Workflow Efficiency Metrics: ROI Without Micromanaging (Michael Toguchi)

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season of Building Better Foundations, but we are the Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast. I am Rob Brodhead, one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor. I am also the founder of RB Consulting, where we help you assess technology, build a roadmap for success. Good things, bad things. Good thing is we are now into a whole new year. The bad thing is, is there have been a lot of whole new years that have happened in my life. It is amazing that I am no longer 18, 19, 20 years old or within decades of any of those numbers. It is just, I love every new year because it's like to me, I like it's like I do, I start fresh. I do have my New Year's resolution stuff and I stick to, I've been pretty good at sticking to like, there's usually like one or two I'm going to stick to each year and a couple that are my like, eh, maybe that'll work. I'm going to try them out. So we'll see how that goes this year, whether I can carry forward. I always have like a like a word of the year. I've had some really fun ones over the last several years and it's always fun like diving into the year and having that as sort of like my focus, my thought, you know, seeing how that evolves. It's always been an enjoyable time. So full time there. Like I said, the downside is, is like yet another year has gone by and I am still not a trillionaire or anything like that. So if there are trillionaires out there that want to just donate to us, we will be happy to take that burden on. Someone else who takes on the burden of being on this with me every single time is Michael. Go ahead and introduce yourself. Hey everyone, my name is Michael Molloch. I'm one of the co-founders of Developner, Building Better Developers. I'm also the owner of Invige and QA, where we build and test custom software that helps businesses run smoother and grow faster. Good things and bad things. Well, since this is coming out in January, like you said, talking about new year coming up, good things. It is a new year. I can't let this year go away. It's been a rough, some couple rough spots this year, looking forward to next year being smoother and some pivots and some changes in focus, both intentional and unintentional. As this year, last year came to a close, it's just been resetting some perspectives because it just, my goal is to definitely have a different perspective on next year and growing the business. And yeah, that reminds me of like 2019, 2020. Come into 2020, there's a lot of people like, all right, this is going to be my year. I'm so happy that we got through 2019. We got past that year. This is going to be great. And then March hit and it was COVID and all that kind of stuff that was people are like, okay, 2021. But everybody was more like, let's tiptoe into 2021 because we didn't do it last time and that did not work well for us. But we're going to march right into part two of this interview because the other Michael, which we were talking to, has just got a lot of great information and this conversation continued with some great ideas, some great recommendations. So pencils up, grab your notepad, take some notes because it is definitely going to be worthwhile and let's get right back into our conversation. On this, like following up on the other end of it is the, and I'm sure you've run into this as you go into businesses, is there's like the, we'll call it like the skunk works or something that exists in almost every organization where you've got the people that are doing the jobs and they don't have the right tools. Well, now they can build their own tools. Excel has allowed that for years. I don't know how many organizations where there's like Excel spreadsheets everywhere. Now you can have apps everywhere basically that do this as this stuff's improving. So as a leader, as an owner, as a manager, how do you recommend maybe getting ahead of that a little bit so you, even when you're building all your SOPs and you've got everything beautifully done that they don't call you back six months from now and say, okay, it was great, but now everybody went off and did their own thing a little bit and now we got to go do this again. That's what we deal with a lot again across the board, no matter what kind of client we have, we always end up with bigger groups that have siloed cultures. Your marketing department is not the same as your IT, which is sort of in a different, and same thing in higher ed, you've got departments and tribalism and things like that. And so that's really, when you ask the question about how do you work with leaders, that is really one of the first things we're talking about is like, how do you ensure that people aren't just kind of going off doing their own thing? You know, you run into that a great deal where people are like, well, hey, I've been here 10 years and I'm the expert at this. I'm going to keep it all in my little area, build my own little thing. And then suddenly, like the leadership has terrible data, no data, terrible data, unvalidated data, like they can't they don't have the business intelligence to make the kind of decisions they need. You don't have groups that are integrated. So