In this episode of The Leadership Launchpad, David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software veteran, shares insights on building exceptional teams through systems, measurement, and customer focus. He explores the evolving role of AI in software development, the dangers of overbuilding, and how successful founders stay grounded in solving real customer problems. David also highlights the power of process artifacts — like detailed estimations and playbooks — in creating consistent, high-quality outcomes.
The Leadership Launchpad: Building Exceptional Teams Through Systems and Customer Focus
This episode of the Leadership Launchpad features David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software development veteran and founder of , a company specializing in AI-driven workflow transformation. The discussion centers around the importance of systems and customer focus in building successful teams and products, particularly within the context of software development.
The Current State of AI in Software Development
David discusses the current state of AI in software development, noting its rapid evolution. While AI code generation has been used for smaller tasks for several years, building full applications remains challenging. Tools like Replit, Bolt, and Vercel offer some value but fall short in creating sophisticated functionality and often produce poorly architected code. David highlights the “context problem” with AI, comparing software development to juggling: “When you’re working on really complex architectural and coding issues… it’s like having seven or eight plates all spinning at the same time.” AI struggles to maintain this complex context, often discarding crucial information and hindering progress. Despite these limitations, David remains optimistic, emphasizing ongoing efforts to improve AI’s context retention and achieve greater acceleration in software development.
The Pitfalls of Overbuilding and the Importance of Problem Focus
The conversation shifts to the tendency of founders to overbuild and lose focus on the core problem they’re trying to solve. David attributes this to the excitement of creation often overshadowing the less glamorous but crucial tasks of analysis, reflection, and risk mitigation. He emphasizes that successful founders prioritize understanding their customers’ problems: “Founders that understand that their business is about the problem that their potential customers are dealing with… those are the founders that will consistently find a path to success.” David advises founders to spend time talking to customers about their problems, not features, to gain a deep understanding of their struggles and inform product development.
Building Exceptional Teams Through Systems and Artifacts
The discussion then turns to the characteristics of exceptional teams. David states that “exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time” and achieve this through robust systems, protocols, and measurement. He provides examples from , such as meticulous time tracking, detailed estimations, and regular reporting, which enable them to maintain less than 10% variance between estimated and actual effort. These practices, David argues, are “artifacts” of exceptional teams, reflecting a culture of meticulousness and continuous improvement. This leads to a discussion about the importance of systematizing work, even for information workers, drawing parallels to the Industrial Revolution and the gains in productivity achieved through standardized processes.
The Power of Playbooks and Measurement
David advocates for the creation of playbooks to document processes and nuances, facilitating scaling and onboarding of new team members. He advises against aiming for complete documentation at once, suggesting a gradual approach: “Playbooks… you don’t build the whole blank book for your business all at once. You do it kind of one little panel at a time.” He also stresses the importance of measurement: “You can’t become exceptional if you don’t have a way of measuring it.” Measurement allows teams to identify areas for improvement and drive transformation towards exceptionalism.
This episode underscores the crucial role of customer-centricity and systematic approaches in building successful teams and products. By focusing on solving customer problems and establishing robust systems, leaders can create exceptional teams that consistently deliver high-quality results. David encourages listeners to embrace systems, create playbooks, and prioritize measurement to achieve exceptionalism.
Transcript
[0:07–0:15] David Hirschfeld: Exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time. So to do that, they have to have systems and protocols in place that they follow and ways of measuring it.
[0:30–0:59] Matt: One thing that new leaders are often hesitant to do is to tell their teams how to get work done or to create standard systems for how work gets done. The truth is that no work happens in a vacuum and the best people often create systems for how to document what they’re working on, how to back up their work, how to send updates to clients and all those things that just have to happen in order for work to be done effectively.
[0:59–1:14] Matt: And if you let everyone on your team come up with their own way to get all these things done, then there’s a chance that these various systems are going to come into conflict and the overall productivity of your team is going to be harmed.
[1:15–1:29] Matt: This week’s guest on the Leadership Launchpad is David Hirschfeld, a 35-year software development veteran with a unique perspective on technological innovation and business growth that he currently uses at the company he founded, .
[1:29–1:49] Matt: David specializes in AI-driven workflow transformation for scale-ups and startups. Having collaborated with over 70 startups, he developed the first launch method, a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding.
[1:50–2:24] Matt: This episode really touches on this idea of how do you create systems that will enable your teams to be incredibly successful. We start off talking a little bit about the current state of AI software development, which I thought was a really interesting discussion. We then dive a little bit deeper into understanding why so many founders or the people with kind of this founder intent tend to build too much and lose focus on the problem they’re trying to solve. And then we finally dive into the importance of systems. It’s really a great discussion. But before we get into
[2:24–2:50] Matt: that discussion, I do want to remind you that if this is your first time listening to the show, please make sure you subscribe so that you never miss a future episode. And if you are listening to my voice right now and you happen to be someone who is responsible for leadership development in your organization, I would love to talk to you. Please reach out to me at Matt at bettereverydaystudios.com so we can see if we can help make the leaders in your organization better.
