Over Engineered

00:00:07.17
Chris Morrell
All right, welcome back to Over Engineered, the podcast where we ask the question, what's the absolute best way to do things we already have a perfectly acceptable solution for? um Today, i am here with ah John Drexler and Dan Matthews.

00:00:22.40
Chris Morrell
and um this is ah This is kind of a reaction to a conversation that started on Blue Sky about running small teams. so that's a So that's where the conversation is headed. But before we get there, do you two want to ah say a quick hello and introduce yourselves?

00:00:40.09
Dan Matthews
John, after you?

00:00:41.53
John Rudolph Drexler
Oh, okay. Great. Hi. ah Hello, everybody. My name is John Rudolph Drexler. I am a product manager, and i run an agency called Thunk with Daniel Colborne.

00:00:53.14
John Rudolph Drexler
And ah we aside from product managing a lot of our own stuff, we also ah do product management as a service. And that's one of the things that I do with InterNACHI couple days a week. and Chris and I have lots of long over-engineered ah conversations about how we do product management and prioritization and stuff like that at InterNACHI, which is really fun.

00:01:19.12
Dan Matthews
Cool. ah My name's Dan Matthews. I'm head of engineering at a little company called Social Sync. We build fundraising software for charities, ah mostly your UK based ones, but we we do have a few US based and Australia based ones at the minute.

00:01:39.90
Dan Matthews
And yeah, we're a small team. um it's It's my blue sky post that triggered this this little conversation we're we' were about to have.

00:01:50.78
Dan Matthews
um I have, I have questions for I'm sure that we could talk about for hours. um Yeah, that's me. um Lovely to, to be.

00:02:00.86
John Rudolph Drexler
Which is also funny because I i i i saw your thing and then we you and I started chatting about like, oh, we should just jump on a call and talk for 30 minutes and like, I'll just, you know, hear about what's going on with you and give whatever, you know, feedback I can.

00:02:09.84
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:02:16.18
John Rudolph Drexler
ah Then Chris is like, how about we do this in public? It's like, great, all the better.

00:02:19.99
Dan Matthews
How about we record this? Let's record this and let everybody else hear it.

00:02:22.88
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah, yeah.

00:02:23.51
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:02:23.91
John Rudolph Drexler
yeah

00:02:24.67
Chris Morrell
That's right. Well, i I love to, I don't know. I think this is a, so the, the, the basic question essentially is just, um, running a small software team is different than running a big software team. Right. And a lot of the advice that you see out on the internet tends to be, you know, coming from the, the, the Facebooks of the world where it's like, okay, when you're running an engineering team, that's got, you know, hundreds of people in it, obviously a lot of processes have to be very different.

00:02:57.62
Chris Morrell
um And I, I, I know that that's something that I struggle with all the time is just like, um filtering all the advice and best practices that come through ah through the lens of like,

00:03:12.34
Chris Morrell
how much of this actually applies to our organization, right? Both terms of size, in terms of scope, in terms of sort of like, don't know, vibes and and and priorities and and all these different all these different pieces. But certainly size is a huge one that comes into play.

00:03:29.09
Chris Morrell
It's just like, okay, this this advice makes sense. there's got a lot of like It's got a lot of just like, common sense behind it, but it also kind of feels a little, little like it doesn't make sense for us, you know?

00:03:45.55
Chris Morrell
And like, where do you draw that line? Does it, does that kind of resonate with where you're, you're coming from dan

00:03:51.38
Dan Matthews
Yeah, definitely. um So obviously the first thing that you go out is you go out searching for, you know, how do I manage my my software team? think one of the problems is that I've, I've came from working in an agency to working for myself and only having to manage myself.

00:04:10.77
Dan Matthews
And then suddenly being at the head of, ah one person, then two people, then three people, then four people, then five people. And now I have to coordinate all those people in the best way that I possibly can, as well as getting some work done myself, which is always a challenge.

00:04:28.73
Dan Matthews
um And you go out and you search for these methodologies and you you see... ones that are really heavily tied into particular tools. So you see Basecamp and their sort of ShapeUp methodology.

00:04:40.95
Dan Matthews
You see, we use Linear as ah as a sort of issue tracking tool and Linear has their own sort of set of posts on the Linear methodology and how it works. and But they're all predicated on these things of like,

00:04:55.55
Dan Matthews
At Basecamp, we run these teams of three developers with one designer each in six-week sprints. And it's like, we have one designer that we share between, you know, between everybody and sometimes another company as well.

00:05:10.48
Dan Matthews
And you try your best to filter some of the best parts of each methodology into your into yall day-to-day practices and you try things and sometimes things don't work and then you try different things and sometimes they don't work.

00:05:27.38
Dan Matthews
But it's very difficult to find any advice out there for running a small team. And we're kind of an awkward size. You see a lot of people who are just two people, you know, two two guys just working on a startup, both technical and or maybe one designer and one developer, you see that a lot.

00:05:51.19
Dan Matthews
You see a lot of teams of 20 or where they have sub teams of you know two or three people, but you don't see a lot out there that's sort of targeted towards this size the size that we're talking about, you know three, four people, three, four, five people.

00:05:59.08
Chris Morrell
yeah

00:06:10.18
Dan Matthews
um And it's really interesting to me and you know is it just because people who are running these teams of these sizes don't have enough time to go out and speak and write down what they're doing because they're so busy?

00:06:25.67
Dan Matthews
It certainly feels like that at times, but yeah. um And then, you know, ah like I say, when when I jumped in the call, I thought Internachi, your team, Chris was much bigger.

00:06:36.60
Dan Matthews
um so I was kind of, I was kind of like, Oh, Chris is going to bring like the big team perspective. And then John's going to bring like the smaller team perspective. And, try and find some sort of middle ground, but I'm actually really happy to find out that you you know my pain a little bit with a smaller team.

00:06:51.41
Chris Morrell
Yeah, absolutely.

00:06:52.99
John Rudolph Drexler
InterNachi ships enough code that you might assume that they're like a 10-person team.

00:06:59.15
Dan Matthews
Yeah, I mean, Chris himself ships enough code that it kind of puts me in me and four other developers of our at our team a little bit to shame.

00:07:02.48
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:07:07.44
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:07:07.47
Dan Matthews
um Yeah, Internachi as a whole, I was i was i was convinced there was at least 10 people at at least.

00:07:16.39
Chris Morrell
That's funny. Yeah, no, it was for... it was me for It was me for probably six or seven years and then me and one other one other dev for the next almost decade. And now it's three of us.

00:07:32.97
Chris Morrell
And, you know, we have help and, ah you know, john John helps out with the on the product side now, which is really great. And um ah you know Obviously, the switch to Laravel in the you know the last last decade or so made a lot of things easier to do efficiently. But yeah, it's just ah it's just a small small little group of us.

00:07:55.71
Chris Morrell
So I definitely know those exact pain points. and And I think that, John, having you here is like such a great... um when when this conversation started happening on on blue sky was just like this is the perfect this is the perfect uh sort of group of people to be talking with because you've you know you've worked in organizations that have big teams or bigger u teams right um and you still work with organizations that have big teams um but you also you know thunk is it is a small relatively small developer

00:08:16.15
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:08:22.16
John Rudolph Drexler
yeah

00:08:28.56
Chris Morrell
um organization, right? And you work with with small groups as well. So you have like a lot of really great perspective that I think will be super useful.

00:08:37.06
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah. and i also think that the um I think we know this kind of intuitively. I don't have numbers to back this up, but ah I did ah but i did a bunch of research right when we started Thunk to look at a whole bunch of companies who use Laravel.

00:08:50.79
John Rudolph Drexler
And like the it seems like the overwhelming majority of like companies that use Laravel have the like two to six person dev teams like that is like definitely the median you know there's a handful of big shot like really big companies and i'm leaving out agencies here i'm thinking more in terms of like companies who make products uh that they they tend to have these smaller teams um there's ah you know there are like solo There's solo ah founders, there's a handful of big ones, but the big, big middle of Laravel is these like smaller teams.

00:09:34.49
John Rudolph Drexler
So I think this is relevant probably to like pretty much everyone who's listening.

00:09:35.58
Chris Morrell
I just pulled up

00:09:39.05
Chris Morrell
i just pulled up the State of Laravel 2024 survey. I don't know how representative this is, but um you know they're putting it at 44%, 45%. ah ah forty forty four forty five percent

00:09:51.23
Dan Matthews
you

00:09:53.99
Chris Morrell
are in that like ah under five, ah you know, 15%

00:09:57.98
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:10:00.98
Chris Morrell
And then, you know, you got like a small percentage in the 50 plus and a little bit in the 20 plus.

00:10:06.64
Dan Matthews
Well, I think even Laravel LLC themselves were only a fairly small team until until everything took off.

00:10:14.61
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah, for a long time.

00:10:14.66
Chris Morrell
Yeah, for a long time.

00:10:17.08
Dan Matthews
they They were, trying to think of everybody involved, but you know I would think 10 or less at least. um And they got they got so much done.

00:10:27.55
Dan Matthews
I remember, I think I asked... um

00:10:31.70
Dan Matthews
I can't remember who I asked. I asked one of the team that i was talking to about Laravel Cloud, what they use, and they said they they use Linear, but i'm sure I'm sure they used to use something else. I'm sure Taylor mentioned that they used to use Basecamp or something, and this's quite I thought there was quite an interesting shift there that they'd maybe shifted from the smaller team to now that they're the bigger team with sub-teams and things that they had moved to to Linear, and I thought, oh, that's quite interesting.

00:10:43.88
John Rudolph Drexler
Mm-hmm.

00:10:56.43
Dan Matthews
you know Maybe... because we've we've kind of we've kind of looked at Basecamp as a possible way to go and it kind of fits in with the wider company. um i was just saying to Chris before started recording John that we have an agency side to our company. So the fundraising agency that works directly with charities to kind of raise money and we're kind of like the software arm, the software sub team.

00:11:24.68
Dan Matthews
Um, so there's, there's five or six of us in the software side of it, but there's sort of 20, 20 to 30 people on the other side of the company that We roughly roughly coll collaborat collaborate with in certain things, um but it is very much separate.

00:11:42.05
Dan Matthews
So we sort of thought, hmm, wonder if we could roll base camp out across the entire thing and yeah.

00:11:45.84
John Rudolph Drexler
Interesting.

