Matt Paige:

All right, we got a good one for you today folks. Today we got Hatcher’s very own Joseph Memer. He runs our solutions consulting practice and has about 20 years experience building teams that build and deliver custom software solutions. And he’s one of the few people that I give the tag of Agile Guru to every time I talk to him, I’m learning something new. I keep the notepad handy whenever I’m chatting with Joseph. He’s just a wealth of knowledge with everything agile, everything, building software in general. But welcome to the show, Joseph.

Joseph Misemer:

Thanks for having me, Matt.

Matt:

Yeah. Excited to start chatting with you on a interesting topic today. And today we got a bit of a hot take with a bit of a contrarian view. What most everyone in our industry holds near and dear to their hearts. And that’s the beloved MVP approach to software development. Everyone’s heard of the mvp, the minimal viable product popularized by air crease. It’s become the sole defacto way of building software full stop. Like it’s just, it just is. Everybody knows the mvp. If you’re talking about waterfall, you kinda get shunned out of the room. And if you try and speak against m p, you sure to attract an angry mob with pitchforks. But luckily Joseph, for us today, we’re in the safety of our homes. This is recorded. Nobody’s coming after us, after the show airs, maybe. But we’re going there today. And don’t get me wrong, MG MVPs have their place. If you’re trying to test a market hypothesis, build a proof of concept, test the technical feasibility of a solution. MVPs are a great way to go. We use MVPs for those approaches when you’re building something new but you can’t, apply this blanket approach to everything and just assume it’ll work. And this is especially true when you’re modernizing or redesigning a software solution. Joseph, take us off the top. Why does an MVP approach not work when you’re modernizing software or redesigning software?

Joseph: 

Yeah, sure thing, Matt. And I want to, we’ll start with a little bit of a metaphor. We’re all familiar. I the MVP metaphor of we’re gonna start with the skateboard, move to a bicycle, move to a car. And I think that’s a great metaphor for MVP software development. But if we think about maybe an experience of driving a car on a highway, right? Because that’s the point that you’re gonna be at when you finish that MVP project front. Your customers have that car, they’re zooming along. In Atlanta, people move pretty quickly on the highways. So let’s think about what would happen if somebody already has a car that you gave them and now you want to tell them you’re gonna start them back over on a skateboard with no warning. On the highway, what’s gonna happen? They’re gonna be terrified, right? They’re gonna be zooming along at 65, 75 miles an hour, and then they’re gonna find themselves standing on a skateboard. And that’s probably pretty dangerous, right? So we can’t, if we’re taking an existing solution, we can’t start people over from zero. We have to meet them where they are now. And that’s using your existing software.
Matt: That’s what, yeah, I was gonna say, that’s what so many people do, right? They take this MVP approach. You hand your customer this shiny new object. It seems great, but it’s not meeting the needs that they have. And you can, you get some upset customers that if you take that approach,
Joseph: Yeah, it’s such a big, it’s such a big risk. People get used to, people get used to things, right? Every time Microsoft changes the location of a button or a color of a highlight, you’ll have coworkers that are flipping out. We all have our experiences when somebody changes the behavior of something inside our email client, right? We’re so used to it. And if it gets moved even if it’s good in the long run, it’s still such a shock in that intermediate. Intermediate phase.

Matt:

Yeah. And so if we’re looking at, MVP, building something new versus MVR like, let’s baseline on a few differences, a few points of difference.They thinking we have this checklist of things, right? If you have an mvp, a new thing you’re testing a new solution versus mvr, you’re trying to replace something existing. Yeah. Primary goal of an mvp. You want to validate a market, validate a product. In VR or modernization, you wanna migrate. Users to a new solution with Little churn. Yeah. User base. None on the new thing. An existing base on the existing thing. Target users, you’re trying to attract new modernization. You wanna retain existing competition’s a whole nother side of it. Are you competing with existing behaviors with a new thing or your own solution with mvp? So there’s a whole litany of different differences here, and that’s not even getting into the workflows and the technology and the culture and all those other pieces. So there’s a dividing line between an mvp, something new versus modernizing something existing.

