Welcome to Tectastic, where we navigate the intersection of technology and business, uncovering innovations that redefine our world. Glad you're fair enough. Welcome to its techtastic. It is lovely to have you here. Thank you so much, for having me here. So one of the reasons I was really excited to get you on this is I am going through right now with my company, the thing that coach people on. And you've had a lot of experience. Coach, you'd start a founders.
You've run a bunch of your own companies, and you currently offer a service co founders. Right? Yes. I do. Founders and technology executives. Yeah. So I'm I'm curious about that and technology executive What is it about the, technology executive that relates to the founder that needs that same level coaching? Oh, absolutely.
Side in the market is that we, as technologists or founders in technology industry, very much focus on the product in client interactions, trying to reach that product market fit. And sometimes we are not paying attention to the relationships between ourselves and our teammates or between ourselves and executives or between executives and the company.
And there is a great risk that over time, if goals outcome relationships are not in line with the company, they can bring the company down at the worst possible moment. And if we start talking about those issues beforehand, it's almost like setting up those metrics or analytics before you start launching the website.
You will have a pulse of how you company actually feels on Insight, and that will enable you to monitor it as a company grows and goes to that product market fit eventually and generate those great revenues for you. So that's where I I see the parallels.
It's the founders venturing into the business it's growing, but the connections may be not still investigated and debugged, or technology leaders are not yet aware that those interfaces as they are right now focusing very much on individual contribution from the technical perspective, but they're not yet know how to develop their human interfaces. To influence others and to achieve what they're looking for.
So I love that, the focus on the human interface's piece, and you remind me of a topic that's come up a lot in my past. I've been in technology long enough that I can remember being the computer guy in a company. Right? And a lot of people that are in very senior role in large companies today, that's how their career started. They were the computer guy. And when the company said, hey. We're gonna being a technology company at some point in the past. They hired people, and they said, hey.
Computer guy managed the technical people now. That was how you train to be a manager. Right? And then that just continued up until you're sitting in, like, the c suite going, I know what I'm doing, but you don't you really don't you haven't been trained on being a human manager, a human leader. It it's like front end development versus back end development. You're very competent in the technology side of job. Right. But the front end part, you had no training on you have no experience in.
Absolutely. And it's been a real trash I think of the technology industry is that we look for the best software engineer and we say, you're going to be the team lead. And then we say, you've been team lead. Now you're gonna be a manager. You're gonna be a director or the VP, and you're gonna keep going up that way for the people that are interested in it. Right? But, again, no training, no expectations of what that means. You you fumble your way through it.
If lucky, you get a chance to try again. And it starts on a technology company, like, we we start in a small room at folding table working on the same project together. We have easy human interaction. But, like, with COVID, a lot of us started our technology companies remote. I don't see my team. Right? When am I gonna see them? And then no standing me anything. I don't wanna get in the way of their flow. Right? I want their hands on their keyboard.
I want them focused, and I want them create So that human piece, we almost run away from it. How do we get it back? How do we how do we make that connection? The way, you phrased that and the way I believe other technology companies are working is we're always trying to optimize, which we always try to build something more and more and more efficient. But we always do it within the domain of our knowledge.
We know how to write code, so we believe if we want to write more code and more and product, we just need to write more code. And sometimes it could be true, but in the end, we're running code, which will then be used by other humans. And we have mental models of other humans, how they will use that code, but it's not necessarily the truth. And realigning those mental models with our users takes a lot of time.
And as you mentioned before, product market feed is part of it to understand how your user thinks. Now if one developer has a user mental model and another developer has a user mental model, chances are those models are not same. And both of them are running at a hundred miles per hour developing code for their own models.
By the time they commit the code, By the time a token gets checked and by the time it goes to production, the user will experience different interfaces in your application because a different developer wrote it. Now you can always apply layers of changes to make sure that people are having the same theme, but the idea, the underlying kind of like harming engine understanding of the product by the developers will not always be perfect.
And thus, there is a really good, exercise to once a week, twice a week, once a month, whatever the cadence is appropriate for the team to align first on how they understand the user, and then eventually to how they understand each other. Because there's opportunity for meshing and communicating with each other in a way that does not require words, which develops over time, or specific kind of communication.
But if you do not talk to each other, you do not get that model training data necessary for you to define that interface between each other that enables you to accelerate. What I'm bringing up here is that it's another to you to make things more efficient, make things, go faster, make things less buggy at the very end. You you touch a a very important part of efficiency that I think gets overlooked a lot. And that is the effort and activity. It's not what you're shooting for.
