workout Builder

  Jul 22, 202638 minS0

  <p>Ernst de Neef, CEO and co-founder of Funxtion, joins Marco and Jonas to talk about building digital products for large fitness operators.<br/><br/>After more than a decade in the industry, Ernst has seen what happens when customers want flexibility, product teams want simplicity, and the roadmap is expected to somehow make both sides happy.<br/><br/>They get into APIs, SDKs, enterprise sales cycles, customization, and an AI workout feature Funxtion spent a long time building before asking a harder question: even if the technology works, can you trust what it gives the user?<br/><br/>There...

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  Episode #3

  Gabriela Cordero - When the Roadmap Came With Inventory

  Jul 8, 202639 minS0

  <p>Some product bets fail because the idea was wrong.<br/><br/>Some get a lot messier because the world around it changed.<br/><br/>Gabriela Cordero joins Marco and Jonas to talk about building health and fitness products where that kind of thing happens. One launch had the product, the inventory, and the plan. Then COVID hit, gyms closed, and the team had to work through what happens when a hardware product is ready, but there’s nowhere for the inventory to go.<br/><br/>That leads into a bigger conversation about hardware and software product work. Software can mo...

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  Episode #2

  Nolan Parker - The Product Leader Who Still Coaches CrossFit

  Jun 24, 202640 minS0

  <p>Nolan Parker’s product perspective was shaped long before he had a product title.<br/><br/>As a former gym owner, CrossFit coach, and trainer, he understands the day-to-day reality of the people using fitness software: busy operators, time-strapped coaches, overwhelmed staff, and members who do not care how complicated the system is behind the scenes. Now, as a product leader at PushPress, he is building for those same workflows from the inside.<br/><br/>This episode is about the calls product teams actually have to make: when to trust customer feedback, when to challenge it, when to say no...

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  Episode #1

  When the Workaround Is the Product | Alex Peacock

  Jun 10, 202640 minS0

  <p>Alex from Leisure Labs joins Marco and Jonas for the first episode of This Feature Will Save Us.<br/><br/>They talk about a feature from the Netpulse days called X-Capture, which let gym members take a photo of a cardio machine console and log the workout from the image. At the time, it solved a messy problem: fitness operators wanted connected equipment, but connecting every machine directly was a headache.<br/><br/>The conversation moves into the stuff product teams usually have to sort through before a feature ever ships: timing, simplicity, internal alignment, and the difference between...

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