Growing Lean

From Marine to Agile Mastery: Jason Tanner's Path to Tech Innovation and the Art of Scaling Software Profit Streams

• Ethan Halfhide

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Discover the transformative journey of Jason Tanner, from Marine infantry officer to agile product management guru, as he joins me, Dylan Burke, revealing his path to mastering Scrum and leading Applied Frameworks to the forefront of "Software Profit Streams." His story will inspire you to rethink the way you approach product evolution, team collaboration, and consulting. Jason's deep dive into his transition into IT, the challenges he faced in traditional software development, and his eventual embrace of Scrum methodology is more than just a career change — it's a testament to the power of agility and innovation in the tech industry.

Embark on a quest to scale your business efficiently with insights from our conversation on the value of complete teams and the Scaled Agile Framework. Luke and Phil Gardner, SAFe fellows, join us to enrich the discussion with their expertise in agile product and lean portfolio management. If you're aiming to stand out in a crowded market, our breakdown of strategic pricing models, market segmentation, and the importance of customer-focused value could be the ace up your sleeve. Get an exclusive look at our advanced online scrum training platform that's revolutionizing the educational landscape by offering intense, feedback-driven learning experiences.

We wrap up this episode by tackling the hurdles businesses encounter in ever-changing economic climates. With strategies for maintaining essential agreements, managing lean teams, and leveraging generative AI to revolutionize customer service and pricing analysis, we're handing you the playbook for resilience and success. Stay tuned to discover how to reach out to Jason and Tana as they invite you to join their network and engage in this agile revolution. Whether you're a seasoned professional or new to the game, this episode is packed with actionable advice that will help you navigate the complexities of today's business world.

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Speaker 1:

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing lead in podcasts sponsored by lean discovery group. This is your host, dylan Burke, also known as Dij, and I'm happy to be here today with Jason Tanner, ceo at Applied Frameworks. Welcome, jason.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thank you for having me, dylan.

Speaker 1:

Yes, thank you for being here. So, jason, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your background, your history and what led you to Applied Frameworks?

Speaker 2:

So I'm on my third career. I started as a marine infantry officer for about 10 years when I got out of college, so I studied mechanical and aerospace engineering, struggled through it and did absolutely nothing with my degree, instead traveled around the world in the Marine Corps and then I was fortunate to stumble into IT and was a network engineer for a telecom company and in the first year I was there I earned a Cisco network administrator certification and with that a friend of mine from college was at a venture backed startup and he invited me to join him and I spent about six years at that company and started as a sales engineer and very quickly got into the field deploying our software, which was a network charge back solution. So it was early IT finance in 2001 timeframe and back then it was the big client server architectures to make enterprise software work. So some of our clients were global. So we'd have to come up with these big, elaborate project plans to deploy servers and software and do big configurations and reporting and typically six to 12 month engagements.

Speaker 2:

And during that time I started complaining about how much better our software could be both for our customers and for all of us out in the field. And one day one of the leaders at the company. So well, if you have got all these great ideas, come be the product manager. I was like what's that I'm like? Well, you're the person that's going to help improve the software and listen to customers and figure out the future evolution of the product and work with engineering. So I took the job and had to figure it out on my own. It was a bit of a challenge but fortunately someone handed me the pragmatic marketing framework and said well, these boxes are your responsibility now. Because we don't have a product marketing manager, you've got to do all this stuff. So I sort of figured it out. But it was the old software development approach of big requirements, documents, big handoffs to development and they would have long cycles to design and build the solution. That ultimately got pushed later and later and in long testing cycles and ultimately we would get a portion of what I'd written in these documents. It didn't make a lot of sense to me at all.

