S1 E16 | Season 1 Podcast Wrap-Up

You're going to use a postmortem whenever you finished a project or a cycle. That is extremely important. Depending on your learning cycle and your product cycle, it would be different things. You might have to do it during a project or you might wait till after the project. And that kind of depends on how fast you are in this, in the system of developing whatever you're doing. So use it as a tool after some big event happened and you're trying to actually look backwards to. To see what you can improve on or what went wrong so you can have a better dialogue, cross functionally and then also possibly tweak up or make your projects stronger going forward.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast, where we challenge the status quo of innovation.

And new product development.

We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer. I'm Bob Masta and I'm the co founder of the Rewired group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're.

Joined by Greg Engel, who is my.

Co founder and chief, Bob interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize, and recharge your brain to build better products.

Hey, this is the 16th episode. This is the season ending. I've never been to a season ending before, so this is kind of exciting for Greg and I. We take the time to kind of reflect and go over a tool we use all the time called a postmortem, where we dive into not only the process, but then we do a postmortem on the podcast to help us kind of frame what we're going to do in season two and ultimately figure out those kinds of things. And then we wrap it with some requests from you all as we think about designing season two, that we can get some input from the listeners to help make it better. So enjoy our little banter. And again, there's a couple of I'll say jabs that we take at each other, but enjoy.

All right, Bob. So we are on episode 16, the last one of the season season.

The season finale. Are we going to hold them at the on the edge?

So what I wanted to do is talk about a tool we use.

Oh, yeah.

And the tool is called a postmortem.

Ooh.

Some people like them, some people don't like the name. Get over yourself. It is what it is. A postmortem just means we're going to examine what happened, what was good, what was bad, and what can we change as we go forward.

Yeah. Yeah.

So what I want to do in this episode is talk about what a post mortem is. And then you are. You and I are going to have a conversation about the podcast and we're going to do a short postmortem on the podcast. We won't hit every step because it is a. It is talking and there's some writing involved in the postmortem. But we'll put some example or we'll put some of the steps in our notes so people can see them and they can look at them. And if people are struggling with doing a postmortem, we can always talk about how they would engage us to do that.

Okay, I'm up for it. Like the, the mic. My, my. I was nervous because I feel like I had to go to the whiteboard, but I can't take the mic to the whiteboard.

So it's like, isn't that great? You're tethered and you can't actually move around. It's a fantastic.

Those who know me know I feel like I'm now chained to the, to the microphone.

So what is a postmortem?

So for me, a postmortem is this the ability to do reflective learning on what we just did, Whether it's the last cycle or whether it's the last product or whether we're looking at something that doesn't work in the engineering world. We talk about it as being a tear down. How do we tear this thing down to say what went well, what didn't go well, what did we learn from it? And then what do we need to start thinking about moving forward? So it's using kind of what we did as a way to kind of reflect and learn and do continuous improvement.

And should you only do it when it was a failure?

No, you should be doing it all the time.

I think that's one of the reasons why people don't like the name. Right. Is they think of a postmortem as a medical thing.

Yes. You have to be dead to kind of open the body.

And that's not what we're talking about here.

No, no, no, no. So, so. And we've, to be honest, we've wrestled with different ways to kind of look at it. But like, postmortem is the thing that just kind of sticks. So it's not a good name. We could come up with a better name, probably.

So when do you use it? You mentioned a few things, but I want to be a little more concrete when.

So I use it. One, when I'm trying to help either a company or somebody who's built product, I'll say let's start with the postmortem. The last two or three things you did and what worked and didn't work, but it's very much going back and kind of building a timeline and understanding the things that happened along the way and how they reacted. And so part of it is to make sure we connect the dots of how we got to where we are.

All right, so I want to be more concrete in that answer. So you're going to use a postmortem whenever you finished a project or a cycle. That is extremely important. Depending on your learning cycle and your product cycle, it would be different things. You might have to do it during a project or you might wait till after the project. And that kind of depends on how fast you are in this, in the system of developing whatever you're doing. So use it as a tool after some big event happened and you're trying to actually look backwards to see what you can improve on or. Or what went wrong so you can have a better dialogue, cross functionally and then also possibly tweak up or make your projects stronger going forward.

Well, I think there's the other part of it. Part of the postmortem is to make sure you understand, like, in the middle of the project, you actually learn, like, new ways to do something and it kind of gets passed over because they're more worried about kind of making the. And they're like, hey, we just developed this new method or tool or technique to do this or this worked and that didn't work. It's trying to make sure you learn as fast as you can and make sure you incorporate it into the next cycles.

Then I want to talk a little bit about what a post mortem is not. So it is not the blame game.

