Process Before Tools: How to Scale Without Burnout (Michael Toguchi)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the DeveloperNord Podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well, hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations. This is Building Better Developers, the DeveloperNord Podcast. I happen to be Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of the DeveloperNord and Building Better Developers. Also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess your business and build a technology roadmap for success. Good thing, bad thing. Huge good thing. I think I've shared a little bit of our DIY and house issues and we finally got the house that we wanted to get set up and did a lot of little work on it. I got it set up and it is now on the market and ready for rentals and stuff like that, which has been a long and torturous path. I am not the main guy that did most of that. My wife is the DIYer. I am the do it yourself or I think somebody else do it as opposed to me. I am the like go hire that person. And so she has bared the brunt of that along with me helping her. And I put that in quotes because I'm not much of a helper in that sense. I'm a little bit more of like the two year old that's there like helping dig while dad's got the back. Well, something like that. The bad thing is, is that we're getting towards the end of the year and it is like it's flown by. It's like we are already as we're recording this, we are into December and it feels like I've like skipped a half a year. It's like there's a ton of stuff that's gone on, but it's flown by very fast. So I have not been able to enjoy it much like I have not been able to enjoy often enough. Michael introducing himself. So dive right in and take over. Hey everyone. My name is Mike Moulache. I'm one of the co-founders of Building Better Developers, also known as DeveloperNUR. I'm also the founder and owner of Envision QA, where I work with businesses that are tired of fighting their software. We build and test custom solutions that actually fit the way you work so that you can stop pulling out your hair, putting out fires and focus on the growth of your business and let the technology work for you, not against you. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, as Rob said, we're nearing the end of the year. So I'm getting into the festive Christmas holidays. Wife made me sit down and watch Die Hard 1 and Die Hard 2 yesterday. So we've finally got that off the track. Yes, I see you. Did you say made you? If she had her way, we would watch Die Hard every single month, every single day of the year. It's just her movie. I'm just a little burned out of it. It is a quintessential Christmas, though. You have to watch Elf and you have to watch Die Hard. That's right. It is, which is why I told you, you cannot watch it till December 1st now. We can watch it in December and we can watch it in January because we do do a week in January of Christmas in July. But other than that, I'm getting back around to watching some of the new Hallmark holidays. My mom got me into that years ago and I'm a sap for that. But I also wanted to get back into some of the traditional Christmas movies like Miracle on 54th Street. Some of the older ones haven't watched those in years. Caught one yesterday. It's like, man, I remember these were feel good movies. I need to go back and watch these. So looking forward to that. So the bad side is I have not watched any classical Christmas movies in a long time. So I'm going to catch up on. And as you may have already picked up, we have a guest today. So it's going to be one of those interview sessions and I'm going to let we will not call you Michael number two because that just doesn't seem right. But Michael, go ahead and introduce yourself. Thanks, Mike Taguchi. I'm the chief strategy officer at eResources. We're a digital strategy and transformation company doing everything from MSP work for IT. We do marketing, branding websites. And on my side, we oversee a platform called Orchestrate that's for mission driven organizations. We do workflow processes, anything to try and help automate, save time, let people actually focus on impactful work. That's something that we do at higher ed, nonprofits, associations, any kind of solution in that area. And we also do a great deal of work with disability centers and higher ed as well. And so I'm really excited to be here and chat with you guys and hear a little bit more about the holiday movie situation we've got going on. My family would be more on the die hard than the Hallmark side, but my wife would probably be fine on both. She would probably play both sides of the aisle. Yes, I've spent the last few years slowly expanding out. And plus, there have been some new movies that have come in recent years. I would say Christmas Chronicles 1 and 2 that came out of Netflix is a great one. There's a couple others I'm trying to think of recent years, but I have my mid-range of your elf and stuff like that. The new Grinch, the full, whoever is I, Pixar, whoever did that one, it's phenomenal. A great soundtrack to it. But then I got to have like I got a few of the old classics, but definitely Die Hard is right up there. I have like my downer ones like Family Stone and some