 But welcome. This is a talk called discovery, discovery, discovery, the most important part of any projects and a it's all about command line. No, not at all But before we get to anything I'm Dwayne. I work for Pantheon and I've got a table out there I'll talk about them in a second. I've been in the sales and marketing world since 2005 That's how I've made my living and I have learned a lot of lessons of the hard way I've also learned lessons formally in schools classes Sandler technique and various other people have studied under and That's where this talk comes from is that world observations. I've made and things But outside of that in tech I do stuff. I like improv There's an improv talk here. Awesome. Hope you're all planning to go to that web comics comic books a little karaoke I'm on Twitter a lot. It worked out well Please find me out there if you tweet this I left my information here at the side for you I Real quick though. I work at Pantheon. We're a web hosting management platform elastic hosting and tools for teams development sites and all that good stuff come talk to the table We'll give you full demos and whatnot Quick silly request if you guys can take a picture of this and someone send this to me of me standing in front of this picture That that would be amazing These are the other two times. I've talked this year I'll give you a second to get that picture. All right. Yeah, this guy's over got it. All right. Thank you very much We'll move on from that silliness In quick question. I want to know who's in the room. I just told you who I was told you where I work So what's after lunch? This is the second session after lunch You're all in that coma the coffee hasn't really kicked in yet So everybody let's wiggle out a little bit just you don't have to get up But just move your arms around a little bit and then at the count of three just yell out your name one two three And where do you work one two three? And where you come from originally what's your hometown one two three? Oh, there you go. That feels better. I feel like we know each other now really is one place one time doing a thing But quick show of hands. Who here is a developer for a living? Awesome, who here to skitters considers themselves a designer for a living Who here considers themselves a business owner for a living and who here needs a website made? ha All right If anybody raised their hand about website making there's a lot of other people here that are designers and developers as you saw But honestly who he here came to this talk because they saw the name and thought I was gonna do something like this developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers developers Love that talk bomber didn't do a lot of good things for the world But he did that and all you need to know about Discovery is this That's a lot of questions. We don't need to get into those yet. We'll come back to that I do have that same passion for discovery based on years and years of doing sales and project management process And it really all boils down to to this We need to have the expectations match results and yes for those graphic people in the room Yeah, this is a little ugly, but did you expect a sales guy to make the prettiest slide? Maybe it fits. Maybe it doesn't But it's all about aligning the expectations with the results and delivering people what they're actually asking for What they're actually think they're paying for is when we don't it is Tragic Yes, this is a yellow cake with an eyeball on it Is it what they asked for I doubt it? I seriously doubt it and As we all know when people don't get exactly what they want they get cranky And cranky people are awful to deal with She's not so bad, but Client calling you a customer saying this is not at all what I signed up for I want my money back or Now we need to do all this extra work. It's just an awful feeling So how do we solve that? Well, I think it boils down to this discovery is the most important part of successful projects We all know most of these words. I'm gonna get into discovery. That's really what today's talk is about obviously But I want to stop for a second and think about what a project is because we say project a lot And we throw that word out and that means a lot of things to a lot of people If we go back and look at definitions, this is just a random definition. I found online Like factor requires a lot of time, but it's specific purpose and I love etymology I love where words come from and It's actually throwing something forward that we are aiming at a thing We are trying to hit in fact a goal Every project has a goal in mind. You don't do projects just to do projects You don't do sales process just for the heck of it You project to get to a or a sales process to get to an endpoint a goal specific goal Is it a good goal or not? Well, that's a completely different talk That is a completely different set of things in the world of how do we set these goals? And how do we know that it's a measurable attainable thing? That's not really what today is about Today is about this process who here has never seen this before in their life Not the slide but this idea Okay, there's a few hands and everyone else is on some other understanding of this So let's just go through this really quick This is a project funnel Let's divide the entire world into boxes that all funnel into each other So I can say everyone in the entire world is a potential lead for word camp Phoenix But then they got people's email addresses and they qualified you in to say yes You actually wanted to come here and there you did discovery of well, it can you actually attend? Are there sessions you even want to see? Oh There is well, that's the proposal process. It's really short. It's just a ticket Screen and then there's a procurement where the process clears and then you're delivering you're here If everyone in the room I got your email address and I treated you as a lead I could qualify and see do you want my services for some of the stuff I do in my life If you do we'll go through a