Episode 5: Shelley Perry Episode Transcription · episode, my plus one is Shelley Perry, Managing Director and Founder of Scalelogix, ... You've seen this throughout your career

Episode 5: Shelley Perry Episode Transcription

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Dr. Mik Kersten: Hello, and welcome to the Mik + One podcast, where I sit down with industry leaders to discuss the Project to Product movement. I'm Dr. Mik Kersten, Founder and CEO of Tasktop, and bestselling author of Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow Framework™. The goal of my book was to help organizations prepare for their turning point in the age of software and digital. The turning point in the age of oil mass production was triggered by the Great Depression, and is now clear to me that ours will be triggered by the economic fallout of COVID-19. I've described the implications of this in a blog post that's on www.projecttoproduct.org, and what's key to me right now is helping organizations move more quickly to adapt to this new reality. Dr. Mik Kersten: So, in order to provide some sage advice on that front, I've invited a special guest, that's got immense experience setting companies - especially tech companies - up for success in this age. On today's episode, my plus one is Shelley Perry, Managing Director and Founder of Scalelogix, an advisory group that specializes in the intersection between the scale up C-suite and investment partners. Shelley has over 20 years of experience growing SaaS organizations, and it was a pleasure to sit down with her and listen to her incredible insights. I hope you enjoy the episode, and I hope it prepares you for the key decisions that you make over the coming weeks. Dr. Mik Kersten: Hello everyone, and welcome to the Project to Product podcast. I'm very excited to have Shelley Perry joining us today. Shelley is the former CTO of Ticketmaster, she was the CTO of Industry Solutions and SaaS at HP, Chief Product Officer of cloud at NTT, and then Operating Partner at Insight Partners. So she's served on numerous boards, advised many scale-ups, and startups, and growth stage companies, and has now founded the Scalelogix Advisory Group. Dr. Mik Kersten: Shelley has been providing some amazing advice to companies who are trying to figure out how to navigate the current economic situation that's been triggered by COVID-19. She shared some of that with me, and I thought it'd be fascinating, and very educational, for all of our listeners to listen to that. So Shelley, could you please introduce yourself, and give us a sense for what you've been communicating in this very challenging time for so many? Shelley Perry: Mik, thanks for having me. I'm excited to bring this message to a larger group. Over the past three weeks, I've had the opportunity to work with about 100 different C-suite groups across different scale ups, to help advise on how to react to the situation. I have a unique advantage in the fact that I'm not deeply running a company right now. I have an advisory group, but I'm able to stand back, and look at the situation without having to deal with some of the issues that the rest of the CEOs might have had to look, to get their employees safe and their customers served. Shelley Perry: One of the things that I've advised groups to do is to step back, and separate the issues. Separate the pandemic, and the issues associated with safety and health into one bucket, to prepare and brace for an economic downturn, because they are separate issues. Although the pandemic caused it, they are separate issues. Then, the third is to look at how to take advantage of the opportunities that are in the marketplace, because of the accelerant digital transformation to service - everyone working remote from their homes, and every other opportunity that's out there.