Joseph: 

Yeah, and I think that, you touched briefly on it, but one of the ones that I think is really worth considering a lot is the question of whether you’re starting from. From nothing or starting from your existing solution, right? You may have already won over a bunch of people to, to doing, whatever they’re gonna be doing on the platform that you’ve built for them, which is great. It’s such a powerful place to begin. But you can’t pretend they don’t have that experience. They can’t, you can’t pretend they’re not used to something. You can’t pretend that they’re not comfortable maybe with the workflows that they’ve built around it. And if you try to take that away without making a really strong argument in return, you’re gonna end up with a bunch of people who are unhappy and who might walk.

Matt: 

Yeah, definitely. And people are attached to their existing processes. But let’s get into the six, or so principles of mvr. So there’s like some core tenets that really start to mold this approach and this methodology. So I’ll Hit one. Let’s hear the rationale and the details behind it. But the first one being with an mvr, you’re competing against your existing product.

Joseph: 

Yeah. We talked a little bit about this just a minute ago, but. Hopefully people are already using the system that you’re trying to modernize. And in that case you’re not just competing against people from the outside. You’re competing against your existing experience. And so there’s a possibility of scaring people away. And, this is a place where there’s actually been a lot of study done on people’s openness and willingness to accept change. And there’s a couple of things that we’ve found are really powerful drivers of maybe sticking with. Older experiences rather than making a switch to the new one. And one of them is something called the endowment effect. And this is where people are really, almost always value what they already have more than something new that they can get. And they’ve got that strong grip on, on the current piece. And you really have to pry that, that out from them. And the other one is this idea of loss aversion. We think that it might be the same. We might be just as happy if we win $5 and if we lose $5. But studies have pretty consistently shown that people feel two to four times as bad when they’re encountering, when they’re encountering a negative experience than a positive experience. And this, I think, touches on one of the big risks you have to be aware of, right? You might be able to keep something, but if you give somebody a bad experience where they lose a tool they’re used to, they’re gonna be way more upset. Then if you give them a new tool that they didn’t have before. So this is something you really need to consider carefully when looking at your modernization plans. Because that idea of loss aversion, making sure you don’t take something away that people value is way more important to your users than giving them a shiny new bobble.

Matt:

Yeah. And you, it’s like that bird in the handsworth too, in the bush. And it’s not just like you can’t supply a bad experience, you gotta. Supply something that’s better than what they have. Something the same just isn’t gonna cut it. Yeah. It’s a, it’s almost a level, a higher bar when you’re modernizing or redesigning something existing in a lot of ways. Yeah. And you mentioned the endowment effect. It makes me think of my, so my brother-in-law, he’s got a dog, sweet dog, great animal. You give him his treat and he turns into this Jekyll high type of thing, protects it. He, if you even get close to it, you’re losing a finger. And it’s the same kind of thing. People are protective of what they know. It’s like humans are weird animals. I guess dogs are too. People are protective of what they have. Yeah. Yeah. There, go ahead.

Joseph:

No, I, I was just gonna say that’s something that that’s incredibly true and it’s so important to keep in mind is that the way people are gonna fight to, to keep their workflows the same and not have to give something up when they make a change.

Matt: 

Yeah. And so the next one prioritize your most valuable users. I think this is a super interesting one and it’s a big kind of differing point when you think of MVP versus MVR. It’s who are your key users? You’re prioritizing.

Joseph:

Oh, yeah. Cuz in MVP, you’re not even sure. When you go in with that blank page, you’re able to, you’re able to draw all over it. You’re able to make whatever decisions you want and draw whatever conclusions you’d like because there’s nobody there to tell you’re wrong. And when you’re doing a modernization, you’re gonna have people that are valuable, whether they’re the folks that are paying the most, the folks that are doing the most lever use, whether they’re people that you’re leveraging to. To speak for you and do word of mouth marketing however you define it. There’s gonna be people that are going to be adding that extra bonus level to your user experience. And you have to cater to them. Don’t bend over backwards, but you have to be particularly concerned with how they’re gonna react to changes. And you can’t just go in and assume that everyone is gonna be reacting the same way and that the impact of everyone’s reaction is gonna be the same.