Speaker 2:

And then we had a transition in our engineering leadership team and the developers and the organization. It was a small company, it's almost 65 people. At that time Developers wanted to try Scrum and it was really a development led scrum, transition, agile adoption and suddenly I found myself creating backlogs and working on a completely different type of collaboration with the developers. It was actually very, very good for the company, good for us. We became much more effective at shipping faster shipping, higher quality and really focusing on the most important work. So during that time I started to talk about that evolution and we had done a really good job mapping out our approach to going from ideation to delivery. So we had a big visio flow chart of everybody who was involved, from the executive leadership all the way down to the team members and the flow from ideas and approvals for funding and all the way through to development and delivery.

Speaker 2:

And when we transitioned to agile, I reformatted the whole thing and inserted scrum. And it turned out at that time this was around 2004, 2005, that this was actually quite novel, that nobody had really documented that type of flow, at least not that I knew of. And our vendor for our requirements management solution was called RIMA Technologies. Actually, they had a pretty cool software application that mapped the pragmatic framework to software so you could actually capture your vision, you can capture your competitive analysis, your win loss and all the requirements, and they hosted a terrific webinar series. It's one of the early product management webinars that you could access and they recorded them. I think it was twice a month at least. And I went and I delivered this webinar and then I spoke at a conference and talked about this and it was just a PowerPoint deck, but it was actually quite interesting.

Speaker 2:

A lot of companies and a lot of people are going through the same transition. So after about a year or two I moved on to another software company and I got a call out of the blue one day from my colleague, luke Hohman, and he said he'd watched the webinar and asked me if I wanted to get in consulting. Like, who is Luke Hohman and why are you calling me? I said, well, you know we do agile product management and what you wrote about is exactly what we do and what we need. And about two years after that I wound up actually going into consulting with Luke. So I was an agile consultant, agile coach, eventually became a scrum trainer, worked at everywhere, from Capital One to Mass Mutual really big companies, big agile adoptions, all the way to smaller startups, even working with founders and their journey to figuring out their business models and what the product would is going to look like and how they're going to actually create the business model and the pricing and licensing and so on.

Speaker 2:

So Applied Frameworks started as Nthiosis in 2003, and now we've evolved to Applied Frameworks. We renamed and reestablished ourselves. So we're pivoting now from the traditional agile transformation type of consulting and a lot of the scrum training to really focus on the content in our book Software Profit Streams. So we provide workshops around profit stream design and software pricing fundamentals. We have a great community of trainers and partners that we really love to talk to, people who want to become partners because they can unlock a lot of value we're finding for their clients and we've already building some software to support the type of work that we do.

Speaker 2:

So we're really finding that not only is the agile consulting space very crowded and competitive, it's also getting tougher out there with a lot of things going on with companies. A lot of companies still need help, but it's getting really hard to find them and work with them and get it over to skepticism, which is why I think the evolution to focusing on business models is really valuable and important for us, because people also need that help. So that's about 30 years in a nutshell, dylan.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, thank you. And what's differentiates you from the competitors in the markets being so saturated, I'm sure you have to have some sort of differentiation to set yourself apart. So what would you say? That is?

Speaker 2:

So for our traditional business, I think there's a couple of things. We still do some work with clients who are looking for assistance with their scaling initiatives. And when I talk about scaling, it's really interesting that I was at a conference in Austin the technology business management conference and the point of view of that world is that there are multiple teams, multiple products and portfolios and they're really tackling the challenge of making wise investment choices across the portfolio and then driving the right work to the teams. And it's really interesting that I've actually heard these financial and business leaders talking in the turns we've been talking about for years send work to teams, don't send partial allocations of people to projects so that they've started to change and they, like I said, still need assistance in getting, I would say, the last mile, getting to that ultimate end state of a high functioning organization that can deliver, frequently with quality. So we still do a lot of the safe work, scale, the agile framework work because we have two safe fellows Luke is a safe fellow and our colleague, phil Gardner is also a safe fellow, so I think that differentiates us over at a different level of play because of their background. Luke worked for Scale Agile. He built a couple of courses the agile product management course and the lean portfolio management course, while it was a Scale Agile. So he brings a ton of expertise to all of the safe engagements, as does Phil and the rest of the team For our scrum training.

