271: How to Make Sure Your Dev Team Productivity is Maximized - with Phil Alves

Matt Wolach: 0:10

Understanding how to get your company moving forward, especially from a development perspective, from a product perspective can be very difficult, especially if you are a non technical founder. How do you measure your dev team? How do you make sure they're doing the right things? How do you understand what needs to happen?And when? And is it even going the right way? Are you on the right path? Well, Phil out of this came in, and he shared all of these things with you. So you can understand how to make sure that things are moving forward the right way, how to make sure you're building a better product than your competitors, and how to make sure that your company moves forward successfully. So definitely check this out.There's a lot of great stuff in here. A lot of good tidbits of wisdom he's got great experience is really going to help you.

Intro/ Outro: 0:50

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach.

Matt Wolach: 1:07

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS. Really excited to have you here. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for listening. I am Matt Wolach. And my goal is to help you scale your SaaS we're gonna help you grow your company through more leads through knowing how to close those leads and scaling your team so you get an amazing exit. If you're not subscribed yet, make sure you're subscribed. Hit that button right there. That way you're gonna hear about all the cool tips that we have coming forward in the next few weeks.Definitely make sure you are a subscriber. We have some great subscribers who are looking to grow their company. Make sure you join them. And today is a great episode. I'm really excited for today learning about what we're going to learn from Phil Alvis. Phil, welcome to the show.

Phil Alves: 1:43

Hey, thanks for having me.

Matt Wolach: 1:44

Absolutely. I'm so glad to have you here. Let me make sure everybody knows who you are, Phil. So Phil, he's the founder at DevStats, and also DevSquad, he led the build of over 100 SaaS products for bootstrap founders and VC funded startups alike, leading multiple clients to multimillion dollar exits along the way. Now, he has DevStats, and I'm excited to join him and learn all about what dev stats does, because it gives you x ray vision into your development team's performance.So you can build our tight timely, high value projects to satisfied stakeholders. Once again, Phil, thanks for coming on the show.

Phil Alves: 2:17

Yeah, no problem.Great to be here.

Matt Wolach: 2:19

It's super great to have you. So tell me what's been going on with you lately? And what's coming up?

Phil Alves: 2:23

Yeah, so the weather is great here in Utah. So I just am flying a lot. When I'm not running my business. I'm a pilot just for fun. So I have that's what I have been doing lately,on top of working on building my my companies.

Matt Wolach: 2:37

That's awesome. I'm super jealous. I've always wanted to be a pilot. And this is two guests in a row who have who have a private pilot's license. And so I think it's a sign for me that I need to go out and get my pilot's license.I've always been an aviation enthusiast, I think I need to do it Sure. is fun. Good for you.That's super cool. So tell me what gave you the idea to start dev stats, how did that come to be?

Phil Alves: 2:58

So for the longest time, I always have this goal of building high performing development teams. And that's what my consulting firm was about was about helping people build their products and give them a development team that's actually high performing. And that can deliver a lot of value.And so that's been a topic that I always study, because I want to make sure my team deliver the most. And I actually, there was some research that was made by Google, Google is sponsored research called data matrix. And then from there, a couple of software's probably start to be built to try to solve that problem to help companies measure what matters. So you're using one software, and the software was pretty good. And they got sold in the company that bought the software made it pretty bad. And so I was like,forget it, I'm just gonna do my own and have a lot of experience in that field. So that's kind of like how it started.

Matt Wolach: 3:50

That's so cool. I find that necessity is the mother of invention all the time. But that's really cool that you did that. And when you get started on something like that, was that you know, going from doing development for others to now doing it for yourself? Were there any changes that you had to adjust to?

Phil Alves: 4:04

Yeah, for sure. Now,I have to think about the big picture of the of the whole business, right. And now I'm kind of like in my own customer shoes and tried to get the product to market quicker. So there's definitely some adjustment, but I had a SaaS product before that I sold, and I had just been this space for a long time. So even though it's kind of different, I really like it too, because my consulting firm got big. And it was more like in the vision and strategy part. And this allowed me to go back to the doing because the team would have squad is only like six people that do my consulting firms. 100 plus, so a super fun to go back to like the zero to one stage and actually get my hands dirty.