Matt: 

And those users that use your system the most, that are driving the most revenue, and we’ll get into this as another principle as well. They have some of the craziest workflows and ways of using your product too. But the example I like to think of is it’s like you’re building condominium, right? Floors one through 20, exactly the same, two grand in rent. They’re all the same ceiling height, same amenities, all that. But you get to the penthouse. And they’re paying let’s say, I don’t know, $20,000 a month, something crazy. And they want swimming pool. They want their own elevator. They want a helipad, they want 30 foot ceilings. They want all these crazy amenities. If you’re not considering that upfront you’re outta luck by the time you get to need to start building that pen penthouse. And you haven’t established a sound foundation before you got there.

Joseph: 

Yeah. And I think along with that too, you can think about maybe people are using your system in ways you don’t anticipate. And so that needs to be part of your conversation as well. When you’re talking to these high value users. You put in a closet that you expect people to use for coats and they end up using it for some other kind of storage or something, and be prepared to respond to people finding that new new exciting way to do something. Maybe you’re, you’ve got people who are used to having an elevator big enough to. Piano in, and you can’t replace that with a tiny little elevator if you don’t talk to them and find out how they’re using it. And so be aware and be particularly aware of your power users, right? Because they’re gonna be the ones who are going to dream up ways to, to take full advantage of everything that you give them. Yeah.

Matt: 

So everybody picture that in your head, your customers. Trying to hoist a piano up the side of a building and how pissed off that’s gonna make ’em. So just visualize that in your head when you’re modernizing something and the approach you’re taking, but you segue perfectly into the next one, which is understanding how customers use your product. And I think every customer or client we’ve engaged with, They’re always surprised at how current users are using their system that they just were not aware of. And as we’re doing the research these new interesting ways of how they use the solution become unveiled, but talk through that a bit. And also that leads to potential opportunities, right? Once you start to learn these things.

Joseph: 

A hundred percent. And I think that’s one of the things that’s so great is that People use whatever tools they’re given to achieve their goals. And so if we’re making a tool for maybe our in-house staff to use, they’re gonna find the ways to do as many pieces of their job with that tool as they can. And if that means that when you’re starting to talk about how to replace it, you discover that people have been using your free text fields, for really weird things, or that people have been, tracking assignments in ways that you hadn’t ever anticipated. You both have to be prepared to support that, but it also gives you a great visibility into some of the valuable pieces you can do as part of the modernization process. If people have been using a notes field to track who owns a task, maybe grant people in the future, the ability to assign tasks, and that opens up a whole space of ability to drive value for your organization. As you find some of those places so you can automate on top of those pieces. As you find these other non-traditional, non intended ways of using the software as you go forward

Matt: 

And then there’s always the the tool that is will be around, I think it’s like a cockroach. It’s never gonna die. And that’s Excel. If people are still, I promise you, using Excel somewhere in their process that you don’t know about, that you could, automate and put into your solution. We’ve seen that a ton of times as well. Yeah.

Joseph: 

Yeah. And I think it’s always informative. The time I’ve worked on a modernization project, there’s always been somebody that’s come up to me after a discussion of a workflow and been like I can’t tell you this when my manager was on the call, but here’s all the steps that we do that, that nobody knows about. And there’s always something in there that you can capture and improve upon because people are having to cook corners. And if you can give them the tool as part of that modernization, it’s gonna be better for everybody. Improve visibility less. Less opportunity for mistakes. All those pieces come into play. But having, being able to have those open and honest conversations about how people are using the tool and about how people are using other tools because the current one doesn’t meet their needs, those are gonna drive the ability to get really successful modernization questions.