Shelley Perry: So, if you separate those three concerns, I think it's easier to get your arms around the problems, to create a plan of action, to be able to not just survive through this, but find a way for your company to thrive. Dr. Mik Kersten: Okay, excellent. In terms of some of the advice that you've been giving on looking at a business level, how to position for a downturn, position how to thrive as conditions change, as there are new growth opportunities, as we head towards a recovery, you gave me some very interesting feedback and thoughts on how to think about operations at a time like this, and the kinds of companies that we actually see navigating this more effectively versus the ones who are not navigating it as effectively. Dr. Mik Kersten: Give us some guidance on that operational part, and how to get started? Because so many people right now are trying to figure out their first steps, their next steps, with more uncertainty than they've ever managed through before. Shelley Perry: I think having worked through the burst in 2000 with technology, and the bubble that we hit in 2008, and 2010, I think we have some references, or some history that we can look at, to try to figure out how to maneuver through this, or make the best guesses. Shelley Perry: I think fundamentally, we all know that we need to reserve cash, and create a good cash reserve, so our instinct from those two activities, or those two times was to cut cost. One of the biggest costs in software companies is labor, and in most companies it's labor, and the reaction is always, "We're going to cut technology, because it's usually one of the biggest cost centers." If you step back and just look at the recessions from that perspective, yes, we have to cut costs, and technology might be the target, but I urge companies to step back and see where you are, because while it's a big labor pool, and an expensive labor pool, there's also a digital transformation that has just been accelerated. And those people that know how to actually help your company thrive have a technology background. Shelley Perry: Now, I will caveat that, and say it's not just about having a technology background, it's also about having a business background with technology. I want to dig into that, a little bit more. Dr. Mik Kersten: Okay, great. Before we dig into that, can you actually speak a little bit more about this? Because I think one of the big problems that I see is there's this camp of companies of various sizes, who do treat technology as cost. There's IT, software delivery has really come out of a cost center mentality, where this was just a cost of the business. You've got the perspective of both sides, right? You've worked with large enterprises, you've worked with Silicon Valley companies, companies who do have Chief Product Officer roles, let's say, who actually treat technology as value, as a profit center, as delivering value. Can you dig into that a little bit more? Shelley Perry: I think there's people who say, "I have business, and then I have IT that supports the business." And then, there's people who recognize the fact that we're all technology companies that provide business value. If you think about it in the latter terms, it changes your mindset.



Shelley Perry: Let's talk about Tesla cars, they're more tech than they are the engine. There's lots of things that we can go on to that, but that's where they're making their investments. We see McDonald's has just announced McDonald's Labs, how you can order things. How you can leverage technology ... It's not even leverage technology, it's technology, we're all software companies that provide business value. I think any company that's going to survive and thrive in this environment is going to have to take on that point of view. Dr. Mik Kersten: Right. This is, I think, where one of my biggest concerns is, is the companies who have not yet aligned business value, and how they deliver value to customers in the market, to how they deliver technology, I think, are going to have a very hard time navigating both the pace of change, and just the economic environment. As you said, we're all tech companies. Today's cars, even cars much less fancy than the Tesla, have a software cost, unit cost, that's higher than the engine. Dr. Mik Kersten: This has already happened to many of these companies, and somehow, some of them are extremely effective at managing it, whereas others are struggling. Of course, with Project to Product, my concern was that these companies are moving too slowly to shift to an understanding of how to manage the delivery of business value through technology. Dr. Mik Kersten: You've seen this throughout your career. Could you just tell us a bit of the story of what it was like, early on in your career, in say Ticketmaster, or wherever you want to start, to what you've seen in terms of the evolution of software, and digital and product innovation, that we see from so many of the companies that you've worked with over the years? Shelley Perry: I would separate it into two categories. The first one, I think is a bit easier, and that is in many cases, most technology people are very good technologists, but they have a hard time expressing what they're trying to say in business value, and in terms of what businesspeople can consume. And because of that, there's a saying in sales that says it's "a confused mind always says no." When a technology person who knows it's the right thing to do, but can't find the right words to express the information of how it's going to provide business value, no one wants to listen to it. They can't absorb it in a way that helps to move the business forward. Shelley Perry: I think early on in my career, one of the things that helped my success is that I've always been able to translate business and technology. I've always said I'm business first, and a technologist second, and technology is there to enable business. From the early days, for me, that was always a driver, and I would find the right technology to achieve the business objective that we were trying to do as a business. When you have those kind of people in your organization that can translate, it unlocks so much power, because they listen to the technology team, they nurture the team, they help the technology team understand the business issues, and they challenge to find different ways to solve them. Then, they translate that same information, in a very different way, to the leadership team, to maneuver through decisions. Shelley Perry:



When companies have skillsets like that in it, they can unlock a mass amount of power. One of the analogies I always use when I'm talking to technology people, and I had to learn this early in my career, because even when I was talking what I thought was business terms, I still will talk in more detail than the business leaders could consume. So now, the analogy that I use is look, you come around the table ... and you guys are all going to be coming around the table doing scenario planning right now. The CFO does not walk in that room and talk about what they had to do to close the books, they tell you the outline of where the dollars are today, what you have to achieve, and what some of the parameters are. But, they don't walk in that room, and talk to you about what the team is doing, and how many people are collecting cash to get DSO down. Shelley Perry: Technology people you cannot walk into a room of business leaders, and expect them to understand it in your language. If you want to survive as a business, and thrive as a business, you need to have people who understand the technology, and can bridge that in a way that the rest of the business people can understand it, and decisions can be made, collaboratively, with that understanding, so that's one. Shelley Perry: The second part of that is if you have an organization that is so focused on what you call project, which is a project plan, and we're going to go through the list, no matter what. Here's the procedures, here's the process, this is how we do it. If you have an organization that that is the culture, and the culture is not we need to get something done, we need to serve our customers to do this, if it's not driven by outcomes, and it doesn't have the ability to shortcut something the way it's always done, you will also not be competitive. Shelley Perry: If you have an organization that doesn't have the first type of individuals, and a culture that says we must do things by process versus outcomes, which usually leads to the why you wouldn't have those other people in your organization, you have two things against you in terms of succeeding in these. Through my career, I've always been able to work in companies that may be more process oriented, but when you bring the right conversation to the table about the tradeoffs, in a way that everybody can understand, they tend to embrace that through one success, and then start, in some areas, getting rid of the rigid processes. That is what leads to change. Shelley Perry: What I hope from all of this is that the catalyst, and examples of everything that have happened over the last three weeks, where organizations moved at the speed of light, and threw process out the door, and achieved the outcomes to keep all employees and their customers safe, that they will take that way of doing business into the future, because now we know they can actually do it. Dr. Mik Kersten: I think that's so spot on right now. You reminded me, with your story of a CFO coming to the meeting and not explaining how they closed the books, I've seen this over and over, at countless companies, sitting in on meetings where the technology and the business people are trying to get together, where the technology people are complaining they don't enough of a seat at the table, or not being heard, or not being understood. Dr. Mik Kersten: It's actually a personal one for me, because I remember that when I first hired our current CFO, five years ago. He was asking how we go about delivering value, he had a lean manufacturing background, actually,



working on some airplane parts. I launched into telling him about agile, and measuring things in story points, and so on. When I said the word story points, and he looked at me like I was going to start talking about unicorns, and other things of that sort, I realized that there's just something so broken about the way I was trying to explain to him value from an activity based point of view, how some of the software is made, rather than actually thinking in terms of what he really cared about, which is outcomes and how we invest, and structure investments towards those outcomes. Dr. Mik Kersten: So, you just said three, I think, such impactful and fascinating things. Just to get back to the first one, that common effective language. What my approach in Project to Product has been is to say that language needs to be about delivering value to customers, and how we measure value. Can you just say what you found to be effective? In terms of helping these organizations align around value delivery, and avoiding these pitfalls of technologists making things so much more complex than they need to be, and making it really ineffective and difficult for leadership to make decisions, or expecting the boards, and CEOs, and CFOs to have a depth of technical understanding that's completely irrelevant to the way that they should be directing, and protecting the company in this time. Shelley Perry: It's not that the depth of what they know is irrelevant, it's actually very relevant at what makes them so good at their job is that depth, because what you want is the talent that can go to that depth. It's about, where do you bring that depth? The depth that you need is with your teams to surface the information, and to summarize it, so that you can collect all of the information, and know that you can say with confidence, this rolled up discussion, so you can get through some pretty hefty discussions. Shelley Perry: If you aren't comfortable with it ... I think if most technology people with a technology background aren't comfortable with all the facts, they have a really hard time summarizing or generalizing, and then they start going into the detail. I think it's important that, if the technology people want to be at the table and really help accelerate their company, they have to learn, have a dual personality and that is, go into depth with your teams, but learn how to summarize it to your C-suite in a way that you summarize it for your business. Shelley Perry: A good example I'll give you, as you said, "Look, the customer value streams." Yes, we're saying customer value streams, but you have to summarize those customers into cohorts. And if there's some cohort group that makes sense to your organization, and for one size organization that cohort might be a group of 50 customers, in another one it might be 10,000 customers. Or, you might have to break it up differently. But, it's not a single customer, it's a cohort of customers, and you have to get artistic about how to break that down so you can have the right conversation. Shelley Perry: When a technologist hears this, they might be customer, they're thinking about it singular, and they're pointing out one particular customer, or one particular side case. It's about understanding yes, you need that detail in your team, just like the CFO needs to make sure that the accounts receivable is what it is, and it needs a lot of people to understand that, but doesn't bring that detail to the table. I think one of the things that can really help organizations today is to have someone to help teach those people, the technology people who do have the detail, how to summarize it. If you're trying to move fast, you really need people that can come in, and listen to the detail, and then summarize it pretty quickly, so you can get to an understanding. And then, go back and teach them how to do it for next time.