Speaker 2:

Carlton Nettleton and Kim Puramsky are the other two certified scrum trainers in the company. So for a pretty small company, we're really heavy on high level expertise and we have built an online platform for advanced scrum training so we work with students worldwide. I think that's our big difference. For people who want an application based experience to learn and become certified at higher levels within the scrum alliance community, our platform really is on its own at the level of intensity. For people who actually do practice what they learn and get feedback from us, we give them direct feedback on their experience. So, for example, one of our courses is facilitation. They actually take the concepts that they learn and go apply them with their teams in various other interactions. They may have to facilitate events and they share what happened and their reflection, their lessons learned, which is great for them and great for us, because we learn from that experience as well when we give them feedback. But also a lot of what we hear back is that people are learning a lot of new things and finding a lot of value for helping their teams become more effective and higher performing. So that's really the bad side of it For the business modeling.

Speaker 2:

People talk a lot about value in the Azure community and beyond and it's kind of nebulous. We make it very concrete. We actually wrote about customer benefit in us. It's in the book where we can actually get very discrete definitions and descriptions of value from an economic point of view, both for the tangible benefits and, in some cases, the intangible benefits, which then allows us to actually talk about pricing. So we have a structured pricing model that allows people to actually identify the strategy for their pricing, which is not typically what you find on the internet.

Speaker 2:

It's been a lot of time researching and distilling down actual pricing strategies like a premium strategy, a value-based strategy, penetration what that actually means and defining and describing it. Then getting into structure around fences for separating your market segments in a logical, well-known way so that enables you to actually set differentiated pricing for different segments to capture maximum profit for those who are willing to pay more and for those who are more economically minded at a lower price point as well as discount policies. We're seeing a lot of research right now that's showing that people are doing way, way too much discounting in the software world. So I think we're one in the few companies that talks about software pricing specifically in a very rational, structured way, with the process, because the business model of a software company is a system. It's a system of interrelated choices and we really hope companies walk through that set of choices to make the best possible decisions.

Speaker 1:

Okay, 100%, 100%. And you've been around for what? Around 30 years, correct.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I say, my professional career started in 1991.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so what have been the biggest challenges for you and doesn't have to be industry specific, but in terms of running a business going through economic changes what have been the biggest challenges and how have you overcome them?

Speaker 2:

The economics is probably one of the big ones. The cycles, of course, are well known and we're really just navigating through it and empowering through it. We've seen a lot of the cycles happen. This is, as far as I can remember, now this is our third time going through a cycle where it's challenging and navigating through that and still honoring all of our agreements and keeping up to date on all the finances. That's a big challenge and we're doing on a very lean with a very lean staff, I'd say. The second is really, I think, working together in a distributed environment.

Speaker 2:

Even though we've got really good at it before COVID because we've always been distributed, it's still hard to ensure everybody is aware of what's going on.

Speaker 2:

Even with a weekly cadence of checking in as a company, there's still opportunities for people to miss details and I think the synchronization and the focus on the goals as a company together is always a challenge for anyone.

Speaker 2:

I think it just requires over communicating, and we find the same with our students. It's some. In some cases it takes three or four times for everyone to hear the message. So when we have a large group of learners for example, we have a client right now has got 350 product managers going through our product management academy, which we call the profitable software academy, and just being clear with all of them about the dates and the schedules. We, even though we've posted it in Microsoft Teams, we shared it by email this index everyone still, we still receive questions about due dates, right? So the communication challenges with a lot of people is always there and I would say the other challenge would be the ability to really continue to be clear and focused and aligned to the same goals, and we've leveraged the Scaling Up framework from Verna Harnes' organization that he wrote about in his book Scaling Up, and I think that helps us a lot to maintain alignment and stay focused together.

Speaker 1:

And, in the more recent years, have you adapted with the times. For example, with generative AI coming into the mainstream, are you taking advantage of the tools that are available to you?

