Jeff and George have worked on projects for over 10 years. Recently George's company, Intevity, has been leading a discussion about Discovery and best practices. Jeff got a chance to sit down with George and go over all the best practices for not just a discovery session, but a discovery period. Topics covered include:

- best length of time for. a discovery period

- Trust, empathy and how not to "lead the witness"

- Best tools to use

- Building trust along the way instead of the BIG REVEAL in the end. 

Music choice for the intro is George's- James Brown, Love, Power, Peace: Live at the Olympia, Paris, 1971 . 

About Intevity

"Intevity is a digital consultancy specializing in Customer Experience, Digital Product Development, and Modernization solutions for both commercial and public sector clients.

We believe that technology should serve not set the vision and strategy of an organization. We see technology’s impact on business to be ineffective without alignment, relevance, and velocity. We use our Digital Triality model to discover root problems, drive organizational readiness, and effective digital transformation within the enterprise, accelerating efficiency, growth, and competitive advantage.

The Intevity process includes deploying senior, cross-functional consulting teams and industry SME’s that work hip-to-hip in the trenches to enable client teams and support the journey of effective digital transformation through utilizing custom software development and proven platforms including Adobe, AWS, BigCommerce, and Salesforce. Example clients include Foundation Medicine, Under Armour, iRobot, LogMeIn, AWS, Sazerac, Drizly, NASA, Department of Defense, Department of Labor, and Department of State." 

You can listen on Spotify here and Apple here

Transcript:

 

Jeff  00:07

Hey there, it's Jeff from the Getting Services Done podcast. So it's been a few weeks or months had a lot of transitions going on with COVID and everything. But kids are back in school and I was able to find an hour where people weren't running around, I think you can hear a leaf blower and occasional screaming in the background. But that's COVID. That's, that's what's going on these days. So we shouldn't be ashamed of any of that. So I, if anybody worked with me, during the break of times, one of my trusted partners was George jagged insky have at the time at the time, they were twin Tex. And they went through and did a rebrand based on a lot of the new processes or the best thing practices that they learned on the way. And they've been posting a lot on LinkedIn and posting about discovery. And that's, that's an issue I always struggle with, especially now that I'm usually just doing discovery by myself, and making sure I'm doing it efficiently and doing it right and following best practices or what can work with me. So George is great. We sat down, you know, talked about some old times before we started recording. And then we really just focused a lot on how to make sure that the Discovery sessions, not just the you know, first kickoff and everything, but like whether it's a three week or an eight week, we talked about the periods that we should be using how to interview, how many to do in a day, I don't know about you, as I mentioned in the podcast after about two and one day, I get a little burnt out and start getting a little Stockholm Syndrome and things like that. So we went over all of those and how to build consensus and make sure you're presenting the right thing. And we just had a blast, and I look forward to talking to George again, check them out on LinkedIn, I'll put his link in to his company in the in the description. And one other quick thing I want to hear from you, I use anchor, this isn't an ad at all. But I use anchor for doing all the distribution and video audio editing and things like that, which I probably should have done twice now recording this. But so they allow me to put bumper music and if anybody knows me, I'm a huge music fan. And so I was like, oh cool, I can just pick songs off of Spotify and mix them right in and not have to worry about all that stuff. And I thought it'd be cool to ask the guests what, what tune or what band they'd like to hear as an intro. I as I was publishing this episode, I learned that by doing that I can only publish on Spotify. And of course, I have the link on my website as well too. So I wanted to know if that was an issue. I never want to do anything that limits listening to the podcast. So let me know about that. I'll put something about that when it posts on LinkedIn and in the blog as well too. And we'd love to hear your feedback. Thanks. Bye and we're rolling. So George Jagodzinski is here with me George and I have gone back. Oh my god, I was just trying to think about this now. Out 15 tenure 2010 Maybe tenure as they tend to write. So I'm actually an easy parlay which I can kick into this is that you know sometimes when you're growing SaaS professional or company and you're run professional services, you can't hire all the people that you need to do the stuff you need to so at the time I reached out to our buddy Alex who everybody knows he's mysterious, you know Unlike figure and in Boston, connected us because I just said, I need a team that can get stuff done that I don't really have to manage too much and can just say, here's how we do it. And, and you guys came on and just started killing it for me, which was great. And then, you know, I actually haven't been as much in touch, like, you guys are doing your thing and some rebranding, which I'd love to hear about as well, too. And then I recently started seeing George post about the discovery process, which I'm like, currently, always agonizing over my process, because I like how can this be more efficient and things like that? So I reached out to George, we instantly agreed that, you know, well, I believe that the, the m&m Sugar cookie is the best way to have a meeting, but started connecting on the important meaning logistics, and there's like, no, it's let's just get online and talk about this. Because if you're in services, or in professional services, you're doing some level of discovery. So to George will introduce yourself, and then I'm at the tail end of your introduction. I love to hear what you guys are currently, like what problems you're being called in to solve right now, which precipitates why you need a discovery process. That's kind of tight like you guys have been talking about?

