Jason spent years running a CrossFit gym before he started building Gym Force.

That experience gave him a pretty specific view of what wasn't working. He'd used gym management software, marketing tools and outside business support, but having access to more tools didn't necessarily make running the business any easier.

Now he's on the other side, building a product for the kind of operator he used to be.

Jason talks with Marco and Jonas about how that experience has shaped Gym Force, from the problems they chose to build around to how they listen to gym owners without taking every request at face value.

They also spend time on community and what actually makes people stay with a gym. The discussion gets into the role of coaching, learning and skill development, where technology fits into those relationships, and where Jason thinks it doesn't.

Jason breaks down:

→ What running a gym taught him about the software built for operators
→ How Gym Force identifies the problems worth building around
→ Why customer requests don't always lead to the right product decisions
→ What "the gym owner is never the problem" means for the way they build
→ How Gym Force thinks about measuring whether the product is actually working
→ Why community plays such a large role in Jason's thinking about fitness products
→ Where technology can help coaches and gym owners, and where Jason draws the line

Follow Jason:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-david-2642371/
Website: https://gymforce.app

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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ROOK: https://www.tryrook.io/

0:21 - Welcome and quick questions with Jason
4:31 - Jason's path from CrossFit gym owner to building for gym operators
5:41 - How COVID exposed the business side of running a gym
6:51 - Having the software doesn't mean the problem is solved
8:51 - Wanting to coach without constantly selling and finding new members
12:11 - Why the gym owner is never the problem
13:01 - What Gym Force is being built to do
13:46 - Building the roadmap around customer struggling moments
14:31 - How Gym Force thinks about measuring success
15:21 - Identifying what gym owners are actually struggling with
17:16 - What customers ask for vs. what they're trying to accomplish
18:51 - Connecting independent gyms with corporate wellness
21:01 - The missing data between fitness, employers and insurance
28:01 - Is community actually the product in fitness?
28:41 - Why lasting communities need learning and skill development
31:11 - Building around coaches and communities
35:41 - What the fitness industry should stop building

Dave Hannum has spent more than 30 years building products in the fitness industry. He led product and business development at Technogym before founding Functional Solutions, one of the early platforms for connected fitness and digital coaching.

For most of his career, building software meant working within engineering constraints. Today, those constraints are changing.

Dave shares how that shift is changing the way product teams think about roadmaps, customer feedback, feature development, and where real competitive advantage comes from. The conversation also looks at what AI changes, what it doesn't, and why understanding people is becoming even more important as building software gets easier.

Dave breaks down:

→ Why faster development doesn't always lead to better products
→ The tradeoff between building for today's customers and tomorrow's customers
→ How AI is changing product teams without replacing product thinking
→ Why legacy software is becoming harder to compete with
→ Where roadmaps still matter, and where they don't
→ Why understanding people is still the biggest competitive advantage

Follow Dave:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davehannum

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/

0:21 – From product roadmaps to vibe coding: how AI is changing the way products get built
4:25 – If coding isn't the moat anymore, what is?
8:50 – Rebuilding Functional Solutions with modern AI tools
9:03 – Functional Solutions and the early days of connected fitness
11:31 – The SMS feature that kept members engaged beyond the gym
14:03 – Why building for your biggest customer can derail your roadmap
15:39 – Feature bloat doesn't disappear. It just happens faster.
17:46 – Product failure, iteration, and rewriting the rules of development
20:45 – Why building software is getting easier, but building a business isn't
25:30 – Generalists, specialists, and the future of product teams
30:30 – Legacy software, acquisitions, and what big companies can't move fast enough to do
40:45 – Why understanding people is still the real moat
42:41 – Rapid-fire questions

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