00:11:47.50
Chris Morrell
can i just ah ah Can I just give my hot take, which is, don't do that. Basecamp is garbage. Mm-hmm.

00:11:54.64
Dan Matthews
It's really funny. we We used to use it. i used When I got my first job, i it was making Drupal websites at an agency. And we used to use Basecamp. So I've used like Basecamp 1, Basecamp 2, all that sort of stuff.

00:12:09.73
Dan Matthews
And i think I just pine for the simplicity of it sometimes. It's just like all you can do is send messages. And I ah haven't used the most recent one. So, you know, apart from ah little play around.

00:12:20.02
Chris Morrell
Sure.

00:12:21.60
Dan Matthews
But... Yeah, that's interesting that you would say that. i think I do think sometimes I think that a new tool will solve the problem. I don't know if that's like, I always think like, we'll just get a new tool and that hope that'll that'll solve all our problems.

00:12:33.81
John Rudolph Drexler
it's

00:12:33.94
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:12:34.87
John Rudolph Drexler
whatever It's what every developer dreams of. Yeah.

00:12:37.50
Dan Matthews
Yeah, just a new thing, a new thing.

00:12:38.42
John Rudolph Drexler
yeah And it just not not doesn't line up with reality. ah

00:12:42.02
Dan Matthews
no

00:12:42.84
John Rudolph Drexler
ah Let me give like one just like overarching opening thought, and then I'll ask a question. ah so And Chris, I don't know how tacky it is for me to be like, basically paraphrasing that talk that I just did at BHP Philly.

00:12:55.98
Chris Morrell
Go for it.

00:12:56.80
John Rudolph Drexler
ah But i i did I did just do, i just did a talk at BHP Philly about this. And um and not not about this exact, exact ah topic, but ah basically captures my thoughts about it, which is that after implementing systems and processes for teams about this, a lot of teams about this size, and then also some much bigger teams.

00:13:23.79
John Rudolph Drexler
ah But ah my overarching thought about it is um that ah the the exact software that you use, the exact tools you use, I care a lot less about.

00:13:36.84
John Rudolph Drexler
um I've seen plain text documents work extremely well for teams as big as five. um And I think that that's completely fine and reasonable.

00:13:47.85
John Rudolph Drexler
The thing that really matters is that you have a systematic way to address your problems and introduce processes that actually solve your problems.

00:13:59.07
John Rudolph Drexler
um And that is the part that really, really matters. and especially at a smaller team, adopting, i guess it image it's not especially true at a smaller team, for any team,

00:14:11.72
John Rudolph Drexler
um Adopting and maintaining any processes that are not productive for you is unbelievably expensive and wasteful and also a good way to make everyone really mad.

00:14:24.47
John Rudolph Drexler
And so I actually think that it's quite dangerous to... adopt a productivity methodology wholesale without like seriously questioning almost every part of it.

00:14:39.44
John Rudolph Drexler
And so my suggestion really is not to say, like oh, adopt linear along with like the entire linear ethos.

00:14:52.68
John Rudolph Drexler
um I think what's what really matters is that you and your team have a process that I would suggest doing a retrospective regularly to surface all of the things that are not working ah and to address them.

00:15:09.94
John Rudolph Drexler
Because you already know, as you've already mentioned, you have this extensive menu of solutions. um You have all of your, all these brilliant blog posts, all of this like stuff that DHH has written, some of which is, I honestly think, quite smart.

00:15:24.28
John Rudolph Drexler
ah I don't agree with all of it. I don't use all of it. You've got um the the brilliant minds behind like the original Agile manifesto. and you've got You've got a million things that you can reach for.

00:15:36.02
John Rudolph Drexler
um You shouldn't do all or most of them. ah You should instead develop a process by which you can say, you know what is wrong with our team this week?

00:15:48.02
John Rudolph Drexler
It's like, I have no idea what you are working on, and thus we like... Stephen Sills – Stumbled each over each other with a bunch of merge conflicts. Why did that happen. ah Let's like understand why it happened and implement the most lightweight solution from our long list of, you know, our long menu of solutions.

00:16:05.78
John Rudolph Drexler
Let's implement the lightest weight one of them see how it goes and check back in next week to see if it actually solved the problem. um I think that if you are doing that and you're doing that well and everyone on the team is able to be honest about what's not working, then what will happen is that you will organically land on ah process that works perfectly for your situation and your a group of team members that might look completely different from mine.

00:16:32.39
John Rudolph Drexler
and If it looks different from mine, that's actually a sign that's a good sign um because every company who I've done this with we landed on something a little bit different. And even earlier today, we Chris and i were like feeling an itch to change something kind of foundational with how we do this.

00:16:52.24
John Rudolph Drexler
And we did have to like hash it out over the course of an hour, but we like landed on, i think, a really lightweight thing and that is honestly different from anything I've ever done with any company. And to me, that's a sign that we're like we're really thinking it through and we're solving the problems that matter for us.

00:17:08.59
John Rudolph Drexler
and not over-engineering a solution and introducing a bunch of process that's like, well, DHA told us to do this, so we're doing it. It's like, no, no, no, we don't do anything just because you know someone someone's smart on the internet said it.

00:17:22.22
John Rudolph Drexler
Anyway, that was a lot of rambling thoughts. My question then for you, i mean, you feel free to respond to that, but my question then is like, what are your problems? Like what something something or some set of things got irritating enough for you that you posted about it.

00:17:39.04
John Rudolph Drexler
And so my question is, what are those specific things?

00:17:43.03
Dan Matthews
So I think we've we we have done some of this. We we just haven't named it. We haven't called them retrospectives. We've done calls at the end of our cycles. So one thing that we do use from Linear is we we do these three-week cycles with one-week cooldown where we sort of take that week cooldown to do things like, you know, tasks that that don't fit into delivering features but have been sat on our to-do lists.

00:18:15.17
Dan Matthews
One of the things, and it was funny you mentioned merge conflicts there, but one of the things that we kept hitting was ah we would put all of our work in progress onto to a dev branch and then we merge that into master to deploy it.

00:18:30.03
Dan Matthews
And we ended up doing these huge merges and we sort talked about it.

00:18:32.43
John Rudolph Drexler
Mm-hmm.

00:18:32.95
Dan Matthews
We all sort of decided that this was a problem. we looked into potential solutions and we ended up looking at trunk-based development. that we made that change one day at the start of a cycle.

00:18:45.07
Dan Matthews
We all really invested in it. And I think that's the key is getting everybody in the team to kind of, to buy into this idea before you, otherwise, if you implement it and somebody, what one person or two people thinks it's a bad idea, they won't buy into it easily as other people will. And that friction stops the solution taking hold.

00:19:06.66
Dan Matthews
Um, We did this, people really bought into it. And then, you know, two, three weeks later when we came to do our next release with our next set of features, it was really, really easy.

00:19:21.61
Dan Matthews
and we were like, right okay, this was amazing. This was ah this is a great choice for us. I'm not saying that everybody should do it or whatever, but like this is a great, great choice for us. We should have done this so much earlier. now we use that process it's what we know and it works really well for us and we've never had i've never had to do that thing of oh we need to do this release uh okay now i'm gonna have to sit for five hours and look at merge conflicts because this gigantic merge is happening and obviously that was caused by you know other problems and things and workflow problems but

00:19:50.83
John Rudolph Drexler
Sure.

00:19:56.66
Dan Matthews
We identified the problem itself. We implemented what we thought was the most lightweight. There's probably other things that we could have done, like release more often, but in our situation,

00:20:04.01
John Rudolph Drexler
sure

00:20:07.05
Dan Matthews
um it wasn't going to work like that. We did it. We fixed it. So I think the problems that we have.

00:20:14.53
John Rudolph Drexler
ah But pause real quick on that also just because I think that's a beautiful example because of what you mentioned about the buy-in thing, which is like it's such a critical part of this is that um I think a lot of, but at least in my experience, the times when you really get buy-in,

00:20:22.88
Dan Matthews
Hmm.

00:20:33.25
John Rudolph Drexler
is when everyone experiences a problem together and then you go we're going to introduce this new thing and this thing is a pain relief for the thing that we the pain we all just experienced together um and that's why i think like retrospectives or whatever process you use to do that are so effective is that like If you just came, if if if there was no discussion and you just had an epiphany one night, oh, we got to do this thing to solve this problem. And you came in and threw it down on everyone's desk and said, we're going to go do this thing differently now, even if it is the right tool for you know all else equal,

00:21:09.93
John Rudolph Drexler
people be pissed off, people be annoyed to just like get that that, that kind of it's perceived as a mandate or something. And it's like, now not only do I have pain, i also have this new crap that I have to do.

00:21:20.96
John Rudolph Drexler
And instead, it's like, no, it's like this group discussion where you're like, okay, we all just experienced pain together. Now, let's find a way to alleviate the pain together. You get real buy-in. And, you know, as you mentioned, it's like, if you don't have that, the process isn't going to work. And if you do have that, the process is much more likely to work. So I just want to pause on that because you you said that and i was like, yes, that's exactly it.

00:21:44.32
Dan Matthews
and And I should, sorry, Chris.

00:21:44.52
Chris Morrell
Well, I also... ah No, I just was going to say, i i think this is actually a really interesting place where the team size um comes into play.

00:21:46.45
Dan Matthews
Hmm.

00:21:55.62
Chris Morrell
Because at large organizations, you can't necessarily do something like that in the same way that you can in a small organization. and in this and And on the flip side of that, in a larger organization, um you can get...

00:22:09.20
Chris Morrell
you can and you kind of have to get away with more like top-down mandates, um even if they're not necessarily as successful because you don't have the same kind of buy-in. But like in a big organization, sometimes decisions just have to be made at like ah ah central higher level and pass down.

00:22:29.11
Chris Morrell
And um as long as you get enough buy-in across the organization, the people who don't love whatever that decision is, like, you know, kind of get evened out in the scale, right?

00:22:42.93
Chris Morrell
Whereas in a small organization, it it goes both ways. It's like, you can get away with doing a more sort of democratic decision-making process.

00:22:54.30
Chris Morrell
ah And one person being a ah really hard set against a process has such a bigger impact on the success of it. right So I think it goes it's just like an interesting it's an interesting um place where I actually think this this question of how do we manage small teams, like this is exactly that. like When you have a small team, I think one key thing is you need to really account for the individual people on your team

00:23:28.22
Chris Morrell
um in a different way than you would if you were in a big organization with hundreds or thousands of developers. You know what i mean?

