Code with Jason
Code with Jason
243 - Johanna Rothman, Author and Consultant
Johanna Rothman shares how to overcome the isolation of remote work by rebuilding community and fostering connections. She talks about the balance between creativity and knowledge, how understanding client needs is more important than just following requests, and why value-based work often beats hourly pay. Johanna also explains how experimenting, using feedback loops, and refining ideas can lead to better results in both business and writing.
Life hasn't been the same since the pandemic. Instead of working at an office around people all day, like we used to, most of us now work remotely from home, in isolation and solitude. We sit and we stare at the cold blue light of our computer screens toiling away at our meaningless work, hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year. Sometimes you wonder how you made it this far without blowing your fucking brains out. If only there were something happening out there, something in the real world that you could be a part of, something fun, something exciting, something borderline, illegal, something that gives you a sense of belonging and companionship, something that helps you get back that zest for life that you have forgotten how to feel because you haven't felt it in so long. Well, ladies and gentlemen, hold on to your fucking asses. What I'm about to share with you is going to change your life. So listen up.
Speaker 1:I, jason Sweat, host of the Code with Jason podcast. I'm putting on a very special event. What makes this event special? Perhaps the most special thing about this event is its small size. It's a tiny conference, strictly limited to 100 attendees, including speakers. This means you'll have a chance to meet pretty much all the other attendees at the conference, including the speakers. The other special thing about this conference is that it's held in Las Vegas. This year it's going to be at the MGM Grand, and you'll be right in the middle of everything on the Las Vegas strip.
Speaker 1:You got bars, restaurants, guys dressed up like Michael Jackson. What other conference do you think you can go to, dear listener? Or you can waltz into a fancy restaurant wearing shorts and a t-shirt, order a quadruple cheeseburger and a strawberry daiquiri at 7 30 am and light up a cigarette right at your table. Well, good luck, because there isn't one Now. As if all that isn't enough, the last thing I want to share with you is the speakers. And remember, dear listener, at this conference, you won't just see the speakers up on the stage, you'll be in the same room with them, breathing the same air. Here's who's coming.
Speaker 2:Irina Nazarova. Oh yeah, here's who's coming For Freedom Dumlao Prathmasiva, fido Von Zastrow, ellen Rydal Hoover and me.
Speaker 1:There you have it, dear listener, To get tickets to Sin City Ruby 2025, which takes place April 10th and 11th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Go to sincityrubycom. Now on to the episode. Hey, today I'm here with Johanna Rothman. Johanna, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I am delighted to be here.
Speaker 1:I'm delighted to have you here. You and I met in the RANS leadership Slack, I believe it was, and I found you interesting. I visited your website before we ever talked, and I found you interesting because it appeared to me, based on your website, that you were doing similar consulting work to what I'm doing some of and what I'm trying to do more of. And so I reached out and we had a nice conversation and now here we are. But for anyone who's not familiar with you, can you tell us a little bit about the kind of consulting you do and stuff like that?
Speaker 3:Sure, I consult all around managing product development. So it's management of people and projects and portfolios. It's product development in terms of planning and and all the actions that you need to actually create and, well, figure out and create the product. So it's all of that. I used to think I was more of a project management consultant and yes, I have done a lot of that, but all of this product development is a system and the more I practice and the more I work with my clients, the more I realize I have, I have, things to say about every part of that system. So that's what I do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I can. I can appreciate that difference between project management and product management, or product development, or however you want to put it. Um, because managing the process is, I think, the less valuable of the two. Um, because you can. You can do everything very well in the process. But if you're building a product that's not very good, then then. But if you're building a product that's not very good, then then you're not going to get something that's very good. But if you do have a good product, um, obviously you still want your process to be good, but the product itself, I think, is the most important thing well, and and the environment that people work in has so much to do with how well they can create the product Right.
Speaker 3:So, if you have, I am old this is gray hair, not blonde and I have been a woman, a woman in tech, for my entire career my entire career. So I have worked with some very narrow teams that happened to be mostly men but and mostly white men. But that wasn't the real issue. The real issue was they had limited experience, all of which was very similar. They had limited understanding of their actual customers. They had no diversity of thought.
Speaker 3:While I think I am an extrovert by nature and if I sit on my hands I can actually stop talking, but we need very few teams, need more than one extrovert. But when you don't have a diversity of experience and a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of how you think about the product, you tend not to get very good products. And this is not because people are stupid or idiots not at all. It's just they don't. If you create a silo team or a single kind of experience team, it's really hard to get the product that you want. So process will definitely not save you right, and experience and expertise will definitely not save you. So it all starts with how does a manager figure out how to hire people and how then to create the environment for a team to succeed? And if a team is missing some kind of expertise, how do you help them first realize that and then fill that in?
Speaker 1:There is so much in there that I want to dig deeper on. I'm trying to figure out where to start. So there's the environment, which I want to talk more about. Um, yeah, and the other thing I think I want to go deeper on is is related to the diversity and depth of experience and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Um, in my opinion, based on my experiences in various different companies, there is a high value placed on creativity and innovation, and I think creativity and all that stuff is, frankly, really overrated and knowledge is really underrated.
