Andrew Kerr: Building Software is Like Making a Movie
Tom talks with Andrew Kerr, CEO and Managing Partner at FortyAU, a technology consultancy in Nashville that builds software for some of the world's largest and most innovative companies.
The two touched on:
why making software is more like making a movie than a house
balancing quality and speed in the software development process
why many software projects fail
how a bad rollout can kill the best software
Transcript (unedited)
[00:00:00] Tom: How does humility help you be a better leader? What are the challenges of running a services business? How is making software like making a movie? These are some of the questions we ask Andrew Kerr, author, speaker, CEO, and managing partner for 40AU, a technology consulting company specializing in custom software development with 100% onshore development teams.
Andrew talks about balancing quality and speed in the software development process, where software projects go wrong, why many projects fail, And how a bad rollout can kill the best software on this episode of the Fortune’s Path podcast
Andrew thank you so much for coming. It's great to see you today.
[00:00:51] Andrew: Yeah, glad to be here Tom.
[00:00:53] Tom: Tell me about the book. I know you wrote a book called the humility imperative. Tell me about how that came about and why you decided to write the book.
[00:01:04] Andrew: Yeah, no, thanks.
The book came about, honestly, I've always liked speaking and teaching on different leadership topics. And I had a couple classes that I was doing professionally, and I really had wanted to develop some new material. And the place I always got inspiration was honestly, what do I need to work on as a leader?
And so I started getting interested in this topic of humility. Probably from Good to Great, and Jim Collins and looking at level five leaders. And then I started looking around for other books and I didn't really see any that touched on the topic. And so I dug into it as best I could.
I put together a class that I started teaching to some different colleagues. And after I taught it a few times, and you have to iterate to get the material kind of honed in, somebody said, this is pretty good stuff. If you want to speak on it more, you should write the book that goes with it.
And so I already had a, about a 90 minute class that was a PowerPoint driven. And I really liked the idea of maybe that, I had the core material for a book there and just now I needed to. Now I needed to create the elongated version, if you will. And and certainly it has proven that, what they said to me on that initial I don't even know who it was.
So it was a class I was teaching. I said, this is interesting stuff. It's something you don't hear a lot. And certainly that was where the idea came from. And I never intended to be an author, but it certainly has proven true that if you. If you have that material and you have that book, it gives you the credibility, I think, to go out and get more speaking opportunities and be able to share that message.
[00:02:28] Tom: You think of yourself as a teacher at all?
[00:02:29] Andrew: I do, my first job in, in software. People ask me how I got into the IT, what was actually teaching people how to use software. And I found that I really enjoyed getting up in front of people and helping them with their job. The essence of consulting and figuring out where the pain points are.
And so it's interesting over the different positions and titles that I've had over the years. I've always worked teaching into it, even when that was not a part of the job description, when I was at HCA, I was a director of a team and we did a lot of learning solutions. That's where you and I actually met, but I always found ways to teach my own classes.
And so I think it is part and parcel of just who I am. I know I get a lot of energy from it. I love being in front of a crowd, and I love being able to see that reaction to people when your material is resonating with them. And so teaching and being able to, the stuff that I've learned and that I feel is valuable, I think in any profession, if you really are passionate about something, there is this natural bent to want to share it with others.
And I actually just enjoy the process, which most people don't, of getting up in front of folks and actually doing the public speaking part.
[00:03:35] Tom: Yeah. So talk to me a little bit about your Jim Collins influence, the Good to Great. So that was the I think his concept was that, excuse me, organizations that really outperform as measured by return in the S and P do it because they have somebody at the top who has I'm not going to get the phrase quite right, but it's Yeah.
Kind of rabid commitment and but also personal humility.
[00:04:02] Andrew: Yeah, that's exactly. So I think it's worth it. And I make this point in the class that I teach because again, Collins was the one who really first pointed me in the direction of humility as a leadership quality. But essentially they looked at companies in Good to Great that outperformed the SMP, not by a little bit, but by three times.
He told his researchers or initially. I don't want you to come back here and tell me that they have better leaders, so look at anything but the leaders. And so eventually, they tried to have this bias of let's look at anything but the leaders, but they came back and they said there are there is something different about the leaders of these companies that have made this dramatic jump and really greatly outperformed their competitors.
And they said, okay what was it? And you touched on it there. He said, it's not that they're not ambitious. They actually have incredible drive and ambition, but their ambition is directed. On behalf of the organization on behalf of the cause if you will and that they also balance that ambition with Personal humility and so he identified and I think it's worth looking at the stats again You know They only identified 11 leaders over a 40 year period That really had this that balance and that and I started seeing it in other contexts, you know I read a book that was about survival and they talked about Navy SEALs and, having this extreme balance of boldness and humility.