Shelley Perry: It is a learned skill, and the only way that you can learn it is having someone who can hear and understand what you're saying, and translate it for you in context. If you do that enough times, Mik and I'm sure you had to do it when you did it many times with your CFO, because he doesn't complain about it now, you have to learn it in context. It's an art, not necessarily a science, but understanding and listening to the room, and body language, to try to figure out how to roll that up, and have those conversations. When you figure out how to do that, you unlock so much potential in organizations to take advantage of technology. Dr. Mik Kersten: Yeah, and I think as you said, the last weeks have been a catalyst. I was just completely blown away by one story of an organization who, to me, not knowing the context, ... I'm talking about the story of Dyson, who in the span of 10 days, figured out how to design and manufacture ventilators, which is an absolutely critical thing at this point in history. That must have been immensely difficult, given thing company had never done that. There were business implications, manufacturing implications, and so on. I think what you're saying is that depth is required, it's assumed, just like we assume our CFOs actually know how to close the books, but it needs to drive decision making from a customer perspective. Dr. Mik Kersten: Now, I want to go into the second point you're making, though, because one of the big frustrations I've seen in a lot of organizations who are trying to do this, there's this disconnect of the technology side, the people doing the work, and them not even knowing who the customer is. Let alone, the cohorts of customers, or learning and adapting over the course of a week, not the span of a year, on how to better deliver to a particular cohort, whose benefiting now from this set of features over here, or some additional value that they can deliver through technology platforms. Dr. Mik Kersten: You've had this experience of, again, we know that these proxy metrics, these activity-based metrics, using agile, and even digital transformations themselves is another form of ceremony, rather than as a way of measuring outcomes. How have you helped the companies that you've worked with, steer them in this direction of understanding the customer, the market, and measuring outcomes? The ones who don't do this right now are going to have trouble. Shelley Perry: It was, in the past, extremely difficult to do what you're talking about, because as your organization grows, you have to get leverage. To get leverage, you tend to say, "All right, we're going to put technology people into a delivery organization," which they will call it in larger organizations. Then, we're going to have go-to-market groups, and we're going to have even product and pricing. In order to get leverage at scale, you separate out roles and divisions, so that you can get economies of scale. You can economies, and have people focus on the job, and you lose some of this. Shelley Perry: So, it was very difficult, in the past, to get a view of the customer, and how a customer was using something real time. But, over the past five years or so, maybe a little bit more, there's a whole category of software that helps to unlock this information in a way that is consumable at speed, and it's all in the product enablement, or customer enablement, and there's many in that category that do it. I won't say specific names, but we could talk about that offline. There's many in the category, in this product enablement category, that help you do that. You capture keystrokes, you capture interfaces from other