Speaker 1:Because if you take a bunch of people okay, I'm going to use an extreme example to illustrate the point if you take a bunch of 18 year old boys and put them in a room and tell them to brainstorm ideas about how to save the world or something, no offense to to 18 year old boys, but they're probably going to come up with a bunch of really dumb ideas, whereas instead, if you ask you know, let's, I guess we can take the same group of people and ask them to spend 10 years traveling the world and reading books and studying and talking to people and stuff like that, and then come back and ask them to come up with some solutions to some problems. You're going to get so much of a higher quality response from them and I think the example I just gave was like kind of weird and not very good, but hopefully, hopefully it carries the point.
Speaker 3:Um, I think a lot of teams could stand to again focus less on creativity and more on finding things out and, like you said, understanding their customer and all that stuff yeah, what you what you encapsulated very well was this whole idea of how fast can each of us learn, and especially in in product development, how fast can we learn as a team, and that the speed of learning allows us to recognize when we don't have all the necessary skills. That's good, and we can then be creative in how we address that. But I think it's very important that while let me say this a little bit differently we are not reinventing the wheel, right?
Speaker 3:Very, most of us work on things we have we have never done before, and that they are at least slightly different from the way everybody else has done them up until now. That's the point of technology, right? We work in high-tech organizations on high-tech products. We work in high-tech organizations on high-tech products. If we had, why would we do the same thing again, right? So we have this built-in bias towards creativity and innovation. However, as you said, the more we can figure out how to learn from things that are adjacent to us learn from things that are adjacent to us. That's the whole point of traveling and being in other organizations and having a diversity of experience. The more we can learn from adjacent ideas, the more we can take those and then say I always get this wrong. Is it synthesized, if we take a bunch of ideas and then make them something new?
Speaker 1:Let's see there's synthesize and analyze. Analyze is to break down and synthesize is to put together right.
Speaker 3:I always get those wrong. I always have to look them up. So see, yeah, I keep learning and I still never learn that part. But I think it's synthesizing that. I mean that we take all these various ideas and we create something new from them, but we need exposure to all those ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I want to. Okay, here's an analogy that's. Maybe I'll make a second pass at what I was trying to say with my. With my first example, um, the Beatles. One of the reasons they were so good is because they, they exposed themselves to so much music. Um, and you know they, they were in a certain environment.
Speaker 1:John and Paul grew up in England in the 1940s and 50s and they just ravenously consumed all this American rock and roll. That was such a new thing at that time and they were greatly inspired. Greatly inspired, and it was. It was a time in the world, um, when there was a, a cultural wave happening and the beatles, they like got right ahead of that wave and they like surfed the wave.
Speaker 1:Um, and so they had all these inputs and they spent like so many years just like learning other people's songs and they like played 10 hours a day in in Germany, uh, taking all kinds of pills so they can stay on their feet for so long. Um, and then, because they had so many inputs, they had the uh, they had a source to draw on, to be so creative. If you had taken John, paul, george and Ringo and like raised them on the moon until age 20 or something like that, and then gave them some guitars, like their music would suck. It was only because of the inputs that they were able to be creative, so creativity comes from knowledge.
Speaker 3:Right. So you said something really interesting. They were exposed to all this stuff. They integrated it into their practice because they actually played covers for a long time, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure they did for a long time, didn't they? Yeah, yeah, I'm pretty sure they did. And then, when they started to create their own songs, they still practiced and learned from the audience reactions to them.
Speaker 1:That's how they could figure out what is a good song for us yeah, yeah, yeah, and so I think a lot of people think creativity comes from yeah, and so I think a lot of people think creativity comes from.
Speaker 3:I don't know where exactly they think it comes from but it's like a mindset or something like that.
Speaker 1:You have to get into a creative mindset, but that's not it at all. It comes from giving yourself inputs and then those inputs mix and create new ideas. Yep, yep, yeah, okay, so I wanted to touch on that. And then the environment factor. It's kind of related, I guess. You know, I think, man, there's so much, there's so much here, a lot of product managers, and that doesn't have to be somebody with a job title of product manager. It could be a CEO or something like that. Steve Jobs was a product manager, or however you might want to put it.
Speaker 1:A lot of people in those positions, I think they see their jobs as to respond to customer requests. People ask for such and such, and so they make a ticket for that and send it to customer requests. People ask for such and such, and so they make a ticket for that and send it to the developers, and then they build it and show it to the customer. I don't think that's a good way of looking at your job. I think your job and I'm curious your thoughts on this, johanna, I would suspect that you agree largely.
Speaker 1:I think a better way to look at your job is to understand your customer's world and to help your customer. Help your customer, help equip your customer with what they need in order to be able to do the things that they need to do, and you shouldn't let your customer design your product. You should understand your customer's world and then you should design your product. If you're only responding to customers requests, then frankly, I think that's kind of lazy, which, to be fair, people aren't being consciously lazy. Maybe they just don't know any other way. But if you do that, you're kind of abdicating your responsibility as a designer. Um, you need to. You need to be the one to design your product and not let the customer do it. But I'm curious your thoughts on that okay.
Speaker 3:So I have many thoughts on that. I would love to see product managers whatever their title right start off understanding the corporate strategy and understanding how this product fits into the overall corporate strategy, make options in the roadmap and figure out. Ask the teams or team to do one or two, solve one or two problems. Now see how the customers work, use that little feedback loop right. And then there's the larger feedback loop of once. We actually have a few things that the customer can use. How does the customer respond? Do we want to change anything? I would like all of those feedback loops to then feed back into strategy, and I have a couple of blog posts about that. As soon as I finish this book, I will work on the continual planning book, which is about how to marry corporate strategy, product strategy and team tactics.
