Optimistic about innovation, with John Mitchell

Episode 110 · 25:33 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

Well, hello, everyone. I wanted to start off by apologizing for the audio quality here. The content is fantastic, but I had forgotten my mic, so we had to record on my laptop, which is unfortunate. But I think what I and John go over is definitely good enough to stick to and pay attention to. Also, I want to make sure you know that we have our spring one tours going on everywhere globally. I was just at the Charlotte one. It was great. In February, we've got St. Louis, Washington, D.C., and Columbus. Then there'll be a little bit of a European thing, and I'll definitely be there in London and Amsterdam, and then we'll be in South Africa in April. And then we go on to Istanbul and Paris and all sorts of other places back in the U.S. But if you want to check out those dates in the cities, just go to springlontour.io. So with that, here's the interview that I had while I was in Charlotte with John Mitchell, who works at Duke Energy. They just opened up a new innovation lab, I would call it. It's more of Optimus Center, as he calls it. And I wanted to ask him how things were going there and for a couple of stories about how they'd been improving software. Oh, we're at the brand new Duke Energy Innovation Center at Optimus Hall. That's a mouthful. Here in Charlotte, right? Here in Charlotte. Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, I'll have to take a picture for the podcast, but it's very nice. I think my favorite part is definitely the wood flooring. I don't know what it is, but man, I like wood flooring. Well, it's over 100 years old, and it's interesting because we're here doing innovation, but when it was built, the turn of the century, it was actually a part of Duke Energy's future of providing electricity in the Carolinas and creating this industry called textiles that just exploded in this area. And this is the world's largest gingham fabric. Gingham? Yes. Like picnics? Yeah. So if you look at the floors and the carpets and everything's gingham, and we wore gingham shirts last week on opening day. Yeah. That's interesting.

Yeah. Huh. Wow, gingham. I've got a good gingham cowboy shirt. Really? Yeah. It's red, so I don't feel so garrish every now and then. Anyways, why don't you introduce yourself? Hi. I'm John Mitchell from Duke Energy. I lead our digital strategy and delivery. It means I have to come up with it and actually deliver it. Not just the slides. Yeah. We can just talk about it. Yeah. Yeah. So I think you and I recorded something maybe about two years ago or so. I don't know. And so I thought it'd be nice to kind of catch up on the way things are going. And well, I mean, you have this building, so that's good. And I think that's good. I think when we talked last, I mean, you went to the story of how you're fixing up your software, and we talked about an application for line worker management that you had been doing, and you have many more applications now that your team has gone through. But, well, first of all, explain what Duke does for people who don't know. We're a large gas and electric provider. I mean, we're a full stack in terms of we generate electricity. We distribute it, transmit it over big transmission lines. We sell it to wholesale, industrial, commercial, and residential customers. And we build the customers. So a lot of utilities that have become kind of separated. Like brokers and things like that. Yeah. But we do, we full stack Indian. Okay. So we're one of the, one of the largest by some measures. Yeah. Yeah. And you do pretty much all of the Southeast United States, right? We, we, yeah, we, well, we have South Carolina, North Carolina, a large portion of the Carolinas, and then portions of Florida, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. Right. Indiana. Yes. Huh. All right. Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Mergers, acquisitions. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. So that's how. That's true. Which creates challenges for us because every one of those areas are, have a slightly different twist on the regulation. Oh, is it state regulated or?

It is. And then I guess down to city and municipal and county as well, right? Yeah. Huh? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's exciting. Yes. Hopefully you don't have to deal with that too much. Just a little bit. So, so tell like, uh, you know, another thing you explained to me that was interesting and then we'll get into maybe we'll pick an application or two to talk about, but, uh, we were walking around and you were explaining the methodology used to go from like corporate strategy down to like developers doing something, which I hadn't really heard this method of doing that. So can you explain this concept of the journey people? Yeah. So when we, uh, one of the, so we, we totally got on board, you know, with agile engineering and particularly the pivotal way of building great software, but, uh, and then we needed to know, you know, very user centric design. So we, we, you know, focused on, on the user solving real problems, um, great UX design, but the piece we had missing and we realized last year was, was really the, when you're doing something completely new. So the lean startup kind of, kind of third piece of it, I guess you, if you will, we realized the lean startup really starts with some intention, some strategy. So we recognize the strategy is going on. We didn't need to invent that. It's actually, we had no shortage of ideas and strategic planning and all that happening at, you know, uh, very high levels of the company. And if I can interrupt your train of thought, so what, what is strategy in that context? Okay. It's, we want to, uh, you know, maybe we want to, we want to grow our, our revenues and, and certain, you know, target certain commercial industries for us or, or maybe we want to change our mix of, um, fuels. So maybe we want to shift more to renewables and what do we want to do about electric vehicles? So there's a lot of strategy going on to anticipate the tipping point when there's actually more, it's more desirable to buy an electric vehicle than it is to buy a gas

