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[:So join us on this journey of conversation. With the folks that bring ideas to life.
ost, Zach Darnell. Welcome to: lf and be on the lookout for [: lk about our favorite things.: This doesn't have to be from:Yeah. So thought about this a little bit. Favorite product, probably for home that was maybe new last year, not so much work related was my oldest son bought me a whoop for Christmas. Ooh, and so that was interesting, I guess, to, to share and compare data and look and see how different things through the year impacted.
t that said, Hey, here's your:And here's how much normal people spent in recovery mode and sleeping. Here's how much you had. Oh, so that a leaderboard aspect of it? A little bit. It was more, more of a healthy, like healthy. And then where you were sort of a thing. Okay. And so it was interesting. A great, like user experience, a great, great design of the product.
ference. So other than that, [:And so it's like, it's a good reminder of how design plays an important role in products and how, how they feel, but also understanding how sort of a targeted use and the impact on behavior changes, how much that affects. The products we use and why products are successful and not. And so, you know, it's something we take into a lot of conversations with clients and any great product almost always involves some sort of behavior change.
And that very rarely shows up as a requirement or a user story or something. And so being intentional about those conversations. And so. This is one of those sort of products that I kind of got to see that experience. I would now favorite products at work. Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Now, did it actually have some behavior change for you?
, especially around thinking [:And you know what? Maybe it wasn't myself or didn't feel great, or there were other aspects when you sort of reflect on it. And then you can start to do some, uh, comparative some comparisons also, and noticing if I eat within a couple hours of bed or eat, you know, late meal, I miss dinner. You kind of see the impact of that.
Then you sort of track sleep and you're like, Oh, I never get sleepless. And I wonder why, then you're like, Oh, wait a minute. And then what happens a couple of times you start to connect some of the dots. So for sure, for sure. Well, that's good. I mean, that's some behavior. Mission accomplished from them.
o prompts and thinking about [:And so there's a lot of aspects there for me personally, as someone who's always struggled with writing or capturing thoughts and ideas, while I can't say that I published more this year than I have other years, certainly I probably have done more. Writing or playing or getting thoughts out and using the tools to help support those.
oping and not picking up new [:Or trying to understand several different perspectives and kind of bringing them together, looking for content and ideas or leaders in the industry. And so it was interesting that that started playing a much larger role than, than I had maybe even anticipated at the beginning. Then I was like, I just want to play with these things.
I'm the same boat, you know, I feel like we're in what our second or third year of chat GPT plus all the other tools. It really, you know, when I open a new tab, it's my screen that I default to. I think I'm on perplexity right now for whatever reason, just I'm trying to try them all out and get comfortable with all of them and kind of understand the nuance differences.
special, but it's black, red [:And I absolutely have gone back to pen and paper. You have as well kind of embarked on this journey. Still love my iPad. Don't get me wrong. But there's something about just this tactile, get stuff out of my head, whether it's meeting notes or an idea or whatever, it's been so helpful. So that's my personal favorite product to the year has been going back to pen and paper.
I mean, maybe not the fountain pen or out like you have. I might have to try these out. I just got a new one that I. You really enjoy it? Yeah. Okay. We'll talk about that later. What about favorite companies or thought leaders? I'm going to throw both of them out. Companies maybe we're just aligned around the product.
don't know, Jeff, Jeff's the [:He's ready. Kind of really coined the term and just been a really great model for me and helping. And the interesting thing is, is, is that the companies he's consulting with and doing stuff with are quite a bit different than our companies. And so it's provided opportunities for us to share and compare notes.
And for me to relay back to him how some of his things are working in. Larger enterprises who are building physical products and safety, critical products, medical devices and whatnot, and still have him kind of share what he's learning and what he's doing with companies and how it's influencing how they work.
And so that's great. The other one, it's somebody actually met sort of through Jeff or common relationship with Jeff is a guy named Pete Anderson. Who is now the chief product officer at Turnberry and Pete has been really fun getting to know him and just share little things. You know, he's in Minnesota, get a text from him on Halloween with him sitting outside in it with his big solo fire pit and beer hand.
loween up there. And so. But [:Pete's been in the industry a long time and was a target for a really long time. And so someone who's been there doing it. More than just, and there's, I feel like there's a lot of people who did it for a while and then they've gone and built companies and then they've written all these books and whatnot, but in some cases they feel a little more removed from the day to day, hands on how people are actually doing things and, and Pete's not one of those.