process and it works mechanically the same way every single time we go through a process We take leads and we qualify them Again, not the point of today's talk It does feed into everything else I'm talking about because we don't want to do a discovery process with people who can't pay us We don't need a discovery process if there's not an actual need there if there's not a timeline involved Why would we bother wasting our time with figuring out what to deliver if they can't meet any of these things? That's one checklist Bant. I learned Scotsman Sandler technique They'll all do the same thing. It is a mechanical very quick checklist to say can you pay me? Do you have the authority to pay me? You have a timeline in mind? Can I even do what you're generally asking if you come to me and ask you to build you a skateboard? I'm the wrong guy. I've come say I want you to teach an improv class I could do that and we qualify and further discover from there what to do again Not the point of the talk But if we don't qualify properly we'll waste a lot of time doing discovery with people that we probably shouldn't have So just keep that in mind when you do discovery step back and say should I be talking to this person in the first place should? This process be going forward from here Sometimes the answer is no sometimes the answer is I need to qualify it a little bit more Qualification can take a few steps like a few calls There's an old saying in sales get me to yes as slow as it takes but giving you no immediately And that's what I want. I don't waste my time and I don't want to waste yours But we're gonna talk about that next step that that process of discovery for the rest of today And it does go back to goal setting it goes back to these smart ideas Are these smart goals that we want to have a specific thing? We're delivering you want to have a measurable result So six months after the project is done. They can call up and say yes, we have succeeded or no We have failed and here's exactly how I'm gonna prove that here's the KPIs Here's all the metrics today. It's not a KPI talk though How do we get them to tell us what they want? If they could just tell us I want this and this and this in the first place they wouldn't need us Honestly, if they knew how to get to where they wanted to go They would have already been there. They'd have already gotten there They wouldn't need a consultant an expert an advisor to say Here's where you are now Let's get you to the next phase where you want to be but what people can tell you is big ideas and rough sketches of Where they want to be in the future but much more importantly they can tell you where they're at right now and If they can't tell you where they're at right now That's not a good sign If they can't tell you how their business fundamentally works if they can't tell you how their teams put together and how they function already Maybe you can solve that. Maybe you want to be in the business of business consulting. It's good money But know that that's what you're doing that you are no longer on a project. You are business consultant doing something utterly different So how do we get this information out of them? How do we get them to tell us their dreams and where they're at today? We get them to tell us the story Fortunately human beings think in stories fundamentally true. There's a quote from Lisa Cron who's a cultural anthropologist who Said if opposable tone if opposable thumbs taught us to hold on Stories told us to what what to hold on to? This predates language the story does it's the fundamental construct of how humans communicate Quick example here everybody go like this real quick. This isn't some kind of symbol. This is just a thing And now everybody put your fingers on your chin. I Said chin Actual spoken word the actual language part of our language is about seven to nine percent depending on who you ask It's a fragment. It is a very very very small thing Understanding the whole context of a thing in that story is Much more important. I like to think of stories isn't this model There's a bunch of ways to think about stories This is what I learned going up through improv classes and theater Story spine every story you've ever heard in your entire life goes something like this once upon a time There was a thing there was a world that existed and every day there's this pattern that happened But one day the pattern broke and Because of that a series of events happen because of that another series of events happen until finally There's a resolution to that change event and ever since then there's a new reality That's every episode of Scooby-Doo Gilligan's Island Every movie you've ever seen in your life is some version of this Memento is backwards It I think it maps to a really nice sine wave or partial sine wave of math geeks excuse me for misusing your term That goes something like this where you have a reality that's going along going along going along All of a sudden there's a change event something has triggered it and because of that There's another series of events another series of events and another series and it's still finally we reached resolution and then a new reality exists I Firmly believe that if we're going to do projects sales anything with a client that gives us any kind of money We need to have them explain that far end deeply How is this work today? What's going on exactly? How is this world exists today and why am I talking to you? What's the change event? What's because but one day? If they don't have those things Why am I talking to you like you need a business consultant if you can't explain once upon a time and every day and but one day There's no trigger event They don't know any of the rest of this except This beautiful piece, which is where they want to be They want to be able to sleep at night knowing this and they can tell you that it doesn't have to be realistic But they can tell you it and if you can map between here and there Oh, that's that's a project to find that is a goal written down with a date You can make