Season 4, Ep. 46 – Founder to Founder: with Matt Genovese, Founder & CEO, Planorama

(This transcript is automatically generated)

Bill, via previous recording (00:04):

Welcome to another founder to founder interview from gun.io, your source for hiring World-class tech Talent today, gun dot iOS, CEO and co-founder Tasia. Yra sits down with Matt Genae, founder and CEO of Panorama, a professional services company that designs intuitive products and helps accelerate your software development process. Okay. Here’s Tasia.

Teja (00:37):

My parents immigrated to Jackson Heights in New York City, and so I grew up, like part of my life. I mean, just like for 10 years I lived in Yeah. Long Island in Queens.

Matt (00:50):

Oh, okay.

Teja (00:51):

So, and I went to a school in Boston. So I went to school in a lot of New Yorkers and all that.

Matt (00:56):

Yeah, I’m sure you did. Yeah. Oh, very cool. You know, I, I only when I was an adult did I ever get to New York City because I was growing up in upstate and it was e it’s called the Southern Tier, so it’s the New York, Pennsylvania border. Yeah. But it was still far enough away from New York City and, you know, we could go into town to get hay seeded and rakes and anything we needed. So we didn’t go to New York City.

Teja (01:18):

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matt (01:19):

It was only about six years ago did I ever get to go to New York City for the first time.

Teja (01:23):

<Laugh>, it, it’s, it’s funny because like upstate basically refers to like a ginormous part of the state, you know? Oh, yeah. Like how, like what 30 long Islands can fit, if not more in all of upstate.

Matt (01:38):

Oh man. Yeah. It’s, it’s huge. And I, I have to explain, ’cause we, we were talking before, you know, I live here in Brazil and I always have to say, you know, Yomo and No York Ji Estado, I have to, I lived in New York state and it takes a while for it to compute. And I’m like, there’s farms. It’s all farm

Teja (02:00):

<Laugh>. Yeah. Yeah.

Matt (02:01):

There’s cities, but it’s farm country.

Teja (02:03):

Yeah. It’s, so how much of, I mean, this is probably a question that is not at all related to this interview, but I’m curious personally, how much of Brazil is like urban sprawl versus like, uninhabited kind of

Matt (02:21):

Oh,

Teja (02:22):

Nature.

Matt (02:23):

I’ll, I’ll tell you now I have not experienced all of Brazil, you know, it’s ginormous. Right? Right. So I, I live in the capital of Santa Kate, and so that’s a, that’s a real city, you know, and it’s a big city and it’s on an island predominantly. So there’s only so much sprawl you can do. Yeah. Before you have to build more land. Wow. Which they’ve done before. However going into the, into the inland, into the continental side the towns are, they’re towns, you know, it’s not cities. These towns that I visited in Santa Cina, and they, they are very rural many times. The houses are very simple and basic. Even the Airbnbs many times reflect that. But they’re cute and they have their own character. And many of the towns are becoming, I I don’t wanna say tourist destinations, but they are, you know, growing up a population of people that are creating Airbnbs to go and visit.

Matt (03:31):

And it, it, it ends up growing a sub set of businesses like restaurants and other attractions that are, that are fun to, fun, to, to experience. So I haven’t, I I haven’t been to many of the larger cities except for Sao Paulo, which is just, that’s the largest city in the Americas. So that one, of course is a, you know, it, it, it has a sprawl just by definition. But I, I don’t know that I have enough experience to say for all the cities, but I can tell you that the, the, the state that I live in in Santa Catarina is very, very rural and beautiful. These mountains and hills and, and canyons are just gorgeous. And they’re all within driving, driving time, a few hours drive.

Teja (04:16):

What’s like the business case or like the trade-offs that you experience, if there are any in building like your company and living in Brazil? Like, ’cause I, I guess maybe the question behind the question is like, I often wonder like, what is the trade off of not living in like a tech city, you know? ’cause Nashville is not really one yet. Yeah. I experienced some degree of line loss. We’re probably behind the power curve a little bit in terms of innovation. The talent, you know, may not be coming from the tier one companies.

Matt (04:49):

I see.

Teja (04:50):

Right. And so I wonder if you think through that at all. I’ll

Matt (04:53):

Tell you this, Flo Opolis where I live reminds me often of a smaller Austin, which is where I used to live in Austin, Texas. So there is a large tech population here. There are incubators, coworking spaces. There’s a, a a either a city or a state co-funded incubator just up the road from me about five minutes. And they house a lot of startups and provide assistance to them. So this has been a, a good place to, to put some roots just in, in, in, in respect to what you’ve said. Right. the in fact, it’s probably a good thing it’s not Austin, because Austin is dealing with the challenges of being Austin <laugh> Yeah.

Matt (05:35):

And all the people that have moved there for that reason. So when I started Panorama, it was a number of years ago, I started at, while I was in Austin, but it was always remote. Most of the people that I’ve, I work with we all work remotely. In fact I, some of them I’ve never met in person. Yeah. And yet we worked together day to day. Yeah. And that was before the pandemic. Right. So when the pandemic happened, it didn’t affect us at all. We were already in our stride. In fact, most of the, the, the US was catching up to that regard saying, well, how’s remote gonna work? And we said, well, we’ll be happy to show you. It works really quite well. <Laugh> <laugh>. But we’ve, we, we’ve always had good experience. And in Brazil, there’s I, I think what I wouldn’t normally say, well, no, I, I can say it, but I, it we’re in between time zones we’re GMT minus three. Right. So we have some clients that we work with that are in the UK and in in Europe. Right. And we’re close enough where it’s not too bad. And then of course, the US time zones are not that far away.

