EP 49 - Acceleration Strategy - Impact on Products

VERN: Welcome. This is the tenth in a series of podcasts that we've been doing for our employees. My name is Vern Dosch and with me today is David Bonnett, the Vice President of Product within NISC. This is a relatively new discipline that we have in our organization, very much defined by David and his people as NISC kind of grew and matured as an organization. We got to a place where we asked the question "Who owns the products?" Is it research and development? Is it implementation? Is it support? Who owns products? Is it our advisory committees? And it became very clear to us that we needed a group of individuals that was absolutely focused on gathering input from all the stakeholders, be it our Members, be it our employees in the service centers that work with our software but also had a responsibility for looking into the future. And so, David, we count alot on your crystal ball as you keep in touch with things that are going on in the industry, directions of the industries, and just a critical part of NISC in helping us make sure that we are devoting the assets that we have - the development assets, the implementation, the support assets that we have - in the correct and most efficient way. So you've got a long list of things. We've got a smarter grid. We've got telephones moving from being telecommunications company to broadband company. You've got electric utilities getting involved in the broadband business. All of that has a technical solution or has technical requirements. How do you kind of sum that up, David, in terms of you look across the landscape of your division and the different product managers you have. What do you see as the biggest opportunities right now for NISC from a product standpoint? DAVID: Well there's a number of significant opportunities right now. I would start with the ones with our current Membership. Our Members know us well; they trust us and that tends to be sometimes the biggest opportunity for us. And to that end the big trend that we see staring at us so closely here is our utilities that are getting into the broadband business and the need for applications that can support that business opportunity. That's one of the biggest opportunities I think we see. With that said we also see a tremendous opportunity with new business, particularly as we move beyond the co-op market, particularly into the public power sector. And that's yet a whole another opportunity that I think relates to supporting multiple services, in particular not just electric but other traditional utilities and in some cases even telecom services. So we are seeing a lot of interest there as well. Those would be the two biggest opportunities I see right now. VERN: Okay. Just a lot of developments in the industry with the advent of a smarter grid. There's certainly all kinds of product expectations and product opportunities for us. And then when you talk about this unification of telephone and electric that you referred to, knowing that you're working hand in hand with research and development to bring those industries together. Not an easy task, right? DAVID: Yeah, it's very exciting, Vern. It's exciting because I think we bring something to the table that is really first of its kind. We really don't see any substantial competition with companies truly committed to bringing that unified solution to the table. So yeah, I mean to your point, the challenges are substantial. Mostly because this is an opportunity for us to build software in a way that dramatically changes the paradigm and the user experience. Really just build a much better product and that means more useful to the consumer, but also more and more cloud-friendly. So we're really both architecturally as well as usability wise, I think we're bringing a solution to the table that's much more contemporary and much more appealing in the market. And so moving to that new model involves a total change in the way we go about building software. It involves not only usability, which is a major new component of our team here at NISC, but also a much more agile process in terms of the release sprints that we're now faced with. That allows us to be much more flexible, responsive, get feedback from Members more quickly, as we get products into the field. It's just a very different process than having a couple major releases a year, a more traditional waterfall approach to the release cycle. So a totally different process, Vern, I think is probably the biggest challenge that we face as a product team as we move forward with iVUE Connect. VERN: I see that, David, as I watch and I listen to your group. I mean you're out there, you're talking to advisory committees, you're talking to our Members that are calling into the service centers, gathering their input. You're looking at what's going on in the industry, and quite frankly what's going on or isn't going on with our competition, and all of that makes for opportunities. You know we have a strategy, right? We have kind of a roadmap. You've been very transparent with that roadmap. We've, as an organization, tried to be more accountable in telling our Members what we're working on, giving them target dates of when those releases are going to happen, and then being accountable for that. But I don't know about you, but this urgency - to get these products to market, to beat our competitors, to give our Members the tools that they need to be competitive out there and to be viable into the future - I don't know about you but I've never felt the urgency, the pressure to get these products out there, to do it right, to do it right the first time, and to meet the expectations of our Members. You feel that? DAVID: Yeah it's funny Vern. Yesterday I was at a site out in the Atlanta area. This is actually a prospect, and this is relatively a large utility, 30,000 plus meters who had just gotten into broadband and they have less than maybe a thousand subscribers. They're trying to use multiple systems to handle both their telecom part of their business and the utility side of the business, and it's just not working. In fact, I would say a new CEO there is even concerned that maybe they shouldn't even be in the telecom business; they just can't pull it off. So I think to your point, it's very motivating when you have an opportunity to solve a business problem that might even mean life or death for a Member of ours trying to get into a new business like broadband. We're able to solve that challenge and give them a solution that can really seamlessly support both those businesses that are crucial to their success and to their communities success even in terms of getting broadband maybe into underserved areas. So I think that does bring a level of excitement, particularly with this whole idea of having a unified product, particularly to some of these new sites that we're working so closely with that are relatively new entrants into the broadband business. VERN: So David, it's very clear the expectations of our Members out there and the urgency to get these products as we say "to carpe diem, to seize the moment." And so we've got a plan but over the last couple of months this Vice President group has really recognized that we need to accelerate that plan. Perhaps in some organizations management comes down and says these timelines aren't acceptable; you need to speed them up you, you just need to work harder and longer. And while there's certainly some of that in our culture our Board, as we talked about this and strategic planning, we said "look guys, we're going to have to add people. We're going to have to add resources. We're going to have to add infrastructure. We need your approval as a Board to be behind us with the financial support, up to five million dollars, up to an additional 50 employees to really meet this urgent opportunity that we have." So, David, when we talk about the acceleration strategy that has been approved by our Board and that we've been talking about here, how does that affect product? How does that affect your people? How does that affect your ability to not only meet the timeframes that we've established and that we've promised, but also to accelerate some of those areas that frankly we just couldn't get to? DAVID: I think the big part of the acceleration challenge that I see is how quickly can we scale our teams using this new agile process that we talked about earlier. We're really building software one persona at a time. As we do so we've got to make sure we have that business leadership who knows that persona, knows it well, who's able to provide those requirements, is able to work with our usability team upfront to make sure we're building the right product if you will. And that's where I think we're just resource constrained and that's where in terms of growth we've got a tremendous need - whether they become ultimately long-term members of our product team or whether we're tapping people on the shoulder who are maybe serving in a more operational role today but have tremendous expertise. We need that help and we need that leadership, that product leadership. So whether we're talking about trouble tickets or capital credits or regulated voice reporting, that's the challenge - staffing up very, very quickly to make sure we've got that business leadership and that input our development team so when this product comes out of the oven it's a beautiful thing. I think that's the biggest challenge we have, Vern, is scaling these processes and making sure we got that business leadership needed to move at the rate we'd like to get this product to market as soon as possible. VERN: Boy I agree with you, David. I so appreciate the work that your people do, the work that they put into our products to make sure as you said, that when they come to market, when they come out of the oven that they're ready to go, and they're embraced by our Members and by the marketplace. So much of NISC's future success rea