00:23:36.97
Dan Matthews
Yeah, ah absolutely. And we we, you know, we have a range of, a range of skills, you know, wherever we have, have, I mean, everybody's pretty, pretty level now, but a year ago we we had brought in people who were juniors and now they've, they are,

00:23:57.48
Dan Matthews
you know, out some of our best developers, they're absolutely, I'm constantly blown away how much they have learned and things in the past year. And one of those things is, I will say that and I will answer your question, John, but one of those things is, I will say is that I have definitely bro brought in some of those things in the past, in the sort of past two, three years of, hey, we're doing we're doing it this way now.

00:24:27.58
Dan Matthews
And the other people would be, well, Dan's in charge. So that's what we're doing now because he he knows best. And I'm just, you know, I'm maybe picking ideas from from different places and trying and thinking, oh, that might be a good way to do things.

00:24:44.31
Dan Matthews
Um, so good example of that is i kind of got sick of what, what a mess our inertia JS components were the sort of organization. And I, I was reading a lot of things online about it.

00:25:00.43
Dan Matthews
And I was like, oh, atomic design is an amazing thing. So we're going to split all our components up into atoms, molecules, and I can't remember the other level. ah And I think that lasted about a month. So now we have some components that are in there that are, because there's just, this it's so subjective. You know, it's like, I think something should be in a molecule or an atom.

00:25:26.51
Dan Matthews
it's a It's a silly example, but it is a kind of thing of like, we tried this thing. It wasn't as democratic as as the trunk-based development stuff. It didn't really stick because people didn't really get it, probably because we hadn't had those discussions. And it also maybe just wasn't the best fit.

00:25:48.24
Dan Matthews
But I'm kind of... I'm kind of okay with the fact that we tried it. We had to try something.

00:25:55.80
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:25:55.79
Dan Matthews
Didn't work. And, you know, the only tech debt we have from it is that things are in weird folders. So it's not the end of the world. um But to answer your question, John, finally, um that's my thing.

00:26:09.44
Dan Matthews
I zig from a question for about 10 minutes and then I come back to it once everybody's forgotten about it.

00:26:13.75
John Rudolph Drexler
Great.

00:26:14.96
Dan Matthews
So I apologize. um Our biggest thing is that And again, this plays into the strengths of small teams is that having a small team working on ah bootstrap startup is immensely powerful because you can pivot very quickly from one thing to the next.

00:26:36.06
Dan Matthews
And that has helped us as company be able to react to certain things that have happened in the nonprofit industry, um be able to jump into new opportunities and new spaces really, really quickly.

00:26:54.92
Dan Matthews
So that's fantastic. But what it leaves is almost kind of a

00:27:04.60
Dan Matthews
a disjointed roadmap, I guess. So this is where we're coming back up to the sort of product level. And... So I'll give an example.

00:27:16.09
Dan Matthews
we We create fundraisers on Facebook. um That was kind of one of our biggest selling points was one that we were ah one of the only Facebook partners that could create Facebook fundraisers using their API. There's about us and about three others.

00:27:34.52
Dan Matthews
um We fought really hard to get get them to give us that. And, and, but then, um, all of a sudden Facebook in, uh, I'm not sure if they did it in North America, but in Europe, they started taking payments using PayPal, not Facebook's own transaction service.

00:27:54.63
Dan Matthews
And, us and all of our competitors were immediately sort of, oh my God, like how are we going to alter our ingestion and our importers to do this? And there was three of us and we did it in something like three days because we could just pivot like that.

00:28:14.28
John Rudolph Drexler
Mm-hmm.

00:28:14.43
Dan Matthews
But I think this, it's it's very chaotic. And I think those are the kinds of problems that we have is that

00:28:18.50
Chris Morrell
Thank you.

00:28:21.74
Dan Matthews
I feel like we don't have two things. I feel like that we don't have a process for taking ah feature from an idea to

00:28:33.14
Dan Matthews
putting it into the app. And then and aside to that, and really where the question comes from is

00:28:42.72
Dan Matthews
Is that because we're missing somebody who can guard that process? And so, you know, if we put a process in place and we say that, you know, we we if we take something like ShapeUp by Basecamp, just as an example, their whole thing is that you you pitch a feature and then you wireframe it, but you never design it.

00:28:47.24
John Rudolph Drexler
Amen.

00:29:03.08
Dan Matthews
And then once it's been approved or you bet on it, then you start doing things like designs and scoping out the feature with developers and everything like that.

00:29:18.14
Dan Matthews
If we were to implement a process like that, my question would probably be,

00:29:25.54
Dan Matthews
Is there a way that we can get the entire team involved in protecting the process? So if somebody tries to jump somebody from the, the the product side of the company tries to say we need to, we need to put this, uh, this feature into the app very, very quickly.

00:29:40.46
Dan Matthews
do we need a product manager project manager that can be, that can act as like, you know, whoa, whoa, like the guys are mid cycle right now, you know, can't just change.

00:29:47.43
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:29:50.86
Dan Matthews
And.

00:29:51.46
John Rudolph Drexler
Right. Yeah, and it's difficult.

00:29:52.76
Dan Matthews
Because we've never had that, it's difficult to to know if that's something that we need.

00:29:53.56
John Rudolph Drexler
I mean,

00:29:58.87
John Rudolph Drexler
ah Totally. and it's And it is not, ah I think in a more naive part of my career, I would say like, oh, every developer should just like learn how to do that for themselves.

00:30:12.53
John Rudolph Drexler
um I think that I still think that there's truth to that. But it's also like it is not easy. Even just the just the like mental mode or like context switching of like you're just like hardcore hacking away for a few days, and like suddenly you have to like jump into like an executive conversation about like priorities and roadmap. And it's like it's not easy to do at all, even if you're like fully capable of both. Just like jumping between them multiple times a week is like actually quite difficult.

00:30:43.93
John Rudolph Drexler
um So I think that's true. and And whether you need a dedicated person, I i don't know. i don't know enough about your your exact situation. But ah I will say, i think that there are questions you can ask as a developer that can help you get closer to it. And like ah one of the questions actually that I asked Chris like when we first started was, like can we write down the goals?

00:31:12.19
John Rudolph Drexler
um And I ask this to developers a lot and I'm surprised by how often the answer is no. But i'm like, do you have like a really clear sense of what the goals for your team are and like what the goals are company wide?

00:31:28.06
John Rudolph Drexler
Because if you have a sense of what those are then when those new things come up, it's it's a lot easier to have like an objective conversation with the other people in the company about like,

00:31:28.14
Dan Matthews
you

00:31:41.48
John Rudolph Drexler
Well, hold on, like, we are dead set on profitable growth right now or whatever. um And you're like, clearly, we have like, three awesome projects queued up and scoped that we're like ready to do.

00:31:55.44
John Rudolph Drexler
And this new thing came up that, you know, so and so said we have to do. But this like, Aaron You know, on the merit of the goals that we all agreed on this doesn't make sense directionally. Aaron Shaw, Ph.D.: you don't have to kind of like make the argument from first principles, you get to kind of point at a thing that was ah something that hopefully like was agreed to organizationally ah and I find that extremely helpful and that's how I resolve most of those situations and like the question of like, man, thing you said earlier, like things feel like it's cool that we can respond to things fast, but like, how do we know if we're working on the right stuff or we get this kind of whiplash from jumping between different, you know, competing priorities.

00:32:39.42
John Rudolph Drexler
And I'm like, all these things get a lot easier if you have a clear sense of what your goals are. And, well, I just, I'm curious what you, what your experience is with that. Because when I ask, even people at like really good companies, I'm like, do you know, like what direction your team is supposed to be swimming in right now and why?

00:32:58.73
John Rudolph Drexler
And they're like, not really. And it's like, I think that that is a very, very valid thing for you to like demand from the other people you work with or your bosses or the CEO or whomever.

00:33:11.42
Dan Matthews
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head and it's definitely conversation that we, me and me ah the owner of the company have had many times. um I think, yeah, I don't know.

00:33:24.12
John Rudolph Drexler
I'm not trying to stir up conflict over a podcast right now. i just

00:33:27.05
Dan Matthews
ah It's really funny because we've had similar conversations and the the one time that the team is swimming in the same direction is when we have a very clear goal. at the minute we have, we have a ah ah feature to ship before a certain deadline and we are all extremely dead, you know, we all have our sights on that particular goal and what, what that entails and and the pieces of that goal and where it brings it together.

00:33:59.07
Dan Matthews
That's really nice. um Yeah, i everything you've said there, I think I would 100% agree with. um I think sometimes

00:34:13.31
Dan Matthews
the the part that I think I'm struggling to find is is maybe the practicalities of that. And I think this is maybe where we can flip this back around to both and say what does the process of shipping a feature ah into Nachi look like or with one of your clients, John, where does it start?

00:34:37.92
Dan Matthews
You know, does it start as here's a full design that we've done, you know, here's, here's a full design that somebody's done.

00:34:45.74
Chris Morrell
Spoiler alert, no.

00:34:46.81
Dan Matthews
and Yeah. And, and I, I would love to know what the sort of,

00:34:54.50
Dan Matthews
You know, i'm i'm I'm not saying that I'm going to take what you guys do and completely copy it or anything like that, but ah I struggle to find real examples out there of what smaller teams do on a day-to-day basis.

00:35:06.76
Dan Matthews
is Whereas you can read a full book from somebody ah Facebook on how they run their team, you know, comes back to the original thing.

00:35:14.27
Chris Morrell
um I had a few things that I just want to chime in with. um One is just sort of going back to the ah the sort of premise of of your question.

00:35:28.71
Chris Morrell
um Like...

00:35:33.55
Chris Morrell
I think, oh my gosh, I'm just like totally blanking out on what I was going to say. um This is such great podcast material. um like i think that a process, like just picking a process to sort of reiterate what John was saying is is not going to get you anywhere because...

00:35:56.64
Chris Morrell
It's not actually, in my experience, the process that solves the problem.

00:35:58.84
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:36:01.03
Chris Morrell
The process is like the vehicle for the solution. It's not the solution itself. um it's It's getting like buy-in from the right people, right?