those dreams come true Let me give you a quick example of how this would work in the business world because I see some faces are like Good business one day. There's a shoe company or once upon a time There was a shoe company and they sold shoes online and every day they could handle about a thousand orders But one day they got 12,000 orders and the system broke and a cascade failure happened and everything went offline And because of that they realized we need a better system We should just improve the one we have Because of that they realized that their current way of doing things was not completely scalable and they went on a hunt for a Better vendor and because of that they realized their requirements set didn't actually match anything off the shelf And they needed a custom build and order this thing until finally they hired a development agency that built them their new system leveraging off-the-shelf tools and Parts and they could handle 10x the traffic and ever since that day they've handled up to a hundred thousand orders a day just fine That's the story of zappos or any other shoe company that sells shoes online these days Notice how the part where they hire developer and they do a bunch of work is the very last piece Your story is not their story. You are a Small component and a much larger story for any body you ever work with Not to slight your work at all. It's an important part. It's an exciting part But unless you step back and see oh, I am part of this whole thing. There's a world that existed before I got here There's a world that will exist after I leave. There's things that happen that I have no control of Over there's things they tried before I got here and those failures are going to influence the way they treat me In the way that they work together Those of you who develop or do any kind of project management. How often do you ask so tell me about your last failure? When's the last time you failed doing a project? How did that work out for you? Nobody that's a crazy question How many ask well, what was your experience like working with a previous developer? You've worked with other developers before right you have great. What was that experience like go details for me? It's not a common question. It's a discovery question The kind of thing I learned was asked have you bought something like this before? As a salesperson have you ever gone through a complex sales cycle to buy enterprise job of a middleware? No, well this explain how that's gonna work then because this is a process This is not a transaction where I want to sell you this bottle of water you say yes I want to bottle bottle water you give me a dollar give you the water we're done That is the entire transaction am I talking about those kind of sales talking about bigger things bigger projects than that That comes down to asking questions. How do we map that? How do we get all that together is? We ask a bunch of questions, which gets us back to this crazy list again Questions don't matter. We'll get back to that not the questions. Don't matter. They really do But they're not necessary to write down at this moment before we get to that We want to talk about some ground rules some things that will be universally true and every discovery process from here for the rest of your life that were beaten to me by vicious VPs of sales and People that taught me this stuff if at all humanly possible you want to do this face-to-face Now there is a period of time where this was not a hundred percent possible but we live in the world of zoom and Google hangouts for what it works and Skype if you're really in a pinch How's this meeting going anybody? How's this meeting going? How do you know what's going good? Was that yes smiling that guy looks a little concerned, but she's happy So this meeting I think is overall going well Now if we close our eyes for just a second if you close your eyes I'll put up a new slide How's this meeting going? I didn't change slides everybody The same meeting is going great, but you don't know there's visual clues again The actual Verbal part of our communication is a fraction. It's a very small fraction Nonverbal communication clues that's how we evolve that is how our brains process Dealing with other people is micro one of the things that makes humans very unique is we have more fine twitch motor Control of our face than any other thing on earth We can control our face at a very very fine grain level and we have adapted over a long time to be able to Pinpoint see oh something's wrong Or that's great So if at all possible see their face when you're talking to them because there's a big difference between that's a good idea And that's a good idea and that's a good idea Those are the same words, but three completely different responses moving on We need to ask open-ended questions This is actually pretty straightforward. There's only six ways to start an open-ended question. Anybody know what they are only six ways Yes, yes All the W's and the H. There's only six ways to Answer our ask an open-ended question and they all start with us one of these words Maybe not grammatically perfect. They have to start with this. Don't think that's a grammatical rule I'm giving you as a question writer, but The difference between the first the first one and the second one there Person who signs off on this no And they just stare there and stand there and look at you. I Don't know how many times that's happened to me in my life where like right is the answer this no Alright, well, what is the answer as Carl Sagan always says if we can eliminate a step. That's eliminate the step Let's let's get rid of it. So who signs off on this you're gonna get a different answer Asking someone specifically like do you want this on the left page side of the page and they're not a hundred percent sure what page layout even means Is a much different answer and like where do you imagine seeing the pictures when you log in when you get your page Where do you imagine this looks like? Very different answer and then yes or no of all of