Hey y'all. How's it going? I just want to do a quick short video today. I don't
know if anybody's gonna join me for this. I'm just gonna talk for I don't know
maybe 5 to 15 minutes about - just some things that have been on my mind, trying
to do this kind of healthy software development thing with y'all. So one of
the questions I've been getting from people is: I'm working in a
software company (this is more question two that I get from people who have been
doing software development for you know 2 to 5 years for more) and I get a
question a lot from people where they ask: "I've been at my company for
a while there's clearly some problems with the way that we're developing
software. I want to fix it. I want to make it better. Maybe I've read all
these different agile and scrum and lean books and you know went to conferences
and read all the right books and sent them to my boss. But I can't
convince him. And I've shared with you under some of my YouTube videos
that one of the things I started to try to get better at in my
consulting work is, connecting with people on a more authentic level
where you really know: who they are they know who you are, and once you really
know what's on their mind it's a lot easier to figure out what is it
that's really holding them back from supporting you with whatever kind of
change you might want to make. Well it can be often, and this has happened to me
several times in my career, where you get into that situation and
there's still just nothing you can really do about it! It's frustrating. it's
frustrating to all of us when we get into that situation. But I wanted to talk
just a little bit about if you're at a point in your career where
you're looking at getting a new job or you maybe have been doing software
development for an existing company and you're thinking about moving on to
something different, what are some things that that might help you? I I think I've
been thinking about this for the last 20 years and I've come up with
a couple different things I think may help
you. So you know having worked with companies that are little tiny startups,
Fortune 50's Fortune 500's and everything kind of in between,
it's a very different culture when you're working for a start-up right
then then when you're working for a big enterprise company. Startups tend to be
more autonomous right. If you work at a start-up you're gonna be expected to
wear multiple hats. And I've started up a couple companies myself
that didn't work out, but I've kind of been through that that process.
We didn't get to the point of getting funding and things like that but
what's interesting is a lot of startups the way they're founded, and this has
just been my experience (and I think you'll find it's true of a lot of other
people kind of into entrepreneurial or software development community), a lot of
people when they start a start-up, they have an idea but they might not be
technical. They may not actually be the person who can write the
code to build that product. And so if somebody has a really great idea for a
software product and they want to go to market with it and they don't have a
technical capability, well they need to find somebody who can help build that
product right. Even if it's just a Minimum Viable Product to get it out the
door and get some feedback on. Well usually that founder or owner or
know if they end up becoming the CEO the person who had the idea that brings on
somebody who's more technical - they know, look "I don't have the capability to
build this product. I don't develop software for a living. I've got a great
idea, but I'm gonna partner with someone or find somebody who does know how to
build good software. And usually at that point if the person who's idea it is
they're fairly humble and reasonable about how they're going about their
business, they'll defer to the software developer or the the technical
person. And they will basically look to them to help them make the best
decisions about how the product should move forward.
Well as a company grows and you may have experienced this yourself - as a start-up
starts to get bigger, one of the reasons a lot of founders start a
company, some of them will start them for altruistic reasons: "I want to
help the world, or I want to feed the hungry" or there's
something more that's driving them. And you know obviously most of us hope that
if somebody builds a multi hundred million dollar or billion dollar
business that it's going to be something beneficial to society. But truth be told,
I mean let's be honest here. A lot of people get into software development
and entrepreneurship because they want to get rich. They want to make a lot of
money. They want all their friends to think they're cool. They want to be able
to not be around other people that have more than them and they feel
insecure about themselves because they're putting a lot of their value in
their possessions or their status. And so they go off and build a company simply
to really have a company and build it up. And the unfortunate thing is if
that's really the attitude that the person starts a company with, well then
when that company starts to grow and runs into scaling problems, or people
start to be unhappy, or new hires are coming on and the culture is
very frustrating to work in. If that person running the company who's really
steering the ship and they're responsible for the direction and probably the
budgeting (at least at first) and things like that. They're not really motivated
to care a whole lot about what the work is like for the people doing work day to
day, because they're not doing it! I mean this is this is simple. If one of your
children for example, or your spouse is complaining to you all the time
about something they're having to do and they're saying how difficult it is and
you never do it, you're never gonna have really an appreciation for how difficult
that is. And at that point you need to actually have empathy for the other
person meaning: "I haven't been through this myself, I don't know exactly
what you're going through, it's not painful to me. But it's painful to you.
And obviously you care about it." So if you if your leadership at a
software company has an empathetic type of an attitude then as the company grows
hopefully the leadership keeps that spirit alive and they keep an open mind
and a realistic mindset that "Look, these people that I'm bringing onto my company,
they know things I don't know. They bring new value to the company that I don't
have. They may even have a different way of working that I'm not used to." There's a lot of
startups that grow and they get to a certain scale and then they're pressured
by whoever's funding them to bring on professional management. And
unfortunately there's still a lot of professional management out in the
Silicon Valley VC world who don't subscribe to the Lean Startup approach.