[2:51–2:58] Matt: With that, let’s get into the discussion with David Hirschfeld. David, welcome to the Leadership Launchpad. How are you doing today?
[2:58–3:00] David Hirschfeld: I’m doing great. Thanks for having me, Matt.
[3:01–3:12] Matt: Yeah, I’m really excited that you reached out to me and that we kind of connected a few, like a week or so ago and started talking because you have a very interesting business.
[3:12–3:20] Matt: And so I wanted to start there. Could you tell us a little bit more about and kind of what you’ve been doing in the last few years.
[3:21–3:34] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, sure. Well, I founded 18 years ago, and it was after I had two startups, one in the 90s that I sold in 2000.
[3:34–3:45] David Hirschfeld: That was a successful exit. And then one in 95 that I failed in 97. So that was a failure. So I’ve seen both sides just from my own personal experience in terms of startups.
[3:45–4:13] David Hirschfeld: and the second one failed because I didn’t follow the playbook that I followed the first time not realizing exactly what that playbook was. Anyway, then I founded in 2007, so that’s 18 years ago and we’ve been working with startups and scale-ups doing custom software development for that whole time and some of my clients are even, you know, 10 years, I’ve had them for 10 years or more.
[4:13–4:14] Matt: Oh, wow. Oh, wow.
[4:14–4:20] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah, where we’ve become their outsourced IT and development team. Yeah.
[4:21–4:32] Matt: Wow. So you’ve been doing that for a while. I guess, well, since I have you, you’re the perfect person to ask this question. I don’t think it was on the list that I originally sent you, but it always piques my interest. Yeah.
[4:32–4:45] Matt: Because I always get different opinions. What is happening with AI coding right now? Is that something that you’re really leaning into? I keep hearing that that’s transforming software teams.
[4:46–4:59] David Hirschfeld: Well, it’s very funny that you brought that up because this will be my fourth conversation today about that topic with people on my team and customers. And anyway, so everything.
[5:00–5:14] David Hirschfeld: We’ve been benchmarking really in the last two months. We’ve been benchmarking and trying to do problem solving. So this has gone through a big evolution because the technology is changing so quickly.
[5:15–5:28] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. And we’ve been using AI code generation in some form or fashion for two and a half to three years now, right, for building small modules or refactoring small pieces of code and then growing and growing.
[5:29–6:00] David Hirschfeld: About seven, eight months ago, I started trying out some of the code gen tools that can build full applications. and as recently as a couple weeks ago I even tried one of those things like Replit and Bolt and Vercel and products like this and they all provide some value but they fall short in some really key ways and so we’re not able to use those to build whole applications we want to build a very simple prototype
[6:00–6:13] David Hirschfeld: of an application that has some functionality we can do that pretty well with those But if we get into any sophisticated, not even sophisticated, but, you know, semi-sophisticated functionality, they just fall apart.
[6:13–6:24] David Hirschfeld: And they don’t write good code, and they don’t architect the code properly. And so there’s big limitations that we have in those tools. Interesting. Okay.
[6:24–6:44] David Hirschfeld: But that was — I thought we might be able to use that for quick MVPs. We’re a long way from that. Interesting. However, so we’ve been testing all the code editors, and we’ve found Cursor so far to be the best code editor for AI code editing.
[6:45–6:55] David Hirschfeld: But it has some huge limitations. So the problem with all these tools is there’s a context problem. Yes. When we — so this is how I liken it.
[6:55–7:06] David Hirschfeld: If you want me to explain what I mean by this context problem for the listeners. Yeah. Yeah. When you’re developing software, you’re like a juggler.
[7:07–7:19] David Hirschfeld: And the more you concentrate, the more balls or the more things you can keep in the air at the same time. So I liken it to spinning plates that I like on sticks. You know, it’s pretty easy.
[7:19–7:42] David Hirschfeld: Most of our tasks have spin three plates. So even four plates isn’t too tough. But you get to the fifth plate, the level of concentration starts to grow significantly. And when you’re working on really complex architectural and coding issues where you have to keep all different aspects of the application in your brain at different levels simultaneously, it’s like having seven or eight plates all spinning at the same time.
[7:42–7:59] David Hirschfeld: And you’ve probably walked in on a developer who’s in the middle of one of those, and you said, hey, I’ve got a quick question, Matt. And they go, the arms go up in the air, right? And they freak out because they realize how much energy it’s going to take to spin all the plates up because they’re listening to them all crash and break on the floor.
[8:00–8:00] David Hirschfeld: Right.
[8:02–8:15] Matt: There’s a scene, old movie Swordfish, where Hugh Jackman plays a coder. And there’s this scene where he’s like deep in or maybe, yeah, he’s coding some like software virus.
[8:15–8:21] Matt: And he’s like drinking wine and music is blaring. He’s got 18 screens up and he’s just like deep in it. Anyway. Right.