00:36:13.11
Dan Matthews
yeah

00:36:13.69
Chris Morrell
And so you could go ahead and you could implement any one of a dozen established processes, whether it's the shape-up process or something else. And you can get everyone on your team to be like, okay, we're not going to start on anything until we've got wireframes and whatever, right?

00:36:35.53
Chris Morrell
And then your boss comes to you and says, I need this by next Tuesday. And you say, oh I guess we have to do what the boss said.

00:36:38.71
Dan Matthews
Mm-hmm.

00:36:42.25
Chris Morrell
You know what I mean? Like, It doesn't really matter if key folks who have decision-making power aren't bought in. Right.

00:36:52.34
Dan Matthews
yeah

00:36:53.01
Chris Morrell
um And so i think that what the questions that you're asking make a lot of sense because. um you need to have, like I think John described it as like a menu.

00:37:08.82
Chris Morrell
it You need to have have a menu of solutions to like select from when you get to the solution point. right So I don't think that it's not worthwhile to talk about solutions.

00:37:19.65
Chris Morrell
But I just don't think that, I think you could pick the most perfect solution for your team, like something that just like a process that just everyone gets and everyone loves and like maps perfectly to how the like you and for other developers think and you could, at but like you don't have buy in from some product decision folks and it doesn't matter anymore.

00:37:47.77
Chris Morrell
You know what I mean? um So, and I think the the flip side of that is, quite honestly, i think that if you have buy-in from the folks that matter, the process that you pick ultimately doesn't really matter because, like, if people are bought into the process, it's going to work.

00:38:08.62
Chris Morrell
You know what I mean? um and that's not to say that there aren't good.

00:38:10.40
John Rudolph Drexler
All those processes exist because they worked for somebody, right? Like that any of them could work.

00:38:13.82
Chris Morrell
Yes.

00:38:14.53
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:38:14.77
Chris Morrell
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:38:18.14
Chris Morrell
Yeah, and just like um just like design patterns, right? we Design patterns are useful because you know other people have thought long and hard about problems. They've come up with sort of like reproducible solutions that are easy to talk about.

00:38:28.92
Dan Matthews
So, I'm going to start with you.

00:38:32.60
Chris Morrell
And like because ah bunch of people understand like what the factory pattern is, you can just kind of like use as shorthand to talk about like this whole problem space.

00:38:40.54
Dan Matthews
with you. I'm to with going to I'm going to with you.

00:38:44.96
Chris Morrell
you know, like productivity and and process solutions are the same thing.

00:38:45.39
Dan Matthews
going to start with you. I'm going to start with

00:38:49.46
Chris Morrell
It's like, yeah, maybe, maybe the shape up process is going to be great for your team because there's a book that people can read and then everyone's kind of on the same page.

00:39:00.34
Chris Morrell
Like there's, it's certainly worthwhile, but I think that like ultimately, kind of comes down to getting like the the people who are eventually making the decision the the decisions bought in right um and I can say that this was true for me personally right like uh when John when John started working with us at internet actually um he brought up this whole question of goal setting and ah

00:39:18.04
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

00:39:29.80
Chris Morrell
honestly, John, I kind of rolled my eyes at you. Maybe not, maybe not, maybe not to your face, but was just like, Oh my God, we're going like do all this, like this, uh, bullshit.

00:39:34.17
John Rudolph Drexler
Many people do. Yeah.

00:39:41.97
Chris Morrell
Right. And like, not actually get to not get to solutions. That's, you know, um,

00:39:46.82
John Rudolph Drexler
yeah

00:39:50.14
Chris Morrell
once we did it, it was, it was incredibly useful and clarifying for me, ah beyond the, you know, the value that it had to the, the dev team and the rest of the organization, like, uh, really spending some time to do, um, like goal setting and goal evaluation and like figure out, we, you know, we kind of developed a process that worked for us around, um,

00:40:13.64
Chris Morrell
you know, defining, um you know, sort of key values that we could measure projects against. um And those, i think, understanding what those values are um was really interesting.

00:40:30.80
Chris Morrell
ah One thing that like comes to mind for me is I actually think that maybe one of your your company's core values might be like we are flexible and nimble, right?

00:40:33.51
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

00:40:42.66
Chris Morrell
And so it may be that when you look at a potential... like a potential problem that needs to be solved or a potential project that you take on, maybe one of the things that you like evaluate that project on is like, does this, you know, does this further this value of like, you know, we are quick to react and able to to like be a really nimble team, right? Like that, that can be something that like is a formal,

00:41:14.89
Chris Morrell
evaluation criteria for projects. Right.

00:41:17.61
John Rudolph Drexler
I like that.

00:41:17.92
Chris Morrell
Um, it doesn't, it doesn't have to go away, but it may also be that like, um, one of the things is, is a little bit more focused on like, you know, stability or, or, uh, you know, some other value that like balances is out a little bit, you know, or like, uh, or, or recognizes some of the challenges that you're having around like, um,

00:41:27.04
Dan Matthews
you

00:41:43.94
Chris Morrell
maybe feeling a bit unmoored, right? Because, ah and that's coming from my own my own experience as well. It's like, I think and think a lot of small teams, the reality is you're jumping around a lot because you can.

00:41:58.12
Chris Morrell
um And that, That like bigger teams don't necessarily have this same problem in the same way because like they can't move in the way that we can. So like it doesn't even come up as ah as a as an option.

00:42:13.69
Chris Morrell
um But that's ah its it's challenging. It's challenging to be jumping all over the place all the time for sure. And that's like a real that's like a real cost that like needs to be identified somewhere.

00:42:29.36
John Rudolph Drexler
that's correct.

00:42:29.84
Dan Matthews
Definitely. And I think we are, we are getting, we're getting a lot better at We're getting a lot better at being focused and sort of asking those fundamental questions that John talks about. was like, you know, somebody comes to us with an opportunity or ah thing that they would like. And we start asking those real core questions of, you know, who, who is this for?

00:42:53.75
Dan Matthews
And what problem does this solve? And if the answer is that it just solves one person's particular problem with the system or one person's particular case, it's not necessarily something that should be taken forward. But, and I take this directly from one of your talks, John, which is,

00:43:13.99
Dan Matthews
you strip that back and you, you look at why this person is asking for this particular thing. And is there some sort of underlying problem under there that, that needs to be, or could be solved with again, you know, potentially the lowest amount of effort or some real thought into

00:43:34.77
Dan Matthews
fixing or altering something, but it's really interesting.

00:43:37.64
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:43:39.53
Dan Matthews
It's actually kind of, um, it's a bit like project management, project management therapy. feel like I'm being sort of talked out of my belief system here by, by two project managers.

00:43:50.64
Dan Matthews
Um, it's it's really funny because, you know, I, I kind of think to myself or thought to myself, we just need that process and we just need to protect that process. And then we'll be, things will be less chaotic, but it's really, really interesting to hear both say things like, yes, you need that many of your solutions, but you can't necessarily just adopt this and expect it to work for everybody. And I think I know that because I know that the most difficult people to get buy-in from will be the people who,

00:44:27.94
Dan Matthews
have the ideas and want the things built to meet these certain, you know, pieces of, of our target market. Um, but yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of also a little bit unnerving because it's like, well, now we're going to have to really look at ourselves and, you know, build this kind of set of,

00:44:48.75
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

00:44:53.13
Dan Matthews
you know I'm not saying that we're going to go and do like a brand a brand values workshop or or something like that, but I think having goals and have and being able to measure them is definitely one of those kind of things that I would never have went that deep down ah by myself.

00:45:10.10
John Rudolph Drexler
well I think it's like it's it's ah i know it's a frustrating answer in some ways because it's like it's like actually you have to go deeper and do something harder ah than than implementing a new process.

00:45:21.49
John Rudolph Drexler
which is

00:45:22.05
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:45:22.94
John Rudolph Drexler
But i I do think though, like to your point, it's like what it forces you to do is drill into the actual source of the problem, which is the other people at the company who have these ideas, people who own the company, the people who are on the board of the company, the people who are executives of the company.

00:45:37.78
John Rudolph Drexler
And that you you basically, it forces this like reckoning with them, which is like to ask, like hey, what are we doing here? ah And I say that in a jokingly aggressive way, but it's like it really was like when i've when I started with Chris, it's like, I wasn't asking that out of formality. It was like,

00:45:57.64
John Rudolph Drexler
I came in into InterNACHI and was like, i sorry, I just don't i don't know what we're doing here yet. And so it sort of like, well, let's prioritize these tickets and decide on the roadmap. And I'm like, in service of what? like I feel like I'm wearing a blindfold right now. I don't know. like Build a roadmap toward what like i don't you know and once we established that it was like all these questions started answering themselves you know uh and it was really interesting this is a weird comparison and i don't i don't mean to talk about politics at all but uh i was listening to this good interview with ezra klein the other day who was like talking about like vague words that we use that don't really mean anything in politics sometimes and he was like

00:46:40.48
John Rudolph Drexler
He's like, yes, like I too want a more efficient government. like in you know In the abstract, I too want a department of government efficiency to exist as a citizen and as a taxpayer.

00:46:54.54
John Rudolph Drexler
The question is like efficiency toward what? like We have to yoke that to a goal or else it's incoherent. And I think in the same way, it's a similar pattern here where it's like,

00:47:06.24
John Rudolph Drexler
we want a more efficient process. We want more direction. We want more whatever. It's like direction toward what. I can't, it's it's so, and that's why I think like my, some of my advice to the, just, I keep on harping on this, but like my advice to a lot of developers, I'm like,

00:47:22.34
John Rudolph Drexler
if If the answer to that question is muddy in your head, you have every right to go to the powers that be and say, let's put something down on paper, please.

00:47:23.50
Dan Matthews
Hmm.

00:47:32.34
John Rudolph Drexler
Like, it'll be so helpful for us to put something down on paper. And then when one of those other people comes to you and says, we'd actually like to do X, Y, z you get to go, awesome, cool. Let's ah run that through the filter of this paper that we wrote together.

00:47:47.47
John Rudolph Drexler
you know And that I find that to be incredibly clarifying.

00:47:52.20
Chris Morrell
to um To like, i think just to to to make this even more concrete, like I pulled up the spreadsheet that we use and let me just read the headings for you.