it's hard to find efficiencies in any capacity. And that's really like one of our core areas is working with people through workflow. And like that's where you have to like shine like the transparency light on the workflow. Like, OK, well, who is you know, who is doing this? Why is this happening? Like, how do these parts interact within within your business or within your organization? And so that's how we really try and make sure that you don't end up with, you know, one person in their closet, another person in a cave, and they both got, you know, one person did this ASP core something or other. Somebody else built this no code something. And then the third person is like, well, I bought a software as a service tool. And you're like, well, we might be making money, but it's a mess. Like, that's how you create, though. That's how you create that technology debt disaster where it's like, we're doing OK, like my P&L looks OK, but it is a mess down there. So we all know this happens and this goes on. But from a leadership level, how do you work with I'm thinking more kind of like the startup people that haven't done this and maybe a little inexperienced and don't know what to look for or prepare for this? Because, you know, we have all these ideas, we hit the ground running and we tend to run fast. But we tend to just think of the goal and just we're going, going, going. And, you know, we could be spaghetti code. We could be have many different things going on. What are some guardrails or maybe what kind of guidance would you give for someone starting out on how to? Yes, Dave, you know, hyper safe, you know, keep your mission in mind. But how do you stay directed versus all over? I think that's what it is. I'd say there is a bit of creating creating a way for yourself to stay accountable to the vision and the goals. And that's it is our direct experience. We started we had many clients with extremely successful projects, but it wasn't something where we in the early years spent a lot of time. And this is a scalable and we have partnerships. These were groups that we worked with for many, many years, but we didn't say, like, how are we going to scale this? Or when we want to go to version 2.0 to 5.0, like what what will this look like in 2345 years? And so you have to create yourself a pathway to say, like, OK, I know you need to go a million miles an hour in order to make enough money to keep the lights on in year one. But if you don't have that strategy for year two, three, and year four, five, and you don't have a vision for how does this look like so that I don't burn myself out or my employees out, like if you haven't created that plan to scale, to automate things, to have an efficient workflow, you're going to have clients that leave, you're going to have staff that leave, you're they're going to be technological development, you're going to be technology developers, you're they're going to be technological developments, you know, AI or whatever that show up that you're not anticipating. Like if you haven't built out a strategy, it doesn't mean that you don't need to invest most of your energy in making sure you're doing the thing that's now now. But you have to you still have to stay true to where you're where you're headed. Otherwise, you will again get to that. You will end up at that spot and say, I just lost my I was single threaded through this database developer. They built this custom thing for my biggest client and they're you know, they're gone. What do I do now? Or, you know, any any example along those lines where it's like if you haven't made those, you haven't at least planned for those processes and put things in place, you're you're inevitably going to either be miserable or you're going to fail. Yeah, that single point of failure is always the biggest hurdle, especially in tech, because especially when you start getting growing and you have like legacy projects and you don't know what to do with them, but you got to maintain them because you have customers. It's yeah, it can be a mess. Yeah, that's it's the it's the tale we all know. So. Walking through some of these strategies, you know, we talked, you know, single point of failure, we talked about, you know, trying to stay focused, the accountability side of things. How do you help these companies, these organizations assess and understand the importance or how to measure the performances of their business, of their strategies, of their employees and their direction? How do you how do they know how do you show the impact of, hey, if you change this, this will improve on this? Because a lot of people don't understand what has value and what doesn't. Because everyone thinks everything's got value. But how do you measure that? No, it's a it's a great question. And that's where we're you know, we're kind of working in that two layers, like you have to show leadership or C-suite folks like there's you can't always be chasing the money that will come in immediately. Like you need to spend time on these processes, spend time on these workflows and on the experimentation and the innovation and understand that those are going to have benefits to your bottom line. But they might not have the immediate, you know, it's not a contract coming in. And so