As a product manager, have you ever inherited a messy backlog?
In this episode, Product Manager Brian Orlando and Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel break down 6 useful tactics you can use to tackle this common challenge.
Listen as we discuss the challenges of inheriting a product backlog and learn practical strategies for:
- Aligning with company objectives
- Effective stakeholder communication
- Prioritization techniques
- Leveraging data for decision-making
- Streamlining processes and workflows
- Identifying and preparing for skill gaps
If you manage a backlog, this episode provides valuable insights to help you succeed in your role!
#ProductManagement #Agile #BacklogManagement #ProductStrategy #DataDriven
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00:00:01 --> 00:00:10 welcome to the Arguing Agile Podcast, where Enterprise Business Agility Coach Om Patel and Product Manager Brian Orlando argue about product management, leadership, and business agility, so you don't have to.
00:00:11 --> 00:00:34 Fairly recently, we were at a networking event and I remember giving the advice the product management advice of, Hey, you need to understand makes a good business run as opposed to like, what makes a good agile team or a good product management team or the product operating model or whatever we call agile transformations these days.
00:00:34 --> 00:00:38 I remember saying like listen, that's all good and it's great.
00:00:38 --> 00:00:43 , if you want to communicate with the folks on the business side that are in charge of running the business.
00:00:43 --> 00:00:45 You need to quote speak that language.
00:00:45 --> 00:00:55 You need to understand what running a good business is about and then speak the language of running a good business rather than the things in the Azure community that we like to talk about.
00:00:55 --> 00:00:57 It doesn't matter what you say how you dress it up.
00:00:57 --> 00:01:16 You have to communicate in terms that business understands I wanted us to stop and talk a bit about running a successful business and how to go about lobbying for your value as an agile coach or a scrum master or product manager, someone in the product operating model, right?
00:01:16 --> 00:01:17 I wanted to talk about that.
00:01:17 --> 00:01:20 Lobbying for your value in a world that only wants to talk about.
00:01:20 --> 00:01:26 ROI or treating things like a, like a factory stamping out widgets that kind of thing.
00:01:26 --> 00:01:39 The other way this came about was I was in a discussion recently where it was, Hey, I need to have two more developers on my team and then the business said, well, what, what would the, if we added two developers, your team, what would the ROI be?
00:01:40 --> 00:01:48 of adding two developers to your team in the product operating model as a, and this is me in my capacity as a product manager, which that sort of stopped me in my tracks.
00:01:48 --> 00:01:50 And I was like, why am I here?
00:01:50 --> 00:01:54 Like, I mean, on earth, basically a philosophical discussion of why I'm here?
00:01:54 --> 00:01:55 What is my purpose?
00:01:55 --> 00:01:56 Exactly.
00:01:56 --> 00:01:56 Yeah.
00:01:56 --> 00:02:03 I mean, any time when you um, for something leadership will always think about that and say, well, what do we get back?
00:02:03 --> 00:02:05 You know, if we give you what you're looking for.
00:02:05 --> 00:02:08 And a lot of times I find this is actually a gap.
00:02:08 --> 00:02:19 a lot of times I find people gravitate towards saying things like we can deliver something faster or we can go to market faster, but those phrases come out without really some like credibility to them.
00:02:19 --> 00:02:24 How do you know adding two developers is going to reach a cadence where you can go to market quicker?
00:02:24 --> 00:02:25 You don't really know that.
00:02:25 --> 00:02:25 Yeah.
00:02:25 --> 00:02:27 You're supposing a lot.
00:02:27 --> 00:02:38 Because first of all, as soon as you get your two developers or whatever it might be to join your team, there's gonna be an immediate drop in their effectiveness, their efficiency, however you want to measure it, right?
00:02:38 --> 00:02:43 Because they're learning and then people that are there are supporting them and onboarding them.
00:02:43 --> 00:02:46 So they're not delivering to their full potential either.
00:02:46 --> 00:02:47 And that's gonna happen.
00:02:47 --> 00:02:51 So if leadership is looking at that granularly, they'll say, right.
00:02:51 --> 00:02:57 Wait, you just said we're going to go to market quicker, but actually the whole thing is slowing down for us, right?
00:02:57 --> 00:03:06 It can be difficult to navigate it's I completely understand from the executive perspective our previous podcast that probably went up before this was a CFO, right?
00:03:07 --> 00:03:20 from the perspective of the CFO Which is funny because a lot of times that HR management is like rolled under the CFO, you don't know anything about how effective teams are built in human behavior and stuff like that Like you're really about crunching numbers, which is weird.
00:03:20 --> 00:03:30 So from the perspective of a finance person in the organization they don't, I mean, this is all the psychological safety and all these kinds of things that you're talking about, what are the actual hard numbers?
00:03:30 --> 00:03:33 Like, I'm going to discount qualitative means.
00:03:33 --> 00:03:35 I want to know only about quantitative means.
00:03:36 --> 00:03:37 Show me on paper.
00:03:37 --> 00:03:53 And that's very difficult for a lot of people in the agile space, agile coaches, scrum masters, product managers, maybe even development team members it's very difficult for them to say, what are the quantitative metrics of we all need to be involved in discovery?
00:03:53 --> 00:03:53 Oh, snap.
00:03:53 --> 00:03:56 That's a qualitative like the numbers break down I don't know.
00:03:56 --> 00:03:58 I don't know how to quantify that stuff.
00:03:58 --> 00:04:13 I think the closest people have come in the past, I guess looking back historically, is to look at people's utilization rates and say, new people joined, they were maybe only 60%, 50 percent utilized because they were in training, and now we've got 85.
00:04:13 --> 00:04:14 Aren't we doing great?
00:04:14 --> 00:04:18 Well, let's look, let's look at the textbook metrics that you will use.
00:04:19 --> 00:04:50 When someone pins you down in these categories the textbook metrics are velocity metrics sprint burndowns Some people measure team happiness performance of throughput performance of this cycle versus last cycle or whatever Storypoint completion rate say do ratios there There's a lot of metrics sure that I could throw into this category some some actually are very good Some actually are kind of crap, but there's a lot of stuff I can throw into this category of, Hey, like the how do I know that we're being, we added two developers.
00:04:50 --> 00:04:58 How do I know that those two developers that I added to your team of three, for example, so we took your team of three, we expanded it to five.
00:04:58 --> 00:05:00 How do we know that we made a.
00:05:01 --> 00:05:02 Substantial impact.
00:05:02 --> 00:05:15 So the, if I, if I took your team of three and had two more developers, theoretically, there should be a you know, 166%, whatever these values the velocity or, you know what did I just say?
00:05:15 --> 00:05:23 throughput or something like that should increase by nearly twofold there are some things that you would expect that maybe not immediately.
00:05:23 --> 00:05:24 this is something that people forget.
00:05:24 --> 00:05:36 It's not immediate, It takes time, but if you just grant that and say, let's wait a little bit long enough where these people become familiar with what they're doing and so forth, And then you look at it and you're still going to fall short.
00:05:36 --> 00:05:40 there's reasons for that because there's not a linear relationship between adding.
00:05:40 --> 00:05:43 Two developers and having 166.
00:05:43 --> 00:05:48 that's all straight line linear extrapolation and life doesn't work that way.
00:05:48 --> 00:05:55 Adding more people to the team automatically adds more vectors of communication, which drags you down, So having three.
00:05:55 --> 00:05:55 Yeah.