things like that as well. I like Family Stone as well. I also really like, I'm embarrassed to admit a little, but there are a couple newer, not newer, raunchy ones like The Night Before and Office Christmas Party with Jason Bateman that we like to watch as kind of guilty pleasures. But we want my father-in-law in Nakatomi Plaza, you know, shirt because we're in the, we got the, we're on Team Die Hard for Christmas. Those are definitely some of the best. Recommendation, if you have never seen, it's a series, I think there's three shows of it, is a Britcom. It's called The Worst Christmas of My Life, or I think it's the Worst Christmas Week of My Life. It is, it is very cringy to watch as far as like, like you're, the guy goes through some very tough situations. You're like, oh my gosh, stop, stop. Oh no, it's like, we're gonna have, but it's a fun one. And I, yeah, you got to mix it up. You got to have like the, you got to have the like really good ones. You got to have like the tearjerker types, like the Jack Frost or something like that. But then there's like, yeah, it's like, it's nice having that mix. And then you got to have like the Charlie Brown Christmas. There's those like, I can, I could probably recite it from like start to finish, but I just, I got to watch that every year. So I threw out with my wife, Iron Man 3, since Die Hard is officially a Christmas movie, Iron Man 3 is officially a Christmas movie because it does take place during Christmas. There's, there's a lot of that argument, but I think it's people that are just trying to like detract from the Die Hard is truly a Christmas movie. I mean, it's like, I think that's one of those, it's just, it's, it's unquestionable, even though like I also have a household argument with that on a regular basis of like, no, it is definitely a Christmas movie. And she's like, well, you could just watch it. I don't really care. I would add, I would add while you were sleeping into that as the, like the Sappy, I think that's a good Christmas movie too. So I think so. I think there's that and Love Actually is another one of those. I don't know how Sappy, but it's like, yeah, there's some of those that I think have like a, that Christmas role into When Harry Met Sally for New Year's, for New Year's, you know, for, for, because they, because they ended at the New Year's party. Yeah, that is definitely, that's like my late Christmas one is like after Christmas, I still want to watch a couple of Christmas movies, like Harry Met Sally is definitely right up there on that one. So, well, now this is probably going to come out, I think this comes out after Christmas. We'll find out. So everybody will be able to like reminisce a little bit, but we're, we're in a jolly, mood, which is a good start to. So one of the things that you mentioned is like is mission driven organizations and organizing mission driven organizations to me is we talked in the pregame, the pre show a little bit about you just entrepreneurs and startups in general. I think it becomes hard. There is a mess to fix after you go through the like you're going nuts, you're in survival phase. You're just getting stuff done. And then you usually you're really not defining and refining processes during that time. Your process is just get the thing out the door. And so you have some mess to clean up. But I'd also like to, I think that I've found that a lot of mission driven nonprofits have a very similar situation. It's a little different because I think it's more there's a little bit of like you're driven to the mission. So that's what you're focused on. It's not really the building a business behind that becomes, I think, part of the problem or part of the challenge with that. And then also, I think there's like there tends to be some turnover and things like that that you get as the mission grows and the organizations evolve. So I think I'd like to start out with like if you're in that situation, you've got a company where you're like, OK, that's you're you're speaking my language. I'm in a situation where we've been we've been doing business. We've been doing our mission for a while. And it's a mess. Like, where would you where do I begin? Where would you start with that? Yeah, that's a tough one. And I agree with you. I think the mission driven groups, they end up with a lot of the same challenges that a business or an entrepreneur that's in startup mode, everyone's going a million miles an hour. You're you know, you're just trying to survive some days. And so the idea of like SOPs and, you know, those kinds of things, that's not really what you're focused on. You're focused on on the survival part of it. I think if you are a group that has gone through one of those sprint periods and, you know, chicken with your head cut off and you're just trying to make it and then you have a second to take a deep breath and realize you've created a giant mess, you know, that's sort of the situation we're we're talking about. You know, one, you have to kind of start in small digestible bits, right? Like you're not going to be able to wave a magic wand and fix your entire business. You have to kind of set it up as like there's people and culture. There's you know, what is the mission? Again, when we say mission, I might be talking nonprofit, but