Teja (06:45):

Yeah.

Matt (06:46):

So it, it puts us in a good location in order to be able to talk with anybody. And sometimes bridge different teams that normally have a harder time because of their skew relative to each other in time zones. But a lot of the folks here speak English and all of our team does as well. So, you know, we, we don’t really have too many challenges. The the challenge I have is finding designers who are senior enough that we can train and, and when we bring them in, we train them how to do things our way because we have a very heavy focus on organization and documentation and having a certain standard by which that we deliver requirements to our, to the development teams for the clients that we work with. So we usually bring people in who are senior designers, and then we work with them to, to, I’ll say, level up in some of these other areas. Because that’s what our clients pay for. They, they pay for that level of acumen. And, and we, we train our folks how to, how to do that. But the nice thing is we don’t have to, we’re not location based, so we can, we can get folks from anywhere.

Teja (07:55):

Hmm. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah. GMT minus three is nice. I mean, a couple hours away from the uk and then Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. I mean, you have to stay out late, I guess, if it’s like a west coast company, but, you know. Yeah.

Matt (08:08):

Yeah. We, we find times there’s enough, there’s enough crossover.

Teja (08:11):

Yeah. For sure. For sure. Yeah. And that’s, that’s what’s nice about hiring in the Americas because it’s like, yeah. There’s not a, yeah. Broader range. How about for you? Do you feel like you’re, like in terms of like your peers, other business owners, people working on solving problems, like at the business level? Like you’re able to establish like a network of people, like doing very interesting things. Has that been relatively easy to do?

Matt (08:38):

I’m, I’m a member of some online communities. There’s, there’s some good ones. We, we have our own called AI Product Hive. And if you were to Google AI Product Hive, it’ll take you there. And that’s one of our online communities focused on AI for product teams. Cool. But I’m also a member of at August Pump them AI explained, which has a great set of videos on, on YouTube. And I’m one of the, the Patreon sponsors there. And so I get involved in that community as well. And there’s op, there’s always opportunity to meet people online in those areas. And also you just have to reach out. You know, I, I do spend time on LinkedIn looking for people not to sell to, but just to connect with and, and to, to speak with, share what we know, share what we’ve learned. ’cause We’re learning a lot in this in this day and age right now about how to design, how to manage requirements for projects that involve ai. And we’ve, we’ve learned a thing or two by building our own software to help us with that. And, and we try to share that. I don’t think I have it all solved. I, I know that I can do better with you know, probably posting more videos or doing something on <laugh>, one of the many channels

Teja (09:55):

I’m so bad at that my team gets on me about being more open <laugh>. I’m like, how, how many freaking business owners are there on the internet saying this and this about their thoughts? Yeah.

Matt (10:06):

I’ll tell you what I refuse to do though. And maybe I’m just being a stickler, but I refuse to drive in the car and take a video of myself talking to a camera about the, you know, product requirements as if, you know, I, you just happened to get into my car on an Uber <laugh>, you know, <laugh> or refuse to walk down the sidewalk and do this. I am not there yet. And I don’t know that I’ll be,

Teja (10:29):

Well, you know, part part of that I think is actually the lighting, like the lighting it like in an afternoon Oh,

Matt (10:35):

Yeah.

Teja (10:36):

With, with the phone there, like on the windshield is like actually quite nice. And I think that’s why people do it, you know? But maybe it’s pretty, it’s pretty weird, you know, I don’t know. My extemporaneous thoughts are not that valuable. Like, I have to think about what I need to say.

Matt (10:51):

I know what you mean. I have to do, do I have to do it too? I have to make notes and think, otherwise I’m just rattling off and I get done with it. I’m like, I can’t post that. That’s terrible. <Laugh>.

Teja (11:01):

Yeah. Totally. This actually hurts the credibility of the company.

Matt (11:04):

Yeah, exactly. Right. <Laugh>, that’s a negative.

Teja (11:08):

You know, you know what’s interesting is like, we started doing like a motion to be a part of more conferences and just go out. I mean, and obviously it helps the business, but also just more selfishly, it, it’s, it’s engaging for me to meet other people working on interesting things. Oh, yeah. Part of the genesis for the podcast even. Yeah,

Matt (11:26):

Of course. You know, I, I started a tech community in Austin years ago, and part of the reason was to help engineers and tech folks get out from behind their computers Yeah. And go meet each other, because I found that good things happened. And I used to say that networking was predictably unpredictable. Right. Like, I can’t tell you what’s gonna happen. Right. That’s the nature of it. But usually good stuff does.

Teja (11:50):

No, that’s so true. You know, so we were just in Austin for South by Southwest. Yeah. And that was the, that was the second time that I was in Austin the first time for like, work, not just like, for fun and visiting the city. Yeah. I was, and I couldn’t tell how much of that was due to South the conference versus like just the underlying characteristics of the city itself. But I have to say, I mean, like, people are doing interesting things there. And it, and it felt like San Francisco in many ways. And, and, you know, not as unsettling maybe as San Francisco, because sometimes that’s not a political claim. Like some i the city itself, and like how out there people are like, money is dead. Do you know, claims like that, that’s just like fundamentally unsettling to me to hear, I’m focused on like this specific HR issue in this company. I don’t need to be thinking about like the fed printing away our money. Yeah.

