S2E5 - "Crafting the Future of Work" Webinar Snip: Q&A with Jordan Fleming

To the Citrix developer solutions podcast by brick bridge consulting. This podcast is dedicated to the design development and implementation of a growing number of Citrix SAS platforms, as well as some topics around their associated virtualization products. We use this podcast to discuss our own experiences and challenges with these SAS platforms, as well as meet interesting people from around the growing Citrix developer community. If you are a developer designer, administrator, customer, or agency that uses Citrix products and wants the most out of your experience, then you're in the right spot and should hit that subscribe button and the bell. If there's one where those you're listening, if you have already thank you so much for your support. Lastly, engage with us. If you have a topic solution, challenge, or message, we want to know about it. Reach out to us via our company pages on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and soon to be Tik TOK. You can also send a message or Podio chat to service@brickbridgeconsulting.com. So we've got a short episode this time. We just had our summer 2021 webinar crafting the future work. We took a 15 minute snippet from that webinar or Jordan Fleming of smartphone and game-changers fame. Talk about joining the party when it comes to Citrix workspace and Citrix Podio. Let's listen in.

Welcome in Jordan Fleming. I'm going to get you un-muted there. Jordan.

Jordan, can you talk with us the way I can?

Okay. Excellent. Well, uh, Jordan, I, I have to ask, I didn't realize you were a doctor. You get, you got a PhD in musical composition. You never told me that.

Uh, well that's because I didn't actually finish my PhD, so,

Oh, okay. Well that was a little misleading, but that's okay because you are a wonderful podcast host and the general life of the party. Um, and, uh, uh, people probably saw down at the bottom here. I've had some fun stuff. Your about section on LinkedIn is probably the best I've seen in quite some time. I don't know how you came up with that, but it's pretty good. So definitely a roll over to Jordan Fleming on LinkedIn and, and hit him with a friend request and take a look at that about section it's. It's pretty good. So, uh, what we're gonna do is we're going to take about 10 minutes. We're going to do three questions, 10 minutes. Um, and, uh, just, just kinda get your, uh, quick shots on, uh, three questions. I did prep you ahead of time. So we're, we're going to just dive right into it. I do want to highlight a couple more things about, uh, Jordan, for those that have been under a rock don't know who he is, a co-founder and smartphone, which is accelerating heavily. Uh, very proud of that. Started out with Podio. I know it's expanding supercharged podcast on available on all the podcast services. Make sure you give him a subscribe, wonderful content. I love your guests over there and do a lot, uh, industry guests on our podcast. We tend to be a little bit more towards the technical developer side. You have a lot of that use case scenario. It's two great podcasts that play off each other really well started out in game changers. And then, uh, also a collaborator with the international Podio developer meetup, uh, for the sake of time, we'll just dive right into it. Uh, this is the end of the webinars. So, uh, feel free to hang on. We might go a couple minutes over, uh, but, uh, we're just gonna, w we're just going to talk about joining the party of Podio and Citrix workspace. And I'm just going to throw a question one at you, Jordan, you know, how do you envision the future work for humans based on the trends in technology? Is there, is there an existential problem kind of hanging out in the wings for knowledge workers and other related in three minutes, quick shots? I know, I know I tried to think of some hard ones and then I got to compression time. Just that, yeah,

It was a big question. Um, I mean, I think, um, I think we go through swings and roundabouts. I think the pendulum swings and you see this very specifically in the way that SAS and, and this ties into workspace really well, the way that SAS software online web software has evolved. You know, it started out with really heavy, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars investing companies would invest in their own bespoke stuff. And then it swung as, uh, the SAS revolution sort of happened. And all of these, um, all these little, uh, and big platforms came up and it suddenly became possible to just pay a monthly fee, which was reasonable to, uh, action and, and activate a software that you used to have to spend thousands and thousands and thousands for to make it custom. And, and then it's sort of been swinging back in the middle and podium workspace, do that really well because what this side, you know, one side it was too expensive, clunky couldn't change, couldn't be updated, uh, and only, you know, five companies can afford it. The other side, there was noise, there was 50 programs and you ended up having people jump up and down and around. And, and, you know, I had to go over here in this program to do this thing, and my job becomes dispersed. Um, when we get down towards the middle, which is, I think, where we're going to continue to go for a while. Um, it's about consolidating, you know, let the, let the right tools do the job, but consolidate the experience because, um, ultimately, uh, what ended up happening when we start to granulizing to 15 different pieces of software, people started to lose time instead of gaining, because they had to jump around there to learn all these things. And as we've kind of pointed out before, you would often have to learn this thing for something you do once a month. So what am I doing here? Um, and I think that's really, you know, it's, it's, uh, the F the next wave is the concentration now is on efficiency efficiency of making all these things work and finding that way, that middle, where people can be, uh, able to use the right tools in the right ways. I