Speaker 3:However, I rarely see that level of consciousness at any part of the organization. That's because what I most often see is the race for short-term gains right, how fast can we make money? Now? I really like making money. I want to make money fast too. I have nothing opposed to that. Too often in that race to make the next dollar, we don't even consider the millions of dollars and possibilities that we are not even examining. Right, if you think about any of your clients and I certainly think a lot about mine, certainly think a lot about mine One of the things I have done with a lot of my startup clients is really ask them to re-examine their strategy every week or two, as soon as the team finishes, something they can ask themselves are we still playing in the right place? Are we still offering customers solutions to the problems that they have, not the solutions the customers ask for? Wasn't it Henry Ford who said if I ask my customers what they want, they would say a faster horse, something like that. I'm sure I messed that up.
Speaker 1:That's my understanding of that quote. Yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:So I think it's really important to say what is the problem we want to solve, what are our strengths right now that allow us to solve those problems, and do we need to change our strengths to solve the problems we really want to solve, right? So Amazon is a distribution company. They distribute many, many things, including products and services. Well, I should say products. They started with books, but it's now all kinds of products.
Speaker 3:But I have not looked at their corporate filings recently, but at one point AWS was the moneymaker. It all went to distribution. That was their core strength, but it was not books or products or anything like that. And as somebody who distributes her books on Amazon, I'm always a little bit worried when I realize the part of Amazon that has my products and services is maybe 1% or 2% of their company. Right, it's no longer the big thing that drives Amazon, but if they want to stay in the distribution business, they will probably keep up with the book business. But I think that people forget what are our strengths, as our potential customers can use them, and if we are not playing to our strengths to solve customers' problems, we don't have an effective strategy and then we just randomly chase the dollars as opposed to chasing problems. That would allow us to make a whole lot more money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I agree. I have to admit that I think I don't have the perhaps experience to be able to fully appreciate everything that you said, but I think I agree. And pre-show, we talked a little bit about that too. Um, first of all, can you tell us a little bit about the books you've already written, and then can you tell us about this book you're working on now?
Speaker 3:well, um, I've written over 20 books. Do you really want me to tell you?
Speaker 1:well, you, don't have to tell me individually about everyone, but maybe the general topics and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:So I think of my books as in three buckets. There's the management bucket, which is the most recent books. There are the modern management made easy books and then there's the product development bucket, which is the most recent book. There is the Project Life Cycles book and then what I'm calling the personal development bucket, which is I think that oh yeah, the Successful Independent Consulting book is the most recent book there. So I'm working on a book called Effective Public Speaking and I know I have a subtitle for it, but I don't remember what that subtitle is and that's because I have not practiced saying it. I just remember the main title and in our pre-show banter I said I was galloping towards the end but I realized the first couple of chapters were boring and not really engaging. And this often happens to us nonfiction writers that we don't really get going, we don't really know what we want to say until we're in the middle of saying it.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:Right, I have a file in my drive I use by writing in Google Docs because it's easy for my editor to then see everything and comment on it. I have a file in my drive called Old Titles and Old Descriptions that must have 100 possible titles and at least 20 descriptions, because I was not sure where I was going. And even though I try and have a user journey right, because a book is a product, products have user journeys, so I never write to an outline. I don't understand how people can write to an outline.
Speaker 1:I don't know if anybody actually does that. We were taught that in school, but it never occurred to me to ask like, hey, teacher, have you ever written anything by doing this? Because I don't know that anybody really does that right, that's one of the myths.
Speaker 3:I I said in free your inner non-fiction writer. I said don't do that, because your teachers wanted you to use an outline so they had a shot of actually understanding what you were saying in in your written piece. But I don't know of. I know of two writers who write to outlines and let's just say, their stuff does not inspire me to think differently. And it might be me right. I have tremendous respect for these people. They are great people and other people have found their work very interesting and useful. I find it boring. So, yeah, so I don't use an outline for anything. I often have I start with a problem and then I go from there. So in the Effect public speaking book I realized, yeah, I'm going to have to redo those first couple of chapters and that's fine Because I now know what I want to say. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Sorry to interrupt, but this has a tie into programming too. Like you know, people think about code as being like a medium for creating a work product. It's like bricks in a building or something like that. You don't just like play with the bricks to figure out what kind of building you want to build, or something like that. But writing and code also, because I think writing a program is a lot more similar to writing a book than it is to building a building. Writing is not only a medium for creating a work product, it's a medium for thinking.
Speaker 1:There's a Paul Graham tweet that I really like. He said if you're writing without thinking, you only think you're thinking. Like he said if you're writing without thinking, you only think you're thinking. And that has really stuck with me because I found that, you know, if I'm like sitting, if I'm standing in line at the grocery store or something, and I'm like trying to think about something because I'm always trying to think about something productive I find that I never really make much progress. But then if I sit down and like write out my thoughts, then I can make progress, because your mind just doesn't have enough RAM to hold everything that you need to hold. You have to write it to disk in order to be able to make progress. And once you see it written on the page, quite often I look at what I wrote and I'm like that's what.
Speaker 3:I wrote.