Matt Wolach: 4:46

Yeah, that's very true at that stage. Let me ask you, how did you find your first initial customers for DevOps?That's how you know I know it when you go back to zero. It's like okay, what do we do now?What did you guys do in those early days to convince people that hey, this is a platform you

Phil Alves: 4:59

Yeah. So we did call call rich, just cold email to should use?the people that I believe could could benefit from the products and the emails and tried to set demos and, and try to get them on board. And I think I really liked their strategy, because then you also get to test their messaging, like, what is the problem that people are trying to solve what it's going to make someone answer my email, because there's just so much competition, and it's the cheapest way to try to get some traction. Like, I think long term, there's other strategies that you can do it. But that's how I did it for my other business, like I started with code. And that's what I did here, too. I start with code.And then I was able to get some customers. And, of course, I also had some customers from a consulting firm, but I didn't want to start there, because they're big public companies.And I need the smaller, smaller companies using this product at the beginning.

Matt Wolach: 5:47

Yeah, that makes sense. How did you identify your ICP your ideal customers? How did you realize that smaller would be better for the product?Or where did that come from?

Phil Alves: 5:55

Yeah, so what happens, the bigger the company is, the more like regulations there is. So for example, we didn't have a sock shoe certification. And that takes six months to a year to get it expensive. And it's expensive.So I figure, I, if I go to these teams that are like 15 to 50,developers, they're going to be big enough. They can they can get beneficiate from the software, but they're not going to have so much bureaucracy. So that was just my guess, like I was I had a hypothesis, and they test the hypothesis. Especially after like, I start first, actually, I went over the bigger guys, and they go, this is awesome. We're just talking to them like,great. Should I shouldn't know better.So yeah, so that's how I gotta like, we went first to the lower market, which is less bureaucracy, and I'm talking to decision makers. I love that I appreciate going after the smaller market as well, myself.Now, this wasn't your first business, you've had other businesses. Did you feel like you've learned things in those previous businesses that you were able to apply to your software company? Well, yeah,for sure. For sure. There's there's a lot of learning around strategy around positioning around managing people managing expectations, managing money. So there's, there's a bunch of learning, that's all translate into this. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I've seen that as well. What would you say, people who are running dev teams, what are some of those key problems that they encounter? And what are the best ways to overcome them? So I think the biggest problem when you're running a dev team, is to like measure the output of your team and make sure you get like a big impact for your team. And how you fix that. I believe it doesn't start with buying a product like that stats doesn't start with doing the the like dev ops newest things, you start thinking about developer experience, what is the experience our developers have of your company? What's the culture, what I like to say, I want to make my firm like the Disney for software developers.So in once you start from that foundation, then it's when you Okay, let's, let's go think about other ways that it can measure performance, then you can look at things like Laura metrics, but performance alone,if you don't, like associated with OKRs, and we've business impact doesn't do anything. So then you have to find a way to tie all those together. So you can protect your team and help her to be more productive, and be successful. But again, it starts with that developer experience. That's the foundation that I believe anyone or any development team should should prioritize in the experience, from, like the machines that they work from the culture, from the technologies that we use from, like the culture unquote, code, review,collaboration, the all those things are important to create an amazing experience for the development team. I think that's awesome. And taking us that experience for a development team is is such a unique perspective. I don't think a lot of people think of that. If somebody starts a software, and they're not technical. What are some of the metrics that they should be looking at around their development team? What,what what kind of things are they able to get out of DEV stats that's going to help them they can look at things like cycle time, which is the time from when developers started tasks to someone, the developer finished the task. They can look at data of how are the team planning plan acuris. So like we say, we did this how much of what we say we do, we would do?They can look at collaboration are the developers doing code review, how deep is the code reviews, code review being happen? The system also going to let them know if someone is likely to be overwork or burnout, like they're working weekends, they're like getting a lot or going on a was like too much work in progress.They just there's a lot of data points they're going to look at,to make sure there's not burnout for those developers. So but at the end of the day, that's that's the two that hopefully is going to help even that not tangkoko and communicate in a better way with the developers. Because sometimes when you're not technical, you don't know if your developers are doing a good job or not. So like, you go back to our performance metrics,which is your daughter metrics,and you're like, Okay, this is a benchmark your team against this industry standards, it was like a research, believe over 30,000companies. So you look at that benchmark. And you say, how is my team doing out those six of those benchmarks like how we were planning, how much how much? How many bugs we have? How fast are we moving through things, and then you can see here teams are performing or not. Now, just because your team is doing super well, it doesn't mean that they you're creating things that do the impact, and that's product management. But those are two different things.But like, if you can figure like the engineering part, then you can go back into Okay, let's get the product management in the right direction, too. So hope that makes sense. It's a long way to say that there's a lot of