[8:22–8:36] David Hirschfeld: Exactly. Exactly. And then you don’t interrupt them, right? Yeah. I remember when my wife was doing her national boards. This is like your PhD if you’re a schoolteacher.
[8:37–9:16] David Hirschfeld: Most schoolteachers don’t do it because it’s such a big deal to do it. You know, it’s a lot of work. But anyway, she was writing her national boards, and it was the same thing because she had to keep all these different pieces of information in her head and all these because there’s a lot of evidence that she collects in her own classroom as she’s teaching certain things and all of that has to be in her head while she’s writing this very complex and I’d walk into her office I’d say Becca can I and she’d go not now not now not now it was so funny and then you see yeah so that’s something that AI sucks at yeah so yeah yeah go ahead it’s
[9:16–9:49] Matt: funny because I’ve even noticed that in just simple usages of doing some basic research for a course I’m creating or something like that. And it is when you try to have kind of like a dialogue of, yeah, that was interesting, but what about this direction? Or can you give me a little bit more information? After two or three of those back and forth, you can totally notice it like dropping off pieces of context that you gave it early and, you know, it focuses on this thing and expands on that, but it forgets that you would like pinned it in on this thing. So that’s interesting.
[9:50–10:17] Matt: That’s great to hear. Thank you for that kind of side road, because though we’re going to be talking about leadership development, I promise the listeners, I know that’s why you’re here. So we’ll get back to that. But I do think this is such a perfect example of the thing that all leaders need to, you know, keep a touch on. And sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe, what the current state is, what are things really like for practitioners. And so for a practitioner like you, I thought it was the perfect time to ask that question.
[10:17–10:20] Matt: So thank you for kind of giving us the lay of the land from your perspective.
[10:20–10:40] David Hirschfeld: I do want to add one little thing there. We are working to solve this problem as everybody else is The real problem is that AI doesn realize when its context has shifted that there something else out there it may need to consider but it’s not considering.
[10:40–10:51] David Hirschfeld: We as people know that, right? We’re getting into the area. We’re not focused on this other area, but we know it might have an effect on that, and so maybe we need to back up and take a look.
[10:52–11:04] David Hirschfeld: AI doesn’t do that. Not yet. And what it does is it says, oh, this is my new context, and it runs away with it. Very often, destroying good work that’s done before that, which is right.
[11:04–11:22] David Hirschfeld: And we have to manage and control that. There are some tools coming out from OpenAI and from Cloud and from Google that are trying to kind of rein in this problem and continue to keep the full context in its mind, but it’s still not there.
[11:22–11:38] David Hirschfeld: And we are working at building scaffolding around this as well to do it because right now we’re probably at about 40 acceleration, 40 to 80 percent acceleration, depending on that area that we’re working on from what we were six months or nine months ago.
[11:39–11:52] David Hirschfeld: We want to get to — I want to get to 90 percent consistently across the board. Yeah. And we’ve got — there’s some big things that have to happen for us because that would put us at 10x from the productivity and acceleration.
[11:52–11:55] David Hirschfeld: And that’s huge, right? Yeah, absolutely.
[11:55–12:06] Matt: Absolutely. Yeah. Okay. Well, in that discussion, one of the things you mentioned is that, you know, making minimum viable products is one of the first things that you’re trying to use AI for.
[12:06–12:36] Matt: in our last discussion, I think one of the things that you focused a lot on as, and I don’t know if this is exactly part of kind of the protocol that you mentioned, you know, launch first and, and, and things. But one of the things that you mentioned was that it’s really hard for leaders to stay focused and not overbuild. That one of the things that it’s easy for a leader to do is to just kind of, yeah, lose track of the story. What’s the most important thing right now and get focus on a lot of details that don’t matter.
[12:37–12:41] Matt: Why do you think that’s so hard? What makes that so hard in your experience with all the startups you’ve worked with?
[12:43–13:04] David Hirschfeld: It’s a basic perspective, and that’s a really good question. I think it’s just a basic perspective of founders. Because to start something new, like what a founder is doing, they have to step out of their comfort zone and go in a direction and create.
[13:05–13:18] David Hirschfeld: And that creative process, you need a lot of motivation to do that. A lot of people aren’t motivated to do that. They want security and comfort. But founders seek this kind of excitement.
[13:18–13:30] David Hirschfeld: And it’s not exciting to do the hard work, the analysis, the constant reflection, the risk mitigation, planning.
[13:30–13:41] David Hirschfeld: Those aren’t the fun tasks unless you just happen to be that kind of founder that finds all that stuff fun. But usually the people that find that kind of stuff fun aren’t the ones that are creating the businesses.
[13:41–13:53] David Hirschfeld: So it’s a natural tendency to go towards the thing that’s exciting, which is the creation part. And the problem is you might be creating something that nobody cares about.
[13:54–14:22] David Hirschfeld: And that’s where founders go off track. So founders that understand that their business is about the problem that their potential customers are dealing with and every aspect and nuance of that problem and wanting to spend their time talking with customers, those are the founders that will consistently find a path to success.