we run a business as well. So you're talking about what's the P&L, like what are our what are our goals and things like that? And all of those, ultimately, there's a strategy and what you're trying to achieve and accomplish. And so what we try and do with our groups, whether we're working corporate, nonprofit or whatever else, is make sure leadership is bought in on some core principles that they're focused and they're not trying to do too much, that they're they have folks that are championing their ideas and getting buy in at all the levels so that the staff understands that they're being accountable and transparent with the communication so that people aren't just like, am I just working to get to make you more money or am I working an 80 hour a week just for you know, where is this all going? So that there is a vision that's been articulated. And that, you know, the last thing you start getting into the actual technology where you say like, please don't make it about tools. Like it's not like, oh, well, we can fix it if we have HubSpot or, you know, whatever else it might be, it needs to be like, what are the reasons we're doing this? Like, how are we better serving our audience or serving our customers or whoever the members, it doesn't matter every group has got somebody that they're serving, like, how are we better accomplishing this? And then back to, you know, sort of my original piece, like one of our main areas is people that work are there for a reason, like whether it's to make money or awards to again, serve a particular mission, like they want to help a certain kind of people, whatever that might be, they want to spend their time doing that. And on the things that are skilled for that, they don't want to spend their times copying and pasting from spreadsheets, tracking down things in emails, logging into 75 tools during the day. And so, you know, part, I think for groups like ours is helping folks figure out like, it's not about these, you know, having more tools, it's about finding ways to find efficiencies, to automate things, to get people, and that's how they start understanding the ROI, both from a leadership level saying like, this investment is good, and this thought process is good, because we're going to be saving people's time and making them more productive. So from that corporate standpoint, that's what we're really, we would be looking at it in that area, like, your efficiency, you know, this is dollars that you would be wasting if people are just like, you know, again, in a spreadsheet or doing some sort of manual tasks that aren't helpful. I think that's awesome, because that was actually like one of the follow-up questions is that a lot of times, I think, I've, you talk to people and they're like, oh, like, you know, SOPs and all that kind of stuff, that sounds like big business thing. That sounds like something that, you know, we're not there yet. We're, you know, we're a small business or we're, you know, we're, we're a little, you know, we're, we're a little city-based organization, or we're a little nonprofit or something like that. We can't do that. But I think it is, I think that's like, that's where you go is like, there is an ROI on those things that it is not, you're not just doing it just to do it, that there is, there is an investment on that. And so how do you like, take it a step further, like, how do you get that buy-in? Particularly, you can sell it to the executives or the people running the company, as far as like, yeah, this is like bottom line, this is what's going to happen. But the people that are actually have to, that you really have to, I think normally you have to go to, to get the information to like, how do I build out an SOP? Well, I need to know how the, you know, the frontline workers are working and balancing that with them going like, okay, are you going to automate me out of a job or something, especially in the world of AI and stuff like that? I think there's just like regular fear of such thing. Well, I mean, I think the first piece that you mentioned is an important point. And I, it resonates for me because we went through it. We were a small, we were a small business. We were in startup mode for many years, you know, and we created a lot of technical debt for ourselves and a lot of process debt where we were just, oh, well, technology is going this direction. We were zigging and zagging and zooming around, you know, and you suddenly find yourself with like, how do I scale this operation? Like if you're, or if your leadership is like, well, man, my family would really like it if I was actually at home or not working at 10 PM. It was like, part of that is you've created this and, you know, where everybody has to work this way. You're single threaded through things. You haven't created good processes. You haven't found a way to onboard people. And so that really rings true to me that it's important that groups shouldn't think, well, that's, you know, that's for Accenture and Google to do those sorts of things. Like, I don't care if you're, if you're a small mom and pop or you're a two or three person, you know, kind of small group doing guerrilla warfare, like you still, you know, you still need to have those things in place if you ever want to escape the