Matt Wolach: 10:55

Yeah, no, no, it's great stuff. It definitely makes sense to me. I want to ask, you know, what are some of the traits, you've worked with a lot of SaaS companies? What are the traits that some of the best software companies have? And some of the best software leaders have? that others don't?

Phil Alves: 11:12

Yeah, so I think specifically, let's talk about the best software leaders, I think they really understand their industry. And they're very good at casting their vision of where they're trying to do what they're trying to accomplish. So I believe leaders have to be visionaries, and they have to be able to communicate their goals in a very simplistic way. So their team understand. And there's of course, from works,they can use, like OKRs. But great leaders, I believe they're amazing, understand the industry that they're trying to play with. There are very good communicating their vision. And third, I think, great leaders prioritize culture, like, first time intrapreneurs, they care a lot, a lot of things by now,usually culture, they're like,Okay, let's, let's move fast.Let's do this. Let's do marketing by culture, like people say, eats strategy for breakfast. So it's the foundation of everything. You know, I totally agree. I love that feedback. And that that sentiment, because culture is so critical. And it took me a while to learn that. You're absolutely right. Once we found the culture that worked for us, I mean, it just became so strong within our organization, it was something that we could hire to something we could train to something that people just kind of felt, and it helped them become more passionate for the business and what the business was doing. And you could kind of see that people felt connected with each other. Right? Yeah, exactly. And that's why I say it is the foundation before you buy tools,before you make a strategy. It is just the foundation that you have to build upon to build a strong product and a strong company. Yeah, totally. And I also love that you were saying that you've got to know your customer. And that's something that I try to teach my clients a lot is you really have to understand them and get them and really know what makes them tick. What do they care about?What are they striving for? What keeps them up at night? And part of that is having those conversations and understanding from them what they see. And then kind of applying that across? Right? Yeah, and I get,I feel like when you're having those conversations, though, a mistake they see people do, I'm not talking to my customers to understand the solution, I'm talking to my customer to understand the problem, it's my job to make this solution as a founder, you know, so it's my job to call the shots to make the beds to think about the features or how I'm going to solve a specific problem. So that's why I believe there's always the outliers. But the people that understand the industry, themselves have an advantage, because I can hear from like, I can speak with 30engineering managers or review,VP of engineers or CTO, and they can get like their problems, and they're going to have ideas for solutions. But I cannot build all those solutions. So it's like, it's up to me to understand to digest the information. And it's up to me to make the decision of what we're going to build. I cannot outsource that to my customers.I cannot build a product by have a committee of people and we vote like I don't believe we can build software by using democracy.We listen to everybody. And then you make the decision. Of course, the more insights that you have, the better your decision is going to be. Yeah, I would agree with that. It's very tough to have a committee decide on exactly how to do it because everybody makes concessions and it doesn't not it ends up not being as good as it should be.That's a that's a great point.How do you see the tech industry evolving over the next five to10 years or so and and how are you positioning your company dev stats to make sure that you're ready for that future? I see softer development becoming easier and easier. Especially with this AI like there's tools like GitHub co pilot that we're using every day that's making development a lot quicker Oh, and there's, I think there was many years where there was a lot of money. People tend to over engineer and to overcomplicate stuff. But now there's like people are going back to simplicity to make things simpler. So I see, in the next five years software development becoming even easier than what it is today, building a SaaS products 10 years ago was a lot harder than it is today.And I think five years from now is going to be even easier than it is right now. So how you're preparing, I believe that status is one of those tools that's making software development easier, easy to understand, easy to communicate your development teams. And I think it's going to be more and more down to your knowledge of our industry. And not just to like creating something or writing something is getting easier and easier to write products. It's are you an expert? Do you understand English very well, it's more like the thinking is going to be more and more and more important to the thinking, because the creating is going to be easier and easier. That's how I see it.And I believe big companies like Salesforce, that are very horizontal are and for awaken,because when it makes super easy to make software, we start to see CRM for construction CRM for financial advisors, CRM, Forex,CRM, Forex, so like, I always start to see a lot of like,people really niching down because they understand that piece of the market super well.And they can build something for that piece. And then it's big,horizontal play becomes harder,because you don't have all the knowledge. So that's kind of like how I see I see.A lot of companies going to be starting to be successful,because how easy it's going to become to build products. Yeah,that's so true. And so if that's the case, if it becomes easier,what can SAS founders do to make sure that they build strong products that they kind of stay ahead of their competition, it goes back to they really have to understand their market and to think about the pain point that they're solving, in, like really everything they can to to solve their pain, pain point. That's,that's what founders have to deal with. And also, I think they have to stay focused, not trying to go to any directions.You know, so you stay focused,and you stay to where you're doing a good job. And so I think we should do mono, should.