vehicle. Well, what does that mean? What happens when the Tesla supercharger can charge a car in 15 minutes? Well, imagine how much energy that spike in and picture, uh, uh, what a sheets or a QT and you've got, you know, 20 cars trying to charge it once. Yeah. How do we handle that type of situation? That's like if everyone was downloading BitTorrents. Exactly. All at the same time in the same neighborhood. So we have to, so there's a lot of strategy work around those things. Yeah. Out of the strategy then to your, to your question around, uh, what are these journeys and workflow teams? So from the strategy becomes a, either a journey or a workflow. Uh, we like to say journey if it involves people, a customer, what is that customer journey from, uh, if we're, if we're trying to break into a new market or a new product or what is the workflow we're trying to solve for if we're trying to dramatically change the efficiency of one of our plants? Yeah. Then there's, there's a, there's a workflow for how to work throughout the plant gets done, uh, to make the plant work. Yeah. And so those workflow teams, they're, they're small product oriented type teams, uh, led by design thinkers, uh, that help them really map out, uh, map out the, that, that new journey and then identify them. Here's where the lean start comes in, identify what are the big, uh, assumptions. So our nuclear plants, for example, down the hall here, they're working, they had an idea that if we put, so they have a thousand workers at any, any plant. Yeah. Uh, labor is a huge, huge, huge piece of their cost. Uh, they have a lot of work activities going on. So the idea was how can we use technology? What if we had an RFID chip on all of our workers? Yeah. Not to be big brother and check in on them, but to help understand, well, okay, it takes a crew of five because we need a safety person and a regulatory compliance person and,

and, you know, someone verifying the works, you know, following the procedure. Uh-huh. We plan that for an hour, worst case. What happens if they finish in 30 minutes? Well, how do we dynamically move them to other areas? Ah, right, right. So a lot of the thousand people are to account for a worst case scenario on a given day where we're doing hundreds of, uh, just fixing different pieces of work. Yeah. Yeah. And, but to, to the lean startup, you need to validate, will that work? Yeah. Will RFID actually work in the plant? So rather than ordering, actually, the first inclination was to order a thousand of these things. Just get going right up. Yeah. Let's get going. Let's put in the order. No, let's order one. Let's take it out there and see if it actually works in the plant environment. Yeah. Can we get the data back in real time? What do we do with the data? So validating the assumptions is the job of those workflow or journey teams. I see. And do they come up with the assumptions too? Or like who comes up with that? Well, through, through a design, through empathy mapping, through a variety of design thinking type of workshops, they can take that strategy. So what is the outcome that our leaders want? And we'll ideate on what are potential ideas. Right. Right. So I guess in that example, to kind of like, I don't know, I'm just making this up, but like at the strategy level, you're probably like, uh, there's a lot of autonomous things and we can automate stuff. And then that should internally, that should allow us to run our plants more efficiently, which has good bottom line effects. Right. Or, or being more efficient means either you can save money or you can do more. I mean, you can make more with the same thing basically. And so, and so therefore the strategy group's like, you should do that. And, and like maybe with computer stuff, things will work out. And then the journey people are there, they're there too. The assumption is you can improve it somehow, improve how labor is allocated, moved around. And someone might have the idea of like, well, if we knew where every person was, and then we knew who that person is, we can just better locate