cycle that you're in. So I do think of it in that area where it's important to emphasize it doesn't matter the size. In terms of the, you know, the second question you asked, I think that's really one of the most important ones. And that's where it is a piece where you think of it sort of in story brand mode of like, who's the hero in the story, right? Like if your leadership, if you're, if you're the CEO, you're C-suite and you're talking to somebody, like, it's not about you. You've got these workers that are executing there in the tactical day to day, they're, you know, working their behinds off for you. And so, but they want to understand again, what's the vision for this? Where is this going? Like, what's the medium, longer term plan? How do I fit into that? Like if you, I have so much stuff on my plate and you're asking me to, you know, sort of transform on the fly or change concurrently, like how am I supposed to fit all of that in? And, you know, how, what, what, what assurances are you giving me that I'm not just going to be like, I'm not creating a process document so you can fire me and hire someone cheaper or not replace me? And that's where that, I mean, again, communication, like the vision, articulation, transparency, accountability, all those things, like they sound buzzy, but you bundle them up, like that is good leadership. Like that is, that is how you create a culture. And like there may be some people that you have to replace or that don't, that don't come back. But ultimately, like those people, you know, I like to say you win with people. That's an old, like Woody Hayes quote, he's an old football coach. You win with people meaning like, if you have a bad process, you can fix it. If you have a bad tool, you can replace it. If you have bad people and they don't believe in you, you're dead, you're DOA, right? Like your business is not going anywhere. And so that's, we really spend a lot of time trying to work with leadership to get that buy-in because otherwise they're, you know, they may be thinking, well, I can add this tool and, you know, that's sort of the end all be all of it. And maybe I'll save this money. And that's how I'm, that's how I'm, that's my success metrics. Your staff is not going to buy into that. That's your, your initiative is not going to succeed that way. So I kind of got a twofold question on this. So with that, how would you approach like new startups or people starting new missions and getting things going to essentially set themselves up for success, not failure, but then flip that around and, and how would you go about helping those organizations or what suggestions would you give to those organizations that are already into this mess, didn't plan ahead of time? How would they kind of walk their way back to kind of maybe at the beginning or somewhere? How do you reverse engineer the, I think the first, the first piece is, is good because I mean, you mentioned the road mapping and I think, you know, strategic planning and things like that. And there's a part of this where take a company that is in startup mode or take a nonprofit, like here's two, two scenarios that are very similar that are likely to happen. You get a new client as a startup and your processes and what you're doing start revolving around the money you're bringing in as opposed to, you know, sticking to what you're best at and creating a process, you know, pushing your process on how you do business. You let the client kind of dictate how your small organ, because when you're small, it has such an outsized undue influence on, you know, the people that you're working with. And the same thing happens at nonprofits. Oh, we got a grant from this foundation. And so suddenly instead of your mission being one thing, it's like, well, we've got to fulfill the terms of this grant and we've got to spend a lot of focus here. So in both cases, whether corporate or nonprofit, the business is, is, is morphing based on external variables, as opposed to like staying a course where you say, this is who we are. This is how we're going to get there. There may be some rough, chubby waters, but we will need to develop processes and ways of doing things that fit that, not letting the external variables affect what we're doing. In terms of fixing that, once it happens, yeah, I mean, it's, I think that's why those, you know, those exercises where you kind of take that deep breath and say, we can't wave the wand at it, but, and we can't, you know, you're always going to be stuck, especially from like a, the entrepreneur standpoint, like you probably have contracts that you have to fulfill. And you're trying to say like, well, how do I keep the money coming in the door while also, you know, concurrently making this change that's, that shifts our processes. And that's where it's going to have to be, you know, you can't do it all at once. You have to set up, you have to set up a timeline. You have to give people room to fit this into their schedule. Like you can't say, well, I expect you to do the 80 hours plus implement this. Like, and that's, we talk for our AI clients that we're doing AI work. Well, like you have to have room to experiment. You have to have room to fail because this all isn't going to go perfectly. But, you know, with, with