[14:22–14:27] David Hirschfeld: because the customers and the problems continually remind them of what they need to focus on.
[14:28–14:50] Matt: Yeah. As you’re talking, the thing that — tell me if this is kind of what you’re mentioning. I always think about like house projects. I used to be really bad about starting too many house projects because one thing that I realized is that when you are 90% of the way like visually done, you’re 50% of the way actually done, right?
[14:50–15:10] Matt: Because that last visual 10% is really like 50% of the time. Is this like the small little tweaks, the little cleanups, the, oh, I got to measure this just precisely. And, yeah, I think it is really hard to be somebody who likes to do something new but can also focus on the details.
[15:11–15:28] David Hirschfeld: You know, it’s funny. You say house projects. So, first of all, what you’re talking about is there’s a director of development of a big firm that I worked with maybe 15 years ago, and what he called this being done-done.
[15:29–15:45] David Hirschfeld: So not just being done, but then making sure that all of the I’s are dotted, all the T’s are crossed, all the deployment things are done, the communications and delivery and the documentation, right, so that when you say you’re done, you’re really done.
[15:46–15:57] David Hirschfeld: So he called that done, done, and that has always worked. As far as house projects go, that’s like my passion is I love woodworking and building and creating.
[15:57–16:10] David Hirschfeld: in that way as well, right? And when my wife says, how long will that take you? And I say, oh, I’ll probably have it done this weekend. She immediately multiplies by four. And she’s
[16:10–16:30] Matt: mutually right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And you mentioned this in the context of founders, but I think it’s often a lot of the people that get attracted to startups as well. And a lot of those early leaders in startups get attracted to startups, at least in my experience, because they are that builder kind of personality.
[16:30–16:42] Matt: And so whether you’re working with the founders or some of those early leaders, you mentioned it’s kind of like a perspective shift. Have you developed any methods or questions that you ask?
[16:42–16:55] Matt: How do you help people and what can people do themselves to kind of like break that shift? If somebody is listening to this and being like, oh, yeah, maybe we are doing too many things or maybe my team is suffering from a lack of focus right now.
[16:55–17:02] Matt: How can you refocus in on kind of making sure you’re focusing on the right problem, the right customers, that kind of thing?
[17:02–17:14] David Hirschfeld: Okay. I want to talk about it from two different perspectives. One is kind of like how I talk to founders when I start working with them. And the first thing I ask them is I say, what’s your product?
[17:15–17:47] David Hirschfeld: What are the requirements? And then I say, okay, what’s the genesis of this? What’s the problem it solves? what I’ll explain and getting them to describe the problem is usually a lot of effort. Founders have lost, usually lost the problem already at that point because they’ve decided they want to build this thing. So when I say, what’s the problem you’re solving? And they all start telling me about, well, this will just make it easier for so-and-so, right? And I say, okay, that’s a, that’s kind of a benefit. What’s the problem it’s solving? It’s, and then they go, well,
[17:47–18:19] David Hirschfeld: it’s what it’s doing is it’s giving you the ability to do this and I say okay that’s a feature but sounds like a great feature but I’m not hearing a problem statement this is very common conversation almost all founders not all but almost all founders have a lot of trouble articulating a problem statement and then when I finally get them to articulate a problem statement it’s usually a very high level one because they haven’t nail a step back, put their feet in the shoes of the person who they’re solving the problem for
[18:19–18:39] David Hirschfeld: and thinking, what is the real struggle? Why does it matter? If they’re not talking about why that person doesn’t feel threatened by this problem because it’s going to cause this terrible outcome if I don’t solve it, they’re not at the root level problem. And that’s really where you have to get to.
[18:39–18:53] David Hirschfeld: So that’s usually the first conversation I have with founders is getting them kind of redirected. And then I’m constantly asking them about the problem.
[18:53–19:04] David Hirschfeld: They want to talk about features. I want them to stop talking about features and forget features even exist. You know, the feature will just naturally happen as we mitigate the problem.
[19:04–19:17] David Hirschfeld: but if you don’t know what problem you’re mitigating, you’re not building the right thing. So you should only be talking about founders that love the problem, find paths to success. And the ones that love their products fail all the time.
[19:18–19:34] Matt: Yeah. That was one of the biggest things that came out of the last conversation that I had with you is just that importance of falling in love with the problem. And it’s so important these days because the potential solutions to problems are changing so much.
[19:34–19:47] Matt: the technologies that we have available, the landscape in which it’s in. They’re changing so quickly that if you don’t truly care about a problem, you’re just not going to stick with it for long enough to really go after it and solve them.
[19:48–19:53] Matt: Awesome. Okay. So I really like that framework of, you know.