George Jagodzinski  06:24

Sure. But not too. Yeah. So George Jagodzinski, we are a managing partner at integrity. We're a digital consultancy. So that's digital strategy, all the way down to execution, everything from product development, to modernization to experienced platforms, you name it. And we've been doing this well, as a company, we've been doing this for over 17 years, I've been been in doing this for over 20 years now. And what we find is we work across public sector, we work across commercial, we work with, you know, Under Armour in the world, we work with Department of Labor, but we also work with more mid market and smaller companies as well. And we find that there's just, there's always these human problems that are at the center of anything that organizations come to you. So an organization might come to us and say, Hey, we we were our platforms that meeting our needs, we think we need a new platform. And we're like, yeah, maybe you do. But you're like 50 of them now. And they don't seem to be living up to the promise. So it's either them or you and we need to do something different this time,

Jeff  07:24

right? Yeah, right. Or I think Jared, maybe build a middleware component that pulls all the different platforms into one analytic dashboard is when you guys need to,

George Jagodzinski  07:32

yeah, oh, I need this data warehouse, and all of my problems will be solved. Right.

Jeff  07:37

I digress. Yeah, that's a huge problem that's out there. So that's absolutely,

George Jagodzinski  07:42

yeah. So those are, it's, you know, we've grown quickly, and we, we don't have the efficiencies to meet the scale that we're now encountering, or, you know, that's the monetization side of it. Or it's, you know, it's just this realization that they're not servicing their clients or their members the right way, and how can they solve that? And so we always jump in, and we do a heavy, you know, a quick accelerator, which of these eight week engagements, and those are front loaded with discovery?

Jeff  08:07

Do you find that it's funny? So, depending who's your sales team at the time and your customer? It's either three weeks or it's eight weeks, right? Like, no, no, it's just a quick three week, three week thing, right? And, but I do, like, I'll agree, like, you can really find out everything that's needed in eight weeks, right?

George Jagodzinski  08:26

Yeah. How do you time boxing exercise, right, like, like, you could do it forever and ever and ever. But you know, it's funny, I, I'm actually coming back around to the word discovery, because you and I, you know, similar paths, in the early days discovery to me, it meant a 500 page requirements document and enjoy

Jeff  08:46

some nice process flow diagrams,

George Jagodzinski  08:49

Rudel, and so at that word discovery just had a sour taste in my mouth. But it is an accurate description of what you're doing. So I've come back around to it, but I think it can be, you know, reimagined, it can be a nimble thing. It can't be too quick, too long, but it can be done.

Jeff  09:05

Yeah, no, I hear you. And the funny thing is, I was just redoing the website, and I, like had the word discovery there. And I was telling my marketing person like, oh, well, we'll just rename this later. And I was like, what, what else would I call this right now? requirements gathering? Is that sexy, right? Like, you know, so just, we hadn't planned to talk about this. But I am curious. I used to sell a lot of discoveries and you know, getting up to the you know, to find out what you actually need to build and how to price it out. And I used to always hear this one objection. And I'm curious how you do it and probably not I'm gonna say already, which is, so we're gonna pay you X amount of dollars for you just generate another price tag. Right. How do you get around that one? I have a feeling but I'm just curious how you address that one.

George Jagodzinski  09:56

I think first and foremost, I truly am not going in there like know what the next price tag is, I feel that you should be able to deliver some sense of value within those, you know, several to eight weeks, whatever it is, so much so that, you know, there have been situations where we'll go in, and it's enough to get them started on whatever they're going to work on. And they're like, Hey, we don't need you anymore. Right? Like, okay, great, that's a win. I mean, obviously, in running a business, we, we need enough work to kind of convert into the long range. But if you take just a long lens, in general, across the entire portfolio of clients, and relationships that you have, if you're going in there with the intent of just deliver value anywhere that you can, and deliver, and, you know, improve these relationships, it's all gonna work out for everyone.

Jeff  10:39

I can't it's so funny. Like, if you if you had a salesperson in front of you, they don't like that answer. But the answer back is like, they have cut people off. And probably you go in for eight weeks, and you do all the interviewing, which we're going to focus a bit on in a little bit, and you come up and you find what the problem is, and you write what the resolution is. And it might be a tech thing, and might be a process thing. And you've solved their problem. And they actually have the resources internally to fix that. They love you in a they're going to refer you to somebody else, or they're going to bring you in again, because they love the work that you do. Right. And so yeah, but salespeople, like what you guys know, know is your second weekend, you should be preparing the next. So who and I'm like, wow, you know, like, cool, we will definitely know what it would take to do this. But yeah, delivering value, I think is the core thing there that you just always should strive for there.