Speaker 1:I don't really think that I don't buy what I just wrote. And now that you see what you wrote, it's so much easier to see something that's wrong and figure out how to adjust it to make it right than it is to come up with the right thing on the first try. Same exact thing with writing and with code, and so the idea that you can create an outline and then like, stick to that outline and your book is a reflection of your original outline is just so unrealistic I'm not against the idea of like, like.
Speaker 1:I make like a very informal list of topics I want to include in the book or something like that. But I have no expectation that I'm going to stick with it, because the process of writing down my thoughts is going to force me to realize what I really want to say.
Speaker 3:I feel like writing is coning. I should say programming for me, right? I'm an old, old programmer. I started in 1977. And the thing I really liked about programming was I had a problem to solve and while the code was interesting I mean I worked in assembly language in Fortran for years, and then some proprietary languages like Forth and then Lisp. So my first object-oriented programming language was Lisp, because fourth was not really oh, it just was not. So I really think in terms of what is the problem I want to solve and how is at least one way to get there.
Speaker 3:And when I started to write, I realized I felt I had the same feelings about my writing that I did when I was programming, that I was learned by doing.
Speaker 3:Until I actually wrote something down on the page, I had no idea what I was really thinking. I thought I knew what I was thinking, but no, I did not. So for me and I say this in for your inner non-fiction writer that non-fiction writing requires thinking, and the problem with non-fiction writing, if it's really a problem, is that we learn as we go. So I have this notion of cycling, right, this is to me. It feels exactly the same as programming, because I would write. I would write some code and then I would test it and then I would say, oh, that did not do exactly what I wanted it to do. It was fine until here, or I didn't do that thing at all over there. So to me it feels exactly like I'm programming again, which probably for other people sounds strange. But I'm really glad you think that too, because it really it has the same mental challenges for me as programming did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I think it's very similar and the parallels don't stop there. Like, if you change something fundamental in a book and it could be fiction or non-fiction um, if you change something fundamental, then you're gonna have to change a bunch of other parts of the book. So, uh, to keep everything consistent, just like you do in a program. Okay, let's see. I was asking you about books. Um, I want to ask you a very different question about books. Sometimes people ask me how I create what they think is so much content. Because I have this podcast, I have a YouTube channel. Because I have this podcast, I have a YouTube channel, I write blog posts, I write books and other stuff. I have a monthly snail mail newsletter and a weekly email newsletter. And people are, like, how do you manage to do all this stuff? Oh, and I work to make money also, because none of those things make money on their own. It's just a negligible amount of money, basically. So have you ever had people ask you like 20 books? Like how did you?
Speaker 3:manage to do all that. Yeah, people ask me that all the time and I say you know, 15 minutes at a time. I can always find 15 minutes during even the busiest day to write something. Now, if I'm at a conference and I'm, I'm at the parties and evening or I'm doing all that other stuff, maybe I don't actually have 15 minutes that day, but I guarantee I can have 15 minutes sometime, or maybe only five or 10 minutes.
Speaker 3:I think the key is when we you and I have practiced our writing, we have practiced our content creation. And if I said to you you're going to have a day where you're busy from 7 in the morning until 10 at night, are you going to find five minutes to write down several ideas or a couple of sentences or even a paragraph? You would probably say, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm going to find five minutes during that day because I will be exposed to all kinds of things that day, so I want to make notes of them. Will any of that turn into a final blog post or a final email or a final something? Maybe not in the form in which you wrote it, but all of that is fodder for actually creating something later and in times like this, where it's the summer and I think all of my clients are off summering and vacationing, I actually have many more hours, so I'm capitalizing on those hours while my clients are off vacationing because I can finish a bunch of stuff. That's ideal for me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I approach it a similar way. Maybe about a year ago I developed a habit of printing off whatever I'm working on, of printing off whatever I'm working on, like sometimes I work on a computer, but nowadays I actually do most of my writing just by hand. I have this certain book, that is, it's like exactly eight and a half by 11. I have it in my hand right now, and so I always like carry this book with me along with whatever it is, whatever piece of writing that I'm working on, and so I'll like print it off and then make edits and then type in my edits and then print it off again, and it's just a constant cycle In my office.
Speaker 1:My home office is like in a building separate from my house, but like when I, when I go into my house, I'll bring my writing with me house.
Speaker 1:But like when I, when I go into my house, I'll bring my writing with me, and anytime there is a anytime, I'm like held up for a few minutes for some reason, like I'm waiting for somebody or something like that. I just have five minutes or whatever, whatever. Um, it's a light enough type of work that I can like jump into it and be productive for five minutes and then stop. That I can like jump into it and be productive for five minutes and then stop. It's not the kind of thing where you have to have like four hours to dedicate to it or else it will have been a waste of time. So that's one way, and I also find that it's important to have a continuous thread like working on it for like 15 minutes every day is more productive, I think, than working on it for like 15 minutes every day is more productive, I think, than working on it for like four hours once a week that's my experience also, um, when I wrote my first book.
Speaker 3:Um, well, my first couple of books, um, first hiring. The original hiring book was Hiring the Best Knowledge, workers, techies and Nerds. We will talk about titles at some other point, maybe in another podcast, because I had succeeded at terrible titles for too many of my books. But I wrote, I used one-hour chunks and I would get stuck in the middle of the one hour chunk and I still, I would still say, but I have to finish something here. I only have this hour, and it would have been much more useful if I'd said, ah, I'm done for now, I'm going to go off and do something else and let the ideas percolate and then come back to it later for another 20 minutes. I did not realize how much percolation time, thinking time, I needed for the writing, and when.