Meaning they've been very successful with other companies, they've gone into
large fortune 500s and grown their stock price by huge amounts, but as far as
knowing how to bring a product to market a software product in a lean way (which
is what I talk about on my YouTube channel) they don't really understand
that. And so if you bring somebody into a company with a start-up culture that's
very autonomous and you put in executive leadership that maybe did a
good job at Yahoo or one of the big four companies on some growing company well
you're gonna completely annihilate the culture. And you're gonna have to reboot
the culture and change the whole value system and everything. Which is really
unfortunate. However if you have people in place in the leadership I think who
what's driving them is the mission of the company BRINGING VALUE TO THEIR
CUSTOMERS. And they have a humble enough attitude about themselves that they know
"As this company grows, I need to share the success with other people. And I'm
not gonna pull this business off myself. Even if let's say I
were to come up with a really great idea and go pitch it in Silicon Valley and
most of you have heard Jeff Bezos' story from Amazon where he
wrote supposedly the business model for Amazon in the
back of his car while they were driving out to the west coast. Even if you go out
and get funding, and all of a sudden you know your company pops. Well as soon as
you start to grow whatever values are in place at the company that kind of
drove, what originally got that minimum viable
product and your customer and sort of got that market fit tight enough that
people liked it, you have to protect that! I mean that's not - what a lot of people
don't understand I don't think is that it's not the product that really is
what's most valuable in software businesses today. It's the
capability for the software business to actually deliver products. So I mean if
you think of a lot of companies that build software products today they don't
build one product they build multiple products. They might start out with one.
We all know the exponential growth curve that most companies go
through when they're trying to achieve this sort of hockey
stick growth right. They want to go out and get some money.
They're under a lot of pressure especially if they took money from
outside investors if they don't have any leverage. And what's
interesting, and Jez Humble talks about this in one of his his lean product
management videos on YouTube, is as a company hits that hockey stick
growth there's there's a further up the chart point where it does the
opposite the s-curve levels out and that product's not as valuable in the market
it's not as innovative. And at that point a lot of companies before they
hit that point they've bloated their headcount right. They've maybe gone after
some really aggressive contracts or accounts just to grow the
business. And maybe they've they've taken on some technical debt which I could talk
about a whole 'nother video that could be a whole conversation in and of itself! But basically,
businesses tend to make quality compromises and they tend to throw a
whole bunch of resources into a pool of a business to grow it in a short term.
And then once it hits that exponential growth which is great everybody wants
that and starts to level out, well now you've got a product that's maybe not as
compelling in the market. The technology may be 2 to 5 years old. Technology
cycles today, a product could be dead in two years and still be highly successful
during that two-year period. Well one of the things that you need to
think about your career is, if you are gonna come into a company and you're
going to take a job, everybody's gonna tell you during the
interview process of course that the company has great values and
they care about their people and all this stuff. I mean who would say that
that's not the case. But the challenge for you is to find out: is that really
true? And it can be very difficult from the outside, but there's a couple of
different things you can do. One is John Cutler who I've talked about
in my feature factory video on YouTube, (I really like John's work) he talks about
in one of the videos he did I think he was at a conference somewhere overseas
and he was talking to a bunch of product managers. And I loved it that he brought
this up because I talk to developers about this and I try to talk to
product managers about this and he had a forum of people there to hear this which
was fantastic. But he said "When's the last time that you as a
product manager have removed something from your product?" And the reason for
that question, what's kind of hidden below it,
is let's say a company grows from six people to 50 people over a year
and a half period and they start to hit that exponential
growth level off, well now they have 50 people! And they don't really need 50
people to introduce the level of change that's necessary to keep that product
profitable because it's kind of hit it's its max out in the market. At that point
the company needs to start to invest in a new product. Something that's new and
exciting to market. So what often happens is people get stuck working on the now
old project and they're really and (there's a lot of politics and
fighting) "Who's gonna get stuck on the old project? Am I gonna get a chance to
work on the new project with the new technology?" Well I think if you're gonna
join a new software company it's kind of up to you it's sort of like you need to
be a detective to figure out: how far along the market as far as its adoption
curve is this product I'm coming into work on?
Because I think if you don't look at that ahead of time, you may join a
company thinking you're gonna get a chance to work on new technology and
grow and get leadership opportunities and all this stuff. Where if the product
team you're joining is basically maintaining the product and starting a
level off well then you're really joining a losing proposition from the
beginning because you're essentially maintaining a legacy product at that
point. Now no one would ever tell you that to your face during an interview!