Matt Wolach: 17:18

We all should?Yeah.Okay, so somebody's starting their company, they're setting off on this journey. You've done it, you've worked with others.Phil, what advice do you have for software leaders who are starting out?

Phil Alves: 17:31

I would say, keep it simple. Don't look at big companies are doing today and try to copy them. That's a huge mistake, that I see people doing okay, hey, Netflix, use this thing called micro service.Let's use it. But if you go look at Netflix, they never use micro service from day one. Actually,just recently, Amazon was like AWS, like, hey, there are this piece of our software like I think is their video piece.They'll use micro service we overcomplicated stuff in your going back to the basics. We are going back to a monolithic approach to build software. I feel like as a new SAS holder have to be careful not to overcomplicate not over engineer, and not to have hypes to like as you're choosing your tech stack, you don't need the newest thing because they keep change. You need the things that's the most stable, that's gonna allow you to keep doing well. And the thing that has been doing well for the last few years. So those are like, few of my volunteers for people that are starting right now. I love it. Those are great pointers.For sure. This has been a lot of fun. Phil, how can our audience learn more about you and Dev stats? Well, they have stats,they can just go to Devstats.com. And about me, I have my own site, it's few hours.com philalves.com. From there, you can sign up to my newsletter. There's a link to my podcast, SaaS or just stories.So it's everything in there.

Matt Wolach: 18:51

Okay, perfect. And we'll put all that into the show notes are in the description so that if you're watching or listening, you'll be able to get that and see that Phil, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom go, no problem. That was great. Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And everybody out there. Thank you for joining us really appreciate you being here. Please make sure you subscribe. We've got some great interviews coming up some great leaders like Phil who are going to come on and share their expertise. So hit that subscribe button. Also, we're looking for reviews. If you feel like this is something that's helpful for you. Please leave us a review on the podcast service that you're using. That way that'll tell us this is good and we can start you know, keep going in the same direction. And it helps other people see it as well. So thank you for being here. Take care.We'll see you next time. Bye bye.

Intro/ Outro: 19:34

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS for more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com