And so what I think is the trick is to tell people humility is not weakness, right? But this is something that has to be balanced, so you have to be confident. You have to lead from a place of confidence and boldness in many cases, right? But it has to be balanced with humility that you don't know how the market, how your customer base, how the maybe shifting and changing.
And so there's always more to learn. And so those are the very best kind of level five leaders. And what I think was interesting and counterintuitive about his point was that these aren't typically the charismatic leaders. That we look for that they're brash and just all narcissism and confidence and you know It can really go bad in the wrong direction.
And so the humility is that nice I always thought about it as the antidote to some of these toxic toxicity that leadership can and you know Kind of seep into people when they feel like they're untouchable. They feel like they've you know arrived at the mountaintop. How many?
[00:06:09] Tom: Leaders in your own career your own life. Do you think you've encountered who have that combination of humility and drive?
[00:06:15] Andrew: Just a few, just a few. And they stick out, in my brain. And that was, there were people and again I think the confidence part and the, there's lots of leadership classes on executive presence.
There's lots of leadership classes these days on branding yourself. And it's the image part. It's the fake it till you make it that everybody likes to sell and talk about. And Right books on right. There's plenty of those out there. It's really interesting and different to see somebody in the leadership role who's quiet, who sits back and lets their team engage.
And then only then, at the end, maybe jumps in, somebody who sits there and says, Hey, I've had a lot of success, but I don't feel like I'm successful. I want to keep pushing ahead and keep learning, and those are the ones that have made probably the biggest impression on me. And that's why it's You know, I looked at folks like that, and that was where some of the curiosity of the book came from.
[00:07:06] Tom: How do you keep yourself humble?
[00:07:08] Andrew: I just tell people, the easy answer is you can either play golf or just have kids. Because, your
kids, just being real, they don't care what your job is most of the time. They're not going to... They're not impressed that you had a meeting today and really killed it or made a big sale. They want to know you and they want your time just as much as anybody.
And so I think, those are the quick and easy answers. I think what I tell people in part of the course is, when you look at something like StrengthsFinder one of the best selling leadership books for the last 20 years. Has this great formula and it has all, it lays out these quadrants of skills for leaders and humility is nowhere on any of those quadrants.
And so if we don't even have humility as something we're aspiring to and being aware of as leaders and walk towards it with some intention then you're probably you're probably going to be one of those folks who can get off track pretty easily. And again, Success can be your biggest enemy because it tells that you're doing everything right?
And so I think that just being aware and intentional that humility needs to be a part of that leadership playbook or something that you're aspiring to is probably the first step. Just being aware, again, that as a leader, this is something I need to aspire to. And again, I think being tuned in to those moments when you have a great success, quote unquote, in the eyes of the world is that humility is probably most at risk.
And so what do you do to walk yourself back a little bit? And that's how the way I think about it.
[00:08:33] Tom: So speaking of success FortyAU has gone through some pretty rapid growth. You guys have done so you're a consulting company that builds software for other people. That's right. And so what challenges have you encountered over that growth in the last two or three years that have made you rethink your own leadership style or perhaps challenge your humility?
[00:08:55] Andrew: Yeah the, and it's interesting because the great thing about our business is that, essentially you always have to be winning that next deal. You always have to be out there. Responding to customers, being responsive, you never get to feel like you've made it, we're not a software company in the traditional sense where we build a product and then we live off of the margin for years and years into the future.
I think businesses is particularly a service business I like, and I think I'm drawn towards service businesses because I have to serve my clients well in order to continue to be in business and make money. So I think this business is probably well suited to that idea of.
Again, it could be a mom and pop web lead that comes in to us and says they need help with their website. I want to respond to that person same day and get a consult with them the next and we've never changed that ethos. You get lots of advice in the business world as you get bigger to you don't need any of those small clients anymore.
You don't need to work with those high risk startups. You need to be going upstream. You need to go to those secure clients and and again, I think that's all well and good. That's good advice, certainly from a business strategy perspective. But one of the ethos is of our culture has been, we want to help in the community.
We want to help the mom and pop. We want to help the entrepreneur and we want to do big things, certainly at the enterprise level, right? But it having that balance in that portfolio to shift across has helped us, certainly it's helped us. You talk about challenges weathering different economic storms, the rising interest rates today, COVID two years ago.
There's always something coming at you. And so having this idea of having a diverse portfolio of clients that we can help and serve in different ways, I think, has been a part of our success. But, it's one of those things in business, I don't think you've ever arrived. You can have a good month, you can have a good quarter, but guess what?
The pressure is still there to keep building. And I think for us, it's been just about having a good growth mentality and, still being still acting, in some ways the way we treat clients, like those very humble roots of just, Hey, we're happy to have a client.
We're happy that somebody reached out to us. We're happy. That somebody comes back to us as a repeat client and really treat them that way.
[00:10:53] Tom: So how do you empower the the teams in the organization, the developers themselves to be ownership mindset?
