18. Efficiency Unleashed: NoCode Revolutionising Operations

Brandon 0:06

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the operations room a podcast for CEOs I am Brandon Mensing. A joined by my amazing co host, Bethany Ayers, how're things going, Bethany,

Bethany 0:16

they're going okay, Brandon, I have COVID I've had COVID for like two and a half weeks now. And I'm really tired.

Brandon 0:23

Yes, you look terrible and you sound terrible.

Bethany 0:26

I'm sounding a lot better. Oh God, I hope I don't sound terrible. I hope I'm so sounding a lot better than I have been. I went through a robot stage for a while. That that is relevant, I guess to today's episode, because today's episode is all about the operations nation event called conference. I'm trying to pronounce the capital O N of conference, which was the event that we went to a couple of weeks ago. And I'm not saying that I definitely caught COVID. At that event, I may have caught it speaking at SAS stock two days previously in Dublin, but either way, come that Friday, I collapsed. So

Brandon 1:03

you're a super spreader two events in one week. Or I'm the recipient

Bethany 1:07

of being a super spreader event. I'm just not sure what event that was. But little did I realise it was going to knock me out for two and a half. And then I'm still not healthy. So possibly three weeks. So I spent most of my time watching TV. I have watched so much TV as like I've consumed my body weight and TV over the last couple of

Brandon 1:27

weeks. Wow, that is a tremendous amount of TV watching. It really

Bethany 1:31

is less than it would have been pre Zowie but you know, still quite a bit of body weight there.

Brandon 1:36

Right? Anything good on TV these days? My TV, we're talking about streaming error.

Bethany 1:40

Oh, yeah. I mean, who watches real live TV. So 20th century, we always subscribe to Netflix. But I think at this moment there's nothing left on Netflix that I fancy watching in any way but then we strategically subscribe and unsubscribe to Disney plus and Apple TV. So we had subscribed to it already Apple TV to watch TED lasso finished Ted lasso, watch the morning show. Then I also watch something called shrinking, which was quite good to have Harrison Ford in it. Harrison Ford on the small screen. Oh yeah, I

Brandon 2:13

saw a couple episodes of that. Actually. It wasn't bad. Yeah,

Bethany 2:15

quite enjoyed that and then watched the crowded room with Tom Holland. And now I'll watch the final episode of the morning show when it comes out on Wednesday and then cancel Apple TV for the next year. And the Disney plus the same. We're watching Wrexham and Loki. So when both of those are finished, those are ones that I watch with my children. Disney plus will be gone till they for another year as well. Wow.

Brandon 2:40

That's amazing. I think you're one of the few people on the planet that can actually strategically unsubscribe when they're supposed to to get the most value from at least pay the least amount of money, I suppose. All right. As Bethany was just talking about, we both moderated two distinct conversations at the operations nation conference a few weeks back. And we're going to talk about one of the conversations today briefly, which is for no code, no problem with a special guest Phil Lakin. In this case, the co founder and CEO of no code ops. And before we flip over to that conversation moderated by Bethany, the operations nation conference, what was your make of that?

Bethany 3:18

It was awesome. It was a great day. So cool to see all of these ops professionals together. So it was for I'm guessing kind of ops managers all the way through to CEOs was a real mix of seniority. And the content was also for everybody. So there were some sessions that were really in the weeds super detailed that I just thought, Oh, my God, kill me if I would have to do that. Whereas other people in the audience were asking, like, such amazing questions, and I didn't understand what anybody was talking about. And then there were other like big picture ones. And I was like, Oh, here's my element. Let's just glide over the top. That all makes sense.

Brandon 3:58

I mean, even the actual topic that you moderated no code ops. I've seen the phrase before several times. And every time I see it, I'm like, what is that? Like? What the hell are they talking about? So it's good to actually have somebody get up there and explain it properly. And when he explains it, it's very intuitive. And it makes complete sense. You're like, yes, of course. That's the thing. But just the phrasing of it somehow was confusing. Yeah,

Bethany 4:20

I completely agree. And I was so happy that I ended up doing that session, because he does a great job of explaining what no code ops are and how we can take advantage of it. Two