00:05:55 --> 00:05:55 Okay.
00:05:56 --> 00:05:57 I forget the number now.
00:05:57 --> 00:05:59 What was 39 vectors?
00:05:59 --> 00:05:59 Adding five.
00:05:59 --> 00:06:02 It just takes it to a different level altogether.
00:06:02 --> 00:06:06 So you have all of that getting in the way, adding friction to what they're trying to do.
00:06:06 --> 00:06:09 It's kind of, it acts like headwind almost.
00:06:09 --> 00:06:13 . And it's hard to explain that to people that don't understand team dynamics.
00:06:13 --> 00:06:16 Well, if I'm forced to take the Counterpoint on arguing agile.
00:06:17 --> 00:06:20 I would say the CEO doesn't care about story points.
00:06:20 --> 00:06:20 You know what I mean?
00:06:20 --> 00:06:24 That the CFO doesn't care about your vanity metrics or whatever.
00:06:24 --> 00:06:27 he only cares about your delivery of business value.
00:06:27 --> 00:06:34 And I would say your delivery of business value, not even in the terms of like, well, the product manager rates this at a business value of five.
00:06:34 --> 00:06:36 Like that, that's not even what I'm saying.
00:06:36 --> 00:06:38 Cause that in and of itself is a vanity metric.
00:06:38 --> 00:06:41 I'm talking to get a metric that's not a vanity metric.
00:06:41 --> 00:06:47 'cause I was gonna even say even surveys of like customer satisfaction surveys and stuff, even those are vanity metrics.
00:06:47 --> 00:07:00 Like the CFO wants to see renewals and they want to see expansion of current contracts and they want to see the current customers paying more for the services and expanding the services.
00:07:00 --> 00:07:00 Right.
00:07:00 --> 00:07:01 that's how they.
00:07:01 --> 00:07:04 Think that the customers are happy with our solutions.
00:07:04 --> 00:07:05 They're spending more money.
00:07:06 --> 00:07:08 I know that that's sort of a simplistic viewpoint.
00:07:08 --> 00:07:20 Cause the reality is if the customer keeps paying the same dollar value year over year in a B2B kind of deal, that means they're happy if they're staying with your solution and they're paying the same amount of money.
00:07:20 --> 00:07:26 Plus 3 percent year over year, just renewing with no issue They're pretty happy, but you can go deeper than that.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:26 Let me stop there.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:26 Yeah.
00:07:26 --> 00:07:32 I mean, I just wanted to say CFOs, et cetera, when they're looking at it from that lens, it's not their fault.
00:07:32 --> 00:07:33 First of all, right.
00:07:33 --> 00:07:42 Just to kind of take their side for a little bit, they were trained to get ROI or whatever return on capital invested return on investment generally.
00:07:42 --> 00:07:43 So what is the.
00:07:43 --> 00:07:49 Other side of the equation that we can help fill in, So they can feel like the money was well spent.
00:07:49 --> 00:07:51 So you could look at things like renewals.
00:07:52 --> 00:07:53 They spent money.
00:07:53 --> 00:07:57 it's not the two developers because they net out to a certain dollar amount, right?
00:07:57 --> 00:08:02 So let's say they spent 200, 000 to 250, whatever it might be on two developers loaded cost.
00:08:03 --> 00:08:04 What did they get back?
00:08:04 --> 00:08:07 And again, on the other side of the equal sign, they want to see a dollar amount.
00:08:07 --> 00:08:10 So we can talk about story points, all that.
00:08:10 --> 00:08:12 It doesn't compute in their mind, right?
00:08:12 --> 00:08:14 Well, the only thing that computes is a dollar amount.
00:08:14 --> 00:08:16 So how do you get to that point?
00:08:16 --> 00:08:18 You can do things like given the benefit of.
00:08:19 --> 00:08:24 time that you've given these two newcomers to get used to the system and start being productive.
00:08:24 --> 00:08:27 You can look at things like shortened time to market.
00:08:27 --> 00:08:28 Can you measure that?
00:08:28 --> 00:08:30 If you can measure that, what does that mean?
00:08:30 --> 00:08:31 Right?
00:08:31 --> 00:08:34 So CFOs understand the time value of money.
00:08:34 --> 00:08:49 They understand getting revenue now versus Now plus whatever that time frame might be that can be on the other side of the equation So you could say we got this thing out to market quicker We got adoption rates up for example, things like that could help you.
00:08:49 --> 00:08:53 Yep Getting churn rates down as well is a great category.
00:08:53 --> 00:08:57 Here is constantly users who have churned To say, Hey, what could we be doing better?
00:08:57 --> 00:09:00 And then to really listen to what they're saying.
00:09:00 --> 00:09:06 I mean, that is a trade off here it doesn't make any sense to throw out a general survey because the survey becomes a vanity metric.
00:09:06 --> 00:09:12 If you're not willing to really internalize what users are saying Hey, you're really bad at this Oh, are we?
00:09:13 --> 00:09:14 You know, don't make excuses, that kind of thing.
00:09:15 --> 00:09:16 the CEO doesn't care about story points.
00:09:16 --> 00:09:21 It could be the title of this episode of the podcast is the CEO doesn't care about story points.
00:09:21 --> 00:09:22 Because so many people will say.
00:09:23 --> 00:09:28 Well, the CEO when they get, by the time they get involved, they just want to know when's this going to be done, right?
00:09:28 --> 00:09:29 Exactly.
00:09:29 --> 00:09:36 Which I feel like is, is been the, if I could have a tagline to my career is like Brian Orlando, product manager tagline.
00:09:36 --> 00:09:37 When's it going to be done?
00:09:37 --> 00:09:39 It can be done as soon as possible.
00:09:39 --> 00:09:46 If you're okay with the bare minimum, if you want to build the whole world three times over or whatever to make your customer happy.
00:09:46 --> 00:09:48 That's gonna take a long time.
00:09:48 --> 00:09:52 I feel we should do a whole different podcast under the banner of when's it gonna be done?
00:09:52 --> 00:09:56 and that should be the title and the agenda of the whole podcast is dealing with the question.
00:09:56 --> 00:09:57 I like that.
00:09:57 --> 00:09:57 I like that.
00:09:57 --> 00:09:57 What's gonna be done?
00:09:57 --> 00:09:58 that's gonna be on my gravestone.
00:09:58 --> 00:09:59 Hashtag done.
00:09:59 --> 00:10:01 Like finally done.
00:10:01 --> 00:10:01 Done.
00:10:01 --> 00:10:05 This is it, if you think about SMBs you think about small, medium sized businesses.
00:10:05 --> 00:10:18 The when's it going to be done like you actually can't answer when's it going to be done because the executives in SMBs They probably have a lot of experience making the call of it's done enough for now.
00:10:18 --> 00:10:24 We've collected the revenue We've signed the deal we've and then we can move on we can write off to, to greener pastures or whatever.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:25 Exactly.
00:10:25 --> 00:10:35 And I think it's that particular aspect, it may not be limited to SMBs, but you know, SMBs are living day to day almost compared to those large companies, right?
00:10:35 --> 00:10:36 That have deeper pockets.
00:10:36 --> 00:10:36 So.
00:10:37 --> 00:10:37 You're right.
00:10:37 --> 00:10:40 They're experienced enough to say, let's get this thing done.
00:10:40 --> 00:10:40 It's done enough.
00:10:41 --> 00:10:41 Let's get it to market.