No, no, this is not about. Kind of. The underlying premise is that Deming would always say that 85% of all problems are system problems, not people problems. And so what we do is we kind of rule out the people problems and say, what are the systemic things that we. That we should think about systemically changing or improving or leveraging?

Like, some of the things we run into a lot are things like when people go back and they reflect on their project, they find out that the requirements of the project change three or four times. That's something that's a learning that would come out of a postmortem that says, when did it change? Why did it change? And then we can try to be more proactive in solving that in the next projects coming up.

Right. So, I mean, we've done this where we have the team go like, okay, here's the charter, here's what's going on. And then either things come to the charter or people ask for changes. And at some point in time, there's gotta be almost a pause button to go like, okay, are we gonna. What are we gonna do instead of this? Or what are. What are. Like, what's the implication of this? And most teams don't realize, like, they get kind of jacked around because they can't. Like, they just say, oh, yeah, I gotta do this too. And things just keep coming. And so it becomes those kinds of insights. You learn of how to add these new procedures to help you kind of stay focused.

Yeah. So you're looking for, when you're doing this, you're looking for the things that went well, you're looking for things that didn't go well. And then you're looking for things that you would change going forward is what you're really trying to do. So let's kind of take that into the world of our podcast. So I went back and I listened to the origin episode, which is pretty hard. Something, something, it was something. Don't know if it was good or bad.

Did you enjoy it?

Enjoy is a tough word. I got what I needed out of it, which was I want to level set us, which is the three things that we kind of said we wanted to get out of it was we needed a forum to get stuff out of your head. We needed a forum to get our basic knowledge out, which meant we didn't have to answer the same question over and over again. I think is the example we gave and then attract new people, give avenue for people that maybe knew us to show people our podcast or share our podcast so new people get it or new people might stumble upon that type of thing.

But a way to get to know us without, you know, at some point, like before they even meet us kind of thing.

So those were the three kind of objectives we had. So with that in mind, let's ask the first question. So in your mind, what, what, what went well this season in doing the podcasts?

I think for, for us, as you kind of walk through it is I think we found the right kind of structure in terms of like length and topic and things where we can banter and kind of get people know us without kind of going too, too deep or making it too long and too not comprehensive. So to me, it was like, it was a good balance of kind of us talking about the basics but not going into great depth. And so I think that's a good thing.

So I think what went well for me was, as I said on the Origin episode and I think said a couple times in the other episodes, doing a podcast was never my first love. It's not something I aspired to be a podcaster. So doing the first season and getting through the first season, I think has helped me get over the hump of it being work, it being something that is stuck. You know, we were able to put things together relatively quickly. We were able to get the topics out without too much of fight. But we'll talk about that in a minute. Those types of.

It depends on. We've got feedback on definition of fight, so we might have to brawl here just to demonstrate.

So to me, that's kind of went well. I think we've hit on the getting the basic knowledge out. I'm not sure we've done a great job on getting things out of your head, but I think, again, we'll talk about that in a little bit.

Well, I think it's a foundation, but I don't think we have new topics. We're just kind of clearing out all the old topics is how I feel.

About it and then attracting new people. I think we've heard a couple people saying, hey, I've shared this, which is what we kind of wanted. I don't think we never had huge expectations of that. So I think those hit. So I think the one that we're kind of struggling with is the getting out of our head type thing is the one thing.

So I want to add, though, one of the things that I say went well that I didn't anticipate is what we're doing right now is we have all these tools that are kind of on the shelf. And you pulling this one here is a good example of, like, I want to make sure we kind of get back to some of the basics of what we've been doing. And this postmortem is one of those things I love to do, but I feel like we don't do it often enough in terms of just the everyday stuff like the podcast. So this is actually awesome.

So the next step would be what didn't go well? So in your mind, what didn't go well.

So one thing is.

It didn't go well, but it's a struggling moment that's emerged, which is, I can't remember one podcast to the other and so I come up with a topic and I'm like, did we already talk about that? And you'll go like, I think we talked about that. And we go back and forth. It's like there's this whole notion of we're getting stuff out of our head. And my belief is if we actually re recorded on a topic we already talked about, it would still sound different because we just, we don't do the same thing every time. But not knowing kind of.

How they've unfolded and we didn't necessarily unfold them the way we recorded them. And so there's that notion of I have a hard time figuring out what's next. And so I'm counting on you guys now to do that because I can't remember all of them. And the other part is I'm getting confused between podcasts I've been on and podcasts like our podcast. So it's. I'm a little confused in terms of topic, topical. But I'm counting on the team, you and the team that basically help guide us to what's there.