[00:11:02] Andrew: Yeah. I think one of the things that we've tried to do and, we're at upwards of 120 people now is to keep a pretty flat structure, when I talk to developers, and I do a lot of the performance reviews one on one with our developers still, and one of the things I was telling one of our team leads the other day is that the best teams are built when the teammates themselves take pride and ownership of that project, and they're really driving the standard of excellence within that project.
It doesn't work. I'm not a developer. It doesn't work for me to come and chide them or, scold them because we're behind on a deadline or something like that. It works when those teammates really stick together and figure out strengths and weaknesses of one another. And again, the pressure, the tension, if you will, to perform is built from within that team, not necessarily from an outsider, an external deadline or a client even getting mad at them or something like that.
So that's the way I think about it as developers, and, the business we're in. It's easy to think of us as hired guns, so we're hired to come in and build a project, right? I tell our developers what you really have to do if you want to be successful in any of these projects You got to care about what the business outcome is.
You got to care about the people You got to get to know their business and if you can dive in at that level and really be, you know We talked about missionaries versus mercenaries. We want to be the missionaries We want to be all in on whatever product we're building and I think if they get that Connection to mission and they get that connection to business outcomes and how they can really move the needle for that client.
It helps inspire and empower them to really take ownership of it.
[00:12:32] Tom: So your business does not, of software development, particularly software shops, doesn't have the world's best reputation. Sure. Yeah. How much of that do you think is earned and how much do you think is just a
[00:12:43] Andrew: misunderstanding? Ah, interesting.
We always say, in any service business, let's talk about the, Comcast or let's talk about, your local GC building, building out kitchens. If you can show up on time, be honest with people and give them a fair price, you're ahead of 90% of your competitors right out of the gate.
And so in some ways it's basic and simple. It's not complicated. But, the reality in our business is you are building very complex, products that are really more of an art and a science. There is the science part of the coding, but there is. In many ways people like to compare software development to construction projects, right?
I'm building a house, and so I start with the blueprint, and then I have a contractor come in, and you know what? We've been building houses, let's just say, for thousands of years and they still get screwed up all the time, right? We've been in software for, 60 years ish, somewhere in there.
And I like to liken it more to actually to Maybe making a movie, because everybody's seen a movie, right? We've all seen movies. Yeah. And I want to make a movie like that. That's what clients will come to me with. Hey, can you build something like uber? Sure. How much do you think went into uber behind the scenes to see the app today?
And so when you think about, I think about a movie is starting with a script, but it's going to involve a lot and it's going to change when you do the casting and the costumes and the cinematography and you have a budget and nobody comes to a movie executive and says, yeah, let's do this. I need it done by March 3rd.
It has to be released March 3rd, like it doesn't that doesn't really it's an artistic creative endeavor that has lots of technical pieces to it, right? And so I think people underestimate the effort That it requires to make a quality software product, particularly if they haven't done one before.
So again, that's part of the challenge of working with a client who is building their first startup or who is building their first software product. They don't appreciate, a little thing like a bug. A bug is just part of the process and you're a writer. You've written a book If you write a book, do you expect to write the chapter perfectly on the first?
Time you sit down and put your keys to the keyboard. No there's an editing process that has to happen There's an iteration process that has to happen to really make good content whether it be a movie a book or a piece of software and so I think people miss that and I think that's probably one of the bigger that we're just building some sort of widget so you can stamp out on an assembly line.
It's not true at all. It's more I would say, commissioning a piece of art in some way. If I say, hey, Tom, I want to hire you to be my sculptor. I say, I want a picture of a, I want a sculpture of a man, but I don't, you have some, probably some creative license of what that's going to, what that timeline is going to be.
So certainly like I said, in any service business, to go back to your question, there are bad actors. There are people that don't follow through people that don't show up. And I think in that case, we've just tried to be the opposite of that, in many ways.
[00:15:28] Tom: I think your analogy about making a movie is a good one.
I have one minor correction, which is that studios do actually pick when those things are going to be released. They have released windows about when they want, like Superman 20 has to be out in the summer of 12, yeah. In 2015 or whatever. Sure. Yeah, but they your point though is still valid about it's very hard to know when these things are done.
I think that's one of the most aggravating parts for business people when they work with technologists is you say, when's it going to be done? Yeah, and the true answer is when it's done.
[00:15:58] Andrew: And I tell people the true answer is, if it's a digital product, it ought to live and move and change as your business does.
It's like asking me when's my business done? It's not done until I close the doors or, sell it or something. So it's like this idea that even a website is finished. It certainly can be released, to your point, right? But imagine imagine a movie that you re released every quarter to make it better.
That, that's the analogy. Or a book, that, there's different versions of a book, but we have years in between them typically, right? If you want to do the up, if your book's successful enough that you do the updated and expanded edition. A software product could literally be released every week.