But I think (you know, possibly right) but most people are not going to tell
you that. I think one of the best questions you can ask is is John's
question which is well "when's the last time that you removed a feature from
this product?" If the answer is "six months ago" or "why are you even
asking that question" or "we don't remove features from our products" - that's
probably a pretty good indicator that you may be about to take a job at a
feature factory. Somewhere that has too many people and they feel they have to
fully utilize them so they're constantly throwing out new features whether
they're valuable to the community or the customers or not. It's really a losing
game and at that point a smarter company needs to decide: "How do I create a new
learning opportunity for a new product line for my existing employees so that
they don't stagnate?" or "How do I reduce my headcount?" And reducing your headcount
is is a very politically incorrect thing at a company. People don't want to say
this. They don't want to talk about it. They don't want to do it. The bummer is though
I mean if a company doesn't want to lay people off because they don't need them
anymore so they keep them on anyway, it's a really short-sighted stupid decision
because here's the thing. If you don't need those people anyway they're gonna
know that they're getting busy work they're gonna feel it after a while and
they're gonna be frustrated. And so that uncomfortable conversation that
a manager or whoever has to have with someone to let them know: "You
did a great job, we love everything you've done here, we're just this
product's not profitable - we don't need you." or "We don't have a new
product." That's really the best thing you can do for another person if you're
managing a software business, because really then you're freeing them up to
pursue their career. And you're not holding them back with kind of false
promises and unfortunately you know I'll be honest with you doing this 20 years I
think companies give me plenty of false promises and I've often fallen for it.
And I think I talked about in one of my prior YouTube videos about how each
of us needs to be somewhat responsible for our career and kind of set a
deadline or a boundary if we're unhappy with our career that look. "If it gets to
this point I'm gonna quit." or "I'm gonna have a conversation with my boss." or
something's gonna happen. I still really recommend that you do that, but before
you even do that if you're thinking about getting in the door at a new
software company, I think one most important things you can do is try to
figure out: who is the founder? Are they still there? Can you get any pulse in
the industry on their ethics? Like, do they give a lip service to how
much they care about their people, or do they REALLY care about their people? Are
they doing things in their company as far as their company culture and how
satisfied people are that are really encouraging people to stay there and
keeping vibrancy and autonomy and things like that in place? Or are they simply
putting the typical middle management layers in and trying to scale
up and make more and more and more and more money. Because really if that's what
they're trying to do, there's no morals there's no ethics they don't really care!
They may give lip service to it again, PLENTY of companies give lip service to
it. But if you've got a company that's injecting itself or maybe outside forces
are injecting it with a ton of money, and they're taking on headcount, and they're
aggressively going after things, and it seems to make the day-to-day of working
at the company more and more difficult, then the company probably doesn't care
about the toil cost which is something I want to talk about more. Which is
really like: "How uncomfortable or how much suffering is involved for a person
working on that product or on that project? It blows my mind that
you can get into a meeting with someone and talk to them about the
cost of turnover (I was just talking to my brother about this yesterday!)
you know the cost of turnover you can talk about the ability to
innovate faster, all these different business drivers. If you talk about the
suffering of the people on the team, very few people I've run into at like
the c-suite really care! Meaning they're not going to
take action on it. So I think one of the challenges that we all have in software
development as we're on our careers and as we're joining companies and moving
forward, is to try to figure out: "What is the moral compass or the ethical compass
of the leadership?" Maybe not even at the whole company if it's a big company. At
least on the team I'm about to join. Better yet the company, because
as we all know you can work for a great boss, his boss can be really difficult to
work with, and it makes your job miserable right. So that's all I really
wanted to talk about today. I was hoping some people might join us. I've got a
really small following right now and I only announced this 15 minutes ago so I
kind of doubted. This is my first time doing a Facebook live I'm just trying
this out I just wanted to share that with you today. I hope that was somewhat
helpful. And then I just wanted to give you is this isn't really a full formal
announcement, it's just kind of a heads up for my Facebook followers I'm not
gonna post this on YouTube but my wife and I were brainstorming some different
ways to come up with a marketing campaign to help me reach people better
you know it's really hard these days to to get your name out and really get
attention from people there's just so many people out there especially
consultants. Big-name consultants that are just
trying to say what you should and shouldn't be doing, and there's so much
noise. So look for a pretty I think it's gonna be fun and it's gonna be pretty
funny and I hope everybody who knows me and who begins to hopefully
more people follow me and get involved really enjoys this. But, my wife helped me
come up with (she's really one who planted the seed of the idea) I think
it's gonna be a really funny way to get some of the ideas that I've been sharing
with you out to a larger audience and hopefully start just you know get some
more open conversation with people so it's not just me sharing these ideas
with you we can kind of start to pull them apart
talk about different ways people have done these things, and how it's worked or
not work for them. So that's about it. I don't have anybody in this live at least
that I can see. I'm still kind of again learning how this all works. I
did this on a laptop this time maybe I'll try to phone next time. But until
next time I'm going to sign off and look for another YouTube video coming soon in
the typical style that just kind of has some information. But again look soon in
the next probably, I would guess a month or two there's going to be some pretty
interesting hopefully entertaining content about this coming soon. So until
next time - thanks for watching my Facebook live! I'll try to do this a
little bit more often. I'm just getting comfortable with it and
hope I can get some of y'all on this next time so I can have you ask some
questions and things like that. Thanks!
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