So I think what the thing that didn't go well, and it's a hard thing. Didn't go well. Right. But is could have gone better. We didn't have. We didn't have a plan of what we were going to talk about. We didn't have. We weren't produced, we weren't, hey, this topic. Well, I don't mean scripted. I mean, just before we even got to the microphone, we didn't have a, hey, we wanted to cover these things over the course of the season. We didn't have those types of things. We were doing top of mind, ad hoc, which is good. But it leads to the problem that you just said, which was can't remember them because we're busy, people are busy. It gets to our argument and we can talk about this a little bit of you think we can rerecord things in a season, and I am completely the opposite. I don't think we can because I think it actually confuses people because we do bring variety to the answer. But then which one's the right answer? And if I haven't actually consumed the information and used it, I can't actually build upon my, my knowledge. I have to be able to soak in that knowledge for a little while. And that's kind of our. That's the problem with our society right now is we try to build our knowledge too quickly and we actually then put ourselves backwards in the, in the situation because we don't know when to use it, how to use it, and what the conflicts are. So we need to be. I feel we need to be a little bit more structured on what we're trying to talk about and not confuse people while still getting through to our. Answering the basic questions, building our audience, and getting things out of our head, which are things we're trying to do. So that's always the balance there.

And so part of it is, is that we didn't kind of map the content out. I think I would say the first season is really kind of about helping us kind of just build the rhythm, build the muscle, get the record recording in, learning how to get the recordings and upload them and all that. I mean, just to get it started. But I think as we think through next season, we should actually think about the next two or three seasons as we go.

That's. So that gets to the next point. So we're still talking about what didn't work, right? So. So what did. So what else didn't work? What else were the things that.

So I would say that the. The promotion of it. So I've promoted a couple of times, and to be honest, it's done fairly well from a listening. You know, the number of people listening every week. Week is to be a pretty impressive number. But at the same time, I don't feel like it's had very little promotion. And so I'm waiting for kind of as we build kind of the marketing and lead engine, as we're going around some of these things. Like, I feel like we need. Like, I don't feel like we got the word out enough because we just got really busy.

Okay, so that brings us to the next step of the postmortem. Right. Which is. Which is. Okay, now what do you do about it?

You know what went well? You know what didn't go well? What the heck. So I think you said some of the things. So let's just kind of reiterate. What didn't go well for us is I think we were too ad hoc. We weren't thinking about the whole. We were thinking about the pieces, not the whole. So what can we do differently or what should we do differently next year to avoid that?

I think if we think about the progress we're trying to make for this next season and kind of define that better and then do a little bit of understanding of why people have been listening to it and what they get out of it, then we can actually structure kind of here's the systems or the podcast episodes that we can use to help make people make progress and kind of connect the dots for the entire season. And maybe it's three or four topics we hit different ways. Or I think we can design it better in terms of understanding the 16 episodes we want to kind of hit next. I think there's. There's more than 16 episodes we can do, but I think we have to now think about it as it relates to the goals and relate to kind of the. The rhythm we've picked.

Yeah, I think. I think it's one of those things is we spend. We treated the podcast as a side gig. Side hustle.

Well, as a prototype, a very early.

Prototype, but we didn't actually spend enough time on the front end to say we thought about the system, but we didn't think about our system within the system. Yes. How much time can we devote to each step? So we talked a lot. We've been talking for three years about doing the podcast, but we never really coalesced around what the purpose was until we got the origin episode. Then we got that. Which I think was relevant, was evident to us. But then we didn't spend the time to say, how do we get them to get to the journey?

Yes, that's right.

But if we want to empty our head, what does that mean? If we want to get new people, what does that mean? What's the mechanisms we're supposed to do? So I think we have to spend some time between the break we have from season one to season two to define those things.

I think that's right. I think the other thing is to look at what people listen to and whether more popular episodes than others. Again, take that time to now think about the full thing. I think of the first season here as really more of an mvp and how do we make it so it was a side hustle, or we could fit it in between things because we learned a lot along the way to figure out what to do next and. And to be honest, what not to do.

So I think that's an excuse we give ourselves a lot, which is, oh, it's an mvp. Oh, it's a prototype.

Oh, it's what I give myself. Not. You do not like that.

I know that because it actually then defeats the purpose of a postmortem. Right. Because we need to take responsibility for what we did. And I'm not saying it was bad. We've gotten plenty of people to say it was good. It could be better if we put some more work into it. Just like product development, just like everything else that's right. So I think the next thing we talked a little bit about not going well was how do we pick the right topics or get it out of your head. And we've had some very robust discussions about that. I think we need, in order to hit the two first objectives of basic knowledge out there and getting people new people, we have to be a little structured in what we're doing. And you feel like it could be.

More what the thing getting it out of my head is. I realize it's a secondary objective.

Right.

Especially from your perspective. But at the same time, I feel like there's things that I.