these transformations or with places where we're implementing new processes or workflows, we're trying to do them in digestible bits where you can then get on the ground feedback. Like, is this working? You know, are you saving time? And that it answers, it goes back to the original question where people start to see the, the fruits of it, like, oh, this is great. I, I, I'm not, you know, re-entering this from one place to another, suddenly getting that 30 minutes back in the day allows me to do something, something else. And so, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's never easy once you've already created some of the mess, but I mean, that's all of us, right? Like we've, we've all in one, in one form or another, we've got some things that we would like to clean up. And so. Yeah, it's, it's interesting, especially when you're talking about the grants and that for like, the startups and new businesses. So often, and I've noticed this too, you know, you're working, you find someone comes to you as a customer and it may not quite fit, but you can help solve their problem. And, you know, being a startup, you need money. So typically you don't say no a lot. And you could end up in situations where you are off mission, your service is not working, you are off mission, you're serving multiple masters, and you just kind of lose focus on where you're going. And it just becomes a disaster. The second part I thought was interesting. So rolling things back, pointing it back, working through the problems, it's interesting there, especially with the AI component, how would you, how would you talk to like the business owners in encouraging as their leaders, working with their people to encourage them for the fast to fail. So I've worked with a lot of different groups, and there's a huge shift in different markets, shift left, shift right, fast to fail, more time building the processes. There is a balance and it's good to get to the you know, fast to fail, but how would you define that for organizations so that they're not essentially rushing their people to fail too fast, like not thinking through the problem, but still encouraging them enough that it's okay to try things out without consequences. Yeah, I mean, that's some of the big challenge where we're, you know, we're talking to folks who are like, okay, you want to have some sort of digital transformation again, whether you could be corporate nonprofit, higher ed doesn't really matter. And like you want to utilize technology as a force multiplier to create this highly efficient set of processes that empower your staff to, you know, or your employees to be able to do that. And so I think that's a big challenge. Employees to effectively do their jobs. And so yeah, we try and take the idea of failure less as about like, we don't want to do fast failing, but we want, you know, sort of an ongoing, you know, assessment audit, design and implement something automated, and then just be doing analysis, you know, sort of constant feedback and explaining, you know, hey, this is what's on the ground, you know, kind of what's working, what isn't. So we're not looking for the people to like, rush into failure, because it just, it rarely ever has long term benefits, the metrics we use for evaluating successive projects like that, it never seems to go well. We're looking more for a measured approach, but a constant approach. You know, it's not 10 years ago, digital strategy where like, you create the roadmap, like you've implemented, and then you're re-evaluating it in, you know, 18 to 24 months or something. This is as soon as it's as soon as the ink is dry, you're really kind of thinking about like the next phase of it. And so we take that approach with these, the micro parts of it too, where it's like, okay, well, hey, if you're trying to, you know, create an agentic chat bot to provide support for so and so like, it's, it's not something that we want to like rush into production and then say it's successful failure in a short period of time. We want to be constantly refining it or determining whether or not it's serving the mission that we need it to. Are you seeing them, you know, like, I guess continuing down this, this path a little bit, are you seeing that, is that what you're seeing sort of across the board with businesses is that they are starting to embrace this instead of this, like, you know, 12, 18 month and even, I guess, even five or six years ago, it was still six to 12 month cycles of like, you go through it, you build it, then you assess it versus what I'm saying. And I'm wondering if this is, you know, you're seeing this well where it's like, it's starting to become almost very quick, like, you know, days and weeks at most to be able to put something together so that now things that in the past maybe took a little bit longer, like, you know, A mean testing has always been existed to some level. But now it's actually, it feels like it's, it's, it's ABCD A through Z almost, because you can so quickly iterate on these things, get some feedback. And then, like you said, I think it's like, instead of fast fail, it's more like a fast assess. Yeah, I think that's right. I think the modernization is essentially a continuous process now and that good companies are balancing their