00:10:42 --> 00:10:43 Let's capitalize on it as much as we can.
00:10:44 --> 00:10:45 So yeah, that makes sense to me.
00:10:45 --> 00:10:51 to connect this with a reality, I remember I was, I was at a, I was at a small company.
00:10:51 --> 00:10:53 I say small company, meaning less than 30 people, that qualifies.
00:10:53 --> 00:10:58 And, they, at small companies, sometimes you run into the situation where like one.
00:10:58 --> 00:11:07 Very large customer dictated 60 percent of their business one very large customer represented about 60 percent of their revenue.
00:11:07 --> 00:11:20 so basically when this customer picked up the phone and said, we're not happy because we don't have this thing, or because this feature is not being delivered fast enough the company basically cleared the deck to make that thing happen because it's more than half.
00:11:21 --> 00:11:23 Of their revenue is tied up with their one customer.
00:11:23 --> 00:11:39 Cause so at something like you don't want to be in that scenario, generally speaking, . A lot of nuance here, It's not necessarily bad if you think about it, like you have one customer, like you have one big voice to listen to everyone else that onboards as a customer with your company should know like, Hey, we service this one.
00:11:39 --> 00:11:43 As long as you're on board with what this one big customer wants Hey.
00:11:43 --> 00:11:43 Yeah, yeah.
00:11:43 --> 00:11:49 I mean, it's not that hard to keep one customer happy compared to trying to keep multiple customers happy.
00:11:49 --> 00:11:49 Exactly.
00:11:49 --> 00:11:49 Exactly.
00:11:49 --> 00:11:51 So if you can do that, that's your key to survival.
00:11:51 --> 00:11:53 Maybe you can thrive off of that.
00:11:53 --> 00:11:59 But it's also the case where you make them unhappy in the slightest and you have competition.
00:11:59 --> 00:12:00 Well, you're rolling the dice.
00:12:00 --> 00:12:01 Exactly.
00:12:01 --> 00:12:09 But the issue with this company was that, Their very large customer was unhappy because they could never understand when features were coming out.
00:12:09 --> 00:12:12 They could never understand how the company prioritized things.
00:12:12 --> 00:12:18 They could never understand where the things that were their pain points landed on the roadmap.
00:12:18 --> 00:12:20 And , that's because The company never projected this stuff.
00:12:20 --> 00:12:26 They didn't have a culture of transparency with their vendors and their customers and everybody.
00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 And I had to build all that as a first product manager.
00:12:29 --> 00:12:38 So once I built all that, part of building it is you have to get a customer group together, or the easier one is just to bring all the customers to you in a kind of a panel on a regular basis.
00:12:38 --> 00:12:38 Right.
00:12:39 --> 00:12:47 The harder way, I don't know if one of these is better than the other, but the harder way is to go to each customer one on one on a regular basis every week or whatever, have a lot of touch points.
00:12:47 --> 00:12:53 You end up doing a lot of customer success type of customer support type of activities in that.
00:12:53 --> 00:12:56 But in that company, I ended up having to build these.
00:12:56 --> 00:13:19 Grassroots with each customer kind of discussions and talk about their pain points, their needs and stuff like that from the platform Because I built those conversations, because I built those forums when I transitioned out as a product manager, I could transition the other product manager into the forums over time as I transitioned out, and they wouldn't inherit the customer relationship.
00:13:19 --> 00:13:27 and as long as we are talking to the people that directly represent the customer every week, I think at that company was every.
00:13:27 --> 00:13:28 it might've been every other week or every week.
00:13:28 --> 00:13:29 I can't remember what it was.
00:13:29 --> 00:13:32 It was very compared to like working with the government.
00:13:32 --> 00:13:33 It was a lot more frequently.
00:13:33 --> 00:13:36 Once every month or six weeks at the least.
00:13:36 --> 00:13:42 But we built all that from scratch, basically a customer and product community talking about.
00:13:42 --> 00:13:53 What the pain points were and talking about what was on our road map dealing with those pain points and then like that, the nice thing about that was it directly led into our demos.
00:13:53 --> 00:13:58 So we brought those customers that we were talking about their pain points and basically doing discovery work, right?
00:13:58 --> 00:14:03 We brought them directly to our development team as they demoed the new features.
00:14:03 --> 00:14:09 So it was super easy to make that leap into Bringing the development team into the process of talking to customers.
00:14:09 --> 00:14:27 Cause before I was their first product manager at this particular company I'm talking about, they did not have their developers talk directly to customers that the customer talked to some either salesperson or seal executive or customer support or customer success or whatever they're called, and then it would be filtered back to the development team, but the problem with filtering.
00:14:27 --> 00:14:33 Is you sort of lose the prioritization or the real pain of the customer, you lose that in the filtering process.
00:14:34 --> 00:14:34 And I didn't like that.
00:14:35 --> 00:14:42 so I worked with the customer success and sales and the C level executives to talk directly to the customers on a regular basis.
00:14:42 --> 00:14:43 I didn't cut anyone off.
00:14:43 --> 00:14:45 They were all invited to the sessions.
00:14:45 --> 00:14:47 But I felt super strongly about that.
00:14:47 --> 00:14:50 Invaluable for the developers to talk directly to the customers.
00:14:50 --> 00:14:57 I mean that in specifically in that scenario you know, where you have one major customer supporting you basically, that's your lifeline.
00:14:57 --> 00:15:00 I was in that situation with a small software house.
00:15:00 --> 00:15:07 Wasn't that much bigger than the company size you mentioned and they had one big customer It was of the order of 60 70 percent of their business.
00:15:07 --> 00:15:33 the customer had multiple locations with subsidiaries and but this software house sputter along for a while struggle to get other customers But they ran into trouble financially and it was almost to the point where they were running on fumes so the customer decided that they had enough Installations at their subsidiaries of the software that this software house provided And he was doing what they wanted it to do so they were not unhappy Right.
00:15:33 --> 00:15:37 First of all but they didn't want to, they didn't want the company to go under.
00:15:37 --> 00:15:39 They wanted support for a while.
00:15:39 --> 00:15:43 Even if they could replace the system, it would take them years, two, three years minimum.
00:15:43 --> 00:15:46 This is how snail paced the publishing world was back in there.
00:15:46 --> 00:15:48 I don't think it's changed a whole lot now.
00:15:48 --> 00:15:53 So what they decided to do is provide some seed corn funding to the company.
00:15:53 --> 00:15:53 Right.
00:15:53 --> 00:15:59 And the company was basically kept solvent by the seed corn funding, luck would have it.
00:15:59 --> 00:16:08 They then landed a couple of other orders that were sizable nowhere near this other the main customer, but it was enough where they could get out you know, from under the heavy burden, so to speak.
00:16:09 --> 00:16:11 So it can work for you if you keep your customer happy here.
00:16:12 --> 00:16:14 We said the CEO doesn't care about story points.
00:16:14 --> 00:16:14 Well, guess what?
00:16:14 --> 00:16:15 The customer doesn't either.
00:16:15 --> 00:16:23 The CFO also doesn't care about like your release map or whatever, but what they do care about is how you're managing the customer relationship.
00:16:23 --> 00:16:27 They certainly, like I've seen many customer relationship business development or sales.
00:16:27 --> 00:16:34 Like rag reports, red, amber, green, like this is the status of the contract or whatever, I've seen many of those type of reports.