Matt: 

Yeah. And that’s powerful. That almost gets back to the discussion we’ve had with Andy Sylvere on another episode where, Being able to get under that user experience, knowing how to ask the right questions. Like you mentioned, like when mom and dad aren’t in the room. I’ll tell you how this really works, right? But it’s real. It, people figure out the best way to use things and it may not be the instructed way to do things. Yeah. In getting into the next one, so this segues into now identifying the most critical workflow. I think with mvp, the idea is, let’s keep it simple. Let’s keep it end to end. Let’s start with an easy workflow. Modernization redesign, you can’t always go that route. Yeah.

Joseph: 

If you’ve been stacking MVP for a while, you might have accumulated 3, 4, 5 individual pieces. But much like when we were talking about the critical users, when we started with mvp, we had a blank page. We were able to pick a path and we were able to see if it. If it’s stuck with people and try another path and try another path. Now we’ve got people who have worn those tracks into the ground. And we’re not gonna be able to pretend that that we don’t know what’s coming. So we need to look for those spots where people are doing those high value workflows. And hopefully by this point you’ve got an understanding of where the value is in your product, but if you can understand that and look at the things that are driving it that’s gonna help you make the selection on the places where you’re gonna get the most most bang for your buck when you’re looking at going forward.

Matt: 

And this really starts to frame up your roadmap in a lot of ways. Yeah. Once you identify, okay, who’s our most valuable user, right? Who’s, what’s the ways they’re using the product? Identifying the most critical workflows, then it starts to frame up, okay, how do we. How do we sequence this thing out? And that gets to the next principle, which is, and this actually does connect back to an m MVP type of approach, but you gotta prioritize incremental enhancement over big bang. So I think that’s one thing with MV r this is not an approach saying build everything, launch it all at once, and pray that it works. That’s not it. Yeah. Talk us through that.

Joseph: 

Yeah. And it’s. I think it’s important to recognize here we’re not trying to throw away the entire idea of mvp, right? The idea of take a small slice and get people using it so you’re not sitting on value continues to be in play. And you can see a lot of that. As you get an understanding of your workflows, there’s gonna be places where you don’t have to tear down and completely rebuild. Take advantage of that. Get people using the new technologies. If you’ve got customer facing and internal facing, you can make choices about where you want to do your first, UI update. If you’ve got process pieces, you can pick a place and update a, a. Slice of the process. Get yourselves so that you’re seeing some of that value. But I think when you look at these too, these are all tied together, right? Your most critical workflow might depend on which type of user you’re looking at. Your incremental steps may depend on what your critical workflow is. And all of these are gonna depend on, who’s already using your system. And how it’s already being used and how you’re gonna try to support that. So that might drive oh, yeah. The most important incremental enhancement is to make sure that we don’t delete any functionality, but we modernize it and we get it working better. Cool. That’s a good informed choice that you can make sometimes.

Matt: 

Yeah. It’s a, it’s almost like the way to think about it, MVR is a combination of all the MVPs. Required to migrate your existing customers to your new solution. With minimal churn. That’s another way to think about it. It’s like, how do you chunk this thing up in a lot of ways? Yeah. And the last one being, focus on improving the function, the experience and the technology. A lot of times you’ll have people sway too much one way or the other where it’s, solely it’s just technology. That’s all we’re focusing on. Let’s lift and shift this thing to the cloud and not worry about anything else or. Let’s focus too much on the ui, but your technology’s old as dirt, right? But it’s all of those things that are, you gotta think through and prioritize when you get this opportunity to actually modernize something. Yeah. Yeah.