sometimes it's less appealing on their side. And the same thing is true for the staff where it's well, hey, if I, you know, sell this or build this or whatever else this that, you know, that has some tangible, you know, short term thing that feels like it could be beneficial. Whereas, you know, working within a more efficient workflow doesn't you're not really sure what that what that means for you. So in both of those layers, I think the measurability is saying like, again, we come back to the impact of time or the impact of a workflow or impact of efficiency where you're saying, if you can get this much, you know, if you're a developer, if you've created this way for your developers to interact with their project team that and you've automated these elements of your of your workflow, you know, maybe you're getting back 15% of your time. And what does that mean if you're a time and materials group and make sure that that number is there so that they understand both from the leadership standpoint so that they know the, you know, the profit side of it. And then also for the staff to say, like, hey, if you know, the example I keep using about the spreadsheet, but it could be anyone could be a, it could be a developer, it could be a project person who's sending the same emails over and over again, like, that, you know, everybody knows there are parts of their job that are probably wasteful. Like it's, it's necessary, but it's wasteful. And if you can automate those things, then suddenly you can be more efficient. Your team can work better. You can have higher quality of life. And in those things all have a benefit to them, both qualitatively and then from the quantitative standpoint that the ownership says, oh, well, hey, suddenly we are 15% more profitable than there's raises and bonuses and things like that. So that's, that's the, the measurability we're looking for in the messaging we're giving is like, it can't always be about the, like the dollar that's right there, you know, that day. Sometimes it has to be about the plan. So are there any particular tools or like measurements that you would recommend where I'm trying not to be too big brothery here because I know some organizations can just go, Hey, we'll put like sniffers on everyone's machines and see what apps are open for how, what is a more balanced solution that you would suggest for organizations and startups? In terms of like time tracking and efficiency and things like that. Yeah. Like that, or like you said, like they're using this tool or maybe there could. Well, yeah, I mean, we're tracking this. That constantly audit where we are. I mean, we build software platforms ourselves, so I'm not, I'm never going to say don't use tools, but we are, we are always trying to find like a reduction of tools, like, because they're usually are duplicative ones. It does not matter. It's like, we will find a group that's like, Zoe, do you have constant contact and MailChimp and Salesforce? And you're sending out messages from all three, like there's CRM data in multiple places, like legacy database plus, you know, something and those kinds of things like we don't, we try and root out places where even if somebody has created that, I think you would give somebody, give an example, like somebody's created their own little process for their group of themselves and like it works and it may even be profitable, but it's not something that fits into the integrated company vision. And so we're trying to, we're trying to reduce tool usage or at least, you know, say it's got to have a very specific purpose and it's got to be a purpose that serves the needs of the whole company, not something that's like small division, small team, small group. So not so much like a, a tool space, but you kind of do like a tech assessment or a process. We do a technology assessment and we kind of, maybe we speak out both sides of our mouth where we're saying like, it's not about the tools, but it is meaning like we don't want our team. And I'm sure most people, nobody wants to show up and be like, you know, you got a leader who's like, give me, you know, give me what, whatever, give me a Salesforce and make it work at my company for this. And that'll be, you know, that's what I'll say, whether this is successful or not. That's not the way it was. Like we don't want, we don't want that. We want it to be about the process, the workflow, how it affects all of these things. The tool is sort of like this end destination where we say, this is what we're going to utilize in order to create this effect. This is what we're going to use to accomplish it. But by the same token, we always want to be auditing what's there to say, like, even if you have some legacy tool that the people that are there have been using for some long time, it may not be, you have to be in that constant evaluation mode. And so, you know, we want to, we want to get rid of things that aren't necessary, but, you know, and sort of just find those efficiencies from a platforming standpoint. So how do you, that actually leads, because it's, you know, it's one of those things. So you mentioned like change, things change over time. What you did six months ago or a year ago may not be the best right now, but I want to sort of shift that a