00:16:34 --> 00:16:45 and I feel if you really know these people, if you really know the people on the other side of the contract,, if you're really serving the values of agile you really care about the people rather than the contract.
00:16:45 --> 00:16:47 All this kind of falls by the wayside.
00:16:48 --> 00:16:50 It's the same thing I say about if you're delivering.
00:16:50 --> 00:17:09 Working software on a regular cadence, no matter what that regular cadence is monthly, weekly, biweekly, every two days, every three days, it doesn't really matter how minor the releases are, but if customers know that every three days, every week, every two weeks, whatever the cadence you picked out is, they're going to get new things.
00:17:09 --> 00:17:12 Obviously the trap is you need to send some kind of memo every two weeks.
00:17:12 --> 00:17:13 It says, Hey, you know what?
00:17:13 --> 00:17:14 This is two weeks has passed.
00:17:14 --> 00:17:16 This is your new these are your new things, right?
00:17:16 --> 00:17:27 If they know and if they can set their watch to i'm going to get new things every two weeks all this stuff that we're about to talk about it all kinds of falls by the wayside because they they trust you Now you're going to give them something new.
00:17:27 --> 00:17:35 What it is is negotiable, but they're certain that you're going to give them something that's cool and that works for them and then helps them out.
00:17:35 --> 00:17:40 And then maybe occasionally they can complain enough and say maybe my biggest pain point.
00:17:41 --> 00:17:49 We'll get resolved in two weeks , because the alternate to that is like, we just don't believe that you're going to solve any for example, I'll give you an example of a software vendor.
00:17:49 --> 00:17:52 I don't trust to resolve any of my pain points.
00:17:52 --> 00:17:54 Oh, hashtag boy.
00:17:54 --> 00:17:55 I haven't done that in a while.
00:17:56 --> 00:17:58 I don't believe they will resolve anything.
00:17:58 --> 00:18:01 I any of my pain points because I don't think they care about me.
00:18:01 --> 00:18:05 Well, you, you bring up a point there I think ultimately it comes down to building trust.
00:18:05 --> 00:18:12 The company has built enough trust with customers by delivering on a fixed cadence or a regular, whatever regularity it is.
00:18:13 --> 00:18:15 Then they know that something's going to happen, right?
00:18:15 --> 00:18:17 And it keeps them it keeps them interested.
00:18:18 --> 00:18:23 It keeps them from jumping ship as well, because it's the devil you know, but at least they're going to get something.
00:18:23 --> 00:18:24 They know that.
00:18:24 --> 00:18:26 So there's something there to be said for that.
00:18:26 --> 00:18:29 Even in the next category, the ROI.
00:18:29 --> 00:18:44 There's no ROI calculation on, , we have regular recurring meetings with the vendors or with the customers they trust us enough to tell us their real business problems every week or however every two weeks, whatever the thing is, right?
00:18:44 --> 00:18:55 Enough to be included in our sprint reviews where they're attending our sprint reviews and giving us critical information about the software we're building to help us be more valuable into their workflows.
00:18:56 --> 00:18:57 They trust us.
00:18:57 --> 00:19:03 There is no ROI calculation that's going to factor that trust level in.
00:19:03 --> 00:19:05 So you're either, if you're a product manager.
00:19:05 --> 00:19:20 You can be a developer on a team and understand that this regular back and forth communication is what will make the world turn for your company and therefore be way more valuable than any other people that are just kind of ticking a box or punching a clock or whatever.
00:19:20 --> 00:19:26 But the reason I bring up ROI is because I want to pivot us to a category that people really struggle with.
00:19:27 --> 00:20:00 Like where we started in this podcast, we said, Hey, I Maybe I'm a product manager and I have this road map and I know that if I can accelerate this road map it'll be a lot better for the customers because maybe I'm meeting with them every week and maybe I have a team of 2, 3, 4 developers and I think if I just added two more developers, We could really punch ahead for these customers or we could really capture these new deals Like there's a lot of things that we might be able to do in the past the nice thing in my career is I've been super, super successful about lobbying the C suite for more money.
00:20:00 --> 00:20:03 What I really mean is I've been a huge pain.
00:20:03 --> 00:20:04 That's what it takes.
00:20:04 --> 00:20:08 to constantly drive to say, listen, these are the things we want to do.
00:20:08 --> 00:20:08 I make.
00:20:09 --> 00:20:16 Transparent these are the places that we want to go with the business in the future And here's a signal that those places could be profitable for us.
00:20:16 --> 00:20:33 That's part of product management, and then I put it to the business say hey like do you want to make a bet on moving us into these places because the bet is gonna cost this much money and Then usually what I will get is what is the ROI on giving you two more developers in your team?
00:20:33 --> 00:20:35 So you can make these new bets.
00:20:35 --> 00:20:39 Like how can you prove that there is ROI on the other side of it?
00:20:39 --> 00:20:45 Which is a very complicated question to answer for a product manager on a traditional.
00:20:46 --> 00:20:53 Marty Cagan style durable product team that has revenue tied to the product and that kind of thing.
00:20:53 --> 00:20:57 It's a fairly complicated answer because you're betting on revenue.
00:20:57 --> 00:20:58 On the other side of your bets.
00:20:59 --> 00:21:05 So, your feature bets and if you're doing outcome style bets, they have to have money tied to them.
00:21:05 --> 00:21:06 I feel a lot of product management books.
00:21:06 --> 00:21:07 don't go into that.
00:21:07 --> 00:21:09 It's like, Oh, we want to reduce churn.
00:21:10 --> 00:21:22 Well part of reducing churn of your application is you're now going to recapture 20 percent more value that would have otherwise churned out in the form of customers just dropping off because they don't value your solution.
00:21:22 --> 00:21:25 Traditional thinking doesn't really go that far, right?
00:21:25 --> 00:21:41 So if you're a product person, really anybody who's thinking about this from the perspective of the business value side of it, , you really need to differently you're not necessarily saying adding two developers will mean an ROI of X percent, right?
00:21:41 --> 00:21:45 Which is typically how ROI is calculated, a percentage basis, right?
00:21:45 --> 00:21:50 Over a time period, two months, two years, three years, whatever it might be, whatever the time period is.
00:21:50 --> 00:21:54 It's hard to kind of come up with a number like that in these kinds of situations.
00:21:54 --> 00:21:56 So what do you do instead, right?
00:21:56 --> 00:21:58 Forget about all the story point nonsense, right?
00:21:58 --> 00:22:05 Look at what difference has it made to the team and the outcomes of that team.
00:22:05 --> 00:22:09 After a certain period of time, let's allow for all of the nuances of getting new people at it.
00:22:10 --> 00:22:15 So let's say three months out, you look at that again and say,, here's what it's done for us.
00:22:15 --> 00:22:27 Reduce defects because we're pair programming now with the two extra people that we added, or we're delivering these features faster than we anticipated, measure that before making a change like that.
00:22:27 --> 00:22:28 So you have a reference point.
00:22:28 --> 00:22:33 I wrote down three things that were difficult to measure in terms of ROI.
00:22:33 --> 00:22:41 When people ask you for ROI, I wrote down three things that they should be asking for, but the simplistic view is ROI.
00:22:41 --> 00:22:44 I wrote down the time for a change to be made.
00:22:44 --> 00:22:51 So basically the lead time, the time to iterate, the time to put something out on the market learn from it.
