Podcast Transcript and Notes

We’re speaking with Daniel Debow today, who is the SVP of Emerging Technologies at Salesforce and today we’re going to be talking about what he’s been up to since Rypple, his work with Work.com and now, in his role as SVP of Emerging Technologies. So, welcome Daniel.

Daniel: Thanks. Nice to be here.

Pete Abilla: Just to level set, a couple of years ago, back in 2009, while you were still with Rypple, you had written me an email, telling me about your interest in Lean and some of the things that you guys were doing at Rypple. Maybe you could share with us what you’ve been up to since then and the role, if any, Lean has played in your career.

Daniel: Wow, lots of questions in there. Sure. So, Rypple was a company that I was a co-founder of with David Stein and a bunch of other folks and we started that company after we had been part of being co-founders of another software company called Workbrain and that company was a pretty big, traditional enterprise software business but grew really fast, from six of us in 2000, to almost 700 in 2007, like a hundred million in revenue. It grew really, really fast.

Pete Abilla: That’s awesome.

Daniel: Yeah, it was amazing, and what we did was workforce logistics. We did workforce management for very large employers, like Target and Best Buy, American Airlines. We did labor scheduling and planning and kind of attendance tracking, at a very large scale, very complex union stuff. So, that was how I got started in the software business. I did a whole bunch of roles there, none in product but more like corporate development roles.

After this started to get big, we started to create this huge backlog of bugs, basically. Very complicated software, very complicated systems and our growth was kind of choking us, and that’s when I started to get interested in Lean. I have taken an MBA read some operations courses, learned about the goal and stuff like that, but it wasn’t until Mike Theo said let’s think about how to fix this that it all started to come back and I started to really read about Lean in particular as it was applied to software and operations of software business. I remember meeting a woman named Mary Poppendieck. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with her…

Pete Abilla: Oh, I know Mary. Yeah, she’s great.

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. Of course. So, I read her book and called I called her up and said come help us, Mary. She said okay and she came up and it’s great to get to know her. We really started to do all the practices and you know that’s sort of a short story. It was an amazing experience because we took our bug back log and our throughput up down by 90% inside of, I think, three months or less and increased throughput dramatically and really started into a much more flow dynamic and we did a lot of the practices that were laid out. We mapped out the flows and started getting small teams to work on [inaudible 00:03:46 ] ends, small improvements, making changes every weekend.

It was there that I witnessed the power of mindset. I should also say, when Mary came up, I was like Mary, I’m so excited. I bought your book for everybody here. She said why did you do that? I’ve never heard an author say that before. I thought it was helpful. She said oh, you should have just told them to buy the Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno and, if they read that, they would understand the philosophy or what needs to get done and they would have figured it out themselves, which I thought was great. Very Yoda like. So I read that book too and it really inspired me to think about this philosophy as it applies to business, because I saw the power of it.

Pete Abilla: That’s awesome

Daniel: Yeah, yeah. That’s how I got involved in it.

Pete Abilla: Well, you know, since then, Lean has really been taking over. It’s been really applied in every industry and especially with the advent of the Lean Startup from Eric Ries, who we interviewed two weeks ago.

Daniel: Yeah

Peter Abilla: In that interview, he shared with us how GE has adopted the Lean start-up and is now calling it the internal operating system of GE, which is really fascinating. What are some of your thoughts on that? Have you read the book?

Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you a little bit more background. I was into this Lean Startup stuff, reading Eric’s blog before he wrote the book actually, that I reached out to him as we were getting Rypple started. After we sold Workbrain, we sold it to Infor in 2007, myself and one of the other co-founders, David Stein, started this company Rypple and it was really based around the idea of, it was two strains, really. It was the strain of social media and the way were people communicating much more real time and it connected with the pain both of us felt with our feedback and performance systems, because we had been in the HR space and what we really saw, we didn’t really market this much, although I did write to you about it.

Folks just kind of got it, because it can be hard to explain but we saw this classic kind of batch process, where the analogy that was made was Lean can be the mindset, not for manufacturing. It can apply to software. We started to say how come it can’t be applied to general people management, because what we saw in all these companies was this very batch system for feedback, which was called the performance review and it was extremely long and complicated, but even worse, it created all this inventory and the inventory was feedback that we could give you that you could take action on, that you could do something about to improve the business performance and your own happiness and the teammates, but we don’t. What we do is, we store it all up in inventory, so it decreases in value, just like real inventory, and we give it to you at the end of the year in one giant batch.

We thought, that doesn’t make sense. Not just for Lean principles but that’s not the way people learn, which I think is kind of core to Lean or Lean is about how to help human beings learn to work together, to get things done, and create an incentive system around the learning itself, but I digress. Anyhow, we started thinking about this in the context of feedback at work, so we built this system for Rypple, which was the idea that you would pull feedback, rather than having it pushed at you. You could ask at any time and you could do it anonymously and you could gather from folks around you.

Then, we thought the same thing about recognition, where you could just give someone a badge. We saw them engaging in this behavior in email, but why can’t we make it more public? Just like you had, I think the word is Andon [PH], you had these public boards about how people are doing? You can kind of share that status with people and say hey, here’s a badge and it can be fun and whimsical. It doesn’t have to be too serious, but you could also trigger it. Finally, we started to really get into goal setting and, again, how can we make it more public, more real time? Instead of setting goals once a year, creating dynamic social goals that really engage people.

So, the product philosophy of what we were doing, even though we never talked about it on the website, was really infused by this core idea: why can’t we make people learning about how they can improve more like software people learning in a Lean cycle and then more like Lean in general. Okay, so I didn’t answer anything ab