New features can be tested, and so it's a it is really a living, digital product that mindset I think is again, very different from what most people would typically think of. Yeah,
[00:16:44] Tom: I I agree with you there. I think that we even can fall into that trap when we have success in software.
Yeah. Where we'll think about building things without necessarily having the proper amount of research behind them. Or just not understanding the idea that Good enough and available is a lot better than perfect and not available.
[00:17:03] Andrew: And that, yeah, it's scary thing. Yeah.
I think it's scary to release a digital product, whether it's a mobile app or a website, literally to the world and yet not feel like it a hundred percent is finished and represents you as a brand and all that. But that collision with customers early and often when it's in its.
Awkward teenage phase is probably a good thing. I
[00:17:22] Tom: think it's definitely a good thing. It's like I was just talking to a product manager from Asurion yesterday And they limit all of their projects to being six weeks So you're you can't commit to something that's going to take you longer than that.
Yeah, and I think that discipline of trying to narrow something down to what's most essential about it And and then getting it released and getting it to where you can collect information on it because they're trying to run on a kind of let's get smarter process of a lot of the things that we, that get debated.
Nobody really knows that we don't have any information. Everybody's speculating. And it turns into, just a just a debate and that, excuse me you can, the quicker you can get information to inform what you're doing, the better off you're going to be. Absolutely. How many of your clients are willing to pay for the infrastructure necessary?
To get them good user data. So how many of them are using things like segment or they're implementing technologies that allow them to get the heat maps and get the information necessary to understand what's
[00:18:32] Andrew: happening. Yeah, I would say, again, without giving you a hard number, I would say to you, this is something that you and I have collaborated on when I think of product management discipline and what you do there's not a ton of it.
I would say in the southeast in Nashville. And I think it started obviously on the west coast and we have an office in Denver and there's a lot of sophisticated product management there where they're going to do it. Yeah. A B testing and things like this. I think a lot of times people still look at digital products as a utility again.
If it's just something that automates a part of my business there may not be a need to test that particular tool. And we build plenty of those that, what I would call bread and butter digital transformation. You take something that was being done on spreadsheets. Business needs to scale.
You automate an internal process and great. That doesn't require that now. Obviously, anything that's going direct to consumer or, directly to their customers or clients should have that element to it. And I think there's an unwillingness a lot of times to invest in, user feedback and interviews test designs with people, that kind of thing.
I think there's always a pressure to get things out the door so I think a lot of people think they can skip that step. And let's just, again, we were talking about let's get it out there and release it, that doesn't mean that you don't prepare well. I think that idea of yeah, we got to cut a tree down.
We should spend a few minutes sharpening the axe before we just start hacking away at this thing. But again, I think that's hard to do. And again, if I'm a business owner and I have a problem in my business, I want it solved. Hopefully I've studied the problem at some level, but mostly I want to get something done.
And there's an action orientation that kind of can work against us sometimes when taking those initial steps. I'm doing a lot of user research right now for a NIH, and it's hard work. There's a lot of you got to get it. There's a lot of synthesis you got to do. And then The conclusion, guess what?
You may not like it. Yeah, that's right. It may go
[00:20:24] Tom: against your initial hypothesis.
I actually think there's a room for say we'll say sensitivity to users, even in those bread and butter. Transformation projects and the reason why is I think we forget that there the return on investment for a piece of software in an enterprise situation, there's two variables.
One is the completeness of the feature set, and then the second one is the adoption. So you can have a very complete feature set, but if you have low adoption, you're going to have very low ROI. And conversely, if you have a very focused feature set, but very high adoption, you can still manage to have good ROI.
So it's like doing fewer things well than lots of things poorly. Is a better attack. But I think to your point, there's... We get separated the sponsors of software often get separated from the users of software, like an enterprise software, the people who buy the software are never the people who use the software.
So they're just buying a story or an idea. And I think that people. I'm guessing in your situation, people come to you with an idea that they assume nobody's going to have any choice but to use what I'm saying, but they're,
[00:21:39] Andrew: yeah.
[00:21:39] Tom: How do you
[00:21:40] Andrew: educate, how do you educate them? It's interesting cause I, going back to the teaching a little bit, I've taught a class for 10 or 11 years now and change management, right?
And one of the things that you, one of the key principles is that participation builds commitment. So if I have a product that I'm building for the new, the nurses that work in my healthcare company. I better involve the nurses. I better have their input into what I'm building and understand their workflow and how they do workarounds and things like that today.
Before I go and force a product down their throats, right? To me just ignoring basic change management principles. And we as humans, in general, still aren't good at. Bringing about the order of a new thing. And so I've tried to, just in the past year or two, honestly, because I've been teaching this class a while, say, how do I marry these good change management principles and actually take those to my clients first before they implement a new piece of software?