applications, and you figure out the flow of how they're using it, and you can traverse back to a company, a department, how they're using it. Shelley Perry: That information is used in making decisions on pricing, and packaging, and where you make investments, or where you're de-investing in something, because you now have the ability with what's out there to see this at mass, and it's not just someone's gut, and it's not what you sold because sometimes what you've sold in your enterprise contracts are very different to how what you're selling is actually being used. When you bring what you sold against how something is being used at scale, with these tools that are out there, you can see it. Then, of course, it's reacting to what to do with it, and what recommendations that you should be making from that. Shelley Perry: It's more available than it used to be, and the companies that take advantage of doing that are going to make better decisions on where to spend their capital. Dr. Mik Kersten: That is completely consistent with what I'm seeing, which is that, especially with larger organizations ... a lot of the organizations that I work with are very large organizations. They have to have those economies of scale in place. There's a lot of large hierarchies, thousands, 10,000, sometimes hundreds of thousands of staff, and innovation is much different than when you're in a growth stage company, or the start of a scale up. Dr. Mik Kersten: I think it's been fascinating to see the ways that it's working, the way that some of the most effective tech companies, tech joints actually do it. They're doing it consistently, with data. I know, for example ... It's been interesting to me, I'd love to get your take on this. It's two sets of data here, that are so critical, and that I'm seeing the companies who do this best leverage both sets of data. One is I think some of what you just described, which is actually understanding the customer, understanding customer usage. I know how we would make, at Tasktop, some of the decisions that we make, without a tool like Pendo, which is the one that we use, because like you said, that allows us to iterate quickly around actual customer value. There's all of the customer data, and those tools are readily available right now, and have matured tremendously. Dr. Mik Kersten: Then, there's this whole other set of the actual delivery data. This is where are your bottlenecks, internally? Where do you need to invest? Which of your value streams are so filled with tech debt you should stop any investment in them right now, because it's not going to get you anywhere? You need to end of life those things. Which things are not delivering any customer value, any significant revenue growth? That data is actually all locked up within companies. Whereas you look at the successful tech companies, they're leveraging all of that data, they've built or acquired tools that open it all up. I think one of the things that you said that concerns me the most is when, at scale, you try to make these decisions based on opinions, I've just seen traumatic mistakes made that seem so obvious in retrospect. Shelley Perry: I think that it's even more than just the two, I think it's three or four. It's true, you're making it based on historical information, or gut, or politics, or whatever the case may be. It's not based on the actual data, and the data tells such a different story, the speed at which things change. When we think about what happened over the past three weeks, if we look at the distribution of traffic, and how applications are



being used, it's so different now, than it was even three weeks ago. That happens, patterns switch, and it has impacts on your applications, or things that you're doing, that you wouldn't even know because users, you can't predict how they're going to use things, and you don't necessarily want to in all cases. Shelley Perry: It's even further than just how are your customers using it, and then what are the delivery mechanisms. When we think about SaaS on SaaS, or third party tools, when we think about native cloud applications, those are no longer individual, that's not our delivery stream. That is a third party solution that is a big part of our value chain. And when companies think about the technology that they're building, and they're looking at only the piece that they're building, and they're not looking at it in an entire ecosystem, and then the value to their customers all the way through, and then making trade offs to say, should we even be building this? Because what wasn't available on a native cloud solution is now available, it wasn't available three years ago, and now it is. They're not letting go of some of the stuff that they've built proprietary, and taking advantage of something else that exists. Shelley Perry: It's an even bigger problem, so it's not just delivery it's this entire value stream, and how, as an organization, you evolve that. What you want to do is you want to build those things that are going to differentiate your business. If you think about it in terms of IT capital spend, and you keep it in one bucket, or in one department, it's really hard to get that leverage, because the leverage that you get in the mass amount of technology gains you get are by leveraging someone else's solution that has been commoditized so you can build the value on top of what differentiates your business, and how you can bring that extra value to your customers. Shelley Perry: That's an even third value stream, because it's the traditional third party, what some people call hosting, but it's not hosting. It's third party business solutions that are core to your value, and sometimes you might not be using them. If you just used them, you could reallocate some of the spend to something else, that would differentiate you in a major way, so it's understanding how to look at all of that. Dr. Mik Kersten: Yeah, I could not agree more. I think the time for reinventing the wheel, and trying to rebuild everything, companies are out of runway right now. The solutions are there, and it is much more than just going to cloud, and just hosting. You've got to build on that ecosystem that we've got today than the one that's evolving, if you're going to be able to move quickly enough. Shelley Perry: The one other piece to look at in this value stream is the speed at which, when we're talking about data, it's the speed at which you can scenario build as well. You were talking about you couldn't even imagine, at Tasktop, making the decisions. If you have the infrastructure set up to get the data, you can make much more efficient decisions, or derisk your decisions, and do scenario planning. Not just for your business as a whole, which all of us are going to have to be doing now, with the changes that happened so rapidly, but even in terms of your pricing. Shelley Perry: If you want to optimize pricing, ... Right now, if you have not put in scenarios, or have quick ways to make new pricing packages for your customers right now, you might lose them. Or, you have new things you're bringing very quickly to the market, like the respirators, if you don't have a way to price them, you also are at a disadvantage.