Brandon 4:32

faults occurred to me one is previous to this podcast and previous to the operations nation conference engagement that we've had as an operator for the past seven years in scale companies. I was always one of those kind of guys, where I was heads down, focused on the job at hand and did very little networking and knew nothing about the greater operations community in London and pay no attention to it either. It's been really almost a revelation. I think through this podcast that we do getting to No these people, and surely Chen from operations nation is fantastic. It was a great event. And I can definitely see myself going back. So now that I know of operations nation, and I know of Divinia at the CEO roundtable as well, you know, these are fabulous avenues to really upskill. yourself and the community on the observation side of things. They have a fantastic Slack community, questions are asked, answers are given on the CEO Roundtable side of things. They have peer level groups that get together on a monthly basis where they talk about their issues and confidence. And that's fabulous, as well. So there's all sorts of these possibilities now that are exposed to me that I've been great. Yeah,

Bethany 5:38

and I think one of the interesting things that we're going to experience in the coming years is, with more hybrid working and presumably more remote working, I just think we're never going to go back to the way it was no matter how hard we want to, or some people do. And so there is an issue of loneliness. And I think we're seeing all of these communities sprout up as a way to solve that loneliness, you

Brandon 6:02

make a fabulous point here, because number one, being an operations professional is a lonely existence unto itself, because oftentimes, you're by yourself. Or maybe there's a second or third person, in this case, depending on the scale the company, especially in scale ups, and to your point compound that with hybrid working, there's just this loneliness that you talk about, and having peers to speak to about common issues that you're having. That's always a game changer in terms of your mindset. And also just your ability to bounce thoughts off others and really get feedback that it's actually helpful. The other thing that occurred to me at the operations nation conference was that we do this podcast and it's a digital virtual world that we live in. And we can see you know, the number of listeners that we have, and how our tracking per episode, but I think what was a feel good moment, I think for myself was really getting actual human beings coming up to me saying, Hey, I love the podcast, I really enjoy it.

Bethany 6:50

Yeah. So thank you. Thank you, everyone who's listening to this right now.

Brandon 6:56

My not imaginary.

Bethany 6:59

I think my favourite one was when the two of us were talking. And a guy came up to us. And it's just like, it's so strange to hear your voices coming out of actual bodies.

Brandon 7:10

dismembered people in the cloud? Perfect. So let's flip over to Mr. Philip lakyn. And no code ops. Here we go.

Bethany 7:24

Before we get started, I just wanted to understand and actually this is completely stupid question after the last session, who here knows what no code is? So that stupid question. Cool. So the first question would ask you, Phil, what is it?

Philip Lakin 7:40

Great question. If you've built tables of data in air table, or Smartsheet, congratulations, you are a no coder, welcome to the family. That is no code. The way I describe to folks is when creating a website on Wix or Weebly or Squarespace, where you're no longer needed to manage 100 WordPress plugins or, you know, write things in code, you can just drag and drop and the term wiziwig, which is what you see is what you get. That was like the no code for landing pages and for websites. But now no code has gone way beyond that into automations, and integrations and workflows and internal applications. And for that, that whole industry of tooling is called no code where typically you would need code to achieve a certain outcome, you now do not need code. And the spectrum of no code is there SAS, you know software tools, where it's very highly opinionated, you're making some choices about something like let's take Asana for an example, where you're using Asana as a project management application. So it's pretty limited an app, there's a lot of, you know, functionality and choices that you can make. But then you start moving to no code for something like airtable, where you can use it as a project management app, you can use it as a CRM, you can use it as a content calendar, right? So more functionality, more flexibility. But then you can go even further and no code into other areas all the way to low code and writing code where you need it. So it's an entire industry, and very relevant for us ops, folks. Because all of us hate that our word from our developers roadmap, we never get the attention we want for internal tools often. And so often, when the developers can't build it for us, because we're not on the roadmap or off the shelf SAS tools do exactly what we needed to. We find ourselves often turning to creating custom stacks of tools and connecting things and glueing things together with Zapier, you know, etc. And that's no code.

Bethany 9:45

Thank you. So I'm gonna ask you another question. Why does it matter? How does it make an impact on my business? So could you give us some use cases?