those questions I am firmly convinced from all my experience that the why matters more than anything else The who's important as far as getting budget The what well, that's the bigger picture. We're talking about They don't know the what they know what they're trying to get to but they do know the why if they don't have a firm why You probably don't have a project quite honestly if there's not a reason they're doing a thing They're never gonna do a thing asking the why Will expose the bigger business problem the bigger issue. They're actually trying to solve that It's not just I want a new website nobody wants a website They want the results of the work of a website when people visit the website and do something So figuring out what that is is asking the why why is this? Important you why is your company even doing this in the first place? They don't have a good answer to that It's not gonna be a good project Further on the why? Every single person you talk to in a process is a person Every one of us is motivated by completely individual things every single one of us has Selfish desire to preserve our lives further it improve it And there's nothing wrong with that that is just being personal that is a person being a person So if you can connect and this isn't universally true of every project you'll ever do But if you can connect it the why they want to do a thing to a personal reason it carries so much more weight I'll give you an example I'll give you two scenarios here the first scenario if I don't get this project done My bonus this year will be two percent less Is that person motivated to buy a? Little bit If I don't get this project done I will lose my job and my kid won't be able to go to college and I will be homeless in the next six months Is that person motivated? Yes, they're gonna be on board and if they're signed off and they're with you They're gonna fight they're gonna champion all the way through because that person is gonna lose their house if this fails Again that's an extreme example But if you can connect to something personally like this is my business and I have to do it better this way because well You know what I want to build that extension. We're going vacations That's why when they sell you time shares ask those kind of questions. They want to tie it to that personal need ground rules Listen way more than you talk I like a 75 25% rule because you do have to talk you have to lead the conversation But don't dominate the conversation you want to ask them This is their phase and qualification talk about yourself all you want once we get to procurement and Proposal you're all almost a hundred percent gonna talk about yourself because you're gonna explain exactly how you're gonna do The thing that they told you they want it done back in discovery so if You're not The person that speaks The person who speaks the most in a sales conversation loses every time no exception next time you're in sales and conversation just stop and let them talk and Half the time you can let them talk themselves out of selling you the thing or they'll talk you out of buying the thing if they talk long enough Get to a yes and stop or is this talking about yourself again? You'll have a whole chance to do this later in the process Because if you do this that client is gonna go that person not listen to me because how many people have ever Answered the phone and heard I'm blah blah blah from blah blah blah, and I'm selling blah blah blah in your business blah blah blah blah blah blah That's the most annoying thing in the universe Because you don't know who I am. I know you're not listening to me There's no way you can help me because you don't know me you don't know my situation You don't know what I need and discovery that's all about setting them up to talk about themselves But that's unusual a little bit like to sit down and interview someone and say I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions And I'm gonna ask you for real the answer That's not a hundred percent an intuitive process. So set up some ground rules with them Let them know what this process looks like they don't know maybe they do this is I randomly googled person pointing a guide pointing Directions this came up, and I've always liked this picture if I ever go to Gettysburg. I'm doing this tour Because I feel very confident that this guy knows where I'm going Because I go down that street then not a street down that street. I know where to get to in this tour Unless I'd been to Gettysburg and had done this before I wouldn't feel confident going but now this guy's shown me the process Oh, I can do that This isn't again if you've asked him if you ever bought something like this before have you ever gone through a process before? Have you ever worked with a developer on something like this before? Oh, you haven't let's stop and explain how this works Because you're gonna get confused you're gonna get thrown off by things and you're gonna panic and when you panic I'm gonna get angry emails and calls But if you know what's coming you're probably still in an email, but it won't be as frantic. It won't be as crazy. I Like to give people freedoms when I'm explaining my expectations like this is how this should work But don't worry you have a lot of freedom in this thing. These are the ones. I always use You can answer any questions. I don't know you don't have to know the whole world You don't have to boil the ocean here You can say I don't know but I can get back to you. That's a great answer I love that answer because you're gonna involve with the people in the process and we're gonna get to a right answer It's weird to talk about personal stakes in business. It just feels weird It's not we're all people Give them the freedom to do that Freedom from her poach that you're not gonna go back to their bosses like you're never gonna believe with your employee told me Your department head has no idea what they're doing whatsoever. No, no, honestly You're freedom for us. This is me and you to having a conversation and we're