them in the plant as needed. And so the journey people basically are experimenting with and verifying that that's a thing. So they're like that level. And then eventually, I guess, well, what happens once the journey people have figured it out? So the journey team would have enough, you know, a very small amount of support from, I mean, from software engineer or designer to do a prototype. And so ultimately, I mean, hopefully a lot of the assumptions can be validated just by going out and talking to people. Yeah. In some cases, there's a prototype to be taken out into the field, validated. And again, it's, it's, it's not a paper prototype necessarily, unless you can get away with that, you know, it might be working software that's, you know, it's in a nuclear plant. So it's still got to be secure, even if it's not, you know, production environment still has to be secure, has to meet certain minimum standards. So, right. So we've got the platform tools that allow us to do that quickly and very, very low cost. And so once they prove, once they validate, then they would receive that, that's where the metered funding kicks in. Okay. I see. I've given you this, this much, I'm going to double it for a couple of months and you can start to build an engineering team. Now you, you validate it. You've convinced me, the leader, board, whatever, that, you know, what you're, you're talking about, you're going to be able to capture the benefit or the result you were after. Now you can stand up and then, oh, that's interesting. It's kind of a hierarchy. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. So then that's another way to get over the idea of getting funding to innovate, which I think is always a problem of, I mean, obviously you have to argue for and establish this, but it has, it's a system by which you can try out new things without gigantic financial commitments and all the work that comes from it. And it's sort of understood that these journey people are like going through ideas. And then eventually, like you said, you get to the regular budget cycles and planning around things. Huh? So does that work?

It seems to be work. We've had a few, you know, a couple of products, a couple we're about to release next month that have, in my mind, clearly benefiting from the approach. Yeah. Yeah. Huh. That sounds good. So let's, let's pick one of the applications you can talk about. And like I, we were talking after lunch, there's this example of the IRS that I use where they figured out delinquent taxes. And I feel it's a great example. No offense to them, but I've used it for like three years. So I'm on the hunt for new examples of like how, how having like more design and lean product thinking and being able to do weekly cycles. I mean, all the great stuff, how that's actually done better software. Like a good example of like, we had an assumption of how we should do something at first, but we were wrong. And we like, we figured out the right way to do it because we had that, that feedback cycle. So now, now give us the impressive application. Okay. Well, I'll give you a couple of examples. So one, one is, it's very important to us. We're, we're, um, uh, about a month away from releasing, um, our flagship app for our customers. So a mobile app, very native Android and iOS. Oh yeah. I saw that earlier. Yeah. Uh, and so that's, uh, it's taken a year to get to that point. Um, not because it's, it takes a year to build, uh, mobile apps, but because it takes a year to really shore up a lot of backend services that weren't really suitable for building a high performance modern app against. Yeah. So we had to build some APIs, cache data, things like that. Uh, but anyway, the, the original concept, um, our company had had a vendor they were looking at that had said, Hey, I think customers this generation, they want to chat. Yeah. So, uh, anybody looking to build a new, fresh, modern app customers want a chat interface. Yeah. We were not sure that was the right approach, but we're willing to listen to that. We felt like, uh, we were looking at what Google's doing and some of the other, uh, apps, this card approach where cards

slide in. Yeah. So we had, we had two ideas, uh, this chat interface or this card interface. And we said, okay, let's, let's try both and let's see which, which our customers prefer. And so through, you know, rather than committing to one or the other or trying to have a bake off and, you know, have a, have a bunch of meetings to decide, we just took, took the concepts and we said, okay, let's not even build a chat interface. Let's just use the vendor app and, and let's build a different experience using, um, the cards and see which one the customer liked. Well, the customer totally didn't get the chat interface at all. Right. Right. Like, I don't even know what that is. Yeah. And we were like, wow. But, and they totally love the card interface. So, and this is for like paying bills, reporting outages, reporting outages, whatever someone in the house with their energy stuff wouldn't need to do. Yeah. Huh? Yeah. So we'll probably build them a chat interface for the folks that want to do that, but we were able to validate really quickly without hardly any investment. Yeah. Um, before we wrote really any, any code at all, the customers, which, which they prefer. Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. Yeah. I've, I've only in the past year started to like use that chat stuff, like on various things. And, and I guess it's like a great substitute for an open-ended phone call you might have to someone because there's a person doing it, but then it's also like, you're not on the phone, but then like, I don't really want to like do something in Facebook messenger to pay a bill like that. Right. Like that would be weird. Like it, it doesn't need anyways. Yeah. That's interesting. That's a good one. So, so what are some other applications like that? So we're another app we're going to release, and we haven't shared much about this, but, um, a game for our customers to connect to a younger generation. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. This is one of our challenges, and we're not alone. There's a lot of industries like this. Um, we're often, as long as the power is on, if you flip the switch and everything comes on,