00:22:51 --> 00:22:54 Then take it back in and change it and put it back out.
00:22:54 --> 00:22:54 That's iterate.
00:22:54 --> 00:22:56 That's the way I think of iterate.
00:22:56 --> 00:22:57 iteration time.
00:22:57 --> 00:22:59 And then the time to learn.
00:22:59 --> 00:23:05 time to learn might be completely separate from that because the time to learn is I'm spending my team up to learn something new.
00:23:05 --> 00:23:06 Okay.
00:23:06 --> 00:23:11 So those three things, which potentially could be completely disconnected from each other.
00:23:11 --> 00:23:13 So they might be related like time to iterate.
00:23:13 --> 00:23:26 Time to learn and time to change might all be the same related, but they might be related, but, if I'm entering a different market or a different target audience or introducing some kind of new feature, they might be completely unrelated.
00:23:27 --> 00:23:36 And all of those are rolled under ROI from the perspective of, I'm going to give you two new developers because I'm also going to give you three new.
00:23:36 --> 00:23:43 Ideal customer profiles that I want you to target for our software So let's say for example when the insurance business, right?
00:23:43 --> 00:23:46 And we're shucking car insurance.
00:23:46 --> 00:23:56 Oh, that's a little car insurance I know I'm scarred and show Brian and Om's car insurance And then we're gonna say okay, but now we also want to sell like a CDL commercial insurance.
00:23:57 --> 00:24:00 And also maybe we want to bring in a home insurance as well.
00:24:00 --> 00:24:02 Like you just described three different markets.
00:24:02 --> 00:24:11 You described commercial drivers, like professional drivers, like individual personal vehicle drivers, and then that's the German three for home insurance.
00:24:11 --> 00:24:13 Like those are complete, those are unrelated markets.
00:24:14 --> 00:24:21 Totally totally unrelated markets, but you say well, I mean our software can handle all three of those markets let's just roll into each one of them.
00:24:21 --> 00:24:22 Well, we can do that.
00:24:22 --> 00:24:38 Certainly We're all smart people here at Brian and Om insurance company but our development team doesn't know anything about home insurance, so We want to expand into that market maybe we have to spend some time understanding that market For sure maybe we partner with somebody.
00:24:38 --> 00:24:39 Maybe that's an easier way to do it.
00:24:39 --> 00:24:39 I don't know.
00:24:39 --> 00:24:47 I wanna hear like, well, what's the ROII the ROI is like the, the freshly made nice bed with like the nice hospital corners.
00:24:47 --> 00:24:53 And then when I pull the sheet back a little bit, there's underneath, there's a whole different world that I've never seen before.
00:24:53 --> 00:24:54 Yeah.
00:24:54 --> 00:24:55 Of like, what is all this?
00:24:55 --> 00:24:55 I don't.
00:24:55 --> 00:24:57 This is not anything that we know about.
00:24:57 --> 00:24:58 Yeah.
00:24:58 --> 00:25:03 But you know, we're understood by people that are making these demands of ROI, right?
00:25:03 --> 00:25:06 The finance folks, they don't necessarily know about these things.
00:25:06 --> 00:25:08 They don't necessarily care about these things.
00:25:08 --> 00:25:11 So I think it behooves us to be the conduit, right?
00:25:11 --> 00:25:14 To translate that in terms that they can actually understand.
00:25:15 --> 00:25:30 So let's spend a second and talk about improved ROI from the perspective of coming up on line with a small business that has started with a couple founders and an initial starting crew in a small business maybe 15, 20 employees, maybe.
00:25:30 --> 00:25:34 And I have to attack the problem of technical debt before it buries the company.
00:25:34 --> 00:25:44 Because the revenue coming in there's some manual processes and usually the developers are doing some things on nights and weekends to keep the system running and stuff like that.
00:25:44 --> 00:25:47 I have to knock that stuff out before we can scale the company.
00:25:47 --> 00:25:54 You want to take a company from 5 million to 25 million to 50 million, some of this stuff's got to get automated and simplified.
00:25:54 --> 00:25:55 Simplified.
00:25:55 --> 00:25:57 That's the thing we don't talk about in software development.
00:25:57 --> 00:26:07 That's a four letter word right there, We have to simplify some of this architecture to make it easier for a smaller team to maintain this larger solution over time.
00:26:07 --> 00:26:09 And that's one of the things that I've made a lot of money in my career.
00:26:09 --> 00:26:11 Not actual money because I ain't got no yachts.
00:26:12 --> 00:26:17 Off of understanding, Hey, we can like a percentage of our time on the development team.
00:26:18 --> 00:26:20 needs to be spent paying down that interest.
00:26:20 --> 00:26:24 If you go back to our podcast with Alex about technical debt, we need to pay down that interest.
00:26:24 --> 00:26:28 And also the principle against the interest very quickly.
00:26:28 --> 00:26:33 While also keeping the lights on and developing new features and bringing new customers in.
00:26:33 --> 00:26:33 But we need to.
00:26:33 --> 00:26:53 Carve off as much of that cash as possible to pay that principal down so that when we are ready We don't have all this stuff that was incurred To build the initial system and get the initial customers and get our initial profit base You know our initial profitability as a as a company To launch us to the moon, A lot of the founders don't think this way.
00:26:53 --> 00:27:03 Although now what I'm finding is for all of that work that required manual drudgery, there's opportunities to outsource that the companies that can do a lot for you.
00:27:03 --> 00:27:04 So you need to think about that.
00:27:05 --> 00:27:07 But the thing that people should understand is.
00:27:07 --> 00:27:11 Yes, we're saying wind down as much as possible.
00:27:11 --> 00:27:17 All of that technical debt you possibly in real life never get to zero because of the pressure to deliver constantly.
00:27:17 --> 00:27:18 So you're going to maintain it.
00:27:18 --> 00:27:24 The trick is to carry as little as you can and on an ongoing basis, keep paying that down.
00:27:24 --> 00:27:27 So what you do carry, you want to make sure that's the good fat, right?
00:27:27 --> 00:27:31 You want to make sure that that's the stuff that's not going to hinder you as much.
00:27:31 --> 00:27:39 And some of the other stuff, which potentially is like basically a bale of cotton or whatever, hay that just keeps growing bigger and bigger over time.
00:27:39 --> 00:27:44 That's the ticket right there and savvy development managers know this, right?
00:27:44 --> 00:27:50 And they can translate that up to finance folks and say, this is what's going on here, right?
00:27:50 --> 00:27:51 We have to pay this down.
00:27:51 --> 00:27:54 That's why our throughput isn't as big as it can be.
00:27:54 --> 00:27:55 Theoretically.
00:27:55 --> 00:27:59 It's a little less because we're also paying this down on an ongoing basis.
00:27:59 --> 00:28:00 Yeah.
00:28:00 --> 00:28:04 this was not the original intention of this podcast to be where we're at right now.
00:28:05 --> 00:28:27 I'm very happy that we're here because there are some world class CTOs out there can explain and bring it to the sea, the bubble, what we're talking about up to the C level to say, if we don't invest in this, if we're going to constantly be held back by the interests on the loan that we took out we can't take advantage of all of what the technology could provide in the future.
00:28:28 --> 00:28:31 So basically they're laying out a technological road map to the future.
00:28:32 --> 00:28:34 It's somehow woven into the product roadmap.
00:28:34 --> 00:28:42 So they've already worked with product to say, listen, we need some kind of minimal amount of dollars time translated to dollars, right?