George Jagodzinski  11:31

Yeah, I mean, we had a conversation, I literally had a conversation today with an old client of ours, the the first time we started working with them, I think was like 1013 years ago, yeah. And then they put us into a bunch of places. And there have been many times where they've, they've reached out and said, This isn't for us, but I'll point you in the right direction, you know, or, or this isn't the right thing for you to do now. But during those discovery efforts, what I what I really love is if you can find those one or two things to tell someone not to do, whether it's related to what you're doing or not, right, that's the whole, like, Don't stab yourself in the eye with a fork. I just I love those moments. It's so

Jeff  12:07

funny, because, you know, if you've ever, you'll, you'll deal with this and 10 years or so. But like, if you're coaching like kids, like kids sports or whatnot, like I coach a lot of soccer been doing it forever. And if you say hey, you know, defend the person like this, you're gonna get like 15 looks, but if you say, Don't defend them like this, and you stick your body like whoa, right? Don't Don't do that. Right, and they take more out of the don't do. You know, that's why all those don't eat this, that books do so well. So I've heard I don't have any.

George Jagodzinski  12:41

I love the mentality by now. Because even you know, I've I come from a software programming background. And I've, I've managed and coached plenty of software engineers on their way to them becoming a leader. And one of the things I would always tell them is, at a certain point, it's a, you should no longer installed development environment on your computer. Right. And like just that one thing all of a sudden changes their entire outlook on the world, because they can't just get their hands in there and fix everything right? To actually coach

Jeff  13:07

your team through this. Right? I always funny, always comes back to metaphors of my dad, I just remember the first time he's like, Jeff, you're gonna mow the lawn from now on, I'm like, okay, he's like, I'm gonna show you how to do the first row. And then like, he's i Oh, hold on, hold on. And then he would do the whole the whole lot. And I'm like, great, so I'm not going to get my 10 bucks, and I didn't get to do it. And like, I guess he's just going to keep doing it. And I'll just sit back here and watch him, which is what your team will wind up doing, if you don't train them on to do that. But totally. So just curious, do you, you've got a broad range of customer bases, you know, going from consumer to government. Does your process alter like, Well, okay, for government, oh, we're going to do this. But for consumer, we're going to come and come at the problem like this? Or is it more like, more an analogous sort of way of dealing with problem that you just have your one standard process to go in and discover things?

George Jagodzinski  14:00

Yeah, you know, it's definitely not a standard process. It there's, there's a general philosophy and a framework to how we execute on these, but not necessarily prescribed process. And there's a there's a standard toolbox that we use, for sure, the way that you work in public sector is different, because they just buy differently, you know, so So in doing our discovery, it's typically just going to be baked into something larger, because you're just not buying small thing.

Jeff  14:28

I forgot all about that trying to the government experience in a little box and not think about it.

George Jagodzinski  14:34

Yeah, but then, you know, even across industries, it's certainly various because some industries we go in and it can be very easy to talk to the consumers or to their to their end customers, others, like in health insurance, there's there's DHI involved, it's very difficult to talk to them. And so it's always it varies a little bit, but the toolbox is the same. It's this concept of let's do divergent thinking and then convergent thinking with a workshop in the middle, right. So we're going to talk to a ton of People, we're gonna get a lot of stuff on the board, to the point that we're probably just spinning around dizzy, and our brains can't focus on anything. And then we're up, we're gonna get some folks in the room and we're going to work up some stuff, and then we're going to narrow it in, in a few different places to start giving it a little bit of structure so that we can all breathe a little a little easier and not panic. And then and then drive forward on the most meaningful parts. That

Jeff  15:21

is funny, because when I when I heard that, like, in a very crude way of saying that, like, oh, that sounds like a tops down bottoms up sort of approach, but it makes sense. Like, you're gonna get all this divergence stuff, and then you're gonna get the concentrate and stuff as well, too. I like that. That's a nice way of putting it. So. Okay, so my, the thing I struggle with the most right, is interviewing. I debate like, is it because now it's usually just me interviewing somebody one on one, it's COVID times for anybody listening to this 10 years from now. And so everything's zoom, or web conference related. But I find if I do one or two of those, unlike spent, like, I'm just pull a TV up in front of me, like, it just drains me to no end and everything like that. So do it. Am I just more abnormal? Or is that a standard?