So it's been really good to get a compare notes and talk and share. And, uh, he visited here earlier this year, both Jeff and Pete were here for Agilendi. Which I think those videos are out there if people want to look at them, but it was a great time. We got to sit down with our CEO and president Roman Ori and Pete and Roman had a chance to really talk and kind of compare notes and just talk about business and how we're operating and services sort of industry and just really good.
inking about this. This week [:She had a couple of books, obviously awesome and sales pitch, and she was presenting on her newer book sales pitch this year at, uh, industry, which you and I've been to in the past and I ended up having the opportunity to meet with her and chat with her. Um, It's like, she's got a, you know, a marketing and a positioning background and has worked with insert company name bunches of them and has helped some pretty high level positions, but it was more the, I don't know if it was boiling the concept down to a very specific process of helping to guide a customer through why they should buy from you versus kind of the typical, let me pull up my slide deck and show you fancy words and logos and kind of the, you know, What I would say the kind of like typical SAS sales model that I feel like I've seen in a lot of different companies.
She's taking a more [:There's no, you know, OTE that we have to worry about, but we do have to care about like trying to explain a relatively complex thing of building custom software. In a relatively simple way to our customers, it really changed the dynamic for me in the way that I think about trying to position to use her word position, what we do for a living and in a not salesy way and just a very factual data driven methodology.
ich I feel like is very much [:That's interesting. So I thought of two things that are somewhat connected. One is old that I reached back for and pulled out this year. And one. It's been around a little while, but seeing it pop up more in our clients and, and really kind of leaning into it. And so the first is a concept called event storming.
We do lots of discoveries with customers moving from strategy and choosing opportunities that we're going to, or problems we're going to go solve. To discovery, which is identifying solutions to those problems and then moving into ultimately delivery. Man, have you story mapping and stuff for a long time, event storming came out of the domain driven design world.
ple influencing those events [:And, uh, what data is needed or systems are needed as part of that. And so it really lays out, you might look at it and say, it seems similar to a story map or maybe even a journey map. There's some nuance to there, but one of the great ahas then was, they have this idea or this concept of a bounded context, so being able to draw a box around a piece of this event storm.
That is independent and you could describe sort of like inputs and outputs to it as things are sort of flowing through this map or this event storm. That's been really interesting because a lot of our customers, as we've done this and are integrating and building much larger products, there's lots more teams than us involved.
Those bounded contexts become interesting ways to align teams to the work. And there's several clients who've asked us for strategies or, you know, Ideas around, well, how should we think about this? You know, we have a product in Europe. We're going to launch our first version in the United States. Do we align teams around Europe versus us?
[:And so it's something I used years ago. You just keep picking up new tools and learning new things, and you kind of forget some of the ones you have and yeah, and sometimes reaching back for those or trusted. And so we've used it a lot more in the last six months, I would say this year, and even, you know, we're going into some new clients next year, and I'm already sort of penciled it in as part of a Jennifer for a lot of these workshops customers.
And so. I love that because, you know, it's almost like a book. Sometimes you need to reread the thing, given where you are in life or the circumstances or whatever it is. And it gives you new insight. And it's like, oh, you know, this is actually really helpful now. Well, maybe it wasn't 10 years ago, but now it's like really awesome.
So the other tool or [:One of the sort of executive stakeholders there was talking about this new product and the architecture of this product was played a huge role in the parts of the architecture that involving AI and data and connecting these things together and really moving to the cloud. And this is a highly secure.
System that really important from a security data perspective. And so there was lots of conversations around that, but it became real obvious. We were delivering the system back and we'd also done an event storm on this. And so we had identified these bounded context, but they were going to take it back in house and use us to help develop and deliver it, but their teams as well.
del that they already had in [:And like, wow, this is probably not going to work if we don't also offer some insight into how they should think about structuring teams to be able to deliver this product. Way we envisioned it and not only deliver it, but then, you know, maintain it and keep it up. And so the concept right there, it comes from a book called team topologies and team topologies really identifies four types of teams, a stream aligned team or value stream aligned team, a complicated sub component team, a enablement team and a platform team.
eople, and we just call it a [:But the reality is that there's actually a, probably a stream aligned team in there and then there's a platform team. And if we were thinking about that, we might staff or even consider how we might engage with the customer and with each other. Yes, all the context around the team is very differently. So, so the two ideas kind of really flow hand in hand.
It was Joel Toseat who sort of really kind of connected that idea for me. But that team topologies concept, how are we building and structuring teams? What's those teams look like? And how are we aligning those teams to the work and being intentional about that? I have seen start to pop up more and more and play a larger role, I guess, in the overall success of delivering a large enterprise system.
nk about engaging those, but [:I love that. I love when you can pull back in the archives a little bit to pull things forward, cause they're, they're still relevant sometimes is I was thinking about this for myself. You know, they're more of a concept is what came to mind for something that I feel like I've been trying to live into model and then also kind of share with others inside of SCP.