00:48:03.83
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah, do because this would also segue well into actually answering Dan's question of how do we do things? Because this spreadsheet is step one in a lot of ways of how do we build a feature at InterNACHI.

00:48:11.34
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

00:48:13.76
Chris Morrell
Yeah, so we we have basically a Google Sheet that John set up that's a list of projects that we have in Linear. um And we have six columns in this spreadsheet.

00:48:29.67
Chris Morrell
ah The first one is it improves financial stability. The second one is it improves life for our members. ah The third one is it makes our education platform the best in the world.

00:48:42.54
Chris Morrell
ah The next is it improves the experience of working here. ah It's a decades long investment in our future and it's good for the world. So those are our six categories.

00:48:55.70
Chris Morrell
ah We score each project on the six categories and then we sit down and we do the impossible task of trying to estimate the project. And essentially what we do is we multiply the score ah by the estimate, right and or divided by the estimate rather, such that ah you know really low effort projects that ah have high numbers in a bunch of those columns bubble to the top.

00:49:14.22
John Rudolph Drexler
Or divide it.

00:49:27.14
Chris Morrell
um and It's really interesting. It's been a really interesting process for me because it's kind of twofold. One is it's just incredibly clarifying to ask those six questions of each thing.

00:49:40.81
Chris Morrell
um Because I'm, you know, in sitting down myself and sitting down with like the team of directors within the organization and um just like really thinking about things, I'm quite confident that those six measures are like the guiding light right now.

00:50:00.08
Chris Morrell
Um, and so like just stepping back and saying like, okay, this doesn't really, um really move any of these measurably forward forward like why are we talking about it you know like it's easy to get caught up in oh this is a neat idea but like it doesn't actually solve any of the problems that we're trying to solve as an organization like it's just a neat idea nothing else like that in and of itself is really really helpful and and i think that like um

00:50:14.28
Dan Matthews
and

00:50:38.07
Chris Morrell
you know as As the the ah CEO of the company, people expect that maybe I like have some grand unified vision of of things, but like I'm just as lost as everyone else is half the time because it's like it's impossible to keep all of it in your head.

00:50:39.51
John Rudolph Drexler
Thank

00:50:56.49
Chris Morrell
Right.

00:50:56.59
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

00:50:57.10
Chris Morrell
but Taking the time to step back and like ask these clarifying questions of yourself is really, really helpful. But then the other really interesting thing ah is sometimes like a couple of projects have bubbled up to the top is like, oh, man, like.

00:51:14.26
Chris Morrell
This was not on my radar as being important at all, but like when you really think about it, yeah, maybe it's not a super important project, but it's actually quite low effort and it like scores pretty high on a couple of these like measures.

00:51:27.28
Chris Morrell
um We can knock this out in a cycle. and have delivered a ton of value ah instead of like you know committing to this other project that like everyone's thinking about but it's going to take us like four months to complete you know what i mean like um it's been a really interesting process for us and it's it's not perfect um

00:51:45.24
John Rudolph Drexler
The...

00:51:52.20
Chris Morrell
But it's it's been a really good place to start. and it's And it's also just been a really good place to for all those different things that we've been kicking around. like ah It's been useful to just like assess each of them on this this scale and decide, OK, how close to actually pursuing any of these should we really think we are?

00:52:14.49
Chris Morrell
you know

00:52:15.84
John Rudolph Drexler
ah Part of what I love, the thing that one of the things i love most about this spreadsheet, which also, by the way, I i made a copyable version that's just out there. So if anybody wants to ah wants a copy of it, it's just you can just email me at john.thunk.dev.

00:52:32.82
John Rudolph Drexler
I can send you a copyable version of it. um But aside from the fact that it's just really like simple and lightweight, the conversations that it fosters are really good because if you see the results and you don't like them, there's three basic ways for you to contest what you see.

00:52:52.86
John Rudolph Drexler
um One of them, is to say, I question your premise, are these really the goals that matter the most?

00:52:56.36
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

00:53:01.16
John Rudolph Drexler
Which now we're in a conversation about goals. Or like, interestingly, like somebody on the InterNACHI team, ah Jess, who's great, she looked at this and she was like, huh, this assumes that all of these goals are weighted the same.

00:53:14.92
John Rudolph Drexler
Is that true? Is financial stability actually the same weight as these other five? It's like, that's a very interesting question. Now we're into a conversation about our goals. Another way to attack it is to say, actually, you know you scored this thing as like a four on it's good for the world. And in fact, I think it's a six or what. i So now you're in a discussion about how well do our goals actually, or sorry, how well do our projects actually meet our goals, which is a conversation that's great to have.

00:53:43.63
John Rudolph Drexler
And the third way that you could attack this is to say, i hate that this project got tanked to the bottom of the list because its estimate is so big. is there a way to cut the estimate in half and do an MVP version of it to skyrocket this thing back to the top of the list, which is another conversation that I love for people to have.

00:53:57.25
Dan Matthews
Hmm.

00:54:01.95
John Rudolph Drexler
So I love this framework because it basically, if you want to move something on the list, you have to have like one of three very like healthy product conversations.

00:54:14.10
Chris Morrell
I would actually argue that there's a fourth too, which is um if I score something as a two and someone else is like, I think that's a five, that is, it's another place to surface surface like a difference in understanding about what the project is, right?

00:54:30.86
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah, totally.

00:54:30.88
Chris Morrell
Because it could be that like, I'm saying, you know, I'm saying, oh yeah, this like doesn't, this doesn't matter Like this doesn't impact this one goal at all.

00:54:42.79
Chris Morrell
And someone else is like, what are you talking about? Like, though because the way they're thinking about it in their head, like maybe the implementation they're thinking of, or maybe like the scope that they're thinking of actually does touch that side of the organization in a way that I hadn't even considered or vice versa.

00:54:59.47
Chris Morrell
And so I think like, ah It forces you to sort of like break down projects, talk about them just in like ways that as developers in particular, we don't necessarily talk about them all the way, all the time. Like we're talking about them in these more like conceptual value ah ah contexts rather than like the technical context.

00:55:18.97
Chris Morrell
So i I agree that the conversations that come out of the processes ah process are very useful, whatever they are.

00:55:28.33
John Rudolph Drexler
So ah the the next part that I think about with a lot of product management stuff, which InterNACHI is just weird because ah we ah do we don't have a designer. And so i don't don't really do this at InterNACHI.

00:55:42.62
John Rudolph Drexler
But even at places that don't have designs, I do generally. So step zero is like we maintain this list of all of the good project ideas. And they are not thoroughly scoped.

00:55:54.94
John Rudolph Drexler
They are like, notions of projects, basically. ah And then we maintain and sort those to kind of determine what do we think actually matters the most based on the goals of the company.

00:56:07.12
John Rudolph Drexler
um when it When we have time to pick up a new project, we look at this together and you don't have to go kind of like sequentially through them, but we try to be pretty disciplined about picking ones from the kind of top five towards the top.

00:56:20.49
John Rudolph Drexler
about what we want to do next. And ah at most companies, like I think it is, it does really matter then to have, um, a developer lead.

00:56:31.90
John Rudolph Drexler
I don't know, depending on the size of your company and like the organization of your company, I don't know, like maybe that's always the same person. I think it's good to like spread that around a little bit, especially if there's more than one project going at a time to have like ah a lead who is responsible for making sure that, um especially if you don't have a product manager, making sure that like all of as much ambiguity as possible has been kind of squeezed out of the project before we start writing code and i think that that can include like making little mock-ups just to show like this is what this interaction means in my head is this what this means in your head like having something to show to non-technical people uh that can save you quite a bit of grief but basically it's like i think

00:57:04.42
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

00:57:15.74
John Rudolph Drexler
I don't think you want to spend a month on this ah because you could you could waste a lot of time before writing any code, but I do think you want to have like get a lot of the ambiguity out.

00:57:26.22
John Rudolph Drexler
And I think having, allowing like one developer to like own that and kind of ah go figure that out and ask hard questions, write down their hard questions, ah keep track of, keep like a log of all the hard decisions that were made about this feature, write up a good document.

00:57:44.78
John Rudolph Drexler
Again, i think that this can be a plain text document. That's what I almost always use. ah But, i having ah one person be responsible and giving them an allotted amount of time to say, go take this thing from like vague concept to MVP feature that we can actually ship that's like finishable and has a definition of done and has some mockups to demonstrate how it actually works.

00:58:10.74
John Rudolph Drexler
ah I think that's ah that's a pretty critical step.

00:58:15.03
Dan Matthews
I think that that's really interesting that you mentioned that is I've mentioned that, you know, we have, ah we have three, three sort of senior people. We have two sort of mid-level developers.

00:58:28.26
Dan Matthews
And one of the things that I've been thinking about during all this is that the idea of, you know, should we be treating our product team as a bit more of a client maybe,

00:58:28.50
John Rudolph Drexler
Right.

00:58:39.57
Dan Matthews
And maybe this is just because, you know, this is what I did for six, seven years before i worked here, but is, you know, a lot of the things that you do when you're a contractor or when you're a freelancer you spend a lot of time trying to extract things.

00:58:44.61
John Rudolph Drexler
right

00:58:53.01
Dan Matthews
that information from the stakeholder on the project, they make a request of you. They say, can we add this feature? And I say, sure. ah Why do you want to do that? And you start, you start at the the beginnings of everything you start trying to extract.

00:59:06.29
Dan Matthews
And there's obviously a little bit of, there's a little bit of, maybe, ah i don't want to say bias, but you know we all know our system, we all know our kind of company's goals. So maybe people aren't asking enough questions around these features as they're being added or requested.

00:59:24.48
Dan Matthews
And the other thing I thought was, is it you know is this something that we could all be doing is you know rather than just just me trying to extract those details and trying to squeeze all the ambiguity out of something and writing a really good document.

00:59:38.72
Dan Matthews
And then handing that document off to somebody whose job is to go and make that feature. Is it maybe a good thing for that person who will be working on it, even if they are a little bit more junior to to start working towards that?

00:59:54.28
John Rudolph Drexler
Yes.

00:59:57.87
Dan Matthews
And obviously they don't have to do that alone. Like that can be that it could be them and a senior, but I've been very sort of, I don't want to make everybody in the team a project manager.

01:00:09.23
Dan Matthews
You know, I don't want to say everybody has to be their own project manager because we have enough to do. And it seems a little, maybe seems a little unfair, but also at the same time, maybe that would be a really great way for us to work as well, potentially.