George Jagodzinski  16:14

Well, whether or not you're abnormal remains to be seen. But with regards to this, no, it is it can be exhausting. Because you are, you're doing a lot of things at once with an interviewer you're you're building trust very quickly, you're trying to build trust as quickly as you can, you're trying to show empathy, because you want to be empathetic, and you're pulling strings on a picture that you might not really know what that picture is. So it's, it's an ambiguity that you're trying to dig into. It's, it's tough. I mean, it's not like you're doing a 60 Minutes interview. But but a lot of the same personal, you know, human dynamics are there that can be it requires a lot of focus, and a lot of brain time. Yeah, two or three is tough, I've done full days, I find that there is, there's something helpful about going into a day or half day, kind of knowing that you're like, I'm gonna run a marathon tomorrow, I'm gonna hydrate today, you know, I'm gonna clear my mind of all the nonsense, and I'm just gonna get through it. So it's context for thinking, where I think it's really difficult to construct shifting from, maybe you're doing some strategic planning for something else, and then hopping in and out of interviews, that

Jeff  17:21

it's brutal. It's so true. And, yeah, I think you probably hit the nail on the head, because I usually don't, for sanity sake, line up three hours of interviews straight, like, I'm gonna do this one here, gonna go off and maybe do some summarization, or some other thing, record a podcast or something. And then it's like, Oh, I gotta go back into interview mode. You know, do you still do the, you know, 10 people in a room or 10 people on a conference, and you're kind of hashing through stuff, or you go down to one on ones. And that's your best way of getting out information.

George Jagodzinski  17:54

I like we like one on ones, because people will and you'll find people will just really vent to you in a one on one setting. And it's just much more meaningful. And we'll usually have two or three people on our side, because you need someone at least to take notes and then someone else to make sure that you're not missing and or for dead spots. You can bounce off of each other and salt and pepper a little bit for questions, different angles. But yeah, for sure. I think one on ones the best.

Jeff  18:20

Yeah, yeah, it's in when we talked about this earlier. We talked about the Stockholm syndrome. And I feel like I'm the worst. Like, yeah, that does suck. How do you deal with that? Like, oh, let's pull it back. You take a log off. Right?

George Jagodzinski  18:35

Yeah, especially when you do a bunch of back to back. So you know, you'll have one day and you're talking to a bunch of the engineering team. And you leave your leave, though. At the end of the night, when you're checking out, you're like, oh, man, screw product management, being so unreasonable. And then two days later, you talk to product management and sales. You're like, wow, those engineers are really being jerks. I don't know what's going on. Yeah. And then you give yourself a couple more days, and everything percolates in your brain and you look at it from a third party, unbiased perspective. And now you can see the commonality. And you can see where maybe they're, they're talking past each other or using, you know, slightly different language and saying the same thing. And yeah, and that's where you can really find the good stuff.

Jeff  19:15

Yeah. Hey, do you mind me asking about tools because I feel like I'm one step above. Like, writing on stone and, you know, chalk and things like that. So, like, so I get into a conversation, and I take a lot of notes. And recently my daughter, she's in junior high so so not my younger one was like, Hey, Dad, you have any jobs and like, yeah, I interviewed 10 people this week. And I have all these notes. I just would love them, you know, put into electronic format. And she looked at my notes and I think I saw fear in her like a because I look at a phrase on my oh my oh, yeah, that that makes total sense. As to me in my handwriting is like criminal sidenote, I dated a girl before I met my beautiful wife, of course, that used to be an art therapist, and she saw my handwriting and became very scared, like, like, I probably had some pathos going on but so so but I literally am writing all these notes out and I'm like, you know, beautiful mind, like putting a box around things and then writing notes out that and ask this and things like that. And and then at the end of the day, I'm like, This can't be a way to live. And this is I'm like, how do the pros do this? Are they recording looking at transcripts after or? Yeah,

George Jagodzinski  20:37

yeah, it's a mixed bag, I'll preface this, that I was a Montessori kid. So I kind of subscribe to the concept of whatever works for you is what you should do. And we do that internally. So so we have some team members, they'll take notes visually on mural board, they'll just kind of start mapping it out.

Jeff  20:53

Take a note on that, because you are literally the third person that is a Tuesday or the third person that's mentioned Miro. To me. They're a customer of mine at a previous place. We got their LMS lined up. So yeah,

George Jagodzinski  21:04

yeah, I mean, I really do miss being in a room and a whiteboard to I feel like so much. We heavily used Miro, but it's just not the same. Yeah. And so so some people will do it visually like that others will do it visually using like, like a mind mapping tool. They're just latch on to keywords myself, I actually do go pen to paper, and I've color coded notebooks for clients that we're working with. And it's funny I, there you go.

Jeff  21:32

I just held up my notebook that has words drawn, you know, the squares around it. And I've got like a pink, sticky note on it as an it's important.