little bit. So now there are some tools out there and we're seeing, I guess there have been for a while, there have been tools that have changed the productivity levels. And now I think we're seeing actually dramatic changes with AI with some of these tools. So how do you approach that with, particularly from like, you know, companies that deal with time and materials type of an approach is when the time used to be, you know, an hour and now it's taking 30 minutes. How do you, how do you navigate that a little bit or how do you recommend that they navigate that is as far as like, you know, now you're going to have to find three times as many customers or you're going to, you know, how do you, how do you look at that? Well, I mean, there's, you can go to a value priced billing model is one way to do it. You know, that there, and that's, it's one of the things if you're, if you're a company and you're selling your expertise, your time, your product, whatever it might be, you maybe look at something where you say, can I have a retainer or partnership or something where you're paying for the value of having access to us and our expertise. It doesn't matter whether we're spending 2.5 hours, like, you know, we're, we're a certain kind of strategist or technologist or company. We're not a law firm that wants to bill you five minutes because we thought about you while we were going to the bathroom or something. So, I mean, we do look at it a little bit like that where it's like, yes, like time is changing in a sense. And so you can't always say, Hey, a used to cost, you know, used to take us two weeks to design a UX UI for a website. And now it's, you can snap and it's 50% of the time. Well, if it's 50% of the time and you're getting 50% less money, like, it's not going to be realistic for you to just always double the number of customers you have, as you said, in your example. And so you kind of have to find, and that's where some of these efficiencies are so crucial. Like it's, it is, there's a little bit of adapt or die because the old models of working and the old models of pricing don't really apply in the same ways that they did before. So, I mean, we look at more like you have, you have to show your value, you have to have value and you have to potentially get pricing from your, you know, cost and pricing from the value of the work that you're doing as opposed to the actual time itself. Yeah, I'm seeing some of the same things. I think it really is. I think the value model is probably going to, it's just forcing us into it. And yeah, I think the legal law firms are the ones that are like the brunt of this, because that's so much of this is based on hours. And now people are pushing back and saying, I don't think it takes your, your, your people that long to research that anymore, because we can go research that ourselves and, you know, 10 minutes instead of three hours. And yes, we don't have the same view, but obviously time needs to change. So that portion of it needs to be adjusted. Absolutely. I think there, I mean, there's a Wall Street Journal article about McKinsey a couple of months ago and they were, you know, it's a project used to take X number of hours and Y number of staffers. And that percentage is, you know, and they've adapted, but, you know, we all kind of have to understand that that the formula and calculation has, has changed dramatically. You can apply that anywhere. It doesn't matter. Is it, you used to need a certain number of programmers and designers for a website. You don't need that many, you know, from a law firm standpoint, like I can take, you can take a document and vomit it into chat GPT. And suddenly like you've got 60% of what you need. So it doesn't mean that the attorney is not needed any milk, but you, you know, or the law firm is not needed, but you don't need them as much and for as great of volume. And so that is going to reduce everybody's need to spend in those areas, but it doesn't mean that there won't be money to spend on something else. And so there is just a little bit of like redistribution and recalculating, like how can I use my staff's time or what can I sell that might be different? How can I price this differently? Yeah, with that, and that's interesting. So when you're doing the assessments in that, you're, it's like, like you said, you know, it's more of the value. What is the value that you're giving? Because you can use these tools to speed that up. You mentioned chat GPT. Are there any other AI tools that you see that are kind of closer to that point that where people could go to look at to help streamline their processes or help them figure out their assessments even? Yeah, I mean, there are, I mean, there's so many now, like from a coding standpoint, we really like Claude. So I mean, that's, that's probably the site, the one that we utilize the most from, from that side of it in chat GPT, really from the, that's the one that I think those of us in the Gen X, you know, boomer area were, were best at using. But that's why it's such an interesting time that like what, what was good even in AI six to 12 months ago, like so many new things have, have sort of emerged. And like, even what is good is like, it was like, oh, well, this was the gold standard, you know, a