00:28:42 --> 00:28:49 To say, we need to pay down this debt because we need to get to a future of this technological.
00:28:49 --> 00:28:51 Our safe causes architectural runway.
00:28:51 --> 00:28:54 Like I think that that's a great term for it, architectural runway.
00:28:54 --> 00:28:56 I really think that's, that's one of the things that safe got, right.
00:28:56 --> 00:29:05 If I'm going to praise safe for once in a lifetime like you need to be showing the future of the organization, Hey, these are the emerging tech trends in the future.
00:29:06 --> 00:29:08 And going with these things can bring our.
00:29:08 --> 00:29:15 Cost of ownership down and can increase the profit margin, basically of the cost to run the business versus what you're bringing in.
00:29:15 --> 00:29:16 So we want to constantly be.
00:29:17 --> 00:29:30 Expanding that margin between what it costs to run the business and what the technology costs I want to at least show that we're keeping them equal because we're broadening what we can do with the technology out of the box constantly and forever.
00:29:30 --> 00:29:37 And like that, that's a great thing to present to your C level , I say that because I have a technology background, right?
00:29:38 --> 00:29:41 But again, I firmly believe that's a CTO's job.
00:29:42 --> 00:29:43 It is a CTO's job.
00:29:43 --> 00:29:56 I do think that you know, development side of the organization, they need to partner with product and, and putting in on the backlog, certain tech net reduction, refactoring, whatever you want to call it items, right?
00:29:56 --> 00:29:59 And those items need not be buried in the backlog.
00:29:59 --> 00:30:09 They should actually be made visible on a chart when that's presented to leadership to say, this is the net new stuff that we're doing and here is all the tech net reduction that we're doing.
00:30:10 --> 00:30:12 So the messaging is clear, right?
00:30:12 --> 00:30:15 To the C level folks, here's where we're spending our money, right?
00:30:15 --> 00:30:16 And here's why we're doing this.
00:30:17 --> 00:30:29 that's really the key to explain it in those terms to say we're spending this amount of our bandwidth, on cleaning the house, And then this other stuff we're doing for Investing in the future, doing new functionality, etcetera.
00:30:29 --> 00:30:33 if you can do that successfully, you'll have no friction from them.
00:30:33 --> 00:30:39 Because what you're trying to really get is to the point where you say, if we don't do this, here's the opportunity cost, right?
00:30:40 --> 00:30:43 Where that top band of new features that we're Delivering.
00:30:43 --> 00:30:44 It's not about the features.
00:30:44 --> 00:30:51 It's the revenue you're going to garner from those that's going to shrink over time because your tech net grows, right?
00:30:51 --> 00:30:54 So that output entropy is going to be constant, right?
00:30:54 --> 00:30:59 And so as your tech debt grows, your profit margin is going to shrink.
00:30:59 --> 00:31:03 And if you can relay that message clearly to sea level, I think you're onto something.
00:31:03 --> 00:31:06 What do you say to the people that, will say, we're not going to give you.
00:31:06 --> 00:31:14 Two more developers, because the way you're doing product management, I have to wait till 12 months or six months or whatever, to the end of the year to show impact on the product line.
00:31:14 --> 00:31:16 And I'm going to add them to your team.
00:31:16 --> 00:31:24 And you're telling me it's going to be three months because your velocity is going to be all out of whack because you've got to go to this forming, storming nonsense that you're telling me about.
00:31:24 --> 00:31:29 And then you'll get your working agreement together and it's going to be X number of months until I see any.
00:31:29 --> 00:31:31 Impact to my bottom line.
00:31:31 --> 00:31:36 So I'm not even going to bother giving you any developers it's not an uncommon argument to hear.
00:31:36 --> 00:31:37 It's a very elegant, right?
00:31:37 --> 00:31:43 I will, I freely admit I am not representing the argument very well, but it is a real argument that I've experienced and I, and I.
00:31:43 --> 00:31:45 I haven't taken very well is what I'm saying.
00:31:45 --> 00:31:45 Yeah.
00:31:45 --> 00:31:51 So one of the ways you can kind of start to tackle that is to say what's the alternative, right?
00:31:51 --> 00:31:59 The alternative is you don't add this investment to developers or whatever the investment is, and you can now look at what you've done.
00:31:59 --> 00:32:05 From a point in time to today and say, if everything stays constant, we're going to go down this path.
00:32:05 --> 00:32:07 And is that acceptable, right?
00:32:07 --> 00:32:08 You're an SMB.
00:32:08 --> 00:32:09 Is that acceptable?
00:32:09 --> 00:32:12 If it is, We don't need to add more people.
00:32:12 --> 00:32:13 We don't need to add any more investment.
00:32:13 --> 00:32:19 Inevitably though, in the situation that SMBs typically are, you have competition, right?
00:32:19 --> 00:32:23 And you're always fighting for every inch of your market share or every, how would you measure it?
00:32:24 --> 00:32:24 Percentage.
00:32:24 --> 00:32:26 But anyway, you're always fighting for market share.
00:32:26 --> 00:32:33 So in order to do better, you have to spend a little, it's like, you can't go faster unless you're willing to pedal faster.
00:32:34 --> 00:32:35 So let's do this.
00:32:35 --> 00:32:39 If there's pushback, give me one developer and we'll see how it goes.
00:32:40 --> 00:32:47 You're going to wait still, but hopefully within a short period of time, after they've become settled, I can show you a tangible benefit.
00:32:48 --> 00:32:52 And at that point, I'm going to come back to you and say, let's add the other one.
00:32:52 --> 00:32:54 Or I might need two back at that point in time.
00:32:54 --> 00:32:56 That's typically how I would frame that.
00:32:56 --> 00:32:57 Right.
00:32:57 --> 00:32:59 You got to think about it from their perspective too.
00:32:59 --> 00:33:00 You're an SMB.
00:33:00 --> 00:33:04 You really cannot wait 12 months to see a return on that investment.
00:33:04 --> 00:33:10 That money you could put somewhere else, at least in your mind, that can give you quicker or better return.
00:33:10 --> 00:33:13 So you have to fight that in a way that makes sense to the people.
00:33:14 --> 00:33:14 Yeah.
00:33:14 --> 00:33:29 Like I, I completely with you I guess they, in reality that like a lot of the stuff that we're talking about Oh, well, how do I know when to hire a permanent scoremaster or when to bring in a contract, agile coach, for example, to kind of help my teams evolve.
00:33:29 --> 00:33:33 , some of that stuff hopefully is leading edge, meaning you've booked some business.
00:33:34 --> 00:33:36 In order to fulfill that, you haven't got enough capacity.
00:33:37 --> 00:33:45 That's the good way to do it because now you know, you've already got some deposits down, you're going to try and fulfill those orders, and you can't do it with your current crew.
00:33:45 --> 00:33:48 So you need to add more people, right?
00:33:48 --> 00:33:50 That's an easy one to kind of defend.
00:33:50 --> 00:33:53 Where it gets harder is you're vying for greater market share.
00:33:53 --> 00:33:56 You think and you believe in your heart of hearts.
00:33:56 --> 00:34:01 Not just you, the company as a whole that adding people will enable you to get there.
00:34:01 --> 00:34:08 How do you now relay that as a message to the higher ups, the leadership and say, this is what we need to do.
00:34:08 --> 00:34:09 And here's why.