01:00:23.88
John Rudolph Drexler
And some people might be really good at it. I mean, I'm working with one client right now with somebody who had, they were like, oh, we don't have a person to kind of lead this.

01:00:25.89
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:00:32.47
John Rudolph Drexler
and and we're like, well what about the, you know, what about the relatively junior, newer person? um And they put them on it and it turns out that they just have a real talent for this.

01:00:44.37
John Rudolph Drexler
um And it's a different kind of skillset. But yeah, like, and mean che back to that original idea of like, what does it mean for me to like fully scope this thing, document it perfectly, and then hand it off to somebody else who then has to go like get inside of my brain and depend on the writing that I did in order to do things perfectly.

01:00:58.84
Dan Matthews
Yeah. Yeah. yeah

01:01:02.15
John Rudolph Drexler
It's like how often have you seen that work really well? I haven't seen it work like almost ever. um So I love to have like whoever is like primarily responsible for the code that's going to be written is like super involved in the scoping process.

01:01:15.99
John Rudolph Drexler
um And it can also spread the load on like leadership demands, you know, that whoever is a senior developer on the team is not singularly responsible for doing basically all of this product work.

01:01:22.29
Dan Matthews
yeah

01:01:29.08
John Rudolph Drexler
um And it it brings more people into the process earlier to ask hard questions about it.

01:01:34.30
Dan Matthews
Yeah, I'm being, i been I'm being, go for

01:01:34.43
Chris Morrell
I have a question, though. um just ah Just sort of clarifying question. um Typically, and maybe you're maybe you're all over the place. I know we are on this. so ah But like typically, um do you find that your team as a whole is like working towards one or two major features or, or do you find that you're like, ah yeah you know, there's five of you and there's five features happening in parallel or like ah yeah that you like all work on the same feature and ship it and then move on. Like, do you find that you guys um operate ah consistently in one of those modes or is it kind of depends on the circumstances?

01:02:17.66
Dan Matthews
Yeah, there's definitely no consistency. it completely depends on what what is voice coming up and what is the next thing to be released. So at the minute we're barreling towards this deadline and we have pretty much everybody working on separate pieces that we know are intertwined, but we're having a lot of conversations where we sort of, so you know, we'll get together and be like, we know that our three pieces are coming together at some point. so we want to make sure that we're all aligned on this. And there's a lot of Miro diagrams going on and you know, making sure that we're all coming up with the best and we're not duplicating work and things like that. And it's, it's really, really nice.

01:02:57.15
Dan Matthews
um Yeah, we we don't really have, but then every now and then we'll have something where, you know, we'll maybe have, I'll be working on the back end of a feature where somebody else is building the front end out.

01:03:10.29
Dan Matthews
We don't tend to, one of the things that I think everybody loves about the small team part is that you get to do all of the pieces of the the app. You get to do the database design, you get to do the front end, you get to do a little bit of CSS and making it look look nice and making it look polished. And you get to do the Laravel side and the architecture side. And i know I enjoy that. and

01:03:36.76
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:03:36.83
Dan Matthews
And, you know, we've tried to do this thing where we've given people

01:03:36.93
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

01:03:41.32
Dan Matthews
roles And then those people have very quickly changed sort of thought you know i kind of miss writing laravel code can i come back and write some laravel code and it's like hell yeah yeah of course you can like i love it so much why would i deny you it so you know we're all a team of full stack developers we we we just we kind of there are a few people with sort of domain knowledge of certain parts of the app that we they kind of get paid pigeonholed but that's that's something that we're working to address as well um

01:03:49.57
Chris Morrell
ah

01:04:06.61
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:04:12.94
Dan Matthews
We're going try a lot more sort of pairing to try and bring everybody else up on the um each other's sort domain knowledge areas. ah But it's kind of a natural thing.

01:04:24.51
Dan Matthews
But yeah, there's no real consistent mode of of attack for us. It's just kind of who's the best to do this? Who do you think will, you know, who will enjoy this? Who will? might not enjoy this, but we know that we can trust them to get it, get it done.

01:04:38.30
Dan Matthews
And, you know, this is a really boring piece of work, but it needs to be done. So who's the best person, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.

01:04:46.43
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:04:46.61
Dan Matthews
Yeah. It's never.

01:04:49.52
Chris Morrell
Yeah, I was just curious because I think it ah it does impact kind of how you think about um hey you but think about splitting up the the the tasks right or the projects.

01:04:59.84
Dan Matthews
Projects. Yeah.

01:05:01.89
Chris Morrell
Because ah you know and i and at InterNACHI, we have gone through periods of time where we've tried to like really be everyone all in on one feature.

01:05:13.42
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

01:05:14.57
Chris Morrell
um And there's a lot of really like and really nice things that come out of that because you know that I find that review is so much easier because like you and everyone's kind of already on the same page by the time the code gets to review and ah it's easier to pair because everyone's on this in the same sort of headspace, you know bounce ideas. ah and And that's been really great. But at the flip side, it it means that um you're also now ah

01:05:45.79
Chris Morrell
even more so having to make trade-offs around like what we're what we're committing to because we're we're down to like one project per cycle instead of you know a couple um so it comes with trade-offs and we're we're actively exploring right now sort of like you know what how does ah how does it work for our team if we try to

01:05:56.59
Dan Matthews
yeah

01:06:09.50
Chris Morrell
um kind of each be leading one one specific thing um and you know working together on it, but like each each person is kind of in their own lane a little bit.

01:06:25.01
Chris Morrell
um And it's just kind of and interesting it' an interesting experience experiment to see sort of the difference between those two because I can see how both of them work in different ways for us. I don't know if we're going to commit to one or the other always, but...

01:06:39.21
Chris Morrell
I don't know, changes how you think about some things.

01:06:43.90
Dan Matthews
we We have some kind of natural, surge and sorry, John, sorry.

01:06:44.10
John Rudolph Drexler
I also think closer.

01:06:48.48
John Rudolph Drexler
No, go you go ahead.

01:06:48.96
Dan Matthews
we I was just going to say, Chris, we have some natural lines that kind of form because of this sometimes, because we have people, we have three people work in the UK and two people work UK.

01:07:01.20
Dan Matthews
They live in Canada, at opposite ends of Canada.

01:07:03.21
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

01:07:04.04
Dan Matthews
So the time zone the time on stuff kind of comes into, you know, we have people who are out of sync with us by x number of hours. they One of our developers, he comes online at sort of, you know, sometimes 3, 4 in the UK and it means that I'm taking out, you know, I'll check in with him, but then I'm sort taking off and leaving work for six of his hours of his day.

01:07:35.60
Dan Matthews
So these individual projects and his ability to progress things

01:07:36.51
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:07:40.37
Dan Matthews
ah mean that it kind of lends itself nicely to being able to split up into little silos of of certain things. And, um you know, we always have crossover and we always make sure that we have crossover and I'm i'm terrible for work working late anyway.

01:07:56.51
Dan Matthews
So there's been a sort of, you know, the odd eight or 9 p.m. huddle on Slack talking about getting questions answered so he doesn't get blocked by things. But That's kind of one of the reasons that we that we end up with that kind of split between, i don't want to call them teams, but between certain sets of developers is kind of naturally formed strangely ah along those lines.

01:08:24.69
Chris Morrell
Makes sense for sure.

01:08:25.72
Dan Matthews
Yeah, it it does, and it works it works for us, which is which is great.

01:08:25.84
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:08:29.80
Dan Matthews
um Yeah, definitely. It definitely works for us. um Sort of we have that developer as well knows a lot about certain sort of experimental things, little little projects that we've built that are outside of the main app that we build as sort of idea validation stuff for the for the agency side.

01:08:54.03
Dan Matthews
So he knows a lot about those as well. So he gets to kind of, sometimes he might have to go off work on something that they, they've asked for and because he's it's completely outside of everybody else there's no we don't have to have a three hour long meeting to discuss how it looks on a mirror board or whatever so what it does work really well for us that way so that's one thing that i think we really do well and that that richard our other developer does really well as well

01:09:25.73
John Rudolph Drexler
the The only thing I was going to add to that was this, that I, ah I think it really does matter to capture the work involved to scope and design.

01:09:25.97
Chris Morrell
So

01:09:39.11
John Rudolph Drexler
Like if there's, if there, if there's a designer that there's a design ticket, if there's, if there's a person whose job it is to make the documentation and scope of this thing really clear, like give them a ticket to do that, to like show that there's like,

01:09:55.29
John Rudolph Drexler
There's work. This is work, right? and Sometimes I've seen like some dev teams be like, well, tickets are about like the code we write. And it's like, right. But in order to write code well, there's like perhaps a day of like scoping and planning that goes into that. So it's like, why not account for that as part of the work?

01:10:16.20
John Rudolph Drexler
And I've seen that also be helpful with like suppose that you and Chris were like a two-person team. ah the you could do something where it's like, there's two projects that are going to happen. Maybe, so maybe they'll sort of overlap in the timeline, but like Chris is responsible for one and Dan is responsible for one.

01:10:35.38
John Rudolph Drexler
You know, maybe we're, we're working on Dan's project right now and Chris is even doing tickets on Dan's project, but Chris also has a ticket, which is go scope out the next project.

01:10:45.59
John Rudolph Drexler
And so Chris gets to like carve out some time out of his cycle to do that. And then, you know, you could go back and forth. So it's like, you can have it be where it's like, it's not as if, You being the developer lead on a project means you're going to do everything on it.

01:10:59.27
John Rudolph Drexler
um And in fact, you might be like a support player on you could be a senior developer who's like a support player on somebody else's project, while scoping out a bigger and harder project ah with the rest of your site, you know, so I think there's a lot of ways to like mix and match that but like, it's helpful to decide who the dev lead is on a given project and give them like allotted time to do that part of the work well.

01:11:25.70
John Rudolph Drexler
This is my only last thought on that.

01:11:30.43
Dan Matthews
Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's really important. I think, I can't remember if it was from one of your talks that was watching, John, but make the work visible, I think, was that one of yours?

01:11:40.38
John Rudolph Drexler
Hmm.

01:11:42.24
Dan Matthews
And I often think about that is, you know, and I don't want to step too far back into a weird sort of meta discussion, but, you know, a lot of people have different different ideas of what a ticket or an issue in linear or whatever system is for, you know, support people think it think of it as a kind of a problem that has been reported. We maybe think of it as you know, for a project, we'll break it down into 10 or 15 tickets because we have these logical breaks that we make, you know, build build the data database table, ah build the controllers, write the tests, all this sort of stuff.

01:12:21.48
Dan Matthews
But product people, the product side, break things down differently to us as well. So it's, it can be quite difficult. So maybe even kind of defining, defining, you know, what, what unit of work is, I don't want to step too far back again. It kind of feels kind of too meta discussiony, but I think there's making it visible is definitely one of those things that, and it's one thing that we've,

01:12:51.39
Dan Matthews
I think what I'm trying to say is that there's a lot more work goes into a project than, you know, the number of tickets on a project does not necessarily reflect reflect all the work that that needs to be done. And I think it's way too easy to look at a project, think that's only got 12 tickets, so we can knock that out in a week.

01:13:10.75
Dan Matthews
And I think you are right, making this whole sort of scope in,

01:13:19.30
Dan Matthews
measuring against the goals is is such a good yeah i'm definitely going to need a copy that spreadsheet that that's definitely going to need a copy of that amazing thank you

01:13:25.17
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

01:13:26.44
John Rudolph Drexler
I'll send it to you right after this.

01:13:30.18
Chris Morrell
it's It's funny that you say that. I mean, this isn't exactly... i think the um the point that a project... If a project only includes the like dev work tickets, then it doesn't represent the actual ah work that you have to complete.

01:13:52.56
Chris Morrell
I think is 100% true. Yeah. um I think it's also really interesting because the, you know, John and I just spent probably an hour and a half talking about the very specific problem of like, uh, if, if a like, how do you deal with the fact that like the problem statement that comes from one person,

01:14:15.45
Dan Matthews
you

01:14:21.52
Chris Morrell
um like the difference between an issue that someone is trying to resolve or a feature that someone is requesting or or a problem that someone's trying to resolve through a feature request or whatever it is.

01:14:34.46
Chris Morrell
um The difference between that and ultimately the tickets that they go into linear right because those are fundamentally two very different things it's like it's for you know someone on my education team that they might say like you know i just got off the phone with someone at this state licensing board Right.

01:14:58.75
Chris Morrell
And, you know, they need ah to have this new ah approval number listed on certificates that we print. Right.

01:15:09.44
Chris Morrell
And that's what they care about is that this approval number shows up on the certificates. Right.

01:15:15.35
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:15:15.67
Chris Morrell
um from the dev side, it may mean that like, okay, we need to update like the certificate rendering pipeline and then we need to like make a change to the licensing system to support like this new field.

01:15:29.76
Chris Morrell
And then like we need to add some sort of verification process that ensures that that like if a certificate requires this field that it's that the certificate's coming through a department that like has this licensing, know, ah and it may clear for

01:15:42.99
John Rudolph Drexler
which is all all gibberish to them.

01:15:45.70
Chris Morrell
ah right

01:15:45.88
Dan Matthews
Yeah, yeah, they they don't care about that.

01:15:46.48
Chris Morrell
Right, exactly.

01:15:47.92
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:15:48.77
Chris Morrell
and And it's always this question of like, okay, do like ah do we just take their ticket and change everything about it to represent the work that happens at the dev team? That's not super helpful because now...

01:16:07.49
Chris Morrell
the actual problem that this person is trying to get solved kind of gets lost um in the process um and it's just like a really interesting issue to me because fundamentally those are just two totally different things right it's like they're they're connected But they are ah we figuring out how to represent both of them in the same or in systems that work together well.

01:16:41.52
Chris Morrell
It's like a whole other project management ah question that is like really hard to get right, I think.

01:16:49.51
Dan Matthews
Yeah, and I think i think i was sort of thinking the whole time you speak and I was like, well, the difference here is, it you know, where has that request come from? So I couldn't help but liken it to support tickets that we get.

01:17:02.65
Dan Matthews
they come linear. And then if there's a piece of work that is required to fix a particular problem, like if it's a bigger problem, then they're just, Oh, it's a bug and we'll change this.

01:17:15.55
Dan Matthews
We don't necessarily change that ticket to be you know there might be comments underneath it like oh well actually this is a bigger problem than we thought we have to do this this and this but we don't necessarily change the ticket around or add a bunch of sub issues maybe we kind of just build the work and do go do what we need to and then update that ticket so that the requester can update the customer and then I was like, well, that's different when you're building a project because the, you start with, at least, at least we do at the minute is we start with, you know, here's the thing that we want to build.

01:17:54.57
Dan Matthews
Here's the sort of scoped out document that we have that describes the feature. Now let's start building tickets. So you start building tickets that are very abstract away from the problem. You know, it's like,

01:18:07.16
Dan Matthews
you know, but do the, you know, build the database and you might have a few notes in that issue about like, oh, here's off the top of my head what I think we should do for this approach we should use, we need to use this, this, and this.

01:18:20.85
Dan Matthews
But then that's a really interesting thing because you sort of think, well, that ticket is just, it's just a piece of work that somebody needs to do. It doesn't represent the problem.

01:18:34.99
Dan Matthews
And when do those two things diverge? You know, at what point do those two things diverge and is it helpful to diverge them? And I see a lot of, and I keep coming back to ShapeUp and it's not because it's purely not, it's not because I have any kind of,

01:18:53.04
Dan Matthews
bias or anything from it. It's just that it's literally the most recent thing I've, I've read. So it's kind freshest in my mind, but they have this thing where they sort of say, you know, don't go and create to do's for every piece of work, start building.

01:18:58.66
Chris Morrell
Sure.

01:19:08.34
Dan Matthews
And then, um, you know, as you start building, you'll come across some of these questions that then might require you to to make a sort of higher level list. And it's not something that we've done. It's not something that we did even back in sort of my agency days. You know, we would we wouldn't we actually didn't have tickets back then, but we did have, you know, to-dos for everything that we needed to do And yeah it's a really interesting question. And it's it's it is an art in itself to be able to translate

01:19:44.88
Dan Matthews
a requirement into, you know, how we're splitting this work up again.

01:19:51.67
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:19:52.06
Dan Matthews
And, you know, if you've got multiple developers working on it, you could maybe use the the each developer as a way to split the tickets or something, but, you know, I'll take this so that you don't, we don't cross over or something, or, you know, there's so many possible ways that you could split a project up into pieces.

01:20:11.84
Dan Matthews
There's probably a whole podcast on its own. And i am not I'm not volunteering for that one, definitely not, um before anybody says anything. But yeah, it's it's um it's it's a whole it's a whole thing, isn't it? And you know i'm always ah I'm always in awe of when i I've worked with some really good project managers and I've worked with some really, really poor ones. And I'm always in awe of the really good ones and how they manage to make it look effortless and you know really break things down to a place where

01:20:45.75
Dan Matthews
it feels like you can just get on with your job of building things and they can kind of deal with the rest and make sure that it still meets the requirements. It's when you get a good one, it's, it's a different, whole different world.

01:21:01.17
Dan Matthews
Definitely.

01:21:01.31
Chris Morrell
Yeah, so I mean, we've been we've been chatting for a while. I'm happy to keep on going. i But i I want to step back and just say, like... you know I think we've we've touched on a lot of really interesting things.

01:21:14.14
Chris Morrell
um If you like sort of close your eyes and and think about ah the intention that you you you came in with, like is there anything that's still kind of like ah you know tugging at you? or is there anything Either of you, John, like is there anything that you're like, I came in prepped to talk about this thing and we haven't gotten to it or I don't know, just like, let's take a moment to step back and ask the question, like, is there anywhere that we want to make sure we get to before things start to wrap up?

01:21:46.22
John Rudolph Drexler
I'm more interested in Dan's answer.

01:21:48.12
Dan Matthews
Oh, right. Okay. um Like I said, you know, i wasn't I wasn't stepping into this expecting everything to be solved by the end of it. I think I just wanted to have a really interesting discussion with two people who were in a similar similar position to me.

01:22:05.01
Dan Matthews
It's not something I get the chance to do very often. So I think we've talked through a lot of stuff. I think there'll be a bunch of pieces of this, you know, if people can't identify with all of them, there'll be a bunch of pieces that people can identify and things that they can take away.

01:22:20.61
Dan Matthews
I know I've got a plan in my head for what I'm going to be doing, you know, i'm Monday morning and the things.

01:22:27.89
Chris Morrell
Are you willing to share it? I'd be curious to hear what you're what your like takeaway is right now.

01:22:34.43
Dan Matthews
Well, like I said, I think I came into this and I was kind of, secretly hoping I was like, jo John and Chris are going to give me the secrets to, you know, here's this process that we, that we use and and you should totally just do this and, and everything will be amazing.

01:22:52.08
Dan Matthews
And, you know, I knew my naive, ah naive part of me was, was thinking that, but I think I knew really that wasn't going to be the case. Um, cause life is just not that simple, but,

01:23:04.74
Dan Matthews
I think one of the things you know, that we, we definitely have to take a step back and look at everything that we decide to build, you know, before we, before we start to build it, we're often asked about our roadmap.

01:23:16.47
Chris Morrell
Mm-hmm.

01:23:19.21
Dan Matthews
And I think we never have a really good answer because we never really know what kind of opportunities are going to present themselves in, in this sector.

01:23:31.53
Dan Matthews
The nonprofit sector is a very strange one because it's, full of possibilities, but every company is very, very risk averse and scared of technology. um So we have to kind of build these these things that can deliver results and then prove that they work and then convince people to change and adopt the technology, which is ah whole challenge in itself.

01:23:52.60
Dan Matthews
So I think stepping back, John, we are definitely going to make use of that spreadsheet. We are definitely going to be sitting down and having a a long chat about let's get our next set of features put into this and let's look at the values that we you know that we want to we want to build this company on and deliver things for. and And then I think, um ah think and I'll have to chat to the team, I'm not going to force anything on anybody, but I do think that giving people a bit more kind of um room to be their own

01:24:27.75
Dan Matthews
project leads. I think that would be a really interesting, a really interesting thing.

01:24:29.64
John Rudolph Drexler
Mm-hmm.

01:24:33.39
Dan Matthews
I think people getting to a point where they can extract the information that they need out of, the stakeholder without having to use me as a middleman, because I can't keep it all in my head either. You know, as you've said, you just, you can't keep four or five projects worth of information in your head at the same time.