Think it's so cool with the SAS side. And I totally agree with your assessment. A lot of the SAS offers are really great at what they are designed for. They've really invested in that task, in the user experience for that one piece of, of what they solve. They solve the problem really well, you know, but, but there's now there's a whole bunch of these tools that you have to jump around and you get that browser tab problem. Right. And it, it's becoming more and more real because it's more and more fractured and splintered across all these SAS softwares. Okay. Question two. Where do you think the biggest revenue increase that sales professionals? I want to, I want to bring it back to a cliffhanger here. W w when they're applying human centered design around tech stacks that sales professional use, and I'd like you to kind of bring in smartphone to that. So where do you think these revenue increase? We talked about costs, decreases turnover, reduction, uh, labor rates. How about revenue increases? Cause that's also fun to,

Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, from a sales perspective, um, technology is a blessing and a curse. Uh, I think if any of us have LinkedIn, you all have experienced the scourge of 400 people sending you direct messages and contact requests. Um, and then if you will happen to accept one, you would immediately get some, you know, pitch that's pre-programmed prescheduled and pre done, and you click the lead, right? The, the, um, you know, the technology is not only needs to be human centered, but so does the sales perspective and sales experience. So technology can essentially, what I, the way I see it is, um, using the correct technology, uh, on the sales funnel, and then in the sales journey means that you can accelerate the bits that can be accelerated with technology and narrow down the bits where the human gets involved, right? So the faster you can get someone, uh, into the right position to close a sale or warm someone up or whatever that is. And we things out there's a lot that technology can do there. And so you've got not only a human centered design on technology, but allowing you then to leverage that, to make a human centered approach to sales. That's what I think, I, I love that the,

Uh, go back to your pendulum analysis. There was a lot of relational sales back in the day with the old telephone calls and writing somebody, an actual letter as a part of the sales. I know that's decades removed. Now we've swung to where I said in beer, Cynthia, that it probably works really well still. Um, but the, uh, uh, those messages, automated email, text, LinkedIn, wherever they're just everywhere. I'm tired of website, design ads and car warranty stuff, right? Like it's just, it's over the top. What, the way that we see her at brick bridge is by being able to take off some of the burden that salespeople have to do, because a lot of management wants to know metrics around sales is super important. Uh, they're able to actually pick up a telephone and attempt to get a human being, to talk to another human being, right, and establish a relationship critical and B2B sales and consumer sales. You get to spend a little extra time, a little extra touch with that customer that normally may not have a huge ROI around it, but because you're saving in other areas, you can spend a couple extra minutes with a customer on the phone to deepen that relationship. So they get a reorder so that they tell their friends. And you're just able to focus as you're saying, on the human centered side of your customer. So these tech stacks like smartphone, gong is another good one that, that just really helps and supports the sales professional to be able to build relationships B2B or consumer. Okay. Last question. What are your thoughts and then advice for those veterans in the Citrix Podio developer ecosystem around citruses increasing and increased commitment to SAS offerings and expand? Um,