Matt (12:49):

Well, well, Austin has naturally a pretty good culture that is established. And I think people get, IM impressed with, I don’t mean impressed upon them, but I mean, they, when they arrive, you start to notice that people are fairly forthcoming and trying to help each other out genuinely. Wow. And I’ll tell you that when I started that community, it was called Door 64, by the way, do DOOR 64, named after my Commodore 64, which was the, the, the computer I really grew up with after the Vic 20. Because I was trying to serve many of those people that I, you know, were kind of like me starting out in the eighties, you know, learning on these eight bit computers and then moving ahead. But I found that people are very willing to talk about what they’re working on. You just had to provide a, a catalyst, an opportunity for them to do that.

Matt (13:37):

And there’s always this notion that engineers are introverted and will look at their shoes and, you know you know, not, not engage. But that was not the case at all. Now granted, there were some people that came into my events. I held in-person events, and they would kind of you know, walk in and they’d see three, 400 people and they’d, their eyes would kind of gl glaze over. And they had that Bambi look. And I said, you know, yeah, this is your first time here. Right. And I explained to them how to network, how to meet other people. And I’ll tell you, most of the time they came back to me at the end of the night. They were the last ones there. And they said, this was so much fun. I had such a good time. I met so many good people. And it was just having a bit of a recipe for putting this event together that allowed them to realize, Hey, this is really good for me. And meeting other people is a great way for me to not only, you know, spawn new ideas, but also perhaps find avenues for projects to work on. Because most usually engineers wanna work on things of their own. And it was certainly catalyzed that, that you know, ability to find each other Right. And, and turn things into reality.

Teja (14:49):

That’s cool. So you’re a connector. Have you done a lot of that in, in Brazil, like set up events and things like that?

Matt (14:55):

You know, I’m thinking about it. It’s funny you mention that. My challenge is that I, I don’t speak the language. I don’t speak Portuguese very well. As somebody said one time when I was in upstate New York and they said, oh, you live in Brazil? Do you speak Brazilian <laugh>? Not at all. <Laugh>. I’m just trying to get Portuguese. So <laugh>.

Teja (15:16):

Yeah. You know, so I trade Brazilian juujitsu. So there are a bunch of people who live with just like a martial art, and Oh, yeah. There are a bunch of people that like, get so into like BJJ that they end up like, yeah. You know, they, their Portuguese is not great, but they end up adopting the Brazilian intonations, like the Portuguese in nations and like, almost like cadence Yeah. Of their sentences. Right. Which is something like, it’s, it’s like a downward inflection at the end of a clause versus Oh, interesting. You know, like grab the arm and then, and then post. Right. And that’s, that’s like, that’s my really horrible impression of like a native Brazilian moving to the US and like being a five time world champion black belt teaching basically kids. Wow.

Matt (16:12):

Okay.

Teja (16:13):

Wrestle. But yeah. How

Matt (16:15):

About, I’ve not gravitated to that yet. I, I just try to get the words out. I live on an island and they have a, a, a term for the folks, like people from Rio are called Kakas. Wow. People from the island in this area called Mannos. And they’re all, you know, they kind of go back to the fishermen way of life, but they talk so fast, <laugh> that I can’t keep up. And they, they have all kinds of funny ways of saying certain types of concepts. And I just try to pick up on it. And I’ll tell you when my, my, my wife and my and her mom were talking, sometimes I couldn’t, couldn’t understand them. And like, I would sit back and laughing like, I got nothing. <Laugh>

Teja (16:52):

Were they speaking in, in Portuguese?

Matt (16:55):

It’s Portuguese, but it’s, it’s a dialect. It’s a, it’s a, there’s accents, there’s, there’s certain words, and it’s just very fast. Yeah. And I, I’m originally from the Philadelphia area, and Phil, folks from Philly are known as fast talkers too. And so I, I don’t know, I don’t know who would win in this, in this bar fight, who’s gonna get <laugh> was gonna get the award.

Teja (17:17):

So a, a long time ago, I like, I don’t know, maybe at this point 12 or 13 years ago, I used to live in China, like right outta school. Right. Outta, and I, it was sort of like, you know, trial by fire. You just very little Chinese knowledge, like moving there. But if you go out and you drink and you party and you get to know people, then I feel like that actually lubricate, like it helps uncork like your own insecurities associated with speaking the language. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and comfortable saying things in a grammatically incorrect way. And so I found like my language skills like accelerated,

Matt (17:58):

You certainly have to,

Teja (17:59):

Yeah.

Matt (18:00):

People tend to be, and Brazil look as Brazil is fairly laid back. Yep. And in fact, I, I find it from the other angle. I’m the one that is the visit, you know, effectively the visitor, the non-native. Yeah. Right. And folks here, when I just start trying to speak Portuguese or I can get by, they always give me compliments and they encourage me, you know, if they’re doing it. And, and I’ve, I’ve never felt like like an outcast or anything like that. And likewise, when I’ve spoken in English or they just look at me and they know I’m not from here, <laugh> I don’t, I don’t know why, because there’s so many Germans and Italians and Aus Australians and Ukrainians that live are, you know, from those places that moved here long ago. Somehow I still stick out. I’m the gringo. But even when, when they see that they start trying English or they get concerned about their own ability, but if I can coax ’em out of it, their English is great.

Matt (18:55):

And I tell them that, and they had no idea. Right. But they just needed to, to hear it from somebody and be encouraged. And when I was, I, I visited China before, I never, I didn’t live there. I visited India, China, and Malaysia and other places, and they would try to use their English. And sometimes it was for the express reason to test it out with a real American. And when I told them like, yeah, you sounded great they would get so excited and happy, and I realized I made somebody’s day, you know, just by validating that, that their English was was good. Understandable.