00:34:09 --> 00:34:16 And I really think that the only way to do that is to just talk in numbers in terms they understand adding two people will cost X.
00:34:16 --> 00:34:17 Right?
00:34:17 --> 00:34:20 If we add them, we will reduce the time to market by Y.
00:34:20 --> 00:34:29 And this, that then in turn will result in, now these are all projections, and be you can be conservative or you can give the three point projections, right?
00:34:29 --> 00:34:32 Extremely aggressive, conservative, moderate, whatever.
00:34:32 --> 00:34:33 That's what I can suggest you do.
00:34:33 --> 00:34:36 I mean, this is basically what financial advisors do to you, right?
00:34:36 --> 00:34:38 They just say this is a a projection.
00:34:38 --> 00:34:41 I'm a product manager at a SMB, right?
00:34:41 --> 00:34:47 It's a small business, 50 ish employees, one product manager full time, right?
00:34:48 --> 00:34:50 Maybe the product manager has like two teams, right?
00:34:50 --> 00:34:53 If I'm a product manager and my teams could really benefit from agile coach.
00:34:53 --> 00:34:55 what is the case here?
00:34:55 --> 00:35:01 Where I could lobby my management to say, , Hey, let's bring like six months of an agile coach, I think could really accelerate us.
00:35:02 --> 00:35:19 What is the case here that I could make to my company to have them spend six months with a contracted firm to bring an agile coach in how can I convince them that like, I already know that an agile coach constantly pressing on both the team and the organization to develop.
00:35:19 --> 00:35:22 Some of these things that I know the team and the organization need to develop.
00:35:22 --> 00:35:25 I need someone to coach both teams and the organizations.
00:35:25 --> 00:35:32 to kind of evolve their practices, and I, again, I'm a product manager with two teams, so I have two full time jobs, so I can't just do it.
00:35:32 --> 00:35:37 So like, how can I arm the Azure coach for success if I'm lobbying for them to come in?
00:35:37 --> 00:35:42 Yeah, I mean, one of the things to do is to look at why what's your conviction based upon, right?
00:35:42 --> 00:35:45 You're obviously seeing some dysfunction somewhere.
00:35:45 --> 00:35:52 So try and get that down on paper and say, These are the processes that we're doing today that aren't very good.
00:35:52 --> 00:35:53 They're not efficient.
00:35:53 --> 00:35:58 They're sometimes they're not even necessary and you could look at the whole value chain model, right?
00:35:58 --> 00:36:04 And look from start to finish all of the operations that need to happen in various parts of the organization.
00:36:04 --> 00:36:16 You can map those out pretty quickly in a day or so you could come up with this and say, here are all the things that We do, we do X and then there's a wait time of three days because that's how long it takes for someone to give an approval and then we do Y.
00:36:16 --> 00:36:34 So, Net net is you will simply map those out and say here are the inefficiencies that we have in order to remediate these We need to bring in a coach that can coach our folks to do things in a different way And if we do remediate those Where's the payback if you can enumerate that payback, right?
00:36:34 --> 00:36:36 So what does it mean to a company?
00:36:36 --> 00:36:38 Smb Like a product manager with two teams.
00:36:38 --> 00:36:40 What does it mean to you if you could reduce?
00:36:40 --> 00:36:41 the delays that you have Right.
00:36:41 --> 00:36:43 In your processing by 50%.
00:36:44 --> 00:36:44 20%.
00:36:44 --> 00:36:47 And that allows you to then put a dollar on it, right?
00:36:47 --> 00:36:50 that's not necessarily inside of your teams, that might be out.
00:36:50 --> 00:36:50 That's organizational.
00:36:50 --> 00:36:51 The broader organization.
00:36:51 --> 00:36:51 Yeah.
00:36:51 --> 00:36:51 Yeah.
00:36:51 --> 00:36:52 Yeah.
00:36:52 --> 00:36:53 The tough part of this.
00:36:53 --> 00:36:57 It is absolutely, the executives will completely understand the reason for it.
00:36:58 --> 00:37:00 And I think it will be easier to convince them.
00:37:01 --> 00:37:05 The middle managers will look at you and say, Brian, it sounds like you're finger pointing.
00:37:05 --> 00:37:15 It sounds like you're saying, decisions Drag on and are delayed because you can't get the specific middle managers signoffs that you need.
00:37:15 --> 00:37:18 And it just sounds like you don't have a good relationship with these middle managers.
00:37:18 --> 00:37:20 Sounds like a you problem, Brian.
00:37:20 --> 00:37:21 That's what it sounds like.
00:37:21 --> 00:37:22 Sounds like you being a troublemaker.
00:37:22 --> 00:37:22 Yeah.
00:37:23 --> 00:37:26 Or we're doing things we've done this way and it's worked fine.
00:37:26 --> 00:37:26 Thank you.
00:37:26 --> 00:37:27 Right.
00:37:27 --> 00:37:27 And you get that.
00:37:27 --> 00:37:28 Yeah.
00:37:28 --> 00:37:30 Other product managers don't have this problem, Om.
00:37:30 --> 00:37:32 It sounds like a, it sounds like a you problem.
00:37:33 --> 00:37:34 It sounds like a personal problem with you.
00:37:35 --> 00:37:37 You're, you're hitting real close.
00:37:37 --> 00:37:37 I understand.
00:37:38 --> 00:37:38 I understand.
00:37:38 --> 00:37:39 I've been there.
00:37:39 --> 00:37:40 I understand.
00:37:40 --> 00:37:41 I can relate to this, right?
00:37:41 --> 00:37:51 So one of the things that can help is this, you don't necessarily have to go the whole Wait, meaning don't say we need to bring a, an agile coach in for six months, for example.
00:37:51 --> 00:37:59 you could say, well, let's bring somebody in to do an assessment and it's a lower cost because they're only here for a short period of time.
00:37:59 --> 00:38:01 They're not vested in us, right?
00:38:01 --> 00:38:03 They're just going to do an assessment and they're going to give you.
00:38:03 --> 00:38:06 An assessment report that says, here's how things are.
00:38:06 --> 00:38:08 And then you can say, okay, thank you.
00:38:08 --> 00:38:09 And let them go.
00:38:09 --> 00:38:09 That's fine.
00:38:09 --> 00:38:13 Or you could say, We could really benefit from improvement on this.
00:38:13 --> 00:38:16 So armed with that knowledge now, which is evidence.
00:38:17 --> 00:38:22 You can make a decision of hiring that coach or whatever the decision might be.
00:38:22 --> 00:38:28 So going in a little bit as an assessment initially, because you're not spending a whole lot, right?
00:38:28 --> 00:38:34 And the middle managers aren't afraid that they're being perturbed in any way, because this person is just coming in to do a sense.
00:38:34 --> 00:38:35 You could throw out what they say.
00:38:35 --> 00:38:37 Like that, that's a great point.
00:38:37 --> 00:38:40 Because potentially, if it's a good assessment, they could be giving you.
00:38:41 --> 00:38:43 Your quantitative data that you're looking for.
00:38:43 --> 00:38:47 Hey, on average, your teams wait for X number of days for a decision to me.
00:38:47 --> 00:38:50 Do you want to bring that number down?
00:38:51 --> 00:38:55 maybe you need to use a tool of organizational design to bring that number down.
00:38:55 --> 00:38:59 Oh, well, we never considered that organizational design could be a tool.