And it's this idea of, you know, it's easier to edit something than it is to create. And if you think about our business model being the crudest thing, we're consultants, right? But more than that, we really help customers solve problems. And a lot of times that comes with a position on something like have an opinion about it and be willing to negotiate or find what works well, but sometimes customers don't really know until you give them a blank page, it's overwhelming.
cision on what to do at all. [:So that's something I've been living into. And then very recently in the last week, actually talk about something that is not necessarily new, but. Had a new impact on me this year was an immunity to change map. I was at a workshop last week and we practiced this and learned a little bit about it. I remember doing this about six years ago.
for the way that you show up [:And it just kind of helps you see things through a specific lens. And it's, it is a framework that can help you do that. And I've just, it was very impactful for me. So. There's a book about it, you can read and I happened to do a workshop with it and had it facilitated, but it was really cool. Absolutely loved it.
So interesting. Those are my two. Okay. I think our next thing that we wanted to talk about, obviously every year, hopefully we learn things. I don't know. I, I oftentimes describe you, Chris, as one of the people in the building that's really good at asking questions that either challenge your thinking or expand what you might believe about something.
So I'm kind of curious for you. What have you learned this year? That's challenged your thinking or maybe even believe that somebody else should know. So this was an easy one for me. It was a really straight sort of aha, not too long ago, read a book called and like, maybe it was really applicable, but it's called how to take smart notes.
in this advent of all these [:And so the book was fascinating. There was a lot of super interesting things in there. But. But at the crux of it, they make a statement that was very challenging to me. And they essentially said, writing is everything. And they basically, as someone who loves to learn, and I read a lot and love learning new concepts and ideas, and really love the challenge of trying to put these different ideas together, I found the book so fascinating, but they said, if you're not really writing them down in your own words, like that is like the test or quiz to indicate that you really understood.
ad. And the fact is, is that [:So you've probably experienced this in school, like review your notes and it's like, Oh, yep. And then you go review them again. And you're like, Oh yeah, I got this. But what you've convinced yourself you understand it because you've memorized it seems familiar. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Convinced yourself.
You've understand. You haven't really tested yourself to see if you really understand it or not. So then you go to the test and you're like, man, I don't know what I did. I reviewed my notes. I went over him and he didn't really. And so this idea that writing is everything for someone who struggles mightily writing, I found myself being very challenged.
the learning, but because I [:That kind of stung a little bit as someone who takes a lot of pride and enjoys learning my job. So it depends upon learning sort of feel this challenge of. Well, Chris, you're not really learning. You just enjoy the dopamine hit of discovering something new. And you either have to accept that and be that's okay.
lf to this concept of really [:And when you can't write it, they would say. You haven't really learned it. You know, it's the old adage of like, I can't explain if I struggle explaining it to you, maybe I don't really understand the concept. Exactly. And so you're sort of explaining it to yourself by, by forcing yourself to write it.
Cause it's a way to externally process what's going on in your head. It's easy to convince ourself we know it and we've learned, but if you can't really commit it to pen and paper and sort of summarize it or put it in your own words, maybe you haven't really learned. And so there's this sort of internal tension between if you're going to keep reading and you're going to keep doing this stuff.
Then either acknowledge you're just doing it for the dopamine hit of finding something new and it's just fun and you enjoy it, which is hard for me, or you're doing it because you want to learn, you need to start writing more of it down to connect some of these ideas. And so it's interesting. You know, you talk about pen and paper, but it's also in the notion of editing versus creating it's where some of these AI tools looping all the way back to the beginning of favorite products.
them to be. Some of the most [:That's not what I want to say. That's not what I want to say. And then in the process of that, being able to create or write something that is my own, but using some of these tools to help along the way, I love that idea. I didn't mention this before, but I'm going to mention it now. There is an AI tool that I very recently started using called ghost pal.
AI prompt that will help you [:And then it will summarize, paraphrase, and kind of give you a more succinct output of all the stuff you've said. And it will prompt you with more questions as often as you want to do. And it'll give you in a format of a tweet, a LinkedIn post, a blog, or an essay. I have to look at that. It's very handy for anybody that has to talk it out, which is me, hence the podcast.
So that, uh, that has been really helpful for me, but I'm, I haven't gone super deep on it yet. So try it out and see what you think. Let me know. Cause it's been helpful for me. Okay. The thing for me this year that has been really helpful for me to really lean into, you know, Raman uses kind of a, an adage at SEP ism that relationships aren't portable or aren't easily portable.
he leadership team. And that [:And. Believed and lived out, but I think this year it was really brought to the forefront of my mind as something to really lean into and and to actually like live out, you know, I think the common trope about me in the office. I love coffee. Um, I like bougie coffee and. I'm always up for grabbing coffee with a friend or a colleague or a client or whomever.
And there's just something about sitting down outside of our work environment and just having a human conversation, even if we talk about our work and the connection and the trust and the relationship building that you garner within that kind of an environment, I think is just something that makes all the things that we have to do in our day to day lives as a professional.