George Jagodzinski  21:42

But the funny thing is, I find myself I rarely even look at the notes, because so to me, it's more about writing it down. And then going for a long walk at the end of the week and kind of synthesizing in my head, what were the big points that I'm trying to latch on to epsilon i, i also marry myself with my teammates. And so there's typically one person on the team that has very structured notes. So we'll use like, either like a Google Doc or we use one note Yep. So that we can have multiple people collaborate on those notes and pull them together. But then then we ultimately we do synthesize it down into more structured things with different themes. Because it's interesting in these conversations, you might be talking about a platform, but you're gonna have culture, things come up, you're gonna have organizational things come up and, and process and tools. And so we tried to kind of categorize our, our findings into heat maps, and kind of one of my favorite things to do is, we'll actually do a mapping kind of like my map, but it's, um, problem that we heard, root cause and the possible solution to fix that. And when you lay them all out, it's like this crazy, like, beautiful mind, like head headache thing that you're looking at. But then you could take certain slices of that, and kind of, oh, if we remove this one thing, it's always these 10 things. And oh, yeah, kind of see through the forest.

Jeff  23:06

It's funny, and I'll relate that, you know, a lot of people that listen to me are in the implementation and onboarding stage and everything. And so people will, you know, when I get called into some of these things, they're like, oh, like, just we need a new tool, or, you know, the process is broken and everything. And sometimes you get in, and it's like, oh, no, the problem is that your sales team is selling a product that doesn't exist yet. And so your implementation teams never going to be successful. And you know, those types of things. So you hear culture, like, sometimes that's the big issue, it's not the tool or the platform, it's the, it's all these other things, like, we could just keep listing them off for days, but you get brought in to solve one problem. And it's this other cultural or this other, you know, something in the lifecycle of the company, that's, that's causing all the problems?

George Jagodzinski  23:59

Yeah, I mean, you go into an organization and you're looking at a new platform, but then you look at what the goals are of that group. And none of them line up to what the overall company goals are ready, you could you go through these 20 minute one on one interviews, and you realize that no one is really clear on what the company vision is. So what the heck can we do and talk about platforms and tools until we can get everyone aligned and talking the same language and marching in the same direction? You know, what are you going to do?

Jeff  24:26

It's funny, I was involved in one of these sessions as a customer. And I remembered they did one of these exercises upfront, before we did any more discovery. It was like that big kickoff meeting. And I think the exercise was like, you know, what was the Time magazine cover look like for your company in five years or something like that? And they were just, like, dramatically different. And we're talking for members of the exec team, right, like, so they're like, there's four of you and you run the company and you have wildly divergent ideas on what the company should be. So we got to focus on that before we do your website read is

George Jagodzinski  25:09

a misalignments a huge one. But it's just a human thing. I mean, yeah, you're married, I'm married. I mean, how many times do you find that you're so misaligned with your own wife that you live with in love? And then work? How can you?

Jeff  25:21

That would be never I don't know, my wife does a podcast, but my kids do. But no, no, it's true. It's sometimes you know, it goes back. Tasha talked about this. We could use dating metaphors for everything, right? Because it's just, it's just are you listening? Like, are you listening to me right now, George, are you? Or do you have something on the tip of your tongue that is so important to you that you can't even hear the words that I'm saying right now.

George Jagodzinski  25:48

Or as one person changed, and the other person hasn't changed? You changed in different ways in a business too. It's as you've grown and evolved, it's, it's not the same and you need to revisit,

Jeff  25:57

yeah, it's so guy, especially dealing with startups. And I don't know if you know, the level of the ones that you deal with, but like, those people that got you from zero to 20, not usually the ones they get from 20 to 100. And then those 100 People aren't the ones that get you to 500, and then 1000. And so the all these things and ideas, and the reasons why people joined on are going to be different than you need to find out, you know, where everybody is aligned to where you want to go and everything. And that's, I gotta be honest, I don't do that enough. I'm like, focused, laser it on this problem. And I need to go in and fix that and show results in two weeks and what my hypothesis for fixing is and things like that. So

George Jagodzinski  26:40

it's a balancing act, because the way that I've been talking about things you could there's a, there's a dangerous edge where it's like, Are you are you trying to solve everything? Like, are you trying to solve my company's vision? Are you trying to solve this new platform thing, and then there's somewhere in the middle, where, yes, we want to solve this. But if there are things that are really in the way of making this just a waste of time, and effort, you know, if you want to launch a new product, or whatever it is, there needs to be some organizational readiness there. You don't need to solve anything but everything, but you do need to address enough of it.

Jeff  27:14

Especially if it's going to be an influencing factor into the core thing that you're trying to do, right? Like, hey, we could go fix your product. But you know, if the marketing is not going to expose it correctly, X, Y, and Z or whatever, like, that's a bad example. But you know,

George Jagodzinski  27:28

my litmus test for kind of how wide we go with some of those challenges are like, Would it be a waste of your money and effort to do this? If you didn't do this other thing first, right. And I think that helps you kind of constrain where you reach out within discovery. And because you could in discovery, so when they'll tell you, Oh, you should go talk to this other person or talk to this other person. And that can quickly turn into months of conversations. And you need to have a line that you draw.