Teja (19:27):

That’s a hundred percent true. Like, you get into a cab, I, this was the case, I dunno, like 10 years ago, but like, you would get into a cab and you’d have like a cab driver in China try to speak to an English and try to work on their English and how Yeah. Yeah.

Matt (19:41):

Chinese

Teja (19:41):

Work on my Chinese. So you have two people basically trying to communicate in the other language to try to practice. That’s right. You know, it’s

Matt (19:49):

A good thing,

Teja (19:50):

<Laugh>. Yeah, totally.

Matt (19:53):

I had a cab driver in China, by the way, call me. Beautiful. And I just took that for, for what it was worth. I think he was trying to pay a compliment, but I was like, wow, that was really nice. Thank you. Yeah.

Teja (20:04):

<Laugh>. That’s funny. Yeah. Yeah. That’s interesting. I mean, you would say Schwa as I guess. Yeah. That’s funny. He’s probably like, I’ve heard somebody say that in a movie or something like that. Yeah. He

Matt (20:16):

Was smiling in the rear view mirror. And I just, you know, <laugh>,

Teja (20:20):

I mean, I’m, my girlfriend does not allowed me to smoke cigarettes now, but like, this was a thing that you used to have to do in China to be polite. Oh, yeah. You know, like if somebody offers you a c even like a cab grabber offers you a cigarette. Like you have to accept, otherwise you take

Matt (20:34):

It. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Teja (20:35):

Hide rudeness, you know, inhale. But like,

Matt (20:42):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, that does open the eyes. Right. Does cause you to think about what you know, how you are and how you live and, and what is polite and being in kindness and things like that. It’s, it’s a, it’s a good experience.

Teja (20:56):

Yeah, totally. And I mean, like, if you’re an entrepreneur, you likely have like a high degree of openness, you know? And so that, yeah. That like, like probabilistically, it makes you more right. To be an expat and to travel and to enjoy that stuff. So is this your first, like, I mean, I guess you’ve been in Brazil for like basically half a decade. Is this the first time you’ve lived abroad?

Matt (21:17):

It is.

Teja (21:18):

Okay. Nice.

Matt (21:19):

It’s although you could say moving from upstate New York to Texas was like living abroad too. <Laugh> <laugh>, lemme tell you this stage, lemme tell you this stage, I had lived there and I had been there a couple weeks, and I was working at Motorola, right. I started at Motorola as an engineer working in, in design. And we were sitting, this was back in let’s see, I moved there in 97, so it was like 97, 98. And I remember us all going out to lunch and we were sitting at the Salt Lake out in Driftwood, Texas, sitting at a picnic table, all ordering barbecue. And we’re talking about wafer fabrication yields on different lots coming out of the fab. And I remember just sitting there thinking, where am I? <Laugh>? Like <laugh>. It was one of those zoom out moments where you think like, I’m in eating barbecue at a picnic table and we’re talking about fab yield. Yeah. You know? So

Teja (22:14):

How did you get from semiconductors to design

Matt (22:18):

It? It’s funny, the folks previous generations many times tried to work at the same company for their, or they ended up working for the same company forever. And, and of course we know in Gen X and future that, that just doesn’t happen normally. So I kind of bobbed and weaved in my career trying to figure out what I like to do, what I was really good at. And so, yeah, I spent half my, a little less than half my career in, in semiconductors, you know, working at Motorola. I worked in the, what they call the, the, the backend. I have to remember this, the backend was everything after, from fabrication afterwards. Basically after this, the design taped out, and I worked in that, it was called product engineering product and test engineering. And you’re responsible for the chip for the quality of it, for testing, for production product.

Matt (23:08):

Like the ability to productize it, right. Ensure that it, that it goes all the way to production and, and it can have sustainable yields and, and you try to find ways to even, you know make it more robust. And then I worked the other portion of my time in design, which was the, the, I guess the front end where everything, it’s before, so I was doing design and verification on power pc, but there was always that, that idea of test both in the, when I was in the fab and doing work in with the chips, and then in the, on the other side doing verification. You’re testing a lot, and there’s this mantra that like, Hey, if you don’t test it, it doesn’t work. <Laugh>. Yeah. You’ve gotta, you gotta test everything. But I ended up through bobbing and weaving a bit in my career, I ended up getting out of semiconductors.

Matt (23:55):

I kind of saw the writing on the wall in terms of where that was going. And semiconductors can be very cyclical. And so I was part of one of the, one of the big layoffs they had in 2000 2008, something like that. I forget, there was a downturn, right? Yeah. Yeah. And but I, I went in and so that’s where I was running the tech community. I’d already started in Austin, and I was running that for quite some time, and I just kind of continued on that front. But then I moved into product management. And what I found was that product management for software was certainly different than product management for hardware. But it certainly leveraged some of my background because I, as an engineer, always appreciated understanding how, how things worked beneath the hood. Yeah. Right? I, I, and I did, I had a good understanding, not only from the chip side and the hardware side, but also from the software side.

Matt (24:54):

Like, hey, if, if, if the client says they wanna do X, Y, and Z, I can tell you that X and Y are gonna be pretty simple, but Z is gonna be a real challenge and here’s why. Right. And that, that really helped in product. And in fact, I found that I was doing product management consulting without even knowing it when people wanted to go to lunch and talk about their ideas. And I was already helping ’em through that process without even realizing that was product management as a role. But I found that was a good fit for me. And then years later, I kept working in product, and then I ended up starting Planorama because honestly, I saw a gap. There was a a, an an area where design as a discipline was not being followed. And I don’t mean UX design, I mean design just as a concept, right?

Matt (25:42):

The, the planning that goes into the work that you’re gonna do does not happen many times in software, like it does in hardware or almost every other engineering discipline, right? Right. You go to, you can’t have a, like, nobody would ever think, like, you don’t get to tape out a chip without design. Design is creation of the chip. You don’t go into designing a, you don’t create a bridge without designing it. Right? Now, granted, they’re all waterfall projects, right? But there is some key reasons why you should have design as an integral step. And software tended to miss that. And then folks would wonder, why does, why does the project go sideways? You know, why are there, you know, it seems like sometimes there’s solutions and searches of problems because it wasn’t thought through, or the, the software could be structurally built well, but the it, nobody wants to use it, or it’s a pain to use, right? Or nobody wants to buy it, or development costs or timelines are just being blown. Right? And you’ll get down to it. There’s a lack of design work, you know, involved requirements.

Teja (26:49):

How do you reconcile? So like I 100% agree. I, from my standpoint, it feels like in some ways the agile mindset seems to be like, I don’t wanna say antithetical, but it seems in some ways the priors that like end up with Agile as a mode of opera of operation seem an antithetical to like the principles of, let’s say, project design and defining how this looks, feels, you know not just like business value. Because I, I think to your point, like the agile process is like, what’s the business value? Okay, we’re gonna break that out in like two week sprints, blah, blah, blah. And like, you know, as long as we’re hitting the metrics, like we’re fine. So there’s no subjective assessment of like, what is this going to be? Right? And in fact, in my experience, many engineers chafe at that,

Matt (27:48):

At

Teja (27:48):

That type of direction. So how do you hold these things in your head, and, and where does this play a

Matt (27:53):

Role? I think the problem, first of all, I think the problem that has been that, you know, software engineering cuts out design because they believe that, that somehow you’re going to save money by doing that, you’re gonna save time and money Yeah. In the process. Like, our engineers are smart, they know how to build it. Yeah. Right? And it’s like saying, our team of engineers can go build the bridge. We can just go build it. Right? <laugh>, I’m like, well, yeah, I’m sure they can. Right? Yeah. What happened with Agile is we threw the baby out with the bathwater. I think, I think we, we adopted, and rightly so, I think they were trying to pull the pendulum back and saying, you know what? We have some distinct advantage in software that allow us to do things that are different than how every other engineering project can be done. But it doesn’t mean, like, for example, you know, working, so software over comprehensive documentation is one of the tenets, right? But it doesn’t mean no documentation, or there’s no intrinsic value to it. Yep. Not quite the opposite. You’re writing user stories, right? Right. And many times what’s happened I’ve seen is that those user stories become bullet points in the Jira ticket,

Teja (29:03):

Right?

Matt (29:03):

And they’re like, developers go <laugh>. Like, well, what? Right? And then they spend the sprint just trying to figure out the requirements you know, responding to change over, following a plan is the other tenant, right? Doesn’t mean that planning doesn’t have any value. In fact, planning has a lot of value especially in design where you’re trying to think through, Hey, if we know that certain features are coming up, but or we anticipate that that would be the case, a bit of thinking now can allow you to prevent a redesign later on. You’re leaving the space open for those features to, to come into being, even though right now, you’re not going to build them. So what we do at Planorama is we, we certainly are inserting ourselves into that process to ensure that everybody’s receiving what they need to execute on efficiently.

Matt (29:51):

Right? They, they get it. The, the developers are getting the user stories. The, the test engineers are getting the, the QA documentation, the test documentation per user story. We write all of that along with creating the designs for the front end team. And so everybody gets what they need, and you can iterate, right? And you can iterate and change direction, Bob and Weave. But this idea that agile, this extreme agile where it’s like, we don’t need any of this stuff. We just gotta communicate. It was like it, and then the project goes sideways, and then you end up glowing the budget and you don’t have any internal product documentation to go back up to. And so if you bring on a new development team or a new development team member, or any product team member, they’re like, well, how does it work? Well, you just gotta go use it <laugh>. Or we have some Jira tickets. They’re like, ah, you know, like, you lose all the value because you threw the baby out.

Teja (30:48):

Yeah. What’s the difference to you between, let’s say planning and design?

Matt (30:55):

Ah, I, I see them as one and the same one and the same thing. Now, design that term has largely been in software co-opted by UX UI design. Yes. Right? So,

Teja (31:08):

Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Matt (31:10):

So it’s hard to say, and what I say for Planorama is that we are software requirements and UX design, right? That’s almost like saying we’re a car driver and we drive the car <laugh>. But I have to say it that, I have to say it that way because people don’t, people think of design in a very narrow perspective. I, for me, in my head, it’s all design. Yeah. It’s all thinking through what are you going to build? What is the solution you need to build? How are you going to phase that out? What are you gonna start on first that planning, which is why it’s called planorama, right? To get the whole landscape. But there’s that concept of you need to plan a bit. That ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. That, that, that planning upfront and that work that you do to think about workflows and who’s gonna do what and what kind of users are involved.

Matt (32:00):

That is de-risking all the other work coming up. And de-risking reduces timelines, and it prevents you from building something nobody wants. And it reduces cost because now developers have what they need to execute. They have the user stories well written, flushed out. They’re involved in the meetings that are reviewing, they’re getting it ahead of time to give feedback. It’s bringing structure to that process that I’ll tell you every time we do this, teams just execute super efficient downstream because they have what they need. So design, I think of design in a holistic view like we do in every other di engineering discipline.

Teja (32:42):

Do you, do you consider product management within the scope of design?

Matt (32:48):

Yes. Yeah. They product managers, that’s a lonely job. Yeah. I said before, that’s a tough one. It seems like a lot of a lot of things get put into that area. Yeah. And I think most product managers are hired and probably sold on the job of figuring out what do we need to build Yeah. And going out and talking to customers, doing the research. Yeah. And I think to a large degree UX research and product managers, that, that area has been a bit muddled. Yeah. Right. What are, you know, who’s responsible for what? I think companies kind of come up with their own definitions of where the line is, or they work together, which I think it’s a good idea for them to work together because they’re all trying to solve the same problem. But yeah, I, I would say that product managers are hired to be that outward facing person, and yet they’re usually tasked with the product owner, get the development team going, get them executing, write the documentation. They’re probably the ones who are tasked with writing the user stories,

Teja (33:58):

Right?

Matt (33:59):

So what we do at Planner M is we offload that from the product manager, we take direction from them, and, and they can be the expert in their vertical, in their space, and it, and it should be that way. But we’re not gonna know everything about their space unless we happen to be working in semiconductors or EDA or places that we happen to know about. But we consult them, and then they, we, they are our primary contact to write the documentation, to design the features, to scope out what we’re gonna do, and then we execute. So we offload those extra duties that are, you know, it’s a, it’s a big switch for them to go and have to manage that. And most teams aren’t set up for that kind of success. I’ll go back to your original question. Yeah. The, the product manager is, is vital, but they’re always, they’re not always set up for success either.

Teja (34:50):

Yeah. In your, in your view, the ideal SDLC is something like product managers discover the problems or uncover them, define them explicitly, establish some metrics or some set of requirements that map to the problem being solved. The shape, like the contours of that solution are then handed to, you know, your org or the design suite. That solution now has contours, roughly speaking as well as an execution plan, then that is given to engineers? Or am I missing something?

Matt (35:31):

No, it’s, it, it is that way, but I wouldn’t say it is that strict handoff. Okay. You know, many times we’re working with the product manager, they’re talking about what they’re seeing, what they’re thinking about, what they’ve discovered. We’re counseling them with what we’ve seen. You know, certainly we haven’t seen everything, they haven’t seen everything. So why don’t we come together and talk it through? Sometimes during that process, we as the effectively the, the, the, the UX design arm will suggest tools we have in our tool belt to help. Right. So, great. You’re, you think you’re seeing, you’re hearing customers talk about this kind of feature, right? Why don’t we prototype that?

Teja (36:09):

Right.

Matt (36:10):

And, and by the way, design naturally tends to, because design is focused on a solution to a problem that naturally tends to break down silos. So we’ll oftentimes start having conversations that say, Hey I think we need to bring in other people into this conversation. Somebody from DevOps, somebody from development, somebody, one of the other stakeholders, right? And it naturally branches out these little dendrites to bring in the right people to talk about, well, do we need a prototype? Do we need a POC? Does development need to go and evaluate whether that API can handle the performance that we need <laugh> in order to accomplish that? Right? So you’re trying to get some of these activities started a bit early to, again, I’ll use that word de-risk, right? Right. So if we’re gonna go build it, let’s do some steps in the beginning to evaluate whether that is the right thing, whether we should be spending money on it.

Matt (37:05):

Mm-Hmm. You know, is it viable? The work we do with AI especially is that in that case, we talk, we work with companies on buildings, you know, generative AI into their solutions, right? And some of the first things we’re doing is not only thinking about, you know, how to design it in the ui, but even beforehand, like, can the gen gen, can the gen AI do it? Right? Right. People are throwing everything at it thinking like, oh, it’ll solve all my problems. Like, let’s, let’s do some POCs and we, we know our way around the barn enough to be able to try it out ourselves or to tell the, their own internal team, like, Hey, we need to test that this will work using unstructured data. And will it be able to extract the information you think it will be able to,

Teja (37:47):

What’s your view on risks as associated with using LLMs all the way from copyright to them training their models on other people’s data? You

Matt (37:59):

Know? Well, that’s a broad topic. Yeah. And I I don’t know that I’m qualified to speak about all of it. I certainly have ideas, right? But these ai, generative AI companies, let’s just talk about open ai, but you could insert any of them here, right? Open AI certainly has the most usage as of today. Yeah. The, the problem I think that people are overlooking is that the more that you get connected and using OpenAI or any of these services, the more you’re getting married to them.

Teja (38:30):

Yeah.

Matt (38:30):

And they don’t, they think of it as magic versus any other technology, IP or service that you would integrate with Wow. Where you have to ask some questions about, Hey am I getting, am I getting married to this technology? Am I getting married to this particular service? How much of this is really providing value to my customers? And certainly from a design standpoint, we are interested in not just throwing AI in as somebody, a friend of mine said, sprinkling it in <laugh> because they had to, because the stock price would go down if they didn’t. But actually putting it in, in real ways that make sense for people AI has the potential to overload people, right? It can write a whole paper for you. Yeah, great. I wouldn’t go hand that in off the bat. You gotta go and back and edit it.

Matt (39:18):

And sometimes that whole editing process may take as long as just writing it from scratch, right? Yeah. It’s an, it’s an example. Yeah. But it, there are downsides from a UX standpoint that you need to consider. And of course, the, the other challenge I would say with language models unlike code is that you don’t have any control over the output. It is not a not a repeatable process. You can put in a prompt the same way every time and get different types of data coming out of it. And over time, you have no control. There’s no versioning on their end, right? There’s no way to say, Hey, I wanna lock down this language model so that at least I can get some consistency. Many people have complained that GPT-4 has been degrading over time as they’ve been implementing structures to prevent bias, to prevent you know, foul language or whatever it is.

Matt (40:17):

Right? The more they implement that, it’s not a it’s broad swaths that can perhaps remove, or I should say degrade functionality in other areas because it’s, it’s a, it’s a giant neural network. You can’t go and say there’s a bug there <laugh> and fix it, right? So there’s you, it’s a big brush they’re painting with, and it changes the model. So if you’re building according to that model and what it provided you three months ago, you’ve gotta keep looking at it to make sure it does provide what you think it is going to. And if you’re tying a lot of your value and your product to the output of that language model, which many products of course have just come up as prompt front ends. Yes. You’re really, you know, you’re hoping <laugh>, you’re hoping for for that model to behave the same.

Matt (41:07):

So there’s a lot of value in considering if you’re an enterprise, not just the idea that, Hey, I don’t want my data to leave my perimeter. Right. I want to control that. But also the, the, the value in the, in the model itself, just not changing. So you may consider having, you know open source foundational language models that you build or manage there. Yeah. And there’s a lot of amount in the hugging face community, there’s a lot of really good models out there that you can run on your own hardware that cost very little. And by the way, of course, you’re, you’re gonna possibly spend less depending on the amount of tokens that you’re throwing at it, right? Yeah. It’s an infrastructure cost, it’s a fixed cost versus the variable cost of per token.

Teja (41:52):

Yeah, totally. And, and the sort of downstream risk of the model changing and your prices.

Matt (41:58):

Well, we did a plant, by the way, we, we’ve built our own solution to assist with product requirements. It’s called Symphonia. And we use open AI as part of that, but we also have the ability to use open source language models. And we’ve tested on that before. And so as part of that, we ended up building this reusable IP that is effectively a middleware that allows you to do rag to, to do, you know, basically, you know, use real information from real time locations and what the model wasn’t trained on. Right. But it supports other things like semantic routing and caching and things like that. And these are this IP that we created and we’re licensing it out to other companies. But the whole idea is you need to know how to build that. And many of these companies who are just connecting to open ai, they don’t know enough yet to realize that, that you, you have to abstract, you should think of this like anything else and abstract away some of these capabilities. And I get concerned that they’re gonna, again, get married to these providers, these language providers, and then have to back out later on or deal with ramifications ’cause they’re not thinking about it.

Teja (43:13):

Right. Yeah. That’s interesting. Yeah. We, it’s, it’s a set of risks that I don’t think the overall, like, I don’t know, tech community has been apprised of to that It should. And unfortunately, the most, you know, vocal proponents are talking their own own book, so to speak. Yeah.

Matt (43:38):

<Laugh>,

Teja (43:39):

There’s such That’s right.

Matt (43:40):

That’s, well, there’s a lot. It’s nascent. There’s, there’s so much that people are trying to figure out, and it, it seems like magic. Yeah. So in some ways it does remind me of the Bitcoin bubble from a few years ago, but not <laugh>, but, but not because the technology’s better. Not, I mean, look, I actually think that that blockchains are gonna play a role with AI interesting in the future, but there was a lot of hype over it because the money was just, seemed like it was just free money. Here I think people are are thinking, oh, it’s free magic <laugh>, you know? And, and it’s not it is magic. It’s really, I mean, it look, it hit, it hit the market kind of outta left field, right? And people thought, this is amazing. Look, look at all the things we can do with this.

Matt (44:29):

We just never had this before. We thought, you know, as kids that we, you know, we didn’t think we would have watches you could talk to and see people on, and now we have video calls like this from across the world, right? We didn’t think that was the case. Right? And so now we’re seeing something brand new that we outta left field that we never thought was possible with transformers and, and people go a little crazy, but we’ve gotta remember to kind of pull ourselves back down to earth <laugh> and, and realize that there’s you know, let’s do it in the right way. And enterprises, I think are probably the most apt to, to benefit, but also they, they have to be careful because they have big customers and they need to be careful with the data going out. And, and that’s, that’s why when we consult companies on design, we’re thinking along those lines too, you know? Yeah. Like, Hey, let’s, let’s reel it back in a bit and make sure that we’re doing this in a smart way.

Teja (45:27):

Yeah. How do you, so how do you separate your concerns, like practically from a day-to-day standpoint between like, like your professional services business and the r and d initiatives that you’re involved in, like symia and, and so on? Yeah,

Matt (45:43):

You know, it, it’s, it’s funny, our tagline for Panorama Design, which is the professional services, has been time to market accelerated by design. And the, the work that we’ve done in our r and d side has been focused on emerging technologies areas that we have interest and that are certainly aligned to how we think about requirements. Symphonia being one of them as a tool for, for addressing that, both by the way, in software and in hardware. We, we have both of those areas that we, we tr we that Symphonia can tackle. What I would say is that we are using the, the knowledge and understanding and what we learn from Planorama Labs and emerging tech to inform us how to go back and do design better, how to manage requirements better, how to, you know, because we know generative AI so well as, as, as well as anybody can in this nascent time, but we actually have experience designing it.

Matt (46:53):

Wow. For it. And, and knowing what happens underneath the underneath of the hood, we’re able to to, you know, make that much more progress and design capabilities and products and features that are certainly providing value and are buildable, right? Are manageable. So we, I think of it as even the IP that we’ve created, that middleware that I talked about, that we’re licensing out that it’s an accelerant, right? You don’t have to build it yourself. So it is driving time to market for these features for products. We’re doing it both as a professional service and we have IP that supports that same motivation, right? If, if we’ve already built it, and if you wanna license, if you wanna build it yourself, you can too. We’re not gonna get in the way of that. But we, we certainly are trying to provide a, a set of services and tools that allow you to accelerate, you know, features and products to market, and I’ll even say the, the, the right features and the right products to market that are the best positioned to, to be successful.