[19:53–20:24] David Hirschfeld: Here’s one other thing that kind of supports that framework. And so I tell founders, talk to your customers or your potential customers. spend as much time as possible doing that and don’t tell them anything about your product or about any features and don’t ask them if this will fix that problem. Just talk about the problems. Ask them why that’s a problem. Ask them what it costs them. Ask them how much they feel personally impacted by the problem. Ask them
[20:24–20:35] David Hirschfeld: historically what have they done to try to mitigate this problem or have they? If they have, if they use other software to try to mitigate it, did it work?
[20:36–20:47] David Hirschfeld: Where did it fall short? Why aren’t you still using it? Why don’t there’s other solutions out there? Why haven’t you tried using those? You know, get into the history of the problem.
[20:47–21:18] David Hirschfeld: Problem, problem, problem. They will talk because they want to talk about their problems. They want somebody to hear them and understand. They don’t want to talk about your features. They’re not going to be honest with you about your product but they will be honest with you about the problems they struggling with especially if they recognize that you really care about the problem and you really want to understand it And you heard other people talk about the problem and they’ve found some ways of reducing the impact of the problem doing this or that. Have you tried those things? You know, this is what your customer, this is what, this will teach you what to build.
[21:19–21:30] Matt: I love it. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love all that. And, and to all the leaders or, you know, All the listeners who are thinking like, well, I’m deep inside a company. You know, I don’t have a customer.
[21:31–21:44] Matt: Everybody has a customer, you know, and I think that’s really important to remember. I think some of the best organizations that I work with often use this idea of everybody in the company, wherever you sit, you have a supplier and you have a customer.
[21:44–21:54] Matt: And you need to figure out who in your customer. Maybe they’re internal. Maybe they’re external. But it’s about having that obsession with your customer, whoever they are, to understand their problems.
[21:54–21:57] Matt: And that’s how you can be successful.
[21:58–22:15] David Hirschfeld: Everybody that has a job, which is anybody who’s earning money, and a lot of people that aren’t, have to deliver something to someone, right? So if you don’t think you have a customer, then why are you working, right?
[22:15–22:26] David Hirschfeld: You’re producing something or preventing things from being produced or whatever your job is, you’re doing it for some stakeholder of that thing.
[22:27–22:38] David Hirschfeld: And understanding that person and what they’re struggling with and what matters to them will help inform you how to do your job better, right? Absolutely. It doesn’t matter where you are, right?
[22:38–22:54] David Hirschfeld: But people just want their problems mitigated. That’s what drives all of us. People think it’s about excitement and happiness, and that is just a way of getting over this fear of missing out and being sad and struggling.
[22:55–23:11] Matt: Yeah, I mean, human psychology, Tony Robbins always talks about there’s two ways to motivate people. Either people either flee pain or pursue pleasure, and usually for most people, the much stronger lever is fleeing pain.
[23:11–23:18] Matt: It’s a much stronger lever. And so identifying those problems, solving those problems is the true way to help people the most.
[23:19–23:31] David Hirschfeld: And I think pursuing pleasure is just is is just a version of the other anyway. Because you only pursue pleasure because you have fear that you’re not having enough pleasure in your life or some fear.
[23:31–23:44] David Hirschfeld: Something’s motivating you away from a point, which is why you look for these other. If you were perfectly happy and satisfied and thrilled every moment of your life, there would be no reason to ever pursue pleasure.
[23:44–23:45] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[23:45–24:00] Matt: Interesting, interesting. I want to shift the conversation a little bit from focusing specifically kind of on the leader to broader teams. Again, when we last spoke, you used this great phrase where you said, exceptional teams leave artifacts.
[24:01–24:04] Matt: Right. What did you mean by that? Yeah.
[24:04–24:22] David Hirschfeld: They produce artifacts as a natural process of what they do that makes them exceptional. So what I mean by that is exceptional teams create very predictable results at a very high quality all the time.
[24:23–24:34] David Hirschfeld: So to do that, they have to have systems and protocols in place that they follow and ways of measuring it so there’s output as a result of that.
[24:34–24:50] David Hirschfeld: For example, we track time spent doing everything. Everybody tracks it. It’s very easy. It takes a minute or two every day to basically put a bullet in a timesheet and say, I did this.
[24:51–25:02] David Hirschfeld: And it can be a five-word sentence, right? And if they have three bullets in the day or four bullets, it’s plenty, right? And that way we can track exactly what they did and where they spent their time.
[25:02–25:36] David Hirschfeld: as a result of that we can take that and do produce reports and analytics and give it to our clients that show how the time was spent we also go to a very deep detail for all of our estimates whether it’s a brand new product we’re building or it’s new functionality on top of an existing product or new features or whatever that is or a refactoring whatever that thing is that we’re doing an estimate for, we break it down into a lot of detail. We look at downstream effects.
[25:36–26:07] David Hirschfeld: We look at, you know, any kind of conversion, deployment costs, whatever that is in terms of effort and time. And we can report all this. So we know what we were expected to deliver from build to build to build, from major release to major release. We know when it was expected to be done and how much effort we were supposed to spend to get there. And we have all the actuals, which from a daily, weekly, monthly basis of what we actually did, how much we actually spent, how long it actually took.