Jeff  27:54

Yeah. In I do find like, you'll actually, I'll ask you, how many people when do you start seeing these key trends? Like two in five in 10? In?

George Jagodzinski  28:07

Yeah, so to baseline and we typically ask for about the one we're dealing with a large or a mid to large organization, we asked for about 20 people to interview, okay, that because if you're doing 20, that ensures that you're going to get a leader within each key functional area, as well as at least one Doer within each functional area, which is important. And it ebbs and swells, where you will talk to three people, and then you'll start hearing a lot of the same patterns of the same, they're saying the same things. And then all of a sudden, Person number 10, or 11, throws out this curveball, and you're like, Whoa, that really unlocked a whole different conversation. So then you start weaving that into your other conversations, or even do some follow ups. And, and it unlocks a whole nother set of discovery, you know,

Jeff  28:56

on that thread. And I mentioned, this is one of my weaknesses, how do you take that info, but not lead the witness? Like, Hey, do you find that you hate the product dev team that much? Do you think their process is not the best?

George Jagodzinski  29:15

You know, I always I always opt for like, Dumb Question guy.

Jeff  29:20

I can do that.

George Jagodzinski  29:24

So like I tried to remind myself that this one's not always easy for me to remind myself to be humble. And like, you know, I don't know everything, and for sure, they know their business more than I do. And, and so it's it's a little bit of discipline and also a little bit of, you know, playing GM to to make sure that I don't leave the witness too much.

Jeff  29:45

Yeah, it's funny in Yeah, it's a huge issue of mine, but it's fine when we're talking about the like that sort of kickoff meeting and everything. What I'm used to is that you could just basically say hey, What are we trying to do here? And I'm not saying another word for an hour. And in the customer's always say the same thing. Oh, we actually never get together as a group like this. So we're hashing this all out in real time. Yeah. Now, I have kind of, I've debated between doing that, like letting that meeting happen, or sending out like a homework packet like, Hey, can you guys get together and talk about these things? Do you have a preference either way, like, is this cathartic thing for them to get in the room? And just like hash it all out in front of the kids, or let them get aligned a little bit beforehand?

George Jagodzinski  30:35

Yeah, we've seen a few different flavors of it, depending on the company and the culture. So the one is I, first and foremost, we love getting everyone together. The question is, do you do that within a kickoff? Or do you also do it just within the middle of it as a workshop? One of my favorites is, you could just ask them what one word means. And they can go up like what? And it could be, again, going back to dumb guy questions, it could be like, What is a customer, and that could be a three part conversation that they go off on. But taking it back to kickoff, I think kickoff is really important for a few different reasons. One is, when when I've seen kickoffs, and we've been guilty of this in the past, when that when we've not done it, and we've just gone in, and especially in real life offices back when that used to be a thing when you actually go into an office. Word starts trickling out, and people are like, oh, there's, he's here. Well, he's consultants here to do and we're gonna get.

Jeff  31:33

Yeah, he's they've sued swimsuits.

George Jagodzinski  31:36

And like we literally had, they said it jokingly, but they would call us the Bob's because it was too. Before Yeah. So it's important to set that context upfront and broad enough so that and in a shareable way, so that if people aren't in the kickoff, someone in the hallway can at least tell them what the heck is going on. So that it doesn't come off as this nebulous, what the heck of the consultants? Oh,

Jeff  31:59

in the big glass conference room, where you just keep people seeing looking like I don't know, what are they?

George Jagodzinski  32:05

Are we getting bought?

Jeff  32:07

So true? Yes. Yes. This is a pre acquisition meeting that we're having right now. Oh, yeah. So

George Jagodzinski  32:15

what we find is that the big meeting with everyone together, we find the middle is perfect, because you've done enough interviews to get a feel for all the different dynamics and some of those people, you ask them one question, they go off for an hour others, it's you know, really have to pull the questions and build more trust with them before they'll open up to you. But your plant, you're, you're planting seeds and getting everyone to trust you so that when you then go jump into a room, it's much more productive. And if you're building breakout groups, you've now got a feel for everyone's different personalities, so that you can do your wedding planning and like come up with the right seating of all your breakout groups to make sure you have the right mix.