Shelley Perry: I think it's just really understanding how to take advantage of technology in more ways that and automating your business, or optimizing your business. It's also, how can I react quickly to changes? Because the companies that can do that, are the ones that are able to take advantage of whatever turn in happening. Dr. Mik Kersten: Exactly. I think one thing I've personally noticed, and I've noticed with some of our customers and the companies I work with as well, is once you've got that data, that decision making, like you say, it becomes faster. It also becomes so much easier. You're not constantly consternating, and you need to talk to 15 people about their particular opinion on this topic. Dr. Mik Kersten: I've got an example from a month ago, where I was with a company who was looking at, basically, moving faster, the usual, to digital transformation and the agile initiatives. They thought that their organizational structure was not quite aligned to that, and that they had too many, potentially, based on some agile literature, consulting they had, too many people in the business analyst role. They're planning on cutting those. Dr. Mik Kersten: We showed them the data of where their developers were constantly stuck, and in this case, it wasn't on some automation technology that people usually think it was, release automation, or what's now called DevOps. Developers were constantly waiting on business analysis, because this company actually had been cutting those roles for some time, while trying to hire more developers. Those developers were just constantly stuck. They were about to make the decision to get rid of this entire function, whereas their business, by virtue of having significant regulatory needs, data privacy needs, and the other controls because we're talking financial services here, was actually bottlenecked on that. Dr. Mik Kersten: As soon as we presented that data to them, it was a very easy decision on where to invest so that the whole organization could move faster, for this set of their customers. That's actually a really interesting aspect, is when you've got that data, and again, it's there. The companies that you work with, Shelley, they're leveraging it every day in making these decisions. I think what I'm hearing you say, which I think is so critical, is they're able to make these decisions so much faster, and adapt to this uncertainty so much faster. Shelley Perry: So many people think, "I've got to implement agile, I've got to do some kind of process improvement." I'm going to make a controversial statement, to say you could have nothing, have a Trello board, whatever it is. You put process aside, because it's not the process that you should be looking at first. It's this, it's optimizing the dataset, to make the decisions of where you should be spending your resources, and understand that that's going to change. It just is, business is moving very quickly, and that changes faster than any of us could imagine. We can see it, even over the past three weeks. But, it was moving pretty fast even before that. Shelley Perry: So much discussion is around, is it agile, is it safe, is it this process, is it that process, and I'm like, "Look, I don't care what process it is, put that aside." You solve, first, where you should be spending your



resources on an almost real-time basis, and you make the decision about where to put your resources against the value that you're trying to derive in your business. Then, you go to the process improvement, of how you're going to deliver that, but not the other way around. Because as you said, in the example that you gave, it wasn't the agile, or the textbook that says it, it was just like, that's the nature of their business, and if they need to put more resources on regulatory requirements, and I don't care what you say about agile, they're regulatory requirements, right? Dr. Mik Kersten: Yeah. Shelley Perry: There's nothing agile about them. You have to follow policy, you have to figure that out. There's a skillset that nothing that the agile manifesto is going to address. You have to put the resources in your business the way that makes sense for your business. Shelley Perry: So much is on agile, and again, it goes to the first part of the discussion we had, it's only one part of the process. Put more emphasis on understanding where you're using your resources, and the patterns that are changing, especially as you get bigger. Because when you're smaller, you can see more of it. The bigger you get, the more you don't have an understanding of it. Then, use the information not as a stick to hit people with, to say, "Move faster," but to make decisions about value, and where you're going to spend those resources. You're going to have a better outcome. Dr. Mik Kersten: Exactly. Again, I think you said something so key right there, because I see these knee-jerk reactions to, "We need to do it this way. We need to do the Spotify model," and so on. No, it's about understanding your business, how you deliver value, and optimizing around that. In the end, it’s the the technology's intent to support and accelerate that. Dr. Mik Kersten: Shelley, we're almost running out of time, here. I just want to make sure, I think a lot of people are wondering, and you've talked to me about this a little bit, about the uncertainty that's ahead. Is this similar to what we saw in 2008, 2009? Is it different? If so, how should we think about it differently? Again, I think you've given some amazing, and very concrete advice on how important data, the speed of decision making, measuring outcomes, understanding customers is. Can you tell us what you see coming, and the differences that you've seen between past recessions and corrections, and what's happening now? Shelley Perry: I'm laughing as I'm answering this, only because, I think, if I could see to the future, I wouldn't be sitting here right now. Shelley Perry: I think, fundamentally, having lived through the Dot Com burst, and then what happened in 2008 to 2010, I think fundamentally the difference now is that it's the acceleration of what was already in play, which is what we call the digital transformation. It's just leaps and bounds happening, at the same time as a recession is happening, the same time that a pandemic is happening. So, we have these three converging forces that are really coming together at pace, and I think you have to separate out each one, and take advantage of the opportunities that are in the market, which are all around technology enablement, and the speed at which you can react to things.



