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/

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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