[26:08–26:18] David Hirschfeld: And we make it a habit of every week in our status reports to our clients, we produce a report that shows this is what we did last week, this is what we expected to do.
[26:18–26:30] David Hirschfeld: This is where we are month to date, this is what we expected to be month to date. Here’s where we are year to date or quarter to date, right? This is our actual, what’s our variance? is our variance more than 10%.
[26:30–26:42] David Hirschfeld: Then we need to spend some time and do a post-mortem and explain to the client maybe somebody was sick or out. Maybe we ran into an unexpected problem and that we thought we understood the technology we did.
[26:42–26:53] David Hirschfeld: Whatever makes that. And our goal is to always be less than 10% variance from what we estimate to what the actuals are. But to do that, you have to track all that.
[26:53–27:05] David Hirschfeld: To be able to track all that, You have to have an exceptional team that has been inculcated that understands the need for this. Not that’s being forced to do it, but that just does it as a natural DNA.
[27:06–27:07] David Hirschfeld: Right. These are artifacts.
[27:08–27:10] Matt: Have you ever read Cal Newport?
[27:12–27:12] David Hirschfeld: No.
[27:13–27:26] Matt: No? So Cal Newport, he’s probably my second favorite author. One of his great books is a book called Deep Work. and actually A World Without Email is probably my favorite book of his.
[27:27–27:29] David Hirschfeld: I already like him, A World Without Email.
[27:29–27:51] Matt: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Everybody’s like, oh, wouldn’t that be amazing? But what you were just saying really reminded me of a lot of what he talks about because kind of what he says, he spends a lot of time kind of comparing what happened to industrial work during the Industrial Revolution to what’s happening today with information workers.
[27:52–28:02] Matt: And that one of the big backlash, basically what happened during the first Industrial Revolution is that we had all these craftsmen who could kind of work however they wanted to.
[28:03–28:44] Matt: They were artisans that, you know, they took a lot of pride in their work. And a lot of the backlash about the Industrial Revolution is we kind of systematized a lot of their work. And some of them felt like they were losing things, But we gained tons of productivity. And one of his arguments is that the what we’re going through today in information work is similar in that historically we’ve thought of the workplace, especially for information workers or white collar workers or whatever you want to call them, as the right way to do it is to be very hands off, not be be very specific about the outcome you want.
[28:44–28:55] Matt: But don’t be specific or proscriptive about how to get that work done. You leave that up to the experts who can do their thing.
[28:56–29:19] Matt: And similar to what I’m hearing, what you’re saying is, and this is, I think, what Cal Newport talks about is like, you know, you don’t need every software engineer to spend a portion of their time figuring out how they’re going to document their work or answering the emails or keeping track of the other project, you know, figuring out their own method for project management.
[29:19–29:33] Matt: The most effective workplace is going to be one where the system for how the other stuff gets done, the documentation, you know, the project planning, that needs to be a very robust system.
[29:34–29:46] Matt: And then the workers don’t have to figure all that out. and 100% of their energy can be devoted to getting the work done because they don’t have to spend time worrying about all this other stuff.
[29:46–29:49] Matt: That’s at least some of what I heard in what you were saying. Does that sound right?
[29:50–30:02] David Hirschfeld: Yeah, that I think is exactly right. And one of the ways that we’re able to accomplish this is that I have a hiring philosophy, and that is I only hire people if they’re smarter than I am.
[30:03–30:15] David Hirschfeld: And then that ball rolls uphill. So, my director of operations, who’s really smart, it’s hard to find people smarter than her, but again, she only hires people if they’re smarter than she is, right?
[30:15–30:32] David Hirschfeld: In terms of what they’re able to deliver in the context of what they’re being hired to do. Because otherwise, you send the wrong message to the team if you don’t hire people that are smarter, that pick up, they elevate the team and add value to everybody.
[30:32–30:48] David Hirschfeld: But also, then you’re also having to carry people, which means that you can’t. So I look at it like this. Our job as me as a company owner and director of operations and project manager, our job is basically chimney sweeps.
[30:49–31:03] David Hirschfeld: Our job is to sweep all the impediments out of the chimney so that our developers, our QA people, our analysts can just work fast and freely and be creative and add value to the systems and the processes.
[31:04–31:26] David Hirschfeld: Not to drive them. Our job is not to drive them. We want to motivate them in terms of we’re working on exciting things, look at the cool things we’re doing, but then we want them to create a vacuum in front of us, right, because they’re going so fast and so broadly that it’s sucking all the oxygen and we’re rushing to fill it back in from behind, not pushing them.
[31:27–31:38] David Hirschfeld: So that kind of how I look at our role as managers It a bottom We lead from underneath
[31:38–31:56] Matt: Yeah, I like that. I like that. To play devil’s advocate for a second because I can hear somebody saying, you’re saying that your job as a people manager is to remove all the impediments. But on the other hand, you’re saying you have these, like, very prescriptive rules about document it this way, do this thing, put it in here at this time.