Philip Lakin 9:52

So let's take one process as an example, lead routing, right? So say the way that leads were routed at your or company is somebody goes online and fills out a form. Let's say that form is hosted on something like type form, or jot Form or Form stack some form software, they're filling out a form. And you have every form generating email from that form software to go to somebody and account executive to say, who should we route this to in our team? Who does it make the most sense to give this to where is it even a qualified lead or not very standard lead routing process? Well, the reality is that a lot of that can either be fully automated or partially automated with no code tools. So instead of the form stack, just using its native functionality, the form software, you know, just email a person, you can say with something like Zapier, which is an integration platform, which, if something happens over here in this system, then do something in this system may do some stuff in between. So I'll lay that out for you. So in lead routing, you can hook up your form software Formstack, through Zapier to something like Slack. And what you can do is you can say something like, If on our form, they fill out that their company size is one to 10, automatically reject them, right, and just send them an email and invite them to your community or something. If they're 10, through 30 customers, right, which is more, you know, getting closer to ideal, send them to your SMB person in their Slack channel. So you can set up that conditional logic, right, so you're extending the functionality of the form software. And then if it's say 50, plus, you know, size, which is really your sweet spot, and you want your best account executives to get in there, you can send it say there's three count executives, you can send it in Slack to all three of them in a separate channel, and even set up a button where one of them can claim it. And then it can automatically through another zap. Add that to their opportunities in HubSpot or Salesforce. So you're automating the manual parts of the process, and making it visible to all the right parties at the right time. So you're making decisions in advance and making it easier for everybody saving a tonne of time. Awesome.

Bethany: 12:14

That makes a lot of sense. So this actually brings me on to a question that I was going to do a bit later, but I just have to now. And if anybody's listened to the podcast, you'll know I asked this all the time, and I have opinions and my opinions keep changing is where should rev ops, finance ops, etc, all the federated offset? Should they sit in the department? Or should they sit under the COO and then the example that you gave is like a perfect rev ops example. But I can imagine it can go a bit out of control. So with a no code hat on, what's your opinion, federated or Central.

Philip Lakin: 12:50

So I'd like everybody to hear some very spicy opinions on the matter. Here's the thing, the reason these ops roles got created in the first place, right? So Reb, ops, sales ops, people ops, marketing ops, they all got created as the no code MacGyver is on their team, typically, because all of these folks were so tired of waiting for central ops, or dev teams, or IT teams to deliver what they needed. And then finally, if they got what they needed, good luck getting a second version, right? Or what you need is the power of no code tools is that it puts the person that has the problem, way closer to the solution. And that's the power of it. And that's amazing, right? So the person who sits every single day with the revenue team can build tooling, if there's a change the revenue teams needed, right? So say that example I gave were, okay, maybe if it's 20, through 30, people that send it to our AES, that change can be made so much faster when that person is sitting on that team. Right. So that's where this comes from. Now, the reality is that I think there's a world for both areas. But I think you have to choose which one it's kind of like when a product is choosing to go product lead growth or sales lead growth, people often ask, which is better? My answer is always both depends on your business, they can both work. I think that federated and centralise can both work. But you need to know the trade offs. When you have federated ops, it doesn't work the same way. There needs to be rules, and guard rails and check ins amongst the teams to make sure you're not duplicative ly building systems, developers have all these beautiful sets of rules, because they've been at this for so long around continuous improvement in development, deployment. They have GitHub, they have an entire CI CD pipeline of like, when to deploy and monitor and manage in ops. We have none of that for this new generation of software tooling, right? We just go well, I have this idea to automate this thing. Let's do it. Some airtable here. Yeah, I've spent many a long night just rebuilding our whole CRM, right. And that's good. but it also is a bit dangerous. And it's actually kind of the reason that like, we built what we built with operator, which we can go into later. But there's a cause for both centralised and federated. But I think if you're going federated, you need to have some rules of the road, you need to have some alignments, you need to have some what I call like the automation development lifecycle, which is, everybody at the company needs to know is this automation, I built an idea in testing for certain departments for all departments under review, and maintenance deprecated. And if it's going from under review to live, there needs to be deployment barriers for it based on who's impacted by that automation. So in that example, I gave, right, it would both affect the marketing team because it was their form, right, and the sales team, which it's going to the AES, so if I'm making a change in that there needs to be a certain level of sign off in that automation, before I push it live, and a communication after it going live. There needs to be deployment boundaries, when multiple people are building things for multiple teams at this level of speed. Now,

Bethany: 16:08

that makes a lot of sense. Easier said than done, having experienced this hadn't having so I was a CRO, originally. So I'm all for rev ops being in the revenue function. And then I was the CFO. And so I was all for revenue ops being in the CFO function. Hence, my opinion changing a lot. We tried lots of upskilled chats. Okay, let's do it federated directs poor reporting lines, dotted reporting lines, weekly meetings, not weekly meetings, Asana boards, not Asana boards, and like we never cracked it. Any hints?