Speaker 1:Esther and I, yeah, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say I talked with somebody else years ago on this podcast on this very topic. It's like attuning I don't know how to put it but like matching the kind of work that you're going to do to your current mood, or however you want to put it. I think that's a really smart idea. Like, sometimes you're in a creative mood, Sometimes you're in just a turn the crank kind of mood. Sometimes you're in a mood where you just can't get anything done and it's actually more productive to just give yourself a break than to try to work, because after you've rested you can be way more productive than if you had tried to push through. So I just wanted to comment that I totally agree with that way of looking at it.
Speaker 3:Well, and you would think I would have learned from my next experience, when Esther and I wrote Behind Closed Doors, Secrets of Great Management. We wrote that book three full times. The first time we each wrote chapters and then exchanged them for editing and I will. So we gave it to Jerry Weinberg Gerald M Weinberg, Dean Jerry Weinberg and he said it's got great content but it's really boring. So we rewrote the entire book and we sent it to him again and he said it's even more boring. So thank God, Jerry told us I mean that's really funny.
Speaker 3:So then Esther actually had the brilliant idea we would change how to tell this as a story and show all the. We would also pair write it. So instead of exchanging chapters and this is back in the early 00s, so we had to actually get together, which was not a big problem we would spend a week at her house or a week at my house. It took us about eight weeks to write the entire book again and now we have a classic. I mean, Beyond closed doors, Secrets of great management, is a best seller, it's a classic in the field. And that's because, Thank goodness, Jerry gave us the feedback that it was really, really boring Because we had. We could write that book in eight weeks Because we had already Thought everything through. We already knew what we wanted to say, and that was before I had the not-so-novel idea that writing needs thinking and learning that we cannot write without the thinking and learning.
Speaker 1:So, right, yeah, it's like the, the like craft of writing is such a small layer, uh to it's, it's like the crust of the earth. You know it's. It's just a small layer on the outside, but the core of it is is the stuff you have to say um, like it's yeah, I think a big part of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, go ahead let me add something here. This is why I feel like it's programming to me, because back when I was writing code I this is back in the 70s and 80s structured design was all the rage and I was one of those people that said I must be stupid, because I cannot literally conceive of a system from the top down. I need to have an overarching goal, and then I write a little bit of code. I need another goal for this piece, and then I write a little bit of code, because my typing speed is not the gaining factor here.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Typing speed for anything, or writing speed if you're writing by hand, is not the gaining factor. It's how fast, can I think? Now that sounds what I did sounds a little bit like the Agile approaches. Now I thought I was just stupid. It turns out most of us, very few of us, are capable of envisioning an entire system and having that vision be right the first time, Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if that person exists, I'd love to meet that person, because, as far as I can tell, nobody has that capability, because you need that feedback from reality. I think they call it a wicked problem, like where you need to solve part of the problem before you can solve the whole problem yeah, yeah so.
Speaker 3:So that's why, anytime somebody asked me, somebody asked me recently, how many words do you type a minute?
Speaker 1:and I said, well enough, I don't know what that means yeah, yeah, that's why I am uncomfortable with people's um enthusiasm about github co-pilot, because it helps you with the part. That's not the bottleneck, um, and I could rant about that and I have before on this podcast, so I'll suppress myself. But yeah, in programming, the typing of the code isn't the bottleneck, it's thinking of what the code is going to be, and that's another part. It's like there are certain authors who are extremely prolific. You've written 20 books. Alan weiss, last time I knew, had written 60, some books. I don't know how many books isaac asimov wrote, but it was in the hundreds. Um, and like. That, I think, is because like is because the more inputs you give yourself and, ironically, the more you output, the more you can output, and so I am constantly giving myself extremely diverse inputs.
Speaker 1:I'm constantly reading and kind of like the writing stuff. I find ways to kind of fill in the cracks of my day with reading. I have a book in my truck that I always keep there in case I have some downtime and I, you know I can fill up that time by reading. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I have a bookshelf here in my office that you can see behind me. I have a bookshelf in my house and I have like all these stations. Well, I have like 12 books stacked on my nightstand, as if that makes any sense. But I have all these like reading stations so that wherever I am, I always have a book within reach and I can read a little bit.
Speaker 1:And I do read programming books, but I try to read. You know like right now I'm reading a book about statistical learning, another one. I bought this book called oh, what is it? It's Karl Popper Scientific. I forget what it's called. It's called like a method of scientific inquiry or something like that. Anyway, nothing to do with programming. Also, I lost the book immediately once I got it. I haven't even read a single page.
Speaker 1:And then I like to read about psychology, history, like all these very diverse things, because I think if a person only reads about technical content, then you'll be a very flat, one-dimensional person.
Speaker 1:And I try not to read new books, because new books haven't yet passed the filter of time and a lot of these books that are popular, they're just trendy and fashionable. They, their popularity is not actually merited, um, and so I like, am really obviously I don't refuse to read new books, but I'm really careful about it? Um, because everybody has like a limited budget that they can spend reading books and I don't want to waste it only reading fashionable books, like I'm so glad I didn't read all those Malcolm Gladwell books that everybody was reading at some point in time, and stuff like that. No offense, malcolm Gladwell, but yeah, I think giving myself all these inputs that are so diverse gives me always new. These new ideas are making contact with the existing ideas and I'm making connections between disparate areas and that gives me so much to say, such so that my rate of books that I want to write grows faster than than my ability to write books. And I wonder if it's maybe the same for you.