agility and innovation or disruption, depending on how you look at it, with some with the steadiness of the over, you know, that's where you have to combine or thread together the like, here's our steady leadership and our vision and mission. And this is what we're going to stick to with this hyperness of the technological change. Yeah, I think that's like, that's the, that's the danger is now that it's like you can, you have the ability and this is, this is the entrepreneur or the, yeah, the visionary entrepreneur dilemma is that I like, I have all these ideas and all these great places and all these things I can do. I actually just got off a call before this with somebody that is so much that as the visionary, where you can sit down and talk to them about a product. And the next thing you know, you've developed it, you know, theoretically developed a dozen different products. And now that you can, you know, with like vibe coding and no code and some of these other things are out there, they're sort of, they're promising that that to some level. So how do you, how do you, when working with the founders in that, like, how do you rein them in a little bit to like, to bring them into that, that original why, you know, vision and mission? Not easily. That is that it's, it's, it is one of the reasons why, you know, when we, when I talk about, we, we work across many verticals leadership at higher ed or mission driven nonprofits and associations, they tend to be a little bit more conservative or reserved. And, you know, so they're, we work more with them from the leadership standpoint of the communication and helping to understand on the corporate and entrepreneurial side. Yeah, it's, it's exactly what you said. There is this danger now where it's like, it used to be, well, the executives, they've got a million ideas and like, they're going to throw them at the staff now, like, there's actually a reasonable way for them to start having those things appear. And so you really have to, you know, start getting, I think, you know, again, it's a roadmap, it's a, it's a P and L with a plan and a vision where you start saying like, you can do this, but like, this is the wild, wild west and unknown in some places. And like, if you drift too far out, like you, you know, you could lose a great deal of what you're doing. And so we, we try and work on those benchmarks. And again, the, the idea of these small digestible things where there's constant evaluation to ensure that people don't go so far off track or splinter into like, oh, well, hey, we had one product and suddenly there's four. Cause that's, I mean, that you can do that. You can easily say like, well, I've got this, this is now, well, we're going to do this in this niche. And you, you start to tie that to the rest of this conversation where like the staff is like, well, no, wait, are we doing this or are we doing this or wait, you want me to do all of these things at once? And like, they start to lose, you know, they start to lose faith in what's going on. And so it, all you can do from a leadership standpoint with those C-level folks that have the brain going a million miles an hour is, is try and keep it steady. So. And that is where we're going to pause episode one, part one, diehard one of this interview. This has been a great one. This has been a fun one. We, we had a really good time diving into very non-technical stuff beforehand. So that's awesome, but come on back for part two, because it really does continue to have a really good discussion. There's a lot of valuable stuff here. Not a ton of specifics necessarily, as much as I think these are the things that you should be thinking of, particularly as when you're getting into the end of the year and the beginning of a new year, as, as you're, we're getting into now, when this is, is coming out is like, how do I move forward this year? It's, you know, hopefully you've got a plan at this point. And these are some of the things that you want to knock down. These are some of the things you want to accomplish, but maybe there's some things that in this interview, you know, come to light that you're like, Oh, I should probably think about that as well. So do so, and then come back for the next episode as well, because there's probably going to be more till then go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week. And we will talk to you next time. This was sponsored by RB Consulting, your partner in building smarter, scalable tech from startups to established teams. RB Consulting helps you turn tech chaos into clarity with proven roadmaps and hands-on expertise. Visit rb-sns.com to start your next step forward. Also sponsored by Envision QA. They help businesses take control of their software by focusing on what matters most, quality, reliability, and support you can count on. Find out more at EnvisionQA.com. Thanks for tuning in to the Develop the Newer podcast, where we're all about building better developers and better careers. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback. So drop a note to info at DevelopTheNewer.com. Be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you listen. And remember, a little bit of effort every day adds up to a great success. Keep learning, and we'll see you in the next episode.