Because, again, software can be built for a lot of reasons, particularly if it's internal facing. They're looking for scalability, optimization. They're looking to get rid of manual processes, have better data integrity. Those are all good reasons. But it's. If I'm the nurse data integrity, what the heck does that mean to me, and again, what we have to understand is anytime you put a brand new tool in front of somebody who's never used it, they're not going to be excited.
Just to be honest. The initial reaction is that their morale and their productivity goes down. And so realizing that's normal, right? And then being able to coach through that and say, Hey, look, Yeah. Hey, we're going to back off the workload, for instance, for the first couple of weeks that we implement this new software.
So you guys have time to get used to it and comfortable with it. Never heard a business owner say that, usually, hey, we got to launch. We got to go. This software is late. Let's shove it in there and let's get running harder and faster than ever. And, people will come back and say there's something I don't like about the software.
There's a bug in it or something. And that may or may not be true. But what they're really reacting to is their uncomfortableness with the new tool, regardless of if it's super quality built software. We actually had this very conundrum with a client recently where we built this tool that basically took them from a very manual paper based system.
To this tool that was internally focused would allow them to do their scheduling and their payments on a daily basis and again internal utility tool if you want to think about it that way, an internal workflow tool, and they got a lot of pushback the first couple of weeks. They kept saying it's buggy.
It doesn't work. This kind of thing. And I would go to my team. I'd say, Hey, this is the feedback I'm getting from the client. And they're like we went through all their tickets and they're all just user issues. They're all just people don't know how the system works. As intended, but they just, and I think it was shoved into people's laps right before the holidays.
And and again, there was a point of contention where we were with this client, where the clients point the finger at us and we're going, I think we built a quality product for you guys. And again, a little bit of an impasse and I was happy to get. We basically said to the client if you're not happy with the work, we're happy to transition it to somebody else, and that's pretty rare for us.
But we said that, and I got to know, this was just after the holidays where the client sent me a note. I remember I was getting in bed and you shouldn't check your email before you're getting in bed. But he said, on, upon further review, he went, I'm further review. He said, the product was built and your team was in it to win it from the beginning.
You really have built us a quality solution. We probably rushed this rollout and got a lot of negative feedback because of the way we forced it on people. And I've gone back through the issues and they're all kind of user related or lack of training and understanding. So would you consider continuing to work with us?
Now that we have a little bit of time to do some introspection. And so that was, it's gratifying in some ways, but it's unfortunate that you have to get to that point. So it's if we had changed management and some basic principles around, Hey, let's talk about what this rollout is going to look like and how it's going to affect your people.
I think that could have gone a long way.
[00:25:25] Tom: I feel like it's the difficult engagements, the difficult clients are the ones where we learn the most about our business. The ones that go off without a hitch. It's Oh yeah, things are going well. But to your point, like you never arrive at the, you've never made it.
The business doesn't stop. And there, there's a lot of heartache in this situation like you described. But at the, that's an enormously gratifying email to get, even if you're reading it in
[00:25:50] Andrew: bed at night. Absolutely. And I think I always say, to our developers because the biggest variable in our business is we don't know much about the client and we don't know much about their sophistication, their attitudes, their culture, because we work nationwide and and so that's the biggest variable.
And I tell our developers, I can't guarantee you an easy project. I can't guarantee you an easy client all the time. And what we've noticed over the years to your point is that the toughest project makes the tightest teams a lot of times. So it really is a, really can be a foxhole kind of thing where our teams will really get together.
And on the other side of the project, they'll say, yeah, remember those days that was a pretty cool thing we did, even though it wasn't under maybe the best of circumstances, that sort of thing. I, I promise, and I don't, it's on our orientation deck. I don't tell people that I'm promising you attention, less.
developer Xanadu type environment. I'm promising that I'll try and get you worthwhile efforts that will grow your skill sets. And you're going to have to meet those challenges, right? And so again this growth mentality of really being willing to push ourselves, push our technical skill sets, push our people management skill sets, I think is part and parcel of why this place is attractive to folks.
But it never, like I said, it's never easy and you never get to sit back and kick your heels up and say, oh, we're done,
[00:27:01] Tom: you hire a lot of developers, obviously. How, talk to me about that process. How do you, what do you look for when you're hiring
[00:27:08] Andrew: developers?
Sure. I, beyond, I'll just say beyond technical acumen. And again what I tell people on that note is that, if I'm interviewing somebody, I say, I'm not a developer. I'm gonna assume that you can do what's on your resume. But just so you're aware, when you come into this environment, it's nothing but engineers, right?
Like I'm a dot. There's a few. There's a few of me running around that don't code. Let me work on projects with engineers with that team based ethos. And so the main thing is to be able to pull your weight and do what you say you can do, right? Technically, right? When we try and explore people's technical acumen, it's more about Do they understand the technology they've been using?
Do they understand what's maybe the adjacent technology or the competitive technology? And can they speak fluently to the trade offs between the two solutions, right? Because there is not a single best solution typically for most products and for most problems that we deal with. So technical fluency, the ability to talk about it, I think is really important in our environment because One of the things that's different about FortyAU is we want and we welcome all of our developers being client facing and so Client facing means you have to be able to articulate your technical choices, and then I tell our developers you're gonna work with Deeply technical people you're gonna work with CTOs and you're gonna work with computer science professors at universities who will look at your code and you've got to be able to talk to them about why you're doing Things and understand the choices that you're making and the patterns that you're using you're also going to work with The sweet southern old lady who's never built software before and has no idea what you're talking about.
And so you're going to have to be patient and explain things in a way. You know that a lay person can understand and that you know that relates to their business and why you're doing things And so that ability to be able to have this technical fluency and to be able to speak to it Regardless of the audience is something that I think is a little unique about what we look for But and again, I think we look at people that look at this as a trade, as a craft or just passionate about it would probably be doing it even if they weren't getting paid kind of thing.
And I know that's the cliche. Obviously they should get paid if they're good at it, but I think it's those people that really have a passionate curiosity and just really like the engineering aspects. That internal drive is what's going to get them through maybe a tough project or a tough client, that kind of thing.
Do
[00:29:17] Tom: you have one process I've seen in software hiring is you go through a series of tests. Do you guys do that kind of thing? Do you have them submit a coding example and then read that and all that
[00:29:26] Andrew: kind of thing? We typically don't. And again, I think one of the problems in the industry, if you will, is this long, lengthy hiring process.
And, you've got these code tests and you got these little trick quizzes that, people have popularized in Silicon Valley. Again, if all you want is technical proficiency and you're going to stick somebody in a closet and just have them bang out code from tickets. That maybe that works for you, right?
That's not our environment. And so we find it less useful in some ways. We certainly, if we're on the fence about somebody, we'll say, Hey, send us a code sample. Let's go through this together. Pull it up in the interview. And I like to ask people show us a piece of code you're proud about. And walk our engineers through it and why you made the choices that you did.
And again, the passion, the technical decision making, the communication will come out better in like that example. Then. Oh, you failed the quiz, and again, I think most of the interviewing almost 100% is done remotely these days and everybody's got access to Google and chat GPT.
And so if you want to ask them technical quiz questions, that, that's not really what you need. I need technical fluency in the moment. I need good decision making kind of things. And so it's never been a big part of our repertoire to, and again, go through these lengthy coding tests or to give them homework, stuff has just not been a big part of our process.
Yeah.
[00:30:42] Tom: So do you personally have a favorite software
[00:30:45] Andrew: product? Ah, it's funny, I'm actually pretty much a laggard when it comes to most technology. So I have my, finally my partner forced me to upgrade my iPhone last year. I think I had an 8 or so and now I'm on a 13 mini. Being around it so much, I don't get too enamored with the tools.
I think to me the fun part of the business is always the problem solving and the consulting. And what gets me jazzed is learning a new business model, meeting somebody that's in a different industry that I haven't explored before, seeing how we can cross pollinate ideas and steal something from a technology that's from a completely different industry, but bring that concept into one that's maybe not as far ahead of the curve.
No I'd say I'm definitely a laggard on the curve. I got plenty of people that... That are technology forward. And I could certainly call on them and depend on their expertise there. Yeah. So
[00:31:34] Tom: tell me about a business you learned about that was fascinating to you. So one of your clients was in an industry that you hadn't seen
[00:31:40] Andrew: before.
Yeah. Something you learned. Just recently again, I can probably get you a couple examples, but we started working with a client. who is based out of Washington, D. C. It's a global international non profit called RadAid. And they have been around for quite a while. They have a Johns Hopkins led M.
D. Who, runs the non profit. And they're in 44 countries delivering radiology, ultrasound and equipment and training to underserved parts of the world, right? And what do they need a software company for? They're like any other nonprofit. They have a essentially a volunteer portal, a workflow management tool that has 16, 000 volunteers in their database.
And it's aging out. And so they're asking for a technology solution. Do we move this thing? Do we build on it? Do we go to the next version? What does that look like? So being able to just, again, just meeting fascinating people and understanding what they're doing. I always brag on one of our oldest clients, Noah Basketball we use his computer vision.
We've designed this system and built it from the ground up that uses computer vision. to track the arc of your shot when you're shooting a basketball. And it can tell you in real time what the arc of your shot is. And 80% of the NBA teams use this as a training tool for their athletes.
Steph Curry is a huge proponent and a fan of this technology that we've built, right? The idea of just being able to, again, something like computer vision that we learned about in the sports analytics industry, now we can bring it over to healthcare. Now we can bring it into different use cases, whether it be, helping people.