Speaker 3:I need to live at least another 20 years At least, because I have ideas for books, just for nonfiction, never mind the fiction I want to write. I mean, if all I did was write books, well first of all I wouldn't just write. Because I'm the same kind of a reader as you are. I always am reading at least one book at a time. I tend to read at least one fiction and one nonfiction at the same time, because I'm reading the nonfiction in preparation either for the book I think I might want to write in the future or as a reference for the book I'm writing now. Right, so there's always, thank God, there are so many books to read so I never have to worry about running out of books, but I have. I mean, if I write only the books I want to write, I have at least 10 more years of writing nonfiction books, and those are the ones I know about, not the ones I don't know about yet. So, yeah, I mean, my list of nonfiction books right now is at least eight deep that I want to write that I will not let myself write.
Speaker 3:Well, I should say writing quotes. I'm blogging about them, but I'm not writing them as as the book itself, and I find that I experiment a lot with my blog because I've been running my blog since 2003 and I can see, if anything, if people search on that, if it gets any traction anywhere. And even if it doesn't get traction, that's not a reason not to write the book. If I have something to say and I've experimented with it at least three times myself or with three different clients, it's worth writing the book. So I don't have to worry about every book being a bestseller. First of all, there's a huge difference between a bestseller. First of all, there's a real, a huge difference between a bestseller and the best selling, and my books tend to be best selling as in they continually sell over time oh, like, instead of one burst it's, it's sustained, yeah, yeah oh, uh-huh, yeah, interesting yeah, and, like my, my motivation for writing the book I'm writing right now, this um book about ruby on rails, testing is is different from when I originally did it.
Speaker 1:So this is my third time rewriting this book almost from scratch.
Speaker 1:The first one went out in 2019.
Speaker 1:The second edition, I guess you could say, went out in 2021, although it's actually a different book with a different title, and this one will be too, and as we talk it's 2024, and those first two books were a little bit experimental.
Speaker 1:I was like tossing something out into the world to see if anybody would be interested, and people were, which I was happy about. But this time it's not experimental and so I'm putting a huge amount of effort into this one because I know that the effort won't be a waste of time. But even if I only ever sell a few hundred copies because the last version of this book sold well, when I first launched it, it sold like 300 copies in a week and then after that it's been a very slow trickle, and with this, if it works out the exact same a few hundred and then a slow trickle that will be a financial failure completely. But I'm okay with that because, um, I think that having this book out there will do a ton to boost my authority for my consulting work, and so then the investment will pay itself back in that kind of indirect way.
Speaker 3:I figure I only ever need one workshop to pay for the writing of the book. That's pretty much my thinking about a book.
Speaker 1:Interesting, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah like, if I write this book and I get one big client engagement out of it, then that kind of pays back the time I spent on it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I mean, I never think of my hourly rate when I write a book. There are people who do that. That kind of makes me nuts. But my goal in writing any given book is to support people with this problem right, that's why I'm writing the book and to make some money by workshops or speaking or something about like that, after I have published the book. So that's one of the reasons I write, because I see a problem and I know how to solve that problem in a way that works for some people, so I write these books.
Speaker 1:And I bet that when that happens, you get engagements based on these books you've written, and then you go deeper into those same issues and you're like, oh man, that thing that I wrote a chapter on in this book, that's actually an entire book itself that thing that I wrote a chapter on in this book.
Speaker 3:That's actually an entire book itself. The portfolio book came out of Manage it your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, because I included a chapter about defensive portfolio management and I did not realize it at the time. I also had, um, a chapter in uh in the first hiring book about what to do when you don't have enough people, and it was all about choosing which projects to do when. So I had actually been writing about the project portfolio book, but it wasn't until I went to a client where I was focused on their approach to project management and somebody said I never say no to any requests, I only say when. And I thought that's really smart.
Speaker 3:They didn't actually say when. They actually never. Just they never said no, which was a problem. Never just they never said no, which was a problem. But yeah, but it was a way I could then frame all of these learnings I had about the portfolio, which meant it was useful to write the portfolio book. And I wrote the program management book in response to people trying to use the ideas and manage it and not succeeding at scale.
Speaker 1:So okay, um, yeah, it's. It's really interesting to me how there's again that feedback loop, um, with putting something out into the world and then and then gaining more experiences. And what I really, I really like is that the fact that I've written these books and created these blog posts and podcasts and stuff like that, it it kind of like earns me the privilege of getting into situations that I would not otherwise have been able to get into. Like people hire me to solve specific problems and so then I get a viewpoint that I never would have otherwise gotten, and then that can feed back into the content, which I really like.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, the nice thing about being a consultant is you get a lot of exposure to things you might not have gotten exposure to, even if you have a limited engagement. Right, and somebody and you have lunch with people or a meeting and they say, do you know anything about this thing? And I? That's when I get to say, yeah, that's not this engagement, but let me give you a 30 second overview of things you might be able to do and that often gets me the next engagement for that particular thing I see.