Jeff  32:53

Yep, yep. Okay, so let's, we're getting through discovery. And then discovery always has this sort of natural endpoint to it. And I'm going to say three words that you're going to hear, which is initial findings and recommendations. So do you like to do this along the way? So personally, I do this iteratively. Maybe it's because I'm a one man shop. And I'm like, Hey, I'm adding some value, but but also, like, it's just, I'm just always unpeeling the onion. So I'm showing some things, but I need to ask some more questions. But I know a lot of companies and people in organizations like to do like the big finish, like where we're gonna get to this big, it's like a movie and you know, big reveal. In the end, I saw you shake your head. So I have a feeling.

George Jagodzinski  33:40

Yeah, yeah. And you have some of those more brand centric companies. I won't name them right now. But they'll even do like mood lighting, and props and the whole big, big to do. I, we're also very iterative, I think, share early share often as much as you humanly can. And what I love now that you've done all these interviews, you can now you know, the people who are going to give you the most brutal feedback on the ideas. So you share your ideas with them, and you work through it. Is this a good idea? Or is this a bad idea? And quite honest, even before we've gotten to the point of like, what we what we think our findings are, I'll even just start saying, like, Hey, guys, we're not seeing this as a, you know, an organizational problem, or we're not seeing this as you're probably not going to need to buy a new platform, or you shouldn't launch this new product. And we're going to figure out why. So just setting expectations and working through it together as a team of one throughout the whole thing. There's nothing I love I hate worse than the the big aha and

Jeff  34:39

oh, yeah, yeah, like that's smart. We are we made all these assumptions. Yeah, I, you know, for me, you had mentioned that bring the doers in like that's, that's where it hits the road for me. It's like, I need to bounce that off of them. Like, hey, you know, I talked to five of your co workers and I kind of came up with this idea like, would this work before I present this See your boss, basically, I want to know, like, you're the one doing this, like, would this actually work? You know, and then going through and talking to all the other people. Otherwise, yeah, I'm afraid of like me showing that, oh, here's my big aha. And it was like, This is bullshit to even talk to any of us like, you know. So there's that validation of thoughts. And I think I just got an EEG sticker on my podcast for that. But we're good. We're all adults here. This is this is a blue collar podcast, as far as I'm concerned. So. So, yeah, no, I 100% in agreement on you that so. So what am I missing here in the discovery process that I haven't brought up is like a key topic that if you were going to train somebody and how to do it, that I didn't bring up or go over here.

George Jagodzinski  35:44

I think accelerating to common language is a huge one, both for your own team, but also as value to the client. So you know, we use that joking example of what is a customer, that's actually a real customer. I think we sat with Victoria's Secret, I think we had 60 people in the room talking for three hours about what a product set is. So this is it's a real problem. And so your team needs common language, but you need to get them talking the same. And then when you get to that workshop, people are already kind of starting to talk the same language, and they can move through it. And then to your point of the big aha moment at the end. I think a lot of times there's there's frustration with people don't understand the language even that you're using in your big aha moment. So if they've already kind of been brought along that journey, to me that end, that's because there generally is a final presentation. What that final presentation should be about is, is everyone's already on board. And we're already moving forward. We've already started momentum with your team. And maybe there's a place for us afterwards, maybe there's not, but but the momentum is already going. And this is maybe just a sign off moment. Oh, yeah.

Jeff  36:49

And that's not just for what we're talking about with discovery, like any idea, like you're gonna bring it to exec staff, you're gonna bring it to a small team thing. It doesn't have to be in software, you build consensus along the way. So people like to Yeah, I wish somebody had talked to me about this, you know, or there's just so many reasons. But for me, it's like validating that what you're going to present is actually correct. So yeah, yeah. So it's funny. So let's, let's kind of wrap up with this concept. We talked about what not to do as a key concepts. So you know, this is totally we did not, you know, we had a small little outline, and this is not on there. But what are some, what are your like, your, your big, what not to do, you know, in customer discoveries?

George Jagodzinski  37:37

Yeah, I think, don't be judgmental, and poke him in the eye or kick them while they're down. You know, it's easy, because you're coming in to look at problems. So all of your conversation starts to be about problems and challenges. And it can be easy to spiral around that. And everything just becomes negative. And so I think that you need to acknowledge that they're there probably for a really good reason. Hey, the work that you did to date, it's good work and was right at the time, things just need to change because of, you know, you're going through XYZ change right now. So I think I think that assuming, don't assume that you know, their business better than you do. For sure, we see a lot of the same patterns happen across most industries in most companies. But there, there's always this joke in consulting, where people are like, Oh, everyone thinks they're unique, but they're all the same. But there always is something a bit unique to accompany, you know, otherwise, you would be able to use the same exact frameworks everywhere, and it would work perfectly, and none of these problems would exist. And those those uniqueness can just be the types of I mean, at one company, the majority of their employees are PhDs and scientists, they have a very different culture from, you know, Under Armour, where it's a bunch of x, you know, athletes, or current athletes. And so there's just there's always a uniqueness. You can't assume that that everyone is the same.