Teja (48:05):

Do you ever think about going the venture backed route, or are you happy running your org without somebody You

Matt (48:12):

Say venture backed in what way? Like, like taking symphonia and, and doing something with it. I, I wouldn’t turn down the idea of it. I mean, look, I, here’s the thing about agencies that I’ve found is that when they get to be a certain size, you lose some things, you lose some culture. And I’m not saying we’re at that max size yet. I’m not anywhere near what I’d like to be for professional services. We’re still bringing on more clients and still growing, but there’s a point at which you lose some abilities. And for me, I’m involved in most every project that we’re working on to some degree. It’s kind of like Charles Ames, you know, from his design shop, right? He was involved in every project, and he kind of had his name and stamp of approval on it. And I’ve kind of thought about that model, and I like it. I like being involved because, you know, as I mentioned in the beginning, I kind of wanted to find what I like to do when I grow up.

Teja (49:12):

Yeah. And

Matt (49:13):

I like to do this. I like to come in and solve problems, think holistically about what they’re trying to accomplish bring the team together. We all put our heads together and, and try to ensure that they’re, you know, going down the right path. So yeah. I, I wouldn’t, I, I wouldn’t turn down having somebody want to, to, you know, participate in working with us on Symphonia. I’m not allergic to money, like I <laugh>. I just put it out that way. But I, I, I like the professional services that we provide because I’m, I’m trying to really solve problems. Yeah. And if, if there is opportunity to, to grow our work on, on Symphony and accelerate that and get that in more people’s hands to, to drive growth and to solve real problems, then I’m all for it. You know, and I’ll, I’ll take that on a case by case basis. You can put my number at the bottom of the screen. One 800 <laugh>

Teja (50:13):

Is mostly developers, but I have heard feedback there that there are some other types of stakeholders who Yeah. Do this podcast. So yeah.

Matt (50:22):

I’m not the best marketer. And you, you mentioned it before, like I, I really am more of an engineer and I get allergic to seeing people that hype projects that are not up to snuff. Right. And I’m usually the opposite. I’m the kind of person that like, well, it’s good enough, you know, but it, it could be a whole lot better. And then people come back and say, no, it’s really good. <Laugh>.

Teja (50:44):

That’s my personality. Yeah.

Matt (50:46):

<Laugh>.

Teja (50:46):

Yeah. I don’t know, in this, in this world, it seems like there’s like, there are rewards for being a vocal proponent of your, I don’t know of what you’re working on, but it feels awkward, you know, it’s like the digital equivalent of like walking into a room being like, I am very smart. Please look at what I’m doing. That’s right. <Laugh>, you know, which is like really awkward to do if you’re like at a war and you, that’s how you initiate a conversation. People are like, who is this person?

Matt (51:14):

Yeah, that’s right. <Laugh>.

Teja (51:17):

What is happening?

Matt (51:18):

That’s right. That’s right. And I, I, I get it. There’s a, I I’ve never been really good at that self-promotion because I like to say that our work speaks for itself.

Teja (51:27):

No doubt.

Matt (51:27):

The problem I have with our professional services is that we’re under NDA for most of this stuff. So we can’t show <laugh>. So like, it’s behind the curtain, but believe me, it looks really good, <laugh>. Yeah. We did a great job. I just can’t prove it. Yeah. But but we do have enough projects that we can show that we, we do have that, you know, demonstrate our work. But look, at the end of the day, design is solving problems and we look at it, we’re solving a problem for, for product teams who just need to be able to execute, get products out the door, get up the right product out the door, and, and have good internal documentation, solve a lot of those problems that have been thrown out with the bath water <laugh>, the, the, the benefits of, of good documentation and the, the, the benefits of, of, of the, of the kind of work that we do are intrinsic to the team now. And we execute, have good process. We bring a lot of there’s a, there’s a guy I know who has a, a podcast called Chaos to Clarity and is like, the best way to say it is, you know, we bring Clarity <laugh> to, to otherwise process chaos, right? Chaos in terms of budget, timelines, whatever. It’s, and I, I I’m not gonna take his term, but I’m gonna use it <laugh> <laugh> because it’s it’s a good one. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s probably the best way to say what we do.

Teja (52:50):

Yeah.

Matt (52:51):

So

Teja (52:51):

That’s awesome. Where, so where could people find you, Matt?

Matt (52:56):

If you go to Planorama Design, so it’s pl, right? Planorama Design slash Matt they’ll find me there. It kind of has a bit about me, but if you just go to Planorama Design, you’ll see where we are. Awesome. And I have a, on that slash Matt link, I have a area to set up a time to talk or way to reach me on LinkedIn. So if folks wanna continue the conversation or chat about anything we’ve spoken about, I’m happy to, to happy to network, happy to get on a call.

Teja (53:28):

Cool. Please reach out to Matt. He would love to hear from you if you have a ton of developers who listen to this. So I think they would want to talk shop, and I wish you had more of an opportunity to dig into your background because you have a CS background and an electrical engineering background. I’m not mistaken. I

Matt (53:41):

Have a, it’s computer engineering and electrical masters, so, but yeah, computer engineering is half software anyway, so yeah, it, it’s all good. So

Teja (53:51):

Sweet. Please reach out to him guys, show us the love. Thanks Matt, appreciate your time today.

Matt (53:56):

Thank you, Tesia.

Abbey, via previous recording (53:57):

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