[31:56–32:00] Matt: aren’t those barriers to just getting to the work?
[32:01–32:22] David Hirschfeld: They’re systems that they work within. So no matter who you are, you’re always working within a system of some kind unless you’re working by yourself. And if you work by yourself, you start to develop systems because otherwise you end up losing big chunks of work because you didn’t back it up properly or you end up rewriting things because you didn’t abstract it properly or whatever.
[32:23–32:34] David Hirschfeld: You start to develop your own systems, right? So we’re providing these systems and protocols, and we’re providing a lot of automation around it so that they don’t have to do a lot with it, right?
[32:34–32:49] David Hirschfeld: They just have to learn it. And then we provide a lot of management scaffolding that can account for the work that they’ve done and remind them what they’re missing and that they need to do this until they get into the habit of doing those things.
[32:49–33:00] David Hirschfeld: But we don’t have people that are pushing back on, oh, God, here’s another rule that we have to follow. It’s not like that. There are certain things like we have standard operating procedures.
[33:00–33:12] David Hirschfeld: When we develop a screen, for example, we want our styling, our prompts on the screen to look and behave a certain way. But we document all this stuff, right?
[33:12–33:23] David Hirschfeld: And we teach our developers, you know, when you’re doing something, go to the place where all the SOPs are and look up the SOPs for your particular, for the thing that you’re working on and see if there is one.
[33:23–33:40] David Hirschfeld: If not, then don’t worry about it. And we document playbooks so that everybody understands if they have to do something that follows a certain protocol, there’s a playbook that documents it and that gives you all the visual flows and everything.
[33:40–33:51] David Hirschfeld: We have to do some of that because we have a lot of projects that are compliance oriented, like health care, law enforcement, and we have to follow very strict compliance guidelines.
[33:51–34:08] David Hirschfeld: In those cases, that has to be enforced and wrapped around the project. But everybody knows that going into these projects. And they just learn what those workflows are, even how a bug is reported, how that gets the feedback loop, the flow through development and tests.
[34:08–34:21] David Hirschfeld: All that has to be very accurate because we get audited, you know, yearly by a third-party auditor on whether we have six — the last six months we’ve been compliant in a pristine way or not.
[34:22–34:32] David Hirschfeld: Nothing to do to get around those things other than provide automation and tools that make the documentation really easy and effortless to, you know, to stay within those guidelines.
[34:33–34:51] Matt: Well, I love how you pointed out that the creation of systems is just natural. But it just does happen because I used to always say that I thought organizations that had the most disdain for bureaucracy were the most likely to succumb to bureaucracy and red tape.
[34:52–35:03] Matt: Because bureaucracy, it’s a thing that just naturally occurs in a large organization. And the way to avoid it is to embrace it and deliberately plan it out and plan those structures.
[35:04–35:19] Matt: And, you know, I can include everybody. Yeah, include everybody in that process. Exactly. And I think that’s the same. You know, what’s true at the organizational level is true at the small team and even the individual level of if you’re going to get work done, you have to develop systems.
[35:19–35:33] Matt: And so you might as well be proactive about it and really think about it. Yeah. Because, as you say, exceptional teams have those artifacts. It is it’s not an accident that you achieve exceptional results again and again.
[35:33–35:38] Matt: There’s systems there that you can point to and say that is why they are achieving those exceptional results.
[35:39–35:59] David Hirschfeld: And we have a kind of a philosophy that we’re never good enough either. And we have never had, you know, we’re never exceptional enough. And so we understand the gaps that we have and where those gaps can make us better and faster and more accurate and improve quality and improve team morale.
[36:00–36:15] David Hirschfeld: And, you know, in every respect. Right. Right. So what because what will happen is if you don’t constantly strive for all that stuff. Right. Then then, like I was saying, like you were saying, everybody starts to build their own systems for the things that they’re doing all the time.
[36:15–36:30] David Hirschfeld: Then you’ve got two or three different people doing similar things with completely different systems in place. Yes. And there’s no consistency from one project to the next or from even one developer to the next in terms of how they’re creating and developing and and communicating and orchestrating.
[36:31–36:55] David Hirschfeld: Right. And that’s not uncommon, by the way. That’s probably fairly common in most development teams that there’s some of that. And I call that sort of the average mediocre development team that’s productive, but they have all these limitations because of this lack of, you know, highways, you know, technology, highways internally.
[36:55–36:56] David Hirschfeld: Yeah. Yeah.
[36:57–37:07] Matt: Well, this has been great. I mean, I think if I’m if I think back to the conversation, kind of the two biggest takeaways that I would have for a leader at any level in any organization.
[37:07–37:24] Matt: Number one, it’s the importance of understanding your customer and their problems. That is the kind of a path forward to making sure you’re not creating what you don’t need to create, building what you don’t need to build, and you really get passionate about solving the problems of your customers.
[37:24–37:37] Matt: And then once you’re clear on that, if you want to deliver on solving those in an exceptional way, David and I are giving you the green light to create systems and rules for your team.