, it's just something that's [: t are you going to carry into:Right. With fixed budget and limited amount of time, let's get to some place where we can deliver a product that's going to help them realize the outcomes that they, they sought out to deliver to their organization, to their customers, whatever. And so we oftentimes just sort of umbrella that whole process.
about discovery, discovery, [:Maybe it's more technical or enterprise architecture focused. And what we really needed is more design focused or. And stuff. And so sometimes we haven't always put the right teams together. Sometimes we haven't asked the right questions of our customer. And so this 4S method, I think gives me an orthogonal way to view this, that I've never really thought about it before.
And I've had a chance to show it or sort of use it with two customers just in the last month. It was amazing at the way they responded to it and quickly sort of gravitated and understood the concept and went through. And so the 4S method is really a framework that's focused on problem solving. And there's four steps.
solve. And then sell, sell, [:And the purpose of doing that, of defining the problem is to be able to identify one of three paths that you're going to move through the other three as a structure, solve and sell with. The first of those path is what they call a hypothesis driven path. And most of our customers, I think, show up to us with this idea.
Hey, we, we have an idea for a product. We have an idea for a feature to a product. We have some sense that this is going to be impactful, that this is the right solution. We need some help building it. And I think there's some analysis we do to help ensure that we're on the right path here, or that the solution is going to be able to be built on the time and money allowed, then we move quickly into development or whatever the sell part there is then getting everybody else in the organization aligned and on board.
he fastest and cheapest way. [:It's not going to really solve the problem, which hence the reason of really defining that problem statement well, then they would say, okay, well, let's move to an issue driven approach, which is to say that. We've identified a problem and we tried walking down one solution path and kind of hit a dead end with a hypothesis driven.
What are some other alternate paths that we could take through this that might help us? This is gonna take a little more time, a little more costly, but the discovery gets a little more involved as we're starting to consider multiple solutions or multiple opportunities or methods for solving this. That takes longer than the hypothesis driven and is a little more expensive, but maybe necessary.
inking path, and this is the [:And the aha moment for me was. That maturity wasn't doing more of one or the other maturity really comes in being able to identify which one you're on and applying the right principles and team at the right moment to the right path. And I think for us, it's going to allow us to help deliver better solutions to our customers and better take care of their needs by not overdoing something or underdoing something throughout this discovery process.
it was pretty eyeopening and [:Around this and us showing up and maybe not making assumptions around which path they're on, but really taking the time, understanding how to assess and whatnot. So for us method, you can do a Google search for it for us as state structure, solve and sell. We'll see how that might change the way we show up with customers in the next year.
And Hey, maybe next year,: t cracked it open. It's on my:I'll even blend into our personal life, an Instagram post, a LinkedIn post, a blog, an email, a proposal, whatever. And it seems like in some ways our world is becoming more and more nuanced. And my personal opinion is might be a mildly hot take. I think it is almost impossible to convey nuance in a monologue.
g to say in a very clear and [:That is something that I'm realizing. I think, I think probably everybody could get better at writing. And now we have lovely tools to help us with that. Sure. Well, and you know, along those lines, one of the things that has really been sort of to somebody who does lots of presentations or does lots of public speaking and stuff.
Really recognizing the role stories play or narrative plays and our ability to communicate and just realizing even earlier as we were talking, I'm probably not telling enough stories because that is a way I think sometimes we can communicate nuance and really have learned and seen this. There's a fairly popular company.
They do lots of YouTube videos. It's called the Bible project. They do a fantastic job of communicating storytelling through, through visual editing, and I had a friend here in town that works for them as one of their designers, and we were talking and he just was conveying and helping me understand the, the importance of narrative and understanding narrative.
especially ideas that people [:And so for me personally, in addition to writing or trying to write more, really think about how do I be more intentional about the stories I tell and weave in? And how does that help convey an idea? Maybe in a different way than, because I think we're all wired, we have been wired or programmed, we love stories, we gravitate to stories for many years, you can go back, you know, thousands and thousands of years, right?
Like that was, that was the way things were passed down that concepts and ideas was through the storytelling. I think today, maybe more than ever with tweets and texts and stuff like that short, short, short term, we've lost some of the, the broader storytelling aspects or Gina. So really, how do we get better at telling stories?
eat way to help and coach an [:Right. Like, yeah, but just to play a role in, in so many different things. So really getting better understanding how to weave those in, I think is interesting. So like the AI tool, you mentioned ghost file, this, um, using some of the other AI tools. This concept of, of writing, learning the book on writing.
Well, lots of sort of similar threads there that I feel like are all sort of connected to this idea of being able to communicate and convey ideas better and help us learn. Yes. Oh, I'm going to definitely start writing to learn now. I love that. All right, Chris, thank you so much for joining me in this, our favorite things show, maybe we'll make this an annual thing.
aving me. We'll see you next [: