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March 21, 2024 21 mins

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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Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey folks, welcome back to the growing lead in
podcasts sponsored by leandiscovery group.
This is your host, dylan Burke,also known as Dij, and I'm
happy to be here today withJason Tanner, ceo at Applied
Frameworks.
Welcome, jason.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Thank you.
Thank you for having me, dylan.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Yes, thank you for being here.
So, jason, to get us started,can you tell us a little bit
about your background, yourhistory and what led you to
Applied Frameworks?

Speaker 2 (00:33):
So I'm on my third career.
I started as a marine infantryofficer for about 10 years when
I got out of college, so Istudied mechanical and aerospace
engineering, struggled throughit and did absolutely nothing
with my degree, instead traveledaround the world in the Marine
Corps and then I was fortunateto stumble into IT and was a

(00:57):
network engineer for a telecomcompany and in the first year I
was there I earned a Cisconetwork administrator
certification and with that afriend of mine from college was
at a venture backed startup andhe invited me to join him and I
spent about six years at thatcompany and started as a sales

(01:18):
engineer and very quickly gotinto the field deploying our
software, which was a networkcharge back solution.
So it was early IT finance in2001 timeframe and back then it
was the big client serverarchitectures to make enterprise
software work.
So some of our clients wereglobal.

(01:38):
So we'd have to come up withthese big, elaborate project
plans to deploy servers andsoftware and do big
configurations and reporting andtypically six to 12 month
engagements.
And during that time I startedcomplaining about how much
better our software could beboth for our customers and for
all of us out in the field.
And one day one of the leadersat the company.

(02:01):
So well, if you have got allthese great ideas, come be the
product manager.
I was like what's that I'm like?
Well, you're the person that'sgoing to help improve the
software and listen to customersand figure out the future
evolution of the product andwork with engineering.
So I took the job and had tofigure it out on my own.
It was a bit of a challenge butfortunately someone handed me

(02:25):
the pragmatic marketingframework and said well, these
boxes are your responsibilitynow.
Because we don't have a productmarketing manager, you've got
to do all this stuff.
So I sort of figured it out.
But it was the old softwaredevelopment approach of big
requirements, documents, bighandoffs to development and they
would have long cycles todesign and build the solution.

(02:46):
That ultimately got pushedlater and later and in long
testing cycles and ultimately wewould get a portion of what I'd
written in these documents.
It didn't make a lot of senseto me at all.
And then we had a transition inour engineering leadership team
and the developers and theorganization.
It was a small company, it'salmost 65 people.
At that time Developers wantedto try Scrum and it was really a

(03:10):
development led scrum,transition, agile adoption and
suddenly I found myself creatingbacklogs and working on a
completely different type ofcollaboration with the
developers.
It was actually very, very goodfor the company, good for us.
We became much more effectiveat shipping faster shipping,

(03:34):
higher quality and reallyfocusing on the most important
work.
So during that time I startedto talk about that evolution and
we had done a really good jobmapping out our approach to
going from ideation to delivery.
So we had a big visio flowchart of everybody who was

(03:57):
involved, from the executiveleadership all the way down to
the team members and the flowfrom ideas and approvals for
funding and all the way throughto development and delivery.
And when we transitioned toagile, I reformatted the whole
thing and inserted scrum.
And it turned out at that timethis was around 2004, 2005, that

(04:21):
this was actually quite novel,that nobody had really
documented that type of flow, atleast not that I knew of.
And our vendor for ourrequirements management solution
was called RIMA Technologies.
Actually, they had a prettycool software application that
mapped the pragmatic frameworkto software so you could

(04:41):
actually capture your vision,you can capture your competitive
analysis, your win loss and allthe requirements, and they
hosted a terrific webinar series.
It's one of the early productmanagement webinars that you
could access and they recordedthem.
I think it was twice a month atleast.
And I went and I delivered thiswebinar and then I spoke at a

(05:03):
conference and talked about thisand it was just a PowerPoint
deck, but it was actually quiteinteresting.
A lot of companies and a lot ofpeople are going through the
same transition.
So after about a year or two Imoved on to another software
company and I got a call out ofthe blue one day from my
colleague, luke Hohman, and hesaid he'd watched the webinar

(05:24):
and asked me if I wanted to getin consulting.
Like, who is Luke Hohman andwhy are you calling me?
I said, well, you know we doagile product management and
what you wrote about is exactlywhat we do and what we need.
And about two years after thatI wound up actually going into
consulting with Luke.
So I was an agile consultant,agile coach, eventually became a

(05:48):
scrum trainer, worked ateverywhere, from Capital One to
Mass Mutual really big companies, big agile adoptions, all the
way to smaller startups, evenworking with founders and their
journey to figuring out theirbusiness models and what the
product would is going to looklike and how they're going to

(06:11):
actually create the businessmodel and the pricing and
licensing and so on.
So Applied Frameworks started asNthiosis in 2003, and now we've
evolved to Applied Frameworks.
We renamed and reestablishedourselves.
So we're pivoting now from thetraditional agile transformation

(06:32):
type of consulting and a lot ofthe scrum training to really
focus on the content in our bookSoftware Profit Streams.
So we provide workshops aroundprofit stream design and
software pricing fundamentals.
We have a great community oftrainers and partners that we

(06:53):
really love to talk to, peoplewho want to become partners
because they can unlock a lot ofvalue we're finding for their
clients and we've alreadybuilding some software to
support the type of work that wedo.
So we're really finding that notonly is the agile consulting
space very crowded andcompetitive, it's also getting

(07:14):
tougher out there with a lot ofthings going on with companies.
A lot of companies still needhelp, but it's getting really
hard to find them and work withthem and get it over to
skepticism, which is why I thinkthe evolution to focusing on
business models is reallyvaluable and important for us,
because people also need thathelp.
So that's about 30 years in anutshell, dylan.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Amazing, thank you.
And what's differentiates youfrom the competitors in the
markets being so saturated, I'msure you have to have some sort
of differentiation to setyourself apart.
So what would you say?
That is?

Speaker 2 (07:54):
So for our traditional business, I think
there's a couple of things.
We still do some work withclients who are looking for
assistance with their scalinginitiatives.
And when I talk about scaling,it's really interesting that I
was at a conference in Austinthe technology business
management conference and thepoint of view of that world is

(08:18):
that there are multiple teams,multiple products and portfolios
and they're really tackling thechallenge of making wise
investment choices across theportfolio and then driving the
right work to the teams.
And it's really interestingthat I've actually heard these
financial and business leaderstalking in the turns we've been
talking about for years sendwork to teams, don't send

(08:42):
partial allocations of people toprojects so that they've
started to change and they, likeI said, still need assistance
in getting, I would say, thelast mile, getting to that
ultimate end state of a highfunctioning organization that
can deliver, frequently withquality.
So we still do a lot of thesafe work, scale, the agile

(09:04):
framework work because we havetwo safe fellows Luke is a safe
fellow and our colleague, philGardner is also a safe fellow,
so I think that differentiatesus over at a different level of
play because of their background.
Luke worked for Scale Agile.
He built a couple of coursesthe agile product management
course and the lean portfoliomanagement course, while it was

(09:26):
a Scale Agile.
So he brings a ton of expertiseto all of the safe engagements,
as does Phil and the rest ofthe team For our scrum training.
Carlton Nettleton and KimPuramsky are the other two
certified scrum trainers in thecompany.
So for a pretty small company,we're really heavy on high level
expertise and we have built anonline platform for advanced

(09:49):
scrum training so we work withstudents worldwide.
I think that's our bigdifference.
For people who want anapplication based experience to
learn and become certified athigher levels within the scrum
alliance community, our platformreally is on its own at the
level of intensity.
For people who actually dopractice what they learn and get

(10:11):
feedback from us, we give themdirect feedback on their
experience.
So, for example, one of ourcourses is facilitation.
They actually take the conceptsthat they learn and go apply
them with their teams in variousother interactions.
They may have to facilitateevents and they share what
happened and their reflection,their lessons learned, which is

(10:32):
great for them and great for us,because we learn from that
experience as well when we givethem feedback.
But also a lot of what we hearback is that people are learning
a lot of new things and findinga lot of value for helping
their teams become moreeffective and higher performing.
So that's really the bad sideof it For the business modeling.

(10:56):
People talk a lot about value inthe Azure community and beyond
and it's kind of nebulous.
We make it very concrete.
We actually wrote aboutcustomer benefit in us.
It's in the book where we canactually get very discrete
definitions and descriptions ofvalue from an economic point of
view, both for the tangiblebenefits and, in some cases, the

(11:18):
intangible benefits, which thenallows us to actually talk
about pricing.
So we have a structured pricingmodel that allows people to
actually identify the strategyfor their pricing, which is not
typically what you find on theinternet.
It's been a lot of timeresearching and distilling down
actual pricing strategies like apremium strategy, a value-based

(11:40):
strategy, penetration what thatactually means and defining and
describing it.
Then getting into structurearound fences for separating
your market segments in alogical, well-known way so that
enables you to actually setdifferentiated pricing for
different segments to capturemaximum profit for those who are
willing to pay more and forthose who are more economically

(12:04):
minded at a lower price point aswell as discount policies.
We're seeing a lot of researchright now that's showing that
people are doing way, way toomuch discounting in the software
world.
So I think we're one in the fewcompanies that talks about
software pricing specifically ina very rational, structured way
, with the process, because thebusiness model of a software

(12:24):
company is a system.
It's a system of interrelatedchoices and we really hope
companies walk through that setof choices to make the best
possible decisions.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Okay, 100%, 100%.
And you've been around for what?
Around 30 years, correct.

Speaker 2 (12:42):
Yeah, I say, my professional career started in
1991.

Speaker 1 (12:46):
Okay, so what have been the biggest challenges for
you and doesn't have to beindustry specific, but in terms
of running a business goingthrough economic changes what
have been the biggest challengesand how have you overcome them?

Speaker 2 (13:03):
The economics is probably one of the big ones.
The cycles, of course, are wellknown and we're really just
navigating through it andempowering through it.
We've seen a lot of the cycleshappen.
This is, as far as I canremember, now this is our third

(13:25):
time going through a cycle whereit's challenging and navigating
through that and still honoringall of our agreements and
keeping up to date on all thefinances.
That's a big challenge andwe're doing on a very lean with
a very lean staff, I'd say.
The second is really, I think,working together in a

(13:46):
distributed environment.
Even though we've got reallygood at it before COVID because
we've always been distributed,it's still hard to ensure
everybody is aware of what'sgoing on.
Even with a weekly cadence ofchecking in as a company,
there's still opportunities forpeople to miss details and I
think the synchronization andthe focus on the goals as a

(14:07):
company together is always achallenge for anyone.
I think it just requires overcommunicating, and we find the
same with our students.
It's some.
In some cases it takes three orfour times for everyone to hear
the message.
So when we have a large groupof learners for example, we have
a client right now has got 350product managers going through
our product management academy,which we call the profitable

(14:30):
software academy, and just beingclear with all of them about
the dates and the schedules.
We, even though we've posted itin Microsoft Teams, we shared
it by email this index everyonestill, we still receive
questions about due dates, right?
So the communication challengeswith a lot of people is always

(14:52):
there and I would say the otherchallenge would be the ability
to really continue to be clearand focused and aligned to the
same goals, and we've leveragedthe Scaling Up framework from
Verna Harnes' organization thathe wrote about in his book

(15:13):
Scaling Up, and I think thathelps us a lot to maintain
alignment and stay focusedtogether.

Speaker 1 (15:22):
And, in the more recent years, have you adapted
with the times.
For example, with generative AIcoming into the mainstream, are
you taking advantage of thetools that are available to you?

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Yes, part of our practice streams ecosystem
includes a community and was.
People have access to thecommunity, have access to our AI
assistance.
So we basically structured ourown AI assistant based on the
content and structure of thebook and through some pretty
dazzling development, includingwork by a great intern who's in

(15:59):
high school, who's going to be arock star when he graduates
from college, we have actuallycreated the ability within the
assistant to hit a switch andwhen you ask a question related
to the content in the book, youget an answer based on the
content in the book.
So we preload the content inthe book based on the question.

(16:22):
So if you go to our assistantand ask about pricing strategy,
with the software profit streamsswitch turned on, you'll get a
feedback of the book.
It's almost like an amazingsearch engine for the book.
Instead of flipping throughtrying to find that page, it
instantaneously pulls back theresponse.
So that's one way we leverageit.

(16:44):
We actually want people to askquestions in the community, ask
questions through the assistantand when they want to talk more,
they go back to the communityand keep discussing the topics
that they want to explore.
So definitely leveraging AI.
We also did some reallyinteresting.
I say we I should say a coupleof very talented people in our
team did some experimentationwith AI to actually do some

(17:09):
pricing analysis.
So one of the approaches toinvestigating setting the price
level is a Van Weston or pricingprice sensitivity meter, which
is effectively a four questionsurvey that you could run with
100, a couple of 100 people,which takes time and be
investment to do that and you'dhave to process all the

(17:30):
responses.
Well, through some work withchat GPT and a little bit of
tuning, we actually have very,very accurate results in our
experience that actually plottedout a chart that just looked
just like you would expect theVan Weston or price sensitivity
meter to extract, so you'dactually see the price range

(17:50):
emerge from the experiment.
The reason we know this prettyaccurate is because we did it
for trying to establish a pricerange for a standard certified
scrum workshop.
So we kind of know themarketplace.
We know the range is typicallyabout 600 to $800.
It's almost identical to whatchat GPT spit out when we

(18:10):
programmed it to do thatanalysis.
It's a pretty amazing stuffthat we're seeing and we've got
a bright future ahead tocontinue that work.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Amazing, Amazing.
Yeah, I'm glad to see that youare making use of the technology
around.
That's actually one of thethings we do at Lean Discovery
Group is building customautomation tools with a layer of
information on top of chat GPT,so you could basically program
your brain into a chatbot, forexample.

(18:43):
But I'm glad that you aretaking advantage of that.
That's awesome.
And what if you could give onepiece of advice to other
business owners looking tosucceed in this crazy world that
we live in?
What would that advice be?

Speaker 2 (19:07):
I think I'll re-emphasize the notion of being
clear about goals, and Ibelieve the most effective way
to identify the goals is toengage everybody possible that
you can with a small companylike ours.
We're all involved together increating the plan together.
So not only do we enlist buy-in, we generate it through the
collaboration, through ourperiodic planning together.

(19:29):
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 thesame direction and then continue
to communicate, Never pass upan opportunity to have a
conversation, establish therhythm, the cadence for
communications and be very opento feedback.

(19:53):
And it's probably one area whereI'm always a little concerned
about myself, because I'll askin classes, in sessions with
customers and with students whatquestions can I answer?
I'm waiting to answer all thepossible questions I can get,
and I have the same approachwhen we're in our whole company
sinks every week what questionsdoes anybody have?

(20:15):
Is there any information youdon't have?
You need to do your job and I'mjust hoping that everyone feels
comfortable and safe to ask thequestion that they've been
dying to ask.
And I think everyone our teamis In the back of my mind.
I'm always like, I've got tomake sure that I'm behaving in a
way that is open to thosequestions, that feedback that's

(20:37):
necessary to keep us on trackand continue performing and
growing.
So yeah work together toestablish the goals, communicate
a lot and, I'd say, ensure youremain open and maintain that
posture of openness so you canactually hear everything that's
going on.

Speaker 1 (20:57):
OK, amazing.
Thank you so much for that and,jason, thank you for your time
today.
We have come to the end of theshow.
What would be the best way forpeople to reach out to Jason and
Tana if you've got any offersfor them or they're looking to
follow your journey?

Speaker 2 (21:15):
You're LinkedIn.
You can find me there, jasonTanner on LinkedIn, and my email
address is jtanner atappliedframerscom.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Amazing.
Thank you so much, Jason.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Thanks, dylan, appreciate it.
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