01:24:56.18
Dan Matthews
think that might be something we'll do. um And yeah, retrospectives. I think I decided that one before I even came on the podcast, just based on the answer everybody gave me to my blue sky post. Yeah.

01:25:09.63
Dan Matthews
retrospectives and, you know, really tracking what people are saying and then coming back to it and making sure that we've, we've done something to try and address that, that problem, um, whether it's worked or not is a different thing, but we'll, you know, keeping that sort of cycle of constant feedback and trying to address it and making sure that,

01:25:37.00
Dan Matthews
you know, something isn't on our list of things to address for sick six retrospectives, because obviously there's a problem there. But yeah, I think that that pretty much sums up what i I've got planned, I think.

01:25:48.60
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:25:49.30
Dan Matthews
would you like to would would you Would you have any advice when it comes to any of those?

01:25:49.81
John Rudolph Drexler
it i the ah All of the advice I have about retros are in that talk that I did.

01:26:02.08
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:26:02.84
John Rudolph Drexler
ah um

01:26:02.82
Dan Matthews
Yeah. It was definitely that talk that tipped me over the edge. I mean, every I think three different people said do retros when I asked that question originally.

01:26:05.84
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:26:10.48
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:26:12.34
Dan Matthews
And i I watched that talk and the whole thing about, you know, i think even some of the little things that you were saying, like have different people take notes each time, um potentially have somebody different leading it.

01:26:21.04
John Rudolph Drexler
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

01:26:29.88
Dan Matthews
Every now and then i think, cause you know, I talk way too much and I think my team probably gets sick of hearing my voice, but I would love to get them to you know, to to try and lead that as well. I think that'd be fantastic.

01:26:46.70
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:26:47.07
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah, and like I said earlier, it's like it's funny. I'm realizing I want to do that talk again. i have like By giving at once, I feel like i got I did a retrospective with myself about what I want do differently next time on that talk.

01:26:59.87
John Rudolph Drexler
ah But this has entered this has ah given me a new angle into it, which is like, when you ask like what process should we use for a small team, part of me is like,

01:27:13.28
John Rudolph Drexler
ah you The true answer is you actually have to do something much harder, which is like like deep self-examination and a bunch of hard conversations with the powers that be.

01:27:25.49
John Rudolph Drexler
you know um And that will end up like that is the upstream problem of their of your processes

01:27:33.03
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:27:34.57
John Rudolph Drexler
And if you could solve those, you'll not only solve your processes, you'll solve a whole bunch else too. But it's like, um I don't know, i I have this vivid memory when I was a kid of like, I spilled a glass of milk or something at at the table.

01:27:49.92
John Rudolph Drexler
And so the table was covered in milk and it was dripping onto of the ground. And my mom was like, go get a rag. you know get And i like I started cleaning the floor first. And she's like, aha, let me teach you an important life lesson.

01:28:04.14
John Rudolph Drexler
You're going to want to start with where the mess is coming from.

01:28:05.70
Dan Matthews
the root of the problem.

01:28:07.33
John Rudolph Drexler
And then, yeah, and it it feels sort of like that. but i mentioned my mom a lot in these talks.

01:28:10.64
Dan Matthews
yeah Yeah, that's fantastic.

01:28:12.24
John Rudolph Drexler
I'm wondering if that's not a coincidence.

01:28:17.75
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:28:18.59
Dan Matthews
Um,

01:28:18.99
Chris Morrell
um One other thing that I would say ah that I keep on coming back to because, don't know, i like to I like to think, you know, i so i i have ADHD and a important part of um surviving the world with ADHD is relying heavily on processes, right?

01:28:42.42
Chris Morrell
um And the more predictable and consistent those processes are, the easier and the easier they are to to follow and the more likely they they are to happen.

01:28:53.90
Chris Morrell
right So i I just know that when I go through the world, and constantly looking for how can I make things consistent and like predictable because that is how I will survive at the world.

01:29:07.58
Chris Morrell
um

01:29:10.16
Chris Morrell
And I think that... I go into these kinds of conversations often with the same sort of mindset of like, okay, let's just define a process.

01:29:21.15
Chris Morrell
Like let's let's let's come up with a single unified theory that like applies to everything, you know, unilaterally so that I can just like be in my like comfort zone of knowing that like, okay, we have a process. We're gonna stick to the process and everything's gonna be perfect because we have this process.

01:29:40.27
Chris Morrell
um Spoiler alert, that's not how the world works.

01:29:44.56
John Rudolph Drexler
right.

01:29:46.59
Chris Morrell
um And I think it's even more important when you're in a small organization to understand that like,

01:30:00.57
Chris Morrell
Processes only only get you so far. and um and and in And in fact, the people that like these processes like the people that are enacting these processes are just so much more important, right?

01:30:15.00
Chris Morrell
um

01:30:15.34
Dan Matthews
No,

01:30:16.65
Chris Morrell
And so i think like you know kind of going back to that original story that you were talking about, that that this this ah agility that your that your group has,

01:30:27.98
Chris Morrell
um just like you don't want to necessarily, you don't want to give that up, right? You don't want to give that up for some sort of rigidity.

01:30:34.19
Dan Matthews
no. no

01:30:36.54
Chris Morrell
In the same way, I think it's just like really important to to remember Yeah, establishing a good process is great and it really does help a lot of people. And the larger the team gets, the more you have to sort of accept the trade-offs that come with that because the benefits you know become more and more valuable.

01:30:55.48
Dan Matthews
Thank you.

01:30:56.98
Chris Morrell
you know like that the the The types of things that I have to think about as our organization organization for our organization as a whole, right which is is much bigger than our dev team, um have to be more process heavy because you know there's multiple tiers sort of management and all these other things at play um but i think like if you can just get everyone on the same page and then like establish trust and like rely on people's like intuition and, and, and you know doing what's best rather than what is like exactly ah in adherence with like whatever system you, you follow.

01:31:29.59
Dan Matthews
Yeah. Yeah.

01:31:42.26
Dan Matthews
yeah

01:31:42.51
Chris Morrell
Like that's also, I think really important because otherwise, yeah you just, you just, you start to get to a place where people resent the process instead of like,

01:31:54.97
Chris Morrell
appreciate it right it needs to be something that helps people not just like something that's there yeah it can right

01:31:56.55
Dan Matthews
yeah

01:31:59.39
Dan Matthews
Yeah, it becomes another obstacle, doesn't it? It becomes another... and It can, yeah. It can be it can maybe be a really helpful thing, but yeah.

01:32:08.43
Chris Morrell
absolutely

01:32:08.53
Dan Matthews
And I'm the same, Chris. I think that's probably possibly why. You know, I also had ADHD, and I think I come into things thinking, let's do it this way because it sets us up for the best chance of success with the least amount of...

01:32:30.16
Dan Matthews
divergence from it and yeah, I'm, I'm the same. I just kind of have to slowly realize that the world doesn't, doesn't work like that, but unfortunately, but at the same time, I'm kind of glad it isn't all just, you know, rigid and there's no fun in that.

01:32:49.40
Dan Matthews
Is there really sometimes?

01:32:50.07
Chris Morrell
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

01:32:51.45
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:32:52.51
Chris Morrell
Yeah.

01:32:53.27
Dan Matthews
Yeah.

01:32:53.52
Chris Morrell
Yeah. It's a, it's a balance, you know, everything is just finding the right balance.

01:32:58.33
Dan Matthews
Yeah. Well, thank you very much both for your insights. It's been lovely to speak to you both, lovely to speak to some people who feel like, I feel like know what they're doing.

01:33:12.09
Dan Matthews
ah That was meant as a compliment, but it, did yeah.

01:33:13.96
Chris Morrell
I don't know I would say that, but

01:33:15.72
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:33:16.47
Dan Matthews
Well, yeah, yeah.

01:33:16.88
John Rudolph Drexler
We're certainly trying hard.

01:33:18.62
Chris Morrell
we're trying hard.

01:33:19.00
Dan Matthews
I think you're projecting and aura of of competence, which is excellent.

01:33:21.17
John Rudolph Drexler
yeah

01:33:24.25
Dan Matthews
um Yeah, thank you very much both. It's it's been a really illuminating discussion.

01:33:30.22
John Rudolph Drexler
was fun.

01:33:30.34
Chris Morrell
Awesome. Yeah. before ah Before we stop, is there anything that either of you want to plug or shout out or or or point point people towards before we call it?

01:33:45.13
Dan Matthews
No, I don't think so. um Big shout out to my team because they're all absolutely amazing.

01:33:47.05
John Rudolph Drexler
Yeah.

01:33:49.99
Dan Matthews
And and I know they're probably going watch this just so they can hear if I've said anything about them. But big, big, big, ah big shout out to them. They are absolutely amazing. All of them.

01:34:01.09
Dan Matthews
Yeah. really great people. Um, but apart from that, no, no.

01:34:07.77
John Rudolph Drexler
I'll just say to Shil for 10 seconds that ah the we we've been doing and enough, we've kind of brought on enough of this part-time fractional product management work that I can't do all of it anymore, ah which means that we've brought in some really good other people.

01:34:25.18
John Rudolph Drexler
And um one of them is like a person who I used to work with who's a lot better at this than me. And so if you are ah if you are desirous of ah you know part-time product management work or some like short-term consulting or anything like that, we have we some really awesome people in-house.

01:34:48.66
Dan Matthews
Cool. Cool.

01:34:50.70
Chris Morrell
All right. Well, thanks for hanging out, guys.

01:34:51.31
Dan Matthews
Yeah, thank you.

01:34:54.50
Chris Morrell
It's been fun.

01:34:55.65
Dan Matthews
Yeah, thank you both. Have a great afternoon. It's evening. It's evening here, so my brain's breaking, but have a great afternoon, dear.

01:35:03.96
John Rudolph Drexler
Close enough.

01:35:05.06
Dan Matthews
Yeah, close enough. All right.

01:35:06.66
Chris Morrell
Cheers.

01:35:06.90
Dan Matthews
Thank you both.

Running Small Teams w/ Dan Matthews & John Rudolph Drexler

Running Small Teams w/ Dan Matthews & John Rudolph DrexlerRunning Small Teams w/ Dan Matthews & John Rudolph Drexler

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