year ago, and now suddenly something has surpassed it. Like, you know, these groups are in just an arms race, you know, like the browser based ones, though there's some security concerns with them. But like, what Google's doing is put their customer of ours, but what they're doing is some pretty amazing stuff with Gemini and things. And so we're, it's just really exciting time to see all of it, mildly terrifying, but also just very interesting to watch. I would say for some people, it's more than mildly terrifying because it's like, it is, it is, it is literally, I hate, you know, it seems cliche, but it literally is game changing. There is a lot of areas that now, like, for example, I think like the virtual assistant industry may just completely disappear because you, you have that in your, you know, in the palm of your hand in the form of some of these AI agents and stuff like that. Now there's, you know, what they can do is, is limited to some extent, but honestly, so is what you can get out of a lot of your, you know, virtual assistants and that. So I think if you're lower end commodity kind of stuff, I think it's going to change what our commodities and what people are willing to pay for some of those commodities as well. I think there's, like I said, so I think it may be a little more than mildly terrifying for a few because people have settled in and they're like, well, this is the way it's been for my lifetime. And now it has changed dramatically. And the, and the adopter die hits a broad swath of people at this point, I think. I, I, I see the same thing and it's, it kind of hits each industry or vertical differently. You know, there are a lot of, in sort of that nonprofit or 501 C3 area, there are people who are lifers and like it's that, it's changes very hard. Generally this kind of change, which is like, it's beyond seismic is extremely difficult for some folks to adapt. And I think to your point earlier, like from the entrepreneurial side, like it's so, it's such hyper drive that some, some folks are, have a hard time just kind of focusing on, you know, being great at one or two things that they're just kind of all over the place and trying to always adapt to the latest thing. And they're too busy doing that. They're just kind of spinning. So it's, yeah, it is a challenging time, you know, from a leader standpoint, in terms of trying to like run things and structure things and figure out like, you know, do I need to cut or, you know, how do I, how do I stay ahead of this? And from a staffing and employee standpoint, where you're like, I want to, I want, you know, I want to invest in this and I want to learn this, but like, am I just getting replaced? And then what happens to me then? So yeah, it's not, not the most, not the most fun for some folks. So yeah, I think in the IT world, that's something that we have in the past talked at length that developers that are wanting and technologists that want to build out their career. One of the things is you have, you know, you broaden your horizons in different languages and platforms and things like that. And as looking at some of the just the other day, and I say, I don't know that that matters as much. Like if you can, if you've got the core, then you don't really need to learn the language anymore, because you can go like, you can build it out enough that you can have something built as an example. And now you can, you can sort of figure it out from there. And you can even have stuff assessed. You can, I mean, like I can flip and flop applications and have done it now a couple of times where I'll take something like, okay, go write this and react. And I'll take the same thing and go like, okay, go write this in just like a standard HTML JavaScript, go write this in Java, go write this in Python, go write. And you can take the same thing and you can very quickly, especially if you've got the foundations, you can see how those pieces work. And now you can basically say, sure, I can write an application. I've never written a Python application in my life. I can go write one because you know enough to build, you know, you know, the basic building blocks, which I think goes back to, and it's a long way to get to a question here is like the SOPs and stuff like that is that's like the lifeblood to me. That is, and I think to most, that's like the lifeblood of the organization. This is your secret sauce somehow in here. This is what makes your business uniquely your business. And so have you, have you had those conversations, particularly like the last six months or years, AI has moved very quickly about the value of those processes, even in this rapid change environment? Yeah, you just have to, you just have to bake in the knowledge that they can change rapidly and quickly. They still have to be created and still many of the like top level 30,000 foot pieces of those processes are going to stay the same. It doesn't matter whether it is, it doesn't matter whether it is Claude or chat GPT. It doesn't matter whether it is Python or React. Like there are things like that where you don't have to fill in, you know, the granular level of it, but you do have to have a mapped out, you know, way for your business to be effective and successful for your employees to have a