It's the outcome of that activity that you want. And a lot of wasted efforts spinning their wheels doing 2 different things that are crossed with each other is not efficient. So taking a little bit of time to align and make sure you're you're driving towards the same thing is far more efficient. It's like the a bunch of people rolling in a boat. If one person's rowing backwards and everybody else is rowing forward as a less efficient motion than if everybody was rowing the same direction. Right?
And we run into that a lot. That's actually, surprisingly, what we're talking about is what my company tries to solve after the fact. Awesome. Right? You you've created the technical debt. You you've created these place where there's been a disconnect between the desire and the outcome state. We help you solve that.
So the thing that's really interesting to me about that, when you're talking about it with a human interface piece and that that model piece is that organizational structure has such a big impact on people. Right? And I I always think of the game of telephoning played as a kid. You've got the customer screaming about a problem. Now the problem is the customer doesn't actually know the problem they want solved. They know the pain they feel from it.
They know how it impacts them, but they don't really know the problem. And then you've got a product leader. Maybe it's CEO, right, but you've got the person who's got the vision for how we're going to solve that. They believe they've got a better picture. So you've already gone through one game of telephone. Like, one party passed to another. And now that's gonna get passed to the product manager or whoever. Right? It's gonna get passed and passed and passed.
And it gets to the finally, to the people that implement it in code. Who are playing a telephone with the computer itself. Right? They're trying to tell the computer. This is what I want you to do in an imprecise thing itself in the programming language. And so the the natural outcome of this game of telephone is you've got a bad translation.
You're always going to be off the mark, which means we have to iterate It means that code has to be thought of as ephemeral, and we all have to converge towards an a shared understanding of what good looks like. But we won't start there because we all started from different spot in that game of telephone. Yeah. That's a fantastic analogy. And, one of the things to bring up that is not happening and is not most of us are not taught to do is actually ask a lot of stupid questions.
Or powerful Christian, depending on how you look at them, to clarify what the other person is sharing. If you have an act without a sin, you get to UTP communication, which is not necessarily always understood that they received, you need to bring it to TCP in a way that every direction between the layers that you have just described, at least have a high level verification that the person listening has received it.
And maybe there's a feedback loop to the original party, maybe not the same with, that allows you to clarify the information you have received. And on top of that, perhaps maybe there is a way to design incentive structure where the pain of the customer can be felt by all the parties who are in a chain. And that's the hardest part is when people talk about OKRs and KPIs and drive from that is they misalign that, and they build their organization.
I I talked about this this particular topic at length. And so I'm sorry if anybody's gonna be bored with me saying it again, but, like, You have to build teams to be durable, but the goals that they have aren't. If you build a team and say your job is to ensure that the product get better and better and better. That's a terrible goal because we might not do product recommendations in the future. Maybe it's gonna have an AI interface to be something else ever. Right?
I don't want to incentivize a technology choice and a current state of being into perpetuity. However, if I said, I want you to Always make sure that the customer is getting better and better, things that they'd be interested in buying, and we're gonna know that because they're buying more of them. Yeah. That that that stays true. I I do want that as an e Hammer company, let's say. Right? And the second part, like, they're buying more of them tells me that's a good signal. But we don't do that.
We say that the conversion number needs to go from 5 to 6 and 5 to 6 percent, and you need to do better and better product recommendations based on this case AI. Yeah. And probably write more lines of code. The more lines of code you write, the better. The more hours you spend on the computer, the better. I'm always amazed, though, that how fast that game of telephone falls apart, and people don't ask the clarifying questions.
And I'll give you my favorite way to test this in an organization because I've done this multiple times, and I wanna see if you think it's nuts or not. But I will get into a team, and though somebody will say, okay. It'll be done on that date. Please to find done for me. And I and I want everybody else to hear everybody else's definition. Oh, actually, like, you'd need to do that anonymous and then they compare, because otherwise, they start copying.
It's back to the same model of the result and, of what work we're actually doing. People forget the outcomes A lot of people probably don't even know what other people are working on. Yeah. It's so complex if you, if you, like, if you look at any sizable organization, even just eight people working on something. It is hard to keep tabs on what everybody else is working on. Oh, absolutely. And I agree. That's a challenge.
Like, you have your own contact people have others, but that's where the need of the leader comes in, which who's actually aggregating all that into a wholesome picture a project manager, be a part time, leader, it's their responsibility to do that. Cause you have 8 individual contributors for Kenneth code. You're bound to run into the issues where there is no coordination.
Like, you have to define in a router or an interface, which brings all the results together and gives people meaning to their work and also tiny beats of information of what everybody else is working on so they can build their own model and how they relate to the rest of the project. So when you say that I think of, like, the agile manifesto and what was intended by it. The the intensives, the positive human intensives.