Philip Lakin: 16:41

Yeah, it's a one to 10 ratio, any one thing you ask of the ops team to do the doesn't directly impact the stuff they need to get done. You need to deliver 10x value to them. You can't ask for people to fill out spreadsheets, update things, attend meetings, right? Where you or your centralised team are getting all of the value, unless they are getting 10x the value in return. My big thing with internal stakeholders is I really like to treat them like customers, right? And if I'm asking a customer, you know, like, it's so funny when we think about customers, and we think about like I gave the example before that form, right? Everybody fights internally about if we add one more question to this form, we're gonna get drop off, right. But meanwhile, you'll send an NPS form with 64 questions here, they mean to your teammates early. And so I think the more we treat internal team members like customers, when especially when we're asking them for things that don't have an immediate direct impact to them, I think you get better results.

Bethany: 17:44

So there's that. But then there's also how do you deliver the value but also, like, I was so impressed by the last presentation, because like, the thing about the workflow? Yeah, that would kill me, that would make my eyes bleed. And I would do anything in the world other than doing that. And so I suspect this might be the answer for this is all of those dependencies. Yep. They're so hard. They're hard. They're so painful. They're so tedious. Any ways of doing it that isn't as hard as it looks like it has to be done?

Philip Lakin: 18:12

We did over 300 conversations one on one, over two and a half years with folks that use tools like air table and make and Zapier HubSpot at their companies, where they started with these tools are starting to scale upon them. And they're like, having trouble with these dependencies. And what we found is that the way people solve it today was when you know, when they have all these different apps departments building all of these automations was they had one huge Google spreadsheet, or one Excel spreadsheet, or one air table base of every automation of the company, who owns it, what it does, what would happen if they changed it, what fields it's connected to what apps it's connected to. And it was the only way to both make the IT and compliance side of the business that happy and operationally keep you know, those automations decentralised, right. And so all of these dependencies were tracked in that spreadsheet, and we want to do with operator was automate that. So we automate that spreadsheet for folks. So they don't have to manually update it. It's just there. You can search for dependencies. And eventually, we're even bringing in a Chrome extension, where you can hover over a field in any SaaS application and see what automations is hooked up to it just automatically. And what would happen if you changed it? Who owns it? What processes, you know, hooked up to so all that to say that my short answer is that you have to make it as the designer, an orchestrator, you know, an architect, you have to make it easier to do the right thing and the wrong thing. And if your documentation is hidden, it's like it's a tree falls in the forest. Does anyone hear it? If documentation is written and no one reads it doesn't exist, right? And so you've got to make it easy for people to find those dependencies and all of that information. You've got to put it in their face at the right time in the right moment, which is why we you know, we're bringing every all of our data now into a Chrome extension, because no one's going to open up our app who's just sitting in CX, right. But if they hover over a field, they go, Oh, I shouldn't change this from a number of fields to a text field, because I'll break all fields lead routing, right? Maybe I should talk with him about it. And we should have a conversation and that conversation should stick with that field as living documentation. Because, you know, conversations about documentation are also documentation. Right? Yeah.

Bethany: 20:25

Awesome. I didn't actually know what operator did. So I'm great. Great that I asked that question, and now have an answer to all of that pain. So I feel like and we already had a chat GPT question earlier, that we can't have any conversation in 2023. That doesn't include AI. And so AI, no code, discuss Yes, there you go.

Philip Lakin: 20:48

So AI has been a huge boon for no code. Because no code is essentially an abstraction layer away from code. And these new LLM 's and AI are essentially an abstraction layer away from all this stuff that companies used to have to build manually and would take years and years and years. And it's so easy for anybody to use. And so we've seen a lot of really amazing deployments of AI in no code tools, things like one thing Zapier does that I'm obsessed with. If you get an error in Zapier today, it used to just be like, good luck, right? Here's like, some metadata that you don't know how to read. Now, you can press a button, and it will summarise that problem, and maybe what you should do to fix it. So there's really smart deployments of AI as features no code, but what's going to happen for us ops folks over time, and this is the scary thing. So everyone put on your seat belts, if you thought the pace of your teams building their own tools with no code was fast, wait till AI comes in. Because we're just in the very early innings, people will be building their own tools with AI, real fast. And I think that the opportunity here is to take some of the things that we learn from the no code world and that we fail that things like governance, compliance, you know, all like the typical GRC stuff, right? But even collaborating at scale, that stuff needs to get applied to AI too. Because now the barrier is so low to create something, it's very soon going to be a world where I can just say, you know, I can talk to my systems and say, I want to create a report that does this. And off of this report, I want to do these emails that I finally wanted to send out to all these customers, where you don't know if 10 other different types of emails from 10. Other departments are also being sent to those customers. So not to quote Uncle Ben from Spider Man, but with great power, comes great responsibility. And the tooling itself will never solve that. It's always people process technology. And if we forget the people and process part of things, technology just gets so powerful that it creates actually worse customer experiences. And that's what we want to avoid.

