Jeff Lawson - Ask Your Developer

To M & A: I cant wait to see what you build.

In the twenty-first century, every business is a digital business. Customers have expectations of service and user experience based on the best digitally enabled products out there. Eventually, theyll have those expectations of every company, no matter what the industry. What that means is that every organization that hopes not just to survive but to succeed needs to understand how to innovate by building software, and how to hire and manage the people who build it.

Ive spent the last decade helping all kinds of companies, from Silicon Valley startups to Fortune 50 industrial behemoths, increase their chances of building game-changing innovations by adopting the principles outlined in my book TheLean Startup. As a result, Ive often found myself trying to explain the semiconductor revolution to leaders who dont understand software. Many still believe that this tsunami of disruption will somehow bypass their business. I once worked with a group of senior leaders from large hospital trade associations who were desperate to improve patient experience, but throughout our time together they made excuses for why that experience was so dismal. Nothing I said about using digital tools to create the kind of transformation they were looking for got through to them. Finally, I asked how many of them had used Uber or Lyft. When they all said they had, I asked them to take their phones out of their pockets and look at how those apps show theres a car on the way and where it is. I asked them to imagine what it would mean to the patient experience if a patient knew the arrival time of the nurse or a doctor coming to their room to help. Thanks to software, its just as easy to do that for medical staff as it is for ride shares. Only the delusion that theres no connection between software and patient care prevents that from becoming the norm.

The digital revolution is fundamentally rewriting the rules of general management. Software simultaneously lowers transaction costs, demolishes barriers to entry, and accelerates the pace of change. Companiesand institutionsthat cannot cope with this pace and intensity will cease to be relevant. There are few people in the world who are experienced both as software developers and as business executives. Thats what makes Jeff so unique: he has feet in both worlds. Ive seen executives at great companies unintentionally sabotage their own digital success by doing (and not doing) things that disempower talent and kill innovation.

I once advised a company that made household products. They were trying to figure out how to test a new product through a small pilot program. I suggested creating a minimum viable product, an MVP in Lean Startup terms, or a version of the product thats good enough to allow a company to collect useful feedback about its value from a small number of consumers while still being fast and inexpensive to create. The idea was to use the MVP to gather information as quickly as possible in order to determine next steps in the development process. Normally, this company would have to manufacture a huge quantity of the new product and test it out in a few stores. However, in this case, there was already a lab up and running that had made enough of it that team members were taking it home every day because they liked it so much. This immediately presented itself to me as an MVP opportunity. Instead of the team taking this stuff home, they could give it to fifty customers to test and report back on.

To solve the issue of recruiting these customers and making sure they were continuously supplied, I suggested they do the recruiting online, have customers sign up for a subscription, and then provide them with the ability to text the pilot team when they needed more product. I emphasized that this was a perfect example of how software can enable speed accelerations and cost reductions that give companies an advantage in the marketplace. The idea that the team could set up this kind of system quickly and use it to get crucial information about how to make their product more marketable seemed like nothing less than a magic trick to them. But its not magic. Its what Twilio does every day for thousands of companies.

Heres another tale. A major corporation I was working with had a CEO excited about digital transformation and providing customers with online browsing and ordering, something this industry had never done before. They launched an in-house startup to build an experimental website, helmed by a super-motivated junior team with no prestige or resources at their disposal, but a ton of commitment to building this MVP. The catch was they had no idea how to build a website or write software. They were in a completely nontechnological field. First, they went to the companys IT department for help, which refused them because this crazy project wasnt part of its purview. Next, they explored hiring an outside agency to do the site, but that was too expensive. Eventually, they recruited a designer, with a budding desire to write code, to take on the projectbut that created new problems. Designers werent allowed to write code at this company.

This example showed me that even with CEO support and a hungry team, it still takes a lot of work to set up those teams for success. It starts with having the right players on the field and then empowering them to make progress. Ask Your Developer can help companies translate CEO enthusiasm and raw talent into what theyre actually looking fora superior customer experience achieved through digital transformation. Those that embrace the full potential of their employees will reap outsized rewards in the years and decades to come.

Ive had the privilege of watching what Jeff Lawson and his extraordinary team at Twilio have built unfold in real time as it has been integrated into our world in countless ways that we never stop to consider. Jeffs long-term vision for the company and his skill at bringing together incredibly talented people are the reasons that so much of the hidden infrastructure our lives now run on works seamlessly and elegantly. Twilio is what allows you to text your Uber driver or order a pizza online. Its built into Hulu and Twitter and Salesforce to help with communication and information sharing. It plays roles in the real estate industry and health care, as well as numerous nonprofits and relief organizations. Its helping businesses that never imagined themselves as digital companies make extraordinary transformations and grow under intense pressure to evolve or face their own demise.

Ask Your Developer begins with why its so important to actually understand what well-crafted software can make possible. Its that initial leap of imagination that allows leaders to understand the value of software developers. From there, it explains why even if a company hires talented coders, making good use of them is an impossibility without good management to help them realize their full potential. Every company needs to employ people who have the skills to help them build things in order to grow and transform, but they also need to be willing to listen to them about what has to happen in order to reap the full benefit of what they have to offer.

As Jeff details, its destructive for leaders to sit atop an organization far removed from the people who make its interfaces and user experience work. Building a structure and methodology for ideas to flow not just down but up the hierarchy, as well as across different areas of the organization, is critical not only to survive but also to thrive. Having worked with a large number of companies undergoing digital transformation, Ive seen over and over again that the ones that did this kind of management transformation