And we build a computer vision product several years ago for to watch pill counts. And so when you're talking about the opioid crisis, you want to be able to look, take a snapshot of that pill bottle and see how many pills have been consumed and whether or not they're ready for a refill and whether or not they're on dosage and things like that.
So to me, yeah, there's just no end. Honestly and every week somebody calls me and it's I've never heard of this industry. I've never heard of your business, but how can we help? And that's the variety I think is what really makes it compelling. That's
[00:33:30] Tom: really cool. I like the taking, I'm assuming taking a picture of the pill bottle and it can estimate how many pills are in there.
[00:33:35] Andrew: And that's really cool. The old jelly bean game, right? That's right.
[00:33:41] Tom: What. So we talked a little bit about the frustrations some people have when they work with software organizations. What portion of those frustrations do you think are self inflicted by the software developers themselves?
[00:33:56] Andrew: Again, I think one of the things I'll go back to is I never blame the developers but I'll go back to this game of telephone that we play a lot of times in creating software is just part of the process, and so let's just say You know an account executive or somebody who's serving customers identifies a need They try and translate that to a project manager who tries to translate that to a ba And then the ba is the only person who's allowed to actually talk to the devs So that's pretty much the predominant model that you see in a lot of cases, I'll call the B.
A. You could call him a product manager, but in many cases you don't have fidelity from what was the original problem to how did it? How did it get transformed by the game of telephone when it got to the devs? And then how did the devs understand it and build that into ones and zeros, right? And so I think that we've narrowed in on that is probably one of the bigger issues.
And so we've our answer is To try and cut out as many of the middlemen as possible and again, put the developer right at the table with the people who actually have the problem. And in all cases that doesn't work out. I think I still think your discipline of product management of having somebody who can speak tech and speak.
This is really that key crucial point. And so when we go to clients and they say, look, I already know what I want to build. I already got this thing. I already got the solution. I just need your team to plug in and build it. We're always going to question that. We're always going to say okay, then, okay.
As if I'm an investor, pitch it to me, what are you trying to build? Why? What's the business case ROI? How are we going to, how are we going to know we're getting there? And again, I'll usually ask them the second question is if they can answer those is, do you have a product manager?
Do you have a product person that can work with us on a day to day basis and really get down into the weeds? Of how you take this vision that you've described and turn it into an actual digital product, right? I think that's where we see the most tension and that's where I think we really try and work with our clients to set the right expectation.
On the developer side I think the biggest challenge for them a lot of times is Speed versus quality. How much time do I have to really make this? Could I make the perfect line of code? Yes, but it's just like we said about writing a book. I would want to write my paragraph, edit it, harden it, test it in front of people, and you may not have time for that, so when we can have a real honest conversation with a client we had recently who said, Look, I will never say I don't want quality software.
And if you say I did, I'll deny it, right? But I have a deadline I need to hit. And so we want to build the best quality software we can within this time frame, knowing that we're going to come back and we're going to have to rework on some of this. We're going to throw some of it out. We're going to, we're going to get feedback from that customer and some of it will shift, right?
So being able to have that, that really healthy conversation about what is that trade off between probably speed and quality is, I think, where the developers probably will struggle the most. And again, left to their own devices. I've told my teams to do. It may sound cool to have sort of an absentee business owner, somebody right But at some point that's not gonna, remain the case, right that whoever that Business owners is gonna come back and then What you're going to show them isn't going to sync with what their vision or what their initial inclination was of that software.
The idea, obviously, of agile software and being in touch and having that day to day interaction and solving problems together is the best way to make software. It doesn't let the developers get too far into their heads from an engineering perspective of making the golden toilet, and you have to have that conversation on an ongoing basis between speed and quality.
And what are we really going for in this next iteration, this next sprint, this next phase of the product,
[00:37:24] Tom: it's I do think no surprises is an important thing in any service business certainly in software, because the risk of rework is so high. Yeah. And so that, as you say, you don't want the absentee business owner.
That's actually a really bad thing. You don't want a business owner who changes priorities or changes vision on an hourly basis. But you really don't want someone who's gone because they're going to be disappointed. It's almost impossible to please somebody where you really don't know what they're thinking.
[00:37:58] Andrew: Absolutely. And again, we've
got quite a bit of healthcare expertise at this point, because we've done a lot of healthcare projects here in Nashville. We'll just build an app that sells cattle online, that's cool. Not so much in the ag tech industry, right? So we're always going to rely on our clients to bring some of that subject matter expertise to the table.
But again, if in the work you do, if you're doing user research, a consensus of one person is right. That's right. So risky. Yeah. And again, just the idea that, the check writer, the check writer person who, you're building the software for.
But you're really building it to be used by a consumer. And so what is their flow and understanding how are they getting information and feedback from their customers? And is that an ongoing basis or did they just have a theory that we're going to test in a really expensive way if we build this product out, right?