That's a harder one. Um, I mean, I think, I think it's about for me, you know, I used to have a mantra that we stuck on the wall and essence in game changes was all leads, all roads lead the podium. We had Andrew Cranston, who's the new CEO of game changers. Um, uh, he used a stick that on a, uh, uh, a post-it note on his, uh, monitor as a, as a little jokey reminder that everything, you know, it's all podium. Uh, but the truth is, of course it's not all podium. Um, and, uh, and I'm a lover of Podio. I mean, I've been in Bodie over a long time and I've built hundreds and hundreds of systems there, but, um, there, you know, Podio is what is always going to be the best, or I hope it's always going to be the best hub to the spoke, whether that's set of spokes are departments and people inside a Podio ecosystem, or whether that hub and spoke model is allowing other bits of technology to do what they do really well and let Podio, um, you know, kind of drive a lot of workflow in the middle. And that dovetails to me, I can't speak to the right the right bit from Citrix because, uh, I just can't speak to that one yet. Um, but from a workspace perspective, I do see that coming in and making sense because essentially you're allowing everything to do its best bit and centralizing the experience. And so, you know, from a Podio perspective, you know, well, it's, it's sometimes, you know, we want to do things in Podio because that's what we do and that's what we breathe. And that's where we know, uh, the, you know, an obvious example is like an accounting system. Um, you would be mad to try and replicate QuickBooks online in polio. Now we do a lot of financial management and Podio, but it's always about doing the workflow around finance and then automating the QuickBooks stuff and automating the payments and receipts and invoice and all that you would be mad to do otherwise. Right. You'd be mad to try and replicate tax information in Podio. It would be insane. Um, so I look at it as Podio has amazing capabilities, um, but it isn't, it's the, it's not the only thing out there. And when you start to broaden particular to workspace in my mind, um, given I'd say the right signature in ShareFile or a given, because they're just parts of the spokes, but Podio and workspace are parts of this kind of hub where you're connecting, bringing, uh, and, and, uh, aggregating information and users and being able to position things, um, correctly in the right way. So whether that's bringing QuickBooks in line in, or some other SAS systems, so the data flows through, or whether that is, uh, you know, having your, um, workflow that only needs to happen once a month showing up in workspace. Uh, to me, it's, it's about finding where, um, the right tools are going to fit and the patchwork can, can work well beautifully said.

Um, we see a, and w we'll end on this thought, uh, here at brick Ridge echo a lot of the same thoughts, and I don't want it to turn into an echo chamber, but we, we will, we're thinking that Podio is going to be really well positioned for, for the orchestration part. So not everything needs to bubble up to work space and the human being. That's a part of that dashboard. You know, you can almost have like an assistant and that's Podio words. You have a system of record that watches other systems of record and may be able to fend off some of these more boring or accessory tasks, or do a lot of KPI tracking. So you, you can, you, you almost have this layered system to where you have systems of record that either need to reach the human being directly or systems of record that need to report up to another system of record. Podio can catch those and then work amongst the system of records and then pull the human being into the process when they need to do something creative or problem solving, or, or there's an exception in the process. And, and, and those corner cases that we tend to round off the corners when something hits that corner case territory, okay, we need to get a human being in here and we can draw them in. And I think Citrix is, is doing a great job at aligning some of this stuff, um, agreed also that you don't want to try to make every system of record every, every other system of record, right? Like there's, there's plenty of things that the SAS offers do really well. And it's a huge advantage for people to take, uh, take designs to these SAS softwares, but we don't want to fracture the experience. We're kind of coming full circle where we don't want a fraction that fracture, that user experience out too much. Because as you said, Jordan, it's, you could spend all day chasing your work around all the tabs. And why not just have that work come to you? Uh, w when you, or your role or your employee needs to pay attention to that and do something creative. We're a few minutes over on time. So, Jordan, thank you so much for your participation today. Thank you so much for your thoughts. You're a thought leader in this space, uh, for all our webinar guests, please, please, please. At minimum, subscribe to his podcast. Definitely go take a look@smartphone.io. It's a beautiful phone system. Uh, we're a bit of homers. We love it. We use it. And, uh, there's obviously wonderful services with Andrew and his group, uh, game changers, and be on the lookout for the next international Podio developer meetup. Uh, with that, we'll go ahead and conclude our web.

Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Citrix developer solutions podcast by brick bridge consulting. If you haven't already, please, please, please subscribe matters a lot to us hit the bell. There's one of those where you're listening, and if you have already thank you so much with your support, hit us up on our LinkedIn Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Tik TOK, Podio chat message, or email to service@bridgeconsulting.com. We've got some great episodes coming up in a few weeks, so please, please, please keep an eye out or a new content. Thank you.