gonna figure this out together And we're gonna partner up on this and the last one is my favorite one I've always phrased this not as you have a freedom to dream that sounds really big. It's like here's a magic wand in six months What does this all look like? What's your world look like? Here's a magic wand Don't worry about the how or even if it's possible. Just what does your world look like in six months if we're happy? The freedom to dream is huge being transparent is Super important. We only buy from people we trust or if there's no other options Comcast I buy Sonic in San Francisco, by the way, but transparency a hundred percent leads to trust let them know Upfront like hey, I'm in this to make money as a developer and I want to help you with your business as well But here's all my expectations and goals and here's how it's all laid out and if you're true to that Your trust will only go up over time and when push comes to shove later in the process when something does go off the rails because it will Almost always somewhere along the line They'll be like I trust this person because everything else they've ever told me was on the money I have no reason not to trust them And if you're transparent from day one, that's super easy to gain. It's a process But they discover you won't have all your questions answered all of them By each of the stakeholders in the group And the group itself if you're dealing with a single client This is super easy because it's one person if you're dealing with a committee You need to go in and actually interview them all and figure out what's going on with them And you want to have your questions thoroughly answered before we get done with the discovery phase Discovery's not the end of the project. It's a part of the project and no It's not a hundred percent lockdown if you need to come back and re-scope something later Know that you need to do another scoping exercise in a new discovery process But to know that you're done with discovery means that you are ready to sit down and write a proposal and all of your questions are answered I fly a lot last year about 120,000 miles in the air all in and one of my favorite things to hear in the world is prepared doors for All-call or prepared doors for cross-check and all-call Because that means we've landed safely and the flight attendants are getting the cabin ready to go And we are gonna open the door any second now I'm getting off this plane nobody died hooray And I know that because that's the very very very last thing on the flight checklist There's the pre-flight checklist the flight checklist and then the post-flight checklist I don't care about the post-flight checklist the flight checklist the last thing is like prepare doors for all-call Our unarmed doors or whatever it is You should have a checklist you should know like I am done with this process because I got to hear all of these things happened Please just back to our questions Not a bad list of questions. I googled project management question examples This found this URL. It's not a bad one But it also found 80 others on that same day, and this is just the one I picked There aren't bad questions, and if I sat down and went through a methodical methodical process Every single time with this set of questions and fine-tuned it for my customers. I would find success Is it flawless? No, there's people are people, but having a fine-tuneable process Makes all the difference between super angry customers that hate you and won't buy again And people are like yes, I am with you and partnered on this and we're sitting together So I mean told I have one minute. I didn't manage my time while this at all people So unfortunately not a lot of time for questions in conversation, but I will be out at my table But I do have time for one or two. Yeah, let's say we're a little behind schedule, but um Questions or observations What are the hardest parts of negotiation and how do you resolve them over in the Drupal space? There's a talk that got really popular last year. It's retired now called project management the musical and it has this wonderful line in it Just a spoonful of research help the stakeholder calm down It's all about getting those data points early before the money is on the table before there is That process before you get push comes to shove in negotiation of saying hey remember your kids not gonna college if we don't do this Hey, remember these data points you shared with me and that these metrics don't increase You know your company is gonna make 20% less money next year Remember that? That's what we're doing here If it doesn't bring that value then probably they shouldn't do it, but if you can prove on paper Hey, the verses by this proposal. These are the results and these results are exactly what you wanted Why are you now saying that wasn't what you wanted? Do we need to rediscover? Do we need to re-scope this? The answer sometimes is yes that the money is just not there Sometimes it's like well. Yeah, we can do this for less, but then we can't do these parts So let's just cover up those lines. We'll deliver all of this that you want, but not these parts Is that fail-proof? Probably not, but that's helped me in a lot of complex sales Just going back to that discovery and the research I did early One more All right, I'll leave you with this then The two things first you all have more knowledge in your head about individual Discovery processes and real-world experience in this collectively than I could ever have in my lifetime So talk to everyone else here. It's word camp everybody shares friendly and happy to share their thoughts and feelings on this stuff I am not the subject matter expert of anything in the entire world I'm just the guy that submitted a talk that they let do this So hopefully you can all have a conversation yourself or maybe write your own talk if you have some better points in here But very lastly just because it's on video if you all could just indulge me and let's get a discovery Discovery discovery discovery Alright good Thank you