Joseph: 

And I think the big piece with this is we don’t want to do something for no reason. Let’s understand why we’re doing things. We don’t want to just pick up and drop something into the cloud. We better have a reason for it. It’s not free to pick up something and drop it into the cloud. Yeah. It’s not free to completely redo our ui. It’s not free to to change our workflows. So let’s understand, let’s make sure we understand why are we cleaning this up? Are we cleaning it up? Because we’re finding that our team members can’t do their tasks without making mistakes and we’ve now learned a better flow to put in place. Great. Are we finding spots where we’re not collecting the right information? And so we can’t do the reporting we need to be successful as a business. Awesome. Let’s collect that information. Let’s do a project to collect that information. Are we finding that we’re not able to scale and so we’re having performance issues because we have our application running on a single server in the closet in back, awesome. Let’s move to the cloud and give ourselves the ability to be responsive to our loads. But all of these are a reason, and it’s making sure that we understand why we’re doing it so that we’re not just Hey, I’ve heard of the cloud. Let’s do the cloud. No let’s do it for a reason. Let’s do it for a reason. And that reason is scalability or flexibility. Or a new technology. Not just because we want to. And I think that’s so important for all of these is that, if we understand why we’re doing something, we’ll be able to position to tell our users what the value is gonna be and offset that endowment effect. We’re gonna be able to, Make the right selection of which users we need to support first. We’re gonna be able to make the selection of which workflows we need to support first. We’re gonna be able to pick which incremental change we make because we know why we’re doing it, and we’re not just throwing a dart at the port.

Matt: 

Yeah, exactly. And hopefully by this point, you, you jive in thinking, okay I understand why MVP may not be the best thing for everything, and I’ll understand the why. But Joseph how the hell do you do this? How does this work in practice? And you hit on some of it too. And that’s one of the most important things to consider. That’s where I see some of our solution consult things, work through this. You gotta be intentional. Yeah. About how you’re releasing out functionality, how you’re communicating it to your users. Cuz the last thing you want is unnecessary churn. Which relates into either unhappy users or lost revenue or inefficiencies. And there’s, several ways you can approach this. We got three favorite ones, at a high level we like to talk about, but take us through the the different approaches. Kind get down to that how layer.

Joseph: 

Yeah. So when we look at it, there’s three ways that we can approach doing a modernization an M V R project. And we don’t always pick just one of these play very well together, either between or within each other. But there’s three approaches that we look at most often. And one of them is called the functional approach. And this basically is where we look at a function that somebody does, and we can try to, we can try to upgrade one slice of your function. And we can pick another function and we can follow that all the way through. And this is maybe a spot where you’ve got different users and they’re very siloed in how they use the system. And if there’s no overlap in how people are gonna use it, we can take a look at this functional approach and we can upgrade or update the flow for all of one type and then all of another type and then all of another type. And this is great if it’s super siloed. But if it’s not super siloed, maybe we’ll need to take a look at another approach. And there we might look at the process process approach. And this is a case where maybe we’re cutting across different user types, but we’re able to follow a single flow all the way through and it sits by itself. And so we’re able to track, maybe an entire deposit flow from nose to tail, and then we can follow an entire audit flow from nose to tail. And this may have different people using the system at each step. But everyone is going to be self-contained inside that process. They’re not gonna have to hop from something that we’ve updated to something that we haven’t updated. While following that flow, they may have to hop from updated flow to not updated flow, but that’s an entirely separate workflow and they can make that transition fairly smoothly. The third one, Is what we call the add-on approach. And the functional and the process approach have been very focused on you have an existing system that’s doing everything you need to do and we need to take something new and bring it into that space with the add-on approach. We’ve got a an opportunity to take something that you’re not doing at all yet. And this can be a new function. It can be a new process. It can be both. But we can take this and no one’s ever done it before and we can bolt that on. Using our new approach and then we can bolt on another system. We can bolt on another system. And this allows us to focus on these new places, use the technology, use the new workflow, use the new pieces and tools that we have available to us while not touching any of the existing pieces. And this is perhaps the most extreme example of not messing with anyone’s current play base, but it’s certainly an option, if you’ve got something that’s completely new, don’t feel like you have to build it the way you built stuff 3, 5, 10 years ago. Yeah. Look for a way to build the new stuff with the new tools and then you can come on behind and try some of the other approaches to bring some of the pieces that you’ve built in the past forward.