Jeff  39:06

That's awesome. I appreciate that. So to get out and discover everything, you could relate it back to that, but what's the big initiative that you're working on right now that you're like, super excited about? Like you get through the BS, all the stuff we have to do? And then you're like, Oh, cool. I get to work on this right now. Is there anything like that? If there's not I'm feel sorry for you, George. I took

George Jagodzinski  39:29

initiative with with one of our specific clients, we're talking about just

Jeff  39:32

in general, like there's what you know, what's the thing that when you see it on your schedule, like oh, cool, I get to work on that.

George Jagodzinski  39:41

I say Oh, cool. Anytime that we're doing like a virtual or used to be real, but virtual whiteboarding session. Yeah, anytime you can get people from different parts of a company working together and focus for a few hours. It's just so many good things happen. They learn from each other, they get more empathy for each other and more empathy for the customer and, and I'd say enjoy Oh, that's probably if we talk about initiatives that I'm working cross with, with my various clients. It is anything that is really leading with that empathy focus of, you know, we want to be helping someone and we feel that we could be doing it better. How can we? How can we get technology the heck out of the way and do it, I think I get really excited with with organizations where that's it's coming from the top, I think where I get bummed out is I see a real top performer, maybe at like, mid level leadership, and they're so passionate, and they want they want to change. But it's just, they can't make it happen from the bottom up. And that's so I gave you both what I get excited about and bummed out.

Jeff  40:39

No, no, that's awesome. And it's funny, because as you were saying that it's actually just came up today, I was talking with somebody else. And I was talking about, I was talking to one of my podcasts with Diane Gordon, she was my boss, and, and deca, and just a huge mentor of mine. And I asked her, you know, what do you look for when you hire somebody in professional services, and they just said, it's the empathy, it's service lead, you know, the, the window, everybody's cold, so the service person tries to service gets up and closes the window, right? And like, you just, you seal that for me, like, that's what we're all trying to do, right? Like, otherwise we'd be in finance. I'm just kidding.

George Jagodzinski  41:19

It's interesting. Like, it's a combination of the empathy and there's like a, a, enough of a boldness to just do it when other people are, say it when other people are being quiet. I mean, you use the closing the door example, how many times like, someone closes the door does whatever you like, everyone's been thinking about it for 10 minutes, but no one's just stood up and close the damn thing. And a lot of times, I think that Boldness is important in both discovery and servicing clients is that sometimes there's something that they need to hear that's really uncomfortable for them to hear, and, or things that you might be afraid to say because you're like, maybe I don't know their business well enough yet. Or maybe this is gonna hurt

Jeff  42:02

someone because you don't want to be that tone deaf, like jerk who's just like, You guys are idiots like, you know, like, they're you can't do that either. As much as you're thinking it sometimes, but

George Jagodzinski  42:14

you can't make snap judgments. But you also you have to tell them, there's there's a, there's a shelf life on that third party freshness when you come into an organization that, you know, if you're there for over a year, you become more like one of them. Right, and you need to, I think it's important, if you say it, at least caveat it with, this is what I think I don't want to tell you that this is true. But here's what I'm thinking.

Jeff  42:40

very humbly. I'm like, This is what I think only saying this and then I might just say, you know, because what do I know? I've only been doing this for 20 years, so I don't? Well, I don't know what

George Jagodzinski  42:50

that is what we look, we look like we look for passive aggressiveness and people to get into. Yeah, so

Jeff  42:55

don't don't don't listen to me. I mean, whatever. No, I'm just kidding. Like, yeah, I

George Jagodzinski  42:59

mean, if you want to, if you want to just fall off a cliff and die, you go ahead, and you do but you know, who am I? Yeah, that's,

Jeff  43:06

that's the one. I always do that to crack my friends out. So, so you've been very gracious with your time? Where can people find you guys? Actually, let's wrap up with some of the stuff you're doing you guys cartoons. Like, I want to talk to your media person, because you guys are doing it. Right.

George Jagodzinski  43:27

Yeah, so So integrity.com and look for us on LinkedIn as well. Yeah, we do have a digital dysfunction cartoon series, where I mean, our whole perspective is this, it's human first. And I think a lot of companies they talked about doing just human centered design, but just in general, we want to be human first. And that's the way that we treat our company, our company, our culture and the companies that we work with and, and through that there's just there's tends to be a lot of BS and nonsense and buzzwords that are out there. And I just I think our whole perspective is to cut through that and just say it out it is and and, and that is hopefully refreshing to some.

Jeff  44:05

Awesome No, that's great. Just hang on one minute, I'm gonna stop the recording, but I just want to make sure I put all the right details into the podcast details. So just so I'm going to say thank you very much. And then I'm going to sign off from here and just hold on one quick second.