That's a really
[00:38:53] Tom: good point is that you're. You cannot avoid user testing. You can either do it before you do the software, or it's going to happen at launch. But there will be user testing. At the most expensive time to do it is at
[00:39:06] Andrew: launch. I tell people the same thing about humility, Tom. Yeah.
There's two ways to get it, right? You either cultivate it, and you have a process for it, or it'll come smack you upside the head at some point, and, it'll eventually find you.
[00:39:20] Tom: I like that a lot. How do you want... You have kids and your what do you want them to understand about business?
So when they see dad's an entrepreneur, dad's busy being an entrepreneur is a pretty all consuming job. What do you want them to learn
[00:39:35] Andrew: about business? I think to me, business and again, even the business that I'm in, I've benefited from by helping people and creating a great network of folks.
That trust me, right? That is, that's probably been the thing that I've done that's been most successful. So being able to, not compromise your integrity, being able to say when you're wrong, being able to give grace to other people when they're wrong. Those are things that aren't real popular in business books.
But I think, the long game is the way I look at it. The long game that I've played is I want to help people. A lot of often time with no reward. I love helping people get jobs. I love connecting people to something they're passionate about because at some point I'm going to need help to and you want to be able to have that ability to call on people when you need them.
And and so I think, building for the long game and thinking about a network and a reputation is probably the most important thing to me. Because I think you're, at the end of the day. I, most of the software that we build is for other people. We can't even tell people that we build it, kind of thing.
So I don't know that people are going to remember the software products and say, Oh, 40AU is a genius because they built, that was their shining success. I think our success is the type of company we built, the culture we built, the people and the families that we support and, what we've done in the community.
Those are. , relationally. Those are the things that I think will matter beyond , this sprint or certainly this product kind of thing. I don't know. It's an interesting question. 'cause like I said I don't think most kids really care about what their parents do, but you would almost want to conduct business in a way that make your kids proud.
I think, yeah. I
[00:41:12] Tom: think first of all I think your objective is very honorable. We, I write a lot about virtue and virtue in business and seeing the product that you produce as being your business and the relationships that it creates and the families that it supports and I commend that point of view.
And I think that For me, my children want to understand my humanity. They want to know my struggle. They want to understand that I don't it's the humility that you were talking about. I don't have the answers and my Relationship with them changes as they age And their relationship with me. There could be a time in life where they're taking care of me and I hope that our relationship has evolved over the course of our life that we have the strength and intimacy to
[00:42:01] Andrew: support that.
Yeah, it's interesting you say that because I think a lot of times when I was younger and my kids were younger I think I just I didn't want to talk about work at home. I didn't think it was good to bring work home It's just you know, and I guess as my kids have gotten to be older. I think it's okay to say to them Hey, how was work today dad?
It wasn't great You know a tough week, why i'll tell you a little bit about it You know kind of thing and just to let them see that mom and dad can struggle to, I'm sure they have stuff going on. It's okay for them to come home and say, I didn't enjoy school today.
I, whatever it was. And just to have a little more of an honest dialogue rather than say, Oh, everything's fine. Dad's always fine,
I'm always good. You're always good. Yeah.
[00:42:41] Tom: There's it's like, how do you be positive, but honest, how can you bring somebody in where you like my daughter's really good at this. She's an extremely positive person, but you also tell me it's this stuff is a pain.
And I really admire her for that.
And I'll say that I was like, like you and my kids were younger I never wanted to bring the stress of my job into the home that was supposed to be a place where I was present and not dumping on everybody. Yeah. But as I've gotten older and I've started a business my children are really interested.
They work for me now and they're really interested in seeing how the struggle of trying to create something.
[00:43:23] Andrew: Yeah, my kids think that our office is a playground. They like to come for the free food and The free drinks and then you can use the whiteboards and they think like dad you don't work hard
It's a good perspective,
[00:43:38] Tom: Exactly, andrew. It was so much fun talking to you today. I really appreciate you taking some time and Look forward to
[00:43:45] Andrew: talking to you soon Yeah, no, I appreciate you. Thanks for doing this. And thanks for being a good collaborator and colleague over the years. Like I said, we need more good product management in this community.
And it certainly makes our jobs easier when you guys are doing yours. And so definitely appreciate you. And just thanks for having me on. Yeah.
Fortune's Path
[00:44:10] Tom: Podcast is a production of Fortune's Path. We help technology businesses create products that generate monopoly profits, fractional product management, product leadership, coaching. Competitive intelligence. Find your genius with Fortune's Path. Special thanks to Andrew Kerr for being our guest.
Using and editing of the Fortune's Path podcast are by my son, Ted Noser. Look for the Fortune's Path book from Advantage Books on fortunespath. com. I'm Tom Noser. Thanks for listening. And I hope we meet along Fortune's Path.