Matt: 

Yeah, and this is one where if you looking to get into a new market or maybe a new customer segment, that add-on approach is. Particularly interesting way to test that out. So we got functional process add-on. Those are the three right there. And, it’s all about getting to, what is that? Releasable increment. How are we thinking about the approach to really bite off this elephant one bite at a time? Yeah. We’ve seen it fail on one side where you try to release an MVP and customers are unhappy. We’ve seen it on the other side where you try to do too much and package this giant thing together and release it, and that’s not great either. So you gotta have a dedicated approach and have the teams aligned on the approach that’s a critical thing cuz. But something existing you’re not, you mentioned sandbox earlier, you’re not in your own little sandbox. You got customer support. You got finance, you got all these different areas of the organization that you have to consider.

Joseph: 

Yeah. All right.

Matt: 

Go ahead, Joseph. You got other, there’s

Joseph: 

There’s so many moving, there’s so many more moving parts when you already have, when you already have the car running. That you can’t assume. Are gonna play nicely together if you don’t have that conversation, if you don’t spend that time doing that the prep work to set yourself up for success.

Matt: 

Yeah. It’s what’s the example? It’s like you’re building the airplane as it’s flying. That’s a startup example. It’s, very similar. You got an airplane flying, you’re trying to completely rearchitect it in the air and keep everybody safe. Similar kind of metaphor there. Make this real for us. Do you got any. Examples, any use cases where either you’ve seen an NVR type of approach for great, or on the flip side, a fail where a company maybe did not take this type of approach?

Joseph: 

Yeah. I was thinking a little bit about this before we, we talked and I, I had a bad experience with one of my online banks and they maintained some of saving accounts for my family. And they created a new product that was anyways really great, but I think they, they took an MVP approach to replacing an existing product and they sent it out the door where it could do the absolute bare minimum of this product, right? It was a savings account, it took in money, and it let me take money out, and it showed me my balance, but it couldn’t do any of the other things that the old savings account could do, including set up a joint owner. Yeah, so I was I used this to move money around to, to handle banking with my wife, and we were unable to link her, ch her accounts to this savings account, and it completely defeated the purpose. Of creating the savings account, which was a place to to bridge the other accounts that we had. And it was incredibly frustrating because we had a, an established process that we were using based on the tools that they had made available to us. And by cutting out that core tool when we needed it to upgrade that account, we almost walked away from that, that banking institution because they made it impossible for us to do the core workflow that we had. We had dreamed up. And I think this touches a little bit on that idea of. They may not have expected people to use their savings accounts to bridge a couple of checking accounts, but that’s how we were using it. And that doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna be impacted by their change in the process. And it really caught us out and it was really a very disappointing and frustrating experience for us.

Matt: 

We’ll keep the name of the bank protected and un undisclosed. But yeah it’s, they didn’t understand your particular needs and I’m sure what they delivered. The new thing was probably, Great shiny, awesome functionality, but it missed that core element that you as a particular user group, I promise you probably weren’t alone. I bet you there were other people in that same scenario, customer segment Yeah. That had that same use case in terms of how they used their solution.

Joseph: 

Quite possibly. Yeah. It was, but it was a clear instance. Somebody getting to that bare minimum functionality that works if you don’t have anything to compare it to, but as soon as you got a comparison point, you’re like, I can’t go backwards. I can’t go backwards.

Matt: 

Awesome. That’s great. And I think we’re about at a stopping point here, but MVR, so what are those core principles you’re competing against your own product? You prioritize your most value, valuable user, prioritize incremental enhancement over your big bang. Identify the most critical workflow. Understand how users are using your product. They got those paperclip products processes out there and improve the, the function, experience and technology of it. And then we talk through the different approaches as well. And, we got some resources out there. You can find ’em in the show notes if you want to go a bit deeper. And I think, Joseph, this is one of those topics where we could go down a rabbit hole on an entire episode, on any number of these areas, and we probably will in the future. But appreciate you having you on the show. I know folks can probably find you on LinkedIn. That’s probably the easiest spot out there. But thanks for joining us today. My pleasure.

Joseph: 

Thank you for having me.

Matt: 

Thanks Joseph.