[37:37–37:49] Matt: Because I do think a lot of new leaders are hesitant to do that. You know, they don’t like me, whether there’s systems there or not, they’re very hesitant to create standards of how work is done on a team.
[37:49–38:08] Matt: You don’t want to be draconian about it because you said include everybody. You don’t want to say like this, it’s my way or the highway. But I think that hopefully this episode gives you the green light, gives people the green light to start to have that conversation of norming the ways that you get work done on your team so you can get it done faster.
[38:09–38:20] David Hirschfeld: Do we have time for me to add one more aspect to that? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So one other thing is maybe you’re thinking there, well, actually two other things. One is the idea of playbooks.
[38:20–38:39] David Hirschfeld: When you have a system that does work really well and you have a lot of tribal intelligence around the thing, like you’ve got a few people that really know how to do this certain thing, have them start to document these processes and playbooks.
[38:39–38:56] David Hirschfeld: And if you say, oh, I can’t because there’s just too many decisions, I call those nuances, then have them document the nuances, the decision point, and when they veer off the standard approach to doing that, and there may be lots of those, but that’s okay.
[38:57–39:19] David Hirschfeld: Because when you want to scale and bring new people in, you don’t want them sucking all the energy out of your most productive people that know how to do these things well. You want those people only to do some high-level training to get them started and give them a resource where they can find out all the nuances and every little aspect of that job because it’s all been documented really solidly in a playbook.
[39:19–39:31] David Hirschfeld: So that’s number one. And playbooks aren’t you don’t build the whole blank book for your business all at once. You do it kind of one little panel at a time, right? And you just keep evolving it.
[39:31–39:32] David Hirschfeld: Right.
[39:32–39:41] Matt: The number of companies that get bogged down in forever and like, okay, we’re creating the official, we’re just documenting it all today. It’s like you’re just never going to get done.
[39:42–39:57] David Hirschfeld: That just doesn’t happen. But playbooks just recognize the more you have this stuff documented, the more your business is worth because somebody that might eventually buy your business is also buying all of this documented knowledge about how to operate effectively.
[39:58–40:12] David Hirschfeld: The second thing is if you’re not sure about where to grow exceptionalism or how would you know that you get there, that sort of thing, you probably don’t have a system of measuring yet.
[40:13–40:27] David Hirschfeld: And that’s the place where you start because you can’t become exceptional if you don’t have a way of measuring it. And if you don’t know a way of measuring how not exceptional you are yet, then you need that before you start.
[40:27–40:40] David Hirschfeld: Because once you start to measure it, you start to recognize what has to transform to start to bring you to a higher level. So systems of measurement are like critical success factor for becoming exceptional.
[40:41–40:55] Matt: I love it. Those last two bits were absolutely perfect. If anybody happens to be listening, since we have a lot of engineers that listen, thinking about their next company, if they’re looking for help with some software, where can they find you?
[40:55–41:09] David Hirschfeld: they can find me at .com. is spelled T-E-K-Y-Z, T-E-K-Y-Z.com. If you’ve made it all the way to the end of the show, then I’ll give you my email.
[41:09–41:16] David Hirschfeld: It won’t be in the links, but it’s david at .com. And I’m easy to find on LinkedIn.
[41:17–41:18] : Perfect.
[41:18–41:29] Matt: Yeah, everybody, make sure to prove to David that you made it to the end and email him directly with your questions. This has been great. Thank you so much, David. Thanks for having me, Matt.
[41:30–41:42] Matt: Thank you so much for listening to today’s show. If you are looking for help turning your organization’s great engineers into great managers, me and my team at Better Everyday Studios would love to help.
[41:42–41:54] Matt: We deliver targeted and interactive training workshops that are designed to help build the three fundamental skills of any new manager. building trust, giving feedback, and setting goals.
[41:55–42:02] Matt: Reach out to me through Matt at bettereverydaystudios.com so we can start making your organization better every day.
David Hirschfeld founded Tekyz, a company dedicated to transforming business software development. With over 30 years of experience, his journey began with a physics degree from UCLA and a successful sales career at Computer Associates. After launching and selling his first software company in 2000, David found his passion for empowering entrepreneurs.
He developed the Launch 1st™ methodology, which focuses on generating revenue before coding begins. This helps startups gain traction while minimizing risks. With a commitment to innovation and collaboration, David leads Tekyz in providing AI-powered development and SaaS solutions, making a meaningful impact in the tech world.
Tekyz is set to launch two new AI applications: one for automating the Launch 1st Methodology Niche Analysis and Estimiz, an AI-based project estimation tool. Outside of work, David enjoys golfing and woodworking.
You can learn more about David Hirschfeld and Tekyz by following his LinkedIn profile — David Hirschfeld LinkedIn Profile.
For more information about Tekyz’s services and how they can help you harness the power of AI in healthcare, visit tekyz.com or contact the founder directly at [email protected].
Using Systems to Create Successful Teams with David Hirschfeld was originally published in Tekyz Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