roadmap for what they're doing and how they're fitting into it to have a workflow that allows them to interact efficiently and, you know, be profitable for you. And so, yeah, it makes it harder, I think, from both like a C level and just like kind of a managerial level to know that like these SOPs, you're going to have to kind of be going back to more often than you want to fill in certain kinds of details. But the main, like the foundational blocks of them should stay the same. If you're true to what your, you know, vision, mission, or, you know, goals are, like the foundational pieces shouldn't be changing. It should just be more the details of how you're doing it. Nice. Now with, so I'm trying to go back to like the startup ideas and for those that don't know what they don't know, what are some, since we're talking AI here, what are some good questions that you would offer these startups or these individuals to start with chat GPT, you know, or AI in general? Like what are some questions that they should start asking themselves to get the right process started? Like prompts that they should be using in AI or how to start approaching AI for their, for their business? Or probably both, really a little bit of a little bit of both. Well, I mean, that that's the thing, right? Like much when we were talking about like legal briefs or whatever it is, like you, you can go into, you can go to chat GPT and say like, Hey, I'm a company that does X, I have this number of employees. These are our primary services and I'm trying to create a workflow that has, you know, these kinds of statuses. Can you help me think through this? And you know, that it's going to, it's almost like a brainstorming friend that will start to learn over time. Like, you know, for chat GPT for me or for any of these, like they know like, Oh, hey, Mike with orchestrate and, you know, workflow platforms and application systems and higher ed, like it will learn those things. And so you really want to be able to utilize it, you know, not, not in the weird buddy way, but in the like, you know, here's something where I can offload information and get some interesting feedback. I don't think it gets you the whole way there, but I think it helps you. It helps you. I think you had said, what, what, what do you not know, like help you understand some of the things that is very obvious for a, for a young entrepreneur, for a startup company that's in its infancy, like some of the obvious things to find, you know, potentially community help or other resources that are going to help them start structuring things. So those are the kinds of things we would use from a prompt standpoint, from like an introduction to AI. I think that's where it is. If you're new to it, it is better to have help to say, because there's so much, you're like, people have a hard time with like, is it, is this generative? Is this agentic? What, what does orchestration mean? Like there's so many terms that are out there that can get complicated. Like it's better to have, whether it's an advisor or somebody that's had that experience to kind of help introduce them to the concepts and understand how it might apply to their business. And so, you know, we kind of focus on like, do you have your business plan, your strategy in place? Like now let's look at where can AI, like where can you create efficiencies and where can AI be part of that? Excellent. Now I loved how you laid out the first part, because traditionally we've talked about this in the past on the software side. I'm a test driven developer, so I like writing user stories and what you just defined there was like the perfect user story to go in and get introduced to AI for defining your processes. And I love that. That is such a great example. Thank you. Awesome. Well, as I put the challenge out to before that, like, you know, everybody is, we've, every guest we've had has just sucked up the time and it's always been a great conversation. And once again, we have suddenly gotten the end of our time together. It's been a great conversation. What are the best ways for people in the audience to reach out to you and learn a little bit more about what you do or ask questions? Yeah, absolutely. I'm on LinkedIn. There's not a lot of Mike Taguchi's floating around the world, so it shouldn't be too hard to find. Or you can, you know, find us online. eResources.com is our company and the website, our platform, the platform orchestrate that I mentioned. You could look up, but yeah, I think LinkedIn is probably your easiest bet. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for your time. Appreciate having you here and this great conversation. And we look forward to even the conversations that started out in holiday movies and all that kind of stuff. We have definitely gone, we have gone far and wide in this interview. So thank you so much for entertaining our whims and doing so as well. And we will wrap this one up. Thank you so much for your time and we will catch you again next time out there on the web. 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 Developmental 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 developthe newer.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, keep growing, and we'll see you in the next episode.