00:38:59 --> 00:39:22 To reduce our reduce cognitive load on teams or reduce the time with which to make decisions it seems that you wouldn't have to make such a difficult case to just bring someone in to do an assessment, just a couple of questions a week or two hey, just ask a question, maybe, I don't know how long a typical assessment is, but Somewhere between two to four weeks, depending on the size of the organization.
00:39:22 --> 00:39:25 just a couple bucks to find out What's the temperature?
00:39:25 --> 00:39:26 What's the temperature?
00:39:26 --> 00:39:30 Yep, and you still have the option to say, Yeah, we know how bad it is now, but we're not gonna do it.
00:39:30 --> 00:39:31 Yeah, you still have that option.
00:39:31 --> 00:39:34 At least you're doing that knowingly, right?
00:39:34 --> 00:39:34 Yeah.
00:39:34 --> 00:39:42 It's interesting that we came back to get help or like one of our least viewed sadly like people's refusal to just ask for help.
00:39:42 --> 00:39:43 I don't know what that's rooted in.
00:39:43 --> 00:39:45 I really want to dig into that.
00:39:45 --> 00:39:49 I need to find somebody in the community, somebody who's a psychology person.
00:39:49 --> 00:39:50 Yeah.
00:39:50 --> 00:39:53 I need to find somebody in the community that can really help us work through that.
00:39:53 --> 00:39:54 It's like, why are people.
00:39:54 --> 00:39:59 Especially professionals in a career for a specific amount of time why are they so resistant?
00:39:59 --> 00:40:00 Well, I think a lot of people feel challenged.
00:40:00 --> 00:40:04 I certainly think a lot of people feel like it's a personal challenge to them.
00:40:04 --> 00:40:06 Yeah, when you say well get help What do you mean get help?
00:40:06 --> 00:40:07 That's crazy.
00:40:07 --> 00:40:24 Like it's I know what I'm doing It's an it's a challenge their identity and therefore like something very personal and I get that I get that but I also think it's There's got to be organizations where the most successful organizations probably have found a way to push through that.
00:40:24 --> 00:40:32 To say, hey, this, this thing that you're feeling where it's an attack on your on your identity, let's take that, put it off to the side for a second.
00:40:32 --> 00:40:33 And just consider it.
00:40:34 --> 00:40:42 And then if you really have real a real roadblock real, a real harsh opinion on it, then bring it back and we'll talk about it.
00:40:42 --> 00:40:47 , but just try to put your personal first take off to the side for a second.
00:40:47 --> 00:41:00 Turn it into an opportunity and not a threat to you necessarily And for that the organization needs to reassure people You know, the employees, this is not something that we're doing in order to thin the crowd, right?
00:41:00 --> 00:41:02 This is not a threat to you.
00:41:02 --> 00:41:06 If you embrace this and treat it as an opportunity, we can all win from it.
00:41:06 --> 00:41:10 Some organizations do actually do that very well, but they tend to be the larger ones.
00:41:10 --> 00:41:14 it's organizations, well, either the larger ones or the very, very small ones.
00:41:14 --> 00:41:15 Yeah, very small ones.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:15 They're the ones.
00:41:15 --> 00:41:18 Yeah, the entrepreneurial ones, what they're invested in.
00:41:18 --> 00:41:22 I was telling you earlier, I had a one on one with a coworker of mine recently.
00:41:23 --> 00:41:27 She's not going to listen to this, but shout out to her where I was saying some folks.
00:41:27 --> 00:41:43 just have a difficult time because of the way they are raised like from children, like the way they were raised of dealing with , Hey I'm not questioning your identity when I say this is a bad decision or a bad action that you've committed to, right?
00:41:43 --> 00:41:47 But we need to talk about it and then maybe make a different decision.
00:41:47 --> 00:41:50 And then like everything just breaks down for them.
00:41:50 --> 00:41:59 that is a personal failing you've run into and in business, I feel there's a, it's almost taboo to say like there are some people you will run into.
00:41:59 --> 00:42:07 That have personal failings like this that can't see past this, that the business will be limited while those are the decision makers.
00:42:07 --> 00:42:13 yeah, I blame the education system because we're not really educated to think about this in this way, right?
00:42:13 --> 00:42:16 We're not educated to say, Okay, we have a problem.
00:42:16 --> 00:42:18 Tackle the problem, not the person.
00:42:18 --> 00:42:22 Unfortunately, people immediately look at it and say, it's your decision.
00:42:22 --> 00:42:24 And then you go on the offensive now.
00:42:24 --> 00:42:24 Right.
00:42:24 --> 00:42:25 It's my decision.
00:42:25 --> 00:42:26 It was the right one.
00:42:26 --> 00:42:26 You don't know.
00:42:26 --> 00:42:27 I know what I'm doing.
00:42:27 --> 00:42:31 There should be a framework to invoke to say, Oh, okay.
00:42:31 --> 00:42:32 Oh my, I understand why you think like that.
00:42:32 --> 00:42:36 But let's take a step back for a second and let's walk through the framework.
00:42:36 --> 00:42:40 And then there should be in your mind, you should say, Oh, walk through the framework.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:41 Oh, Oh, okay.
00:42:41 --> 00:42:42 I understand.
00:42:42 --> 00:42:42 Okay.
00:42:42 --> 00:42:44 Well, what is the situation?
00:42:44 --> 00:42:46 What is the evidence I have in hand?
00:42:46 --> 00:42:48 What is the experience that leads me to believe this?
00:42:49 --> 00:42:49 How does it.
00:42:49 --> 00:42:51 Conflict with the evidence or whatever.
00:42:51 --> 00:43:07 Like there should be a framework steps inside of a framework that you walk through to, to kind of check your self to, to say, Oh, is my identity or something I'm bringing to this conversation coloring my opinion of the thing to let me not see it.
00:43:07 --> 00:43:07 Yeah.
00:43:07 --> 00:43:09 In its in its reality.
00:43:09 --> 00:43:12 Yeah, I mean, there's a coaching model that kind of touches on this.
00:43:12 --> 00:43:19 I don't think it tackles the problem head on necessarily where you bring this out of the coachee slowly over time.
00:43:19 --> 00:43:25 And, but I don't think that's really, I don't think that's the instrument that tackles this problem head on.
00:43:25 --> 00:43:25 Right.
00:43:25 --> 00:43:33 I just think it tangentially touches on, this is, this is one for another podcast, we'll have to find somebody who this is, this is their niche.
00:43:33 --> 00:43:35 Yeah Hey, you've discovered.
00:43:35 --> 00:43:36 An issue.
00:43:36 --> 00:43:39 It might be something personal to you.
00:43:39 --> 00:43:44 Let's break it down and make you a better leader because we've learned how to break this thing down.
00:43:44 --> 00:43:45 Yeah, I agree.
00:43:45 --> 00:43:51 what we're talking about now is a leadership failing that needs to be overcome for you to succeed in your business.
00:43:51 --> 00:43:57 And I feel like when we're at the point of pointing out leadership things that need to be advanced in order for your business to advance, we're done.
00:43:57 --> 00:43:58 We're done.
00:43:58 --> 00:43:59 Okay.
00:43:59 --> 00:44:02 Well, thank you all for staying with us on this one too.
00:44:02 --> 00:44:06 And let us know down below what you'd like us to talk about next.
00:44:06 --> 00:44:07 And ring that bell.
00:44:07 --> 00:44:08 Like and subscribe.
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