Shelley Perry: Earlier, in '08 and '10, there was a lot of downsizing of technologists, that was the immediate area to cut. I think it's just trying to understand where to cut, and make the right cuts to survive your business, and what technology people to keep. But, I also put the onus on the technology people, to learn the business language because if you don't cover that gap, then we're not going to be able to unlock, and bring our economy back faster. I think it's really the difference is how much of an impact people that have both a business and technology background can have on where we are today, versus where we were 10 years ago. Dr. Mik Kersten: That's just some amazing advice. In terms of the economy, that is one of my concerns, is the businesses that have not learned how to measure value in tech, or whether technologists have not adapted their language to the language of the business, they're more likely to cut tech. Dr. Mik Kersten: If we look at the 2010, the Harvard Business School study, by Ranjay Gulati and group, that analyzed 4700 companies to see which ones flourished through the last number of recessions. It wasn't the ones who cut the earliest or the sooner, nor the ones who invested most heavily out of the gate, it was the ones who did careful rebalancing of where they were delivering the most value, had this focus on operational excellence through the downturn, and then thrived after. Dr. Mik Kersten: I think so much of what I've heard you say is actually completely in line with that, and I think will offer some great hope for companies that are going to get through this, will adjust their business models as needed, at the rate that's needed, and will actually thrive. Shelley Perry: The one piece advice, if I had to give one piece of advice to the leaders that are out there today, is if you do nothing else right now other than, of course, take care of your employees, and your family, and your customers, the next thing that every leader needs to be doing is to baseline your business at all levels. At the detail levels, know what everyone is doing, and the skillsets that everyone has, and where they're spending their time. Don't just do it once, certainly baseline it on a manual basis so that you can have it, but build a mechanism in place to be able to analyze that on a frequent basis, because that level of detail is going to allow you to reallocate the resources to different business models, and to take advantage of this opportunity while you're optimizing. Shelley Perry: You cannot do it at the large grain level, you actually have to do it at the detail level, you just have to roll it up to make the decisions. You have to do it at the detail level, so that you can build different scenarios. This is not just one scenario, there are multiple options that you can do. If you don't have that information at the detailed level, you cannot see those scenarios, and you will not be able to take advantage of different opportunities, or you will make much higher risk decisions that you can't mitigate by monitoring them. Dr. Mik Kersten: That's amazing. Shelley, thank you, I think that's just incredible advice, and I hope everyone listening is either doing exactly that right now, or starts very soon. I think what Shelley's saying here is what will get



you through and have you thrive, as the landscape changes, as new business models evolve, and as you adapt your organization, your staff, and your technology delivery. Dr. Mik Kersten: So, Shelley, thank you so, so much. That was incredible. Can you just tell people where they can find you, online? Shelley Perry: You can find me at [email protected], or on LinkedIn, or ScaleUpEdge.com on the Mighty Network community site. Dr. Mik Kersten: Okay. Thank you so much. Shelley Perry: Thank you. Dr. Mik Kersten: A huge thank you to Shelley for joining me on this podcast. I would love to hear what you think of this conversation, so please feel free to leave a review, or follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn, and use the hashtag #Mik+One. Shelley's Twitter handle is @ShelleyMPerry, and you can contact her on LinkedIn as well. Dr. Mik Kersten: Don't forget, I have a new episode out every two weeks, so hit subscribe to join us again. You can also search for Project to Product to get the book, and remember that all of the proceeds go to supporting women and minorities in technology. See you next time, and stay safe.

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Episode 5: Shelley Perry Episode Transcription · episode, my plus one is Shelley Perry, Managing Director and Founder of Scalelogix, ... You've seen this throughout your career