Did you all hear that jab? Did you hear the jab?

Of course. That's how it works. It was a very nice jab, though. I didn't hurt, did it?

It's all right. Just want to make sure we're hurting.

I get it. But the notion, to your point, we need to make this very useful in terms of from our perspective, as we've gotten busier, it's like we don't have time to answer the same question and we don't have time. So how do we actually build this thing so we can help people when we do get together, that they're ready to run or ready to walk with us, as opposed to having to kind of slow down and do that other part? So I see the purpose of that, and I think that the next season should be more focused on that part.

The hope is that I could. My notion of getting stuff out of my head is to try to talk about more current event things that literally then talk about what we should do and let people see how we think about things that happen to us as opposed to things that are kind of the foundational stories or foundational kind of concepts of what we work on. And so it's a wrestling of the both. But I think to your point, we're going to only get better if we build the foundation first.

So I think that what we're talking about there is when we take the time to plan out the next season, we have to take into account those three objectives, unpack them, and then figure out what are the right types of podcasts for each one and what are.

The trade offs we have to make between them. Because you can't design a podcast that has all three of those in them all the time. But it's more like as we look at the portfolio, do we make progress on all of them together?

That's kind of an overview very quickly of what a postmortem is like they usually take about anywhere from a few hours to a half a day. And there would be some drawing involved, there would be some other things involved. And like I said, we'll put some of that up on the show notes so people can see it. But I want to leave like we usually do with homework or requests. And I think it's a little more request than it is homework this time. But the first one is the more homework part of it, which is I want you to think of when should you, as whatever capacity you're in, do a post mortem? What are the right times and spaces that you, your team. Because it's not just about you learning, it's about the team learning. It's about the team understanding different perspectives because a marketer has a different perspective than a, than an engineer who has a different perspective than a product supply person. And it's about understanding what they felt in the project at what time. So as we do a postmortem, we would talk to our producer, we would talk to Catherine and talk about what they feel in them as well, so that we can actually have those things put in our post mortem as well in our project plan going forward would be influenced by that. So I want you to think of that and then I want you to just take a stab at it. Why don't you do one, make a two, try to make a two hour attempt. If, if all you do is go through the three questions we did and then come up with some kind of plan to help people make progress. That's all we really, all we're really asking. If you have a big hairy problem that you need guidance through, then reach out to us and see if we can help you with it. But that's, I mean, just try. It is basically what it is. The second thing is, as we're thinking about our podcasting next season, season two, I want two things from our listeners and they can send these things to podcastewiredinc.com and the first one is questions. What questions do you have? Where are you struggling with innovation? Where are you struggling with applying things? Just some questions. We probably will not answer them offline. If we choose them, they will be on the podcast. And when we do that type of podcast, we will try to do at least two at a time. So we'll get through as many as we can. The second one is those are the questions I want. Also ideas. Is there a podcast you want to hear? Is there something we talked about before? Is there, you know, what is the idea? It doesn't have to be a question then it could just be, it just could be an idea.

What's the rabbit hole we want to go? They would like to hear us go down.

And again, it's not that I'm going to take every suggestion, but as I'm thinking through top of mind, I can see a podcast that helps us answer questions which is the get the basic knowledge part out and then the new audience expanding audience is the things people are struggling with that are topics that we can talk about. An example of that would be I got one the other day that I've responded to that we can talk about later. I don't want to talk about today, which is how do governments or non profits make decisions on jobs to be done. And that's a very actually long discussion because it's what do you mean by job to be done?

What kind of government are we talking about?

All those types of things. So those are the types of things I'm asking for those types of ideas like what should we talk about? So other than that, I think season one has been a wrap.

I just want to confirm you're saying there will be a season two.

I've not committed.

So this is the thing is like.

Will we be back or not? I don't know if we're back.

We'll probably be back in the fall.

Yes, we will be taking the summer off and recycling.

It's useful for people planning, getting the.

Right information out to people and making sure that we're relevant to where people want us to be. I don't know how long we're take off. I know we're going to take off. I know we're going to take off July because some of us get to go on vacation for three weeks, other ones don't.

Did you hear that, Jeb? Did you hear that, Jeff? That is the jab like and yes, I'm going on vacation for three weeks.

So thanks everybody for listening to our season.

Truly appreciate it very much as listeners and love the questions and and continue it to come.

Thanks for listening to the Circuit Breaker podcast. If you haven't already, please subscribe so you won't miss an episode. If you know somebody who's stuck on.

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If you'd like to learn more information, Visit us@therewiregroup.com to find out how we work, how we can help, some resources, some books, some software. Join us next time as we trip the circuit breaker to help you recharge, re energize and refocus your new product development.