The fellow part when it got codified into a series of talking points by consultants. Yes. Well, that's how they got paid if nobody gets paid for a vision. You know? If only. Right? Yeah. It it's an interesting problem. And so, like, if if you were to give, the startup community that's listened to this, a couple things they need to look for to know if they've got a problem to start with, and, like, maybe some tools they might leverage to solve it for themselves. What advice would you give them?
Absolutely. I will focus on the conversational piece between two parties and how to clarify information that flows across the channel. 1, try not to solve the problem right away when somebody comes to you with a question. In technology world, we're so guilty about doing it. Why? Because we're so good at it. Problem, usually, we don't get the full context. Have some patience to have the and share as many details as possible. Next, ask questions. Are there any more details? It's a funny question.
It's a very straightforward question, but it gives you 25% more on average. Number 3, summarize what you've just heard. Don't feel stupid about doing that. You're doing a basic step of making sure that you've heard exactly words in the way that they have arrived. So the other person hears them and understands what they have communicated to you. And then ask what is the expected outcome as, you mentioned, what the outcome should be, and how do they define successful Is that pressing the button?
No. The button just shows up on the screen or something like that. So I would say that's sort of like, think of your communication with another person as that way of getting information, which might have 50% fidelity, like that JPEG of 50%, maybe like, okay, like, 10% where it's hard to see the details and you're adding more and more clarity by asking those questions.
Like, our heads sometimes jump to conclusion, then we'll feel like we've got something, but we're then risking the fact that we might not have gotten it. We pride in ourselves that we get things from the very beginning, but there's a high chance that we might not. Wow. There's actually personal advice in their ongoing And I and I'm gonna give an example of where I've already failed recently on this exact topic. So lifelong technologist love to jump to the solution.
It's my It's the superpower that we all Hammer, as you described. Right? I got into an argument with a VC. Oh, okay. This is Alfred. Can I I cannot Christian to this over what tech debt is? Now the reality is what I should have said in that exact moment is this disagreement is exactly the problem. We all have a different definition for it because we don't see the whole elephant.
We're a bunch of blind people grasping at it and feeling the trunk or the tusks or the tail and thinking we have full view of it. That would have been a great way to describe what we were doing. It's not what I did. It's like, well, hold on. Like, That is also tech ed. And that's tech ed. That's tech ed. Right? Like, just wanted to do that. Now, your point on repeating it back, is such an important one that I know.
I'm I'm repeating it back to everybody else because I know nobody heard it well enough. We all think we need to understand what's in the other person's head clearly. We believe we do. We'd make that assumption. Erase that assumption. You don't know. Of into it. Always assume you don't know and clarify. What I heard you say was this.
That definition of done thing I've run it in every team I've ever run into, and we spent honestly an entire day on it where we would get to a precise definition of what done is. Doesn't include testing. Doesn't include you, you know, like, what about documentation? Is that meant? Well, yeah, it's done to tell us talk. You're like, whatever. Right? You get into that debate, so you all agree.
But it took the debate and getting down to the nitty gritty to have a firm clear definition we could all point back to and say, Hey. I'm gonna be done on December 3rd. And then to go, okay. Well, then I'm gonna get the doc on December 4th, and I'm gonna, you know, do this thing over here with that. As far as, like, definition of done, a new conversation see in a bit of regret. The unfortunate thing about experience is that it comes after you need it. So Yeah. Every time.
And, well, the, the best part of that was that turned into a great follow-up session with that VC. And we're that person's now gonna be an adviser to us. Like, there's no downside to that. Like, he wanted to have that argument, and I love being wrong wrong. I honestly love it because I'm learning something if I'm wrong. I have deeply held convictions. I believe I'm right, but I'm often wrong. We want to be wrong, but it doesn't feel right when we're wrong at all. Yes. I wanna learn.
I wanna be wrong, but I'm not Yeah. That's exactly right. Well, Vladimir, we're almost out of time. I wanna give you a chance to point people towards where they can find out more where reach out to you and they can engage if they need your, your special knowledge and experience. Oh, absolutely. Thank you for giving me that chance, Hammer. If you would like to hear more.
And if you have topics on either human communication or human interactions in your company as a technical executive or as a founder, please do reach out. My website is human interfaces.co. That's human interfaces.co. As part of this podcast, I'm offering a free complimentary session, and you can just add splash. Textastic. Oh, my god. Excellent. And that's a wrap for this episode of Tectastic. Wanna thank you personally for joining us and we'll see you next time.
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