Speaker 2:

Yes, part of our practice streams ecosystem includes a community and was. People have access to the community, have access to our AI assistance. So we basically structured our own AI assistant based on the content and structure of the book and through some pretty dazzling development, including work by a great intern who's in high school, who's going to be a rock star when he graduates from college, we have actually created the ability within the assistant to hit a switch and when you ask a question related to the content in the book, you get an answer based on the content in the book. So we preload the content in the book based on the question. So if you go to our assistant and ask about pricing strategy, with the software profit streams switch turned on, you'll get a feedback of the book. It's almost like an amazing search engine for the book. Instead of flipping through trying to find that page, it instantaneously pulls back the response. So that's one way we leverage it. We actually want people to ask questions in the community, ask questions through the assistant and when they want to talk more, they go back to the community and keep discussing the topics that they want to explore. So definitely leveraging AI.

Speaker 2:

We also did some really interesting.

Speaker 2:

I say we I should say a couple of very talented people in our team did some experimentation with AI to actually do some pricing analysis.

Speaker 2:

So one of the approaches to investigating setting the price level is a Van Weston or pricing price sensitivity meter, which is effectively a four question survey that you could run with 100, a couple of 100 people, which takes time and be investment to do that and you'd have to process all the responses. Well, through some work with chat GPT and a little bit of tuning, we actually have very, very accurate results in our experience that actually plotted out a chart that just looked just like you would expect the Van Weston or price sensitivity meter to extract, so you'd actually see the price range emerge from the experiment. The reason we know this pretty accurate is because we did it for trying to establish a price range for a standard certified scrum workshop. So we kind of know the marketplace. We know the range is typically about 600 to $800. It's almost identical to what chat GPT spit out when we programmed it to do that analysis. It's a pretty amazing stuff that we're seeing and we've got a bright future ahead to continue that work.

Speaker 1:

Amazing, Amazing. Yeah, I'm glad to see that you are making use of the technology around. That's actually one of the things we do at Lean Discovery Group is building custom automation tools with a layer of information on top of chat GPT, so you could basically program your brain into a chatbot, for example. But I'm glad that you are taking advantage of that. That's awesome. And what if you could give one piece of advice to other business owners looking to succeed in this crazy world that we live in? What would that advice be?

Speaker 2:

I think I'll re-emphasize the notion of being clear about goals, and I believe the most effective way to identify the goals is to engage everybody possible that you can with a small company like ours. We're all involved together in creating the plan together. So not only do we enlist buy-in, we generate it through the collaboration, through our periodic planning together. So we'll do quarterly planning, We'll update our roadmap together, and that, I think, establishes the cohesion we need to ensure we're all going the same direction and then continue to communicate, Never pass up an opportunity to have a conversation, establish the rhythm, the cadence for communications and be very open to feedback.

Speaker 2:

And it's probably one area where I'm always a little concerned about myself, because I'll ask in classes, in sessions with customers and with students what questions can I answer? I'm waiting to answer all the possible questions I can get, and I have the same approach when we're in our whole company sinks every week what questions does anybody have? Is there any information you don't have? You need to do your job and I'm just hoping that everyone feels comfortable and safe to ask the question that they've been dying to ask. And I think everyone our team is In the back of my mind. I'm always like, I've got to make sure that I'm behaving in a way that is open to those questions, that feedback that's necessary to keep us on track and continue performing and growing.

Speaker 2:

So yeah work together to establish the goals, communicate a lot and, I'd say, ensure you remain open and maintain that posture of openness so you can actually hear everything that's going on.

Speaker 1:

OK, amazing. Thank you so much for that and, jason, thank you for your time today. We have come to the end of the show. What would be the best way for people to reach out to Jason and Tana if you've got any offers for them or they're looking to follow your journey?

Speaker 2:

You're LinkedIn. You can find me there, jason Tanner on LinkedIn, and my email address is jtanner at appliedframerscom.

Speaker 1:

Amazing. Thank you so much, Jason.

Speaker 2:

Thanks, dylan, appreciate it.