Speaker 1:I want to touch on something that we haven't said explicitly, but there's a lot of freelance programmers out there and I think you and I might have talked about this last time we talked, when we talked offline. But most freelance programmers just work by the hour and it's basically basically a job. I've talked about this on the show before, um, and you know I've done that before, and it's not, in my opinion, it's not great, um. I'm not saying that it's good or bad. That's a judgment for everybody to make for themselves but I think it's way better to do these kinds of things you and I have been doing, demonstrating our expertise. It's kind of two things it's one is demonstrating our expertise, but two is like getting exposure to the world, like letting people know you exist. That kind of thing I should have said it the other way around.
Speaker 1:It's like letting people know you exist and demonstrating your expertise to them so that then you can get hired. And you know, not only do you get more interesting work that way, more enjoyable work, but it tends to pay better, and that's the whole reason I'm doing any of this stuff is to get better work that pays better and then, like like we said, that can feed into creating more content, doing more marketing and getting even better work.
Speaker 3:I don't I don't know that I have a specific question or anything like that, but I wanted to raise that because I'm sure that's something you think about too I think about it all the time, especially especially in the RAND Slack, when we see new consultants saying I just there was somebody this week who said I just landed a client and we agreed on the rate per hour, but then there's no outcomes, there's no description of the project there. Now if you desperately need a job and you take a contract job and you're another pair of hands, that's fine, right, especially if you desperately need a job. But, as you said, it tends to devolve into worse and worse work. That's because everybody has the opposite incentive the contractor wants more hours, the client wants fewer hours. How can you hold these opposing views and still do great work? I don't know how to do that.
Speaker 3:So even when I took on at the beginning of my consulting career, I had two small children and I did not want to travel. So but I wanted to consult in management. So I had. I took roles as a hands-on manager and I promised to find my replacement inside of six weeks or eight weeks, whatever it was. So I had an eight-week contract as a project where I would help them not just do the hands-on management but build the job description and work with HR on how to hire for it and then do the initial phone screening. In effect, I taught them how to hire as I was doing this.
Speaker 3:That led to sometimes extending to different on-site management roles right, because I had already been in development and support and I had not done tech pubs, otherwise, I had done almost everything inside the organization as a director level. So I could do this and it really worked out well for my clients and for me, because I had a project with outcomes and goals and that then I was done and I made enough money to be able to sell market myself. Then one of the problems when you take on contract work for time and materials or an hourly wage is that you tend to work 40 hours or an hourly wage is that you tend to work 40 hours. Well, when are you going to blog? When are you going to write an email newsletter? How are you going to post any writing at all? Because you're exhausted from your day job. So that's why I find that project-based work or value-based work is so much more effective for anyone who is a freelancer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's like a poverty cycle. When you're working in that way, you're, you know, very relatively speaking, you're impoverished because you're working for you're just making normal money, like normal developer money. It's not bad, but it's not anything better than a job and you've taken on so much of that billable work that you don't have time, or maybe at least you don't feel like you have time, to make that investment, to do something better. And that's a whole different topic of how to carve out out that time, even when you feel like you don't, because it's like, in a way, like nobody has time to do that stuff and yet somehow some people figure out how to make time to do that stuff. And for me, I just like loathe having a regular job, so much that I just like, by hook or by crook, found a way to do those things to get myself in a better situation. But yeah, if you're just I mean this isn't a very kind way to put it but if you're just nobody, you know, if you don't have any kind of online footprint or anything like that, you don't have any body of work that demonstrates your expertise, why would anybody pay you more than any other developer? You're kind of interchangeable with any other developer.
Speaker 1:When I was a freelancer, I continually raised my rates but then at some point people started to say why should we pay you more than our other people? And I legitimately did not have a reason. I was wanting more money without having a reason for anybody to give me more money. I didn't realize that at the time, but then later I realized that I had to give people a reason. And then gradually over the years I created more and more good reasons and now you know my proposition is that I can be so valuable to you and I can deliver so much.
Speaker 1:I hate to say value per hour. Let's say value per time unit or whatever um that you'll want to pay me um a higher. And this is tough because it gets into like billing by the project or by the hour and stuff like that. And I'm not necessarily trying to get into that but, like, for me it's all about becoming more efficient and making more money in less time and then taking that time savings and reinvesting that back into sales and marketing and becoming even more valuable, being able to be yet more efficient, making more money in less time and so on, until the ultimate goal is infinite money for infinitely small work, not there yet, but that's how I think about it.
Speaker 3:Well, and I so, just so people realize that we're not all about the money, speak for yourself. Well, okay, it's a lot about the money. But, if I can, my clients typically start to save a week every week for the time I work with them, because they're not tracking the flow metrics. And as soon as soon as I open their eyes to cycle time and whip and aging and all that stuff, they start to say oh, my goodness, we are wasting so much time. When I don't even tell them they could save four weeks of salary for every week I spend with them, they would not believe that. They barely believe the week every week, but they are wasting so so much time. It's just unbelievable. So when I explain to them how they can get back their investment faster, I talk a lot about being effective, not so much efficient, because I find that wording resonates fairly well with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, people have weird ideas about what efficiency means.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So I talk a lot about being effective, but I think it's really important and I can say that because I have a body of work right. They can see my blog has been around since 2003. They can see hundreds of articles. I am behind for the past three or four years of posting them on my site, because me life is short. I would rather write new stuff rather than post it on my site. They can see all these books. So when I say to them, you can be more effective, and I have figured that out for me in my role, I can. I can help you learn how it is in your role that changes the equation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, sorry, I got distracted by something you said because it stirred up a thought for me, but I don't remember what it was. But I don't remember what it was. Yeah, and now I just completely derailed myself. Any additional comments on that topic while I collect my thoughts.