Bethany: 22:58

Okay, so scary and exciting all at the same time. That's the future. We don't know when that future is. It's probably weeks, a month, a couple of years. In the meantime, how can we get prepared? What should we be thinking about? And actually have a second question? What are some really cool use cases of AI that you'd suggest everybody doing? Yeah.

Philip Lakin: 23:18

So look, I think that it's important that everybody here does have their team use AI tools for their own needs. And I also think it's important to do that in a sanction way where it's, here's the training, here's the things that you can put into AI, you can't put into AI, you can't upload our full customer data set, right, like don't do that. So I think your teams are going to be using these tools for certain things, whether you like it or not, they're gonna use it to summarise emails, they're gonna use it to send emails, they're gonna use it to judge copy, right? They're gonna use it to create images for certain campaigns. So the idea is, how do you work with them one, right, and say, These are the guardrails that we're putting in place. We're cool with using X or Y tool, but you have to use Z guidelines, right? So that's really important. And then the second thing is, a lot of us use AI in silos, and we think we're the only person doing it. But what's really cool about AI is see how other people use it. And I think that one of the things that we did at Compass for automations was so we had a centralised team, and all these groups around the country. And what we did is we took one rep from each group that was really systems minded, who now today, you'd be considered like the CX ops person of that group. We would come together every two weeks, and just show each other what we were hacking together. And some of our best ideas came from that. And so I think getting folks together to do some Show and Tell at your company around like, how we're using AI today, right? It might seem simple, but it's actually super, super powerful and fun,

Bethany: 24:57

and fun. 10x Value And

Philip Lakin: 25:00

Yeah, huge. Somebody seeing me build something in Zapier, sometimes they'll go, you just saved me a day a week. And I think part of the problem of some of these tools and this kind of like math, SAS expansion that we've had is that we assume everybody knows how to use these tools. The reality is a lot of people don't, or we just know on a surface level, but if someone actually watches how you use a tool, and you watch how other people use tools, you'll be blown away. I mean, does anyone remember the first time they learned a VLOOKUP? And you're like, wait, what magic is that? I don't have to do like command and search, right? Like, there's so many simple things like that, that you're already doing in tools day to day that I can almost guarantee you 90% of your team doesn't know about yet. And we just assume they do we assume that everyone uses tools like we do, and they don't. And so I think there's value to be had both ways.

Bethany: 25:52

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And now we are wrapping up. And so the final question is, if everyone could take one thing away from today's session, what would it be?

Philip Lakin: 26:04

I would say this, you and the people at your company want to move faster, we've never had more data at our fingertips than we have today. With that comes this need to want to build and move super fast. And we no longer have to wait for devs for it to do things. Because these tools are so powerful. But I would argue that slowing down a bit, right? Can Make You go 20 steps further in the long run. And by slowing down. I mean, like, how do we want to use these tools? Who's responsible for what? And then what are the deployment boundaries? Right? Can we just get together and talk about all the different things that we're doing with these things we can learn from each other? Right? Can we document these things? Or use operators to do it automatically, right? Amazing. Well, you'd like you'd like, but like, how can we slow down a bit so that the tools just don't take over everything? Because oftentimes the reason I see a tool kicked out of a company had nothing to do with the tool and everything to do with how poorly it was deployed and implemented. And so I think taking those steps is really critical. And the last thing I'll say, and I truly mean this, if any of you ever have any questions about deploying automations at your company, how no code works with your ops teams, selecting Tools, anything in that regard, please do not hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn. I save like, you know, anywhere between like an hour and hour and a half every single week, just to talk to ops people one on one about stuff. So please don't hesitate to reach out. That's

Bethany: 27:34

just amazing. Thank you so much, Phil. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.