Speaker 3:So if we go back to I want to call it tuning your own horn, but understanding your value. When I wrote Successful Independent Consulting, the very first chapter was about understanding the value you offer to other people, to your clients, because your first sale is to yourself. If you don't think you can do this work, if you have not yet proven to yourself you can do this work, you will always ask for a lower rate. A lower rate does not guarantee better results. If I think about you and your idea of infinite money for infinitely small periods of time, you can do that because you understand the value you offer to your clients. When clients pay for value, in some form, that's not paying by the hour, because your clients know that you are thinking about their problems in the shower. You're thinking about it when you run or work out or whatever it is that you do right?
Speaker 3:We think about our clients all the time, just as their employees do. In fact, we probably think about them more than their employees, because we're invested in finishing this engagement and then going on to something else. And when we think about finishing this engagement, we want success for everyone. We're not in it just for ourselves. We're not in it just for the client. We are looking for a win-win in everything and when people shortchange themselves by not having some kind of authority in some form that they can point to I mean, we have used books, I also use public speaking, which is why I'm writing the effective public speaking book. But I think when people have not really figured out how to show other people their expertise and the value that other people should place on that expertise, that's when they don't find the right kind of engagements.
Speaker 3:That's when they work for grocery money as opposed to long-term success.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think a person has to figure out a way, obviously, to be genuinely valuable. It's certainly possible to be somebody who creates value but undervalue yourself. And there's this whole get paid what you're worth kind of thing, as if it's like your intrinsic value as a human being, or something like that. Nobody has a worth like it's not like my worth is X dollars per hour, so I deserve to get paid that or something like that. The value that's created in any work relationship is the combination of the person doing the work and the person the work is for, and you have to figure out something that makes sense For me. I don't think I'm done figuring it out I guess I probably never will be but I've been experimenting with different propositions.
Speaker 1:My latest and I've stuck with this, I think, the longest is that I serve as a technical advisor to startup founders. As a technical advisor to startup founders, and what my proposition is is that I can be a sounding board and somebody to talk with on an indefinite basis and I can help you forever, which is a different thing from like I can help you with a database, performance or something like that, where it's kind of transactional. You come in and you fix the problem and then you, you go away, um, um, and that, I think, is like the. The first step in marketing yourself and stuff like that is to like figure, figure out the service that you're going to be marketing, because every all the marketing you're going to do is is going to stem from that service that you provide, and so not that I'm saying anything that I think is different from what you're saying, but, um, yeah, it's, it's not just about being confident in yourself, but it's also about like asking yourself how can I genuinely be valuable and provide a service that's worth more?
Speaker 3:Absolutely that you talk about. I find that I am actually most effective with my clients when they choose that, and that's because they get to choose the agenda, they get to choose how often we talk, they get to choose how often we email back and forth.
Speaker 3:I mean if they really want to talk to me outside of my regular workday. I charge a little bit more for that, but I am very effective with them when it's one-on-one and they are sufficiently senior that they have really hairy big balls of mud problems, right Things that are difficult to untangle and if they can make a little bit of progress every week on untangling them, or maybe even make big progress once a month untangling them, I am totally worth it.
Speaker 1:And they see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I think that's great because, like you know, you and I have had two conversations at this point. But I can. I can tell who you are and what you're all about, and I can tell that you're a smart person and stuff like that. And if I were, you know, for example, I found myself tempted to do this but I didn't want to make it all about me. I wanted to ask you like can you help me?
Speaker 1:You talked about reassessing your plans each week. I'm like man, if you could help me reassess my plans with my consulting, I would love to hear what you say, what you have to say about that, and that has nothing really to do with anything else we've talked about, but I can infer, just based on everything else, that you probably have some smart things to say about that, and that's what I hope I can, I can achieve with my clients is that they recognize me as just a generally smart person, and they might. One week I can actually use a real example, like one week a certain client might ask me about how I diagnose performance problems, and then a different week, he asked me how he may or may not use AI to automate some manual work that he was having one of his people do Totally different topics, but we've established that level of trust where we'll just talk about anything he wants to talk about and he has a justified explanation expectation that I'll have something valuable to contribute on that topic.
Speaker 3:Yep exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, okay, we should probably start wrapping up here. Um so, johanna, again, you've written 20 or so books. Um, I'm sure you have somewhere online where people can find those, but do you want to share something about those and or your consulting site? Anywhere people should find you online.
Speaker 3:Everything is at jrothmancom J-R-O-T-H-M-A-Ncom. That's because when I got my domain name, it was totally fine to have a first initial and the last name. I would have been better off at choosing johannarothmancom, but I did not. So everything is there. I have a books page. I have a services page, my newsletters, the pragmatic manager create an adaptable life, my fiction everything has its own newsletter. I have blogs or their rss feeds. Start at jrothmancom and it's there.
Speaker 1:I'm also on linkedin and several other socials all right, we'll put that stuff in the show notes and, johanna, thanks so much for coming on the show thank you for having me this no-transcript.