and the gas heat's on, and your house is warm, you never think about your energy company. But there are some things we'd like for you to think about, like energy efficiency. And we want you to think of the value of the product that we deliver. Uh, so connecting with young, uh, a young customer, a young generation is something we wanted to do. And we felt like a good way to do that was, was with a game. Well, this was, the idea came about, the strategy came out during the time when Pokemon Go was all the rage. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So we, we were dead set on producing an augmented reality game for our customers. Oh yeah. So, uh, our business owners were pretty, pretty excited about that idea as well. Uh, but instead of jumping into development, we did a one week design sprint. And we actually, um, built, we, we actually designed, prototyped, uh, a working prototype by the fifth day. And we presented it to our customers, um, to, to a group of young customers that we recruited, our kids and family and stuff. We brought them into our corporate headquarters and showed them the app. And, uh, and we also brought some people off the street. They, they thought, what is this? And it was like an AR thing. Yeah. That's cool. I don't get it. I don't know why we're doing this. Yeah. Uh, this is not a game, you know, and they gave us all this feedback and it was so refreshing hearing, hearing that, even though it hurt our feelings a little bit and it wasn't what we wanted to hear. Yeah. But it felt so good knowing that, Hey, this is not what they wanted. They just wanted to play a game. Yeah. Uh, like any of the other million games in the app store. And so we pivoted from there, uh, in our end product. I won't spoil it here. Download it from the app store in a few weeks. Uh, yeah, you showed it to me one. It looked pretty, it looked like it would be fun, right? It's, it's, uh, it looks like it would be one of those games that can like fill empty time. Yeah. Right. You know,

like it's like, you ever play that game threes? Yeah. Oh man, that one's amazing. It can do that and teach you a little bit about energy efficiency without being too preachy or teaching. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the idea. So a huge pivot there and no doubt, uh, you know, it could have been disastrous to spend a lot of money on an augmented reality game that nobody wanted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hopefully that'll pan out. I mean, that, that seems like anyways, it'll look nice. So that's, and the last thing I wanted to ask, uh, and we talked a little bit about this is like, so what, uh, how's like recruitment and retention going? Like not only with this facility, but just in general, I mean, I know you've like been out in the community speaking a little bit, but like, how do you, how are y'all thinking through, like, we gotta not only hire good people, but also like have not have people leave. Like, how are y'all managing that, uh, as you, I don't know, get better at software? It's, you know, the cliche, it's all about the culture. And we believe that from day one, even, even before we have, every engineer that we've, we brought into this environment, um, has had to be vetted to be culture compatible. Yeah. How do you, how do you do that vetting? We, we have a few folks that just have a knack for, for that. Okay. They can do, sit down, do the coffee talk, ask questions, interact. And we don't look at it as if you're passing or failing the test. We look at it like, are we compatible? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you might be miserable here, right? If you want to go off in a corner and, and, and do development by yourself, you're not going to want to, don't come here. That's, that's not what we're doing. We're, we're really repairing. We're, we're out in the open. It's a very open environment. We expect, um, we expect, um, we expect to, to share, expect a lot of learning. So, um, we're probably not as talented as, as a lot of companies in terms of pure, you know, we're not hiring rock scientists necessarily, necessarily, but we're looking for the culture compatible people. Um, we have a saying,

be kind, be amazing. All right, right. And, you know, kind because ultimately, uh, it's about our customers and if we can't, uh, step in their shoes, understand, you know, what a diverse group they are, what are their problems? How can we ever be amazing? And then being amazing is the expectation that, you know, we can deliver a software experience as good as anybody. Yeah. Yeah. So, so then, I mean, to approach it from a different angle. So like what I talked with a lot of people and like, it's hard to hire, like, what, what would you, what are like the three things you would tell them to start doing? Like if they think, and let's, let's assume they're correct and they're not just like wrong, but actually it's easy to hire, but they're finding it hard to like get people on board, right? Like people keep declining their job offers. No, no matter how good it is. Like, how do you, how do they start to fix that? Well, so I think you gotta be, you gotta move quickly. And so we should, our big pivot was from hiring on demand where, Oh, I need a song. I need a job developer running post a job. And, you know, let's hope during this two week period, it's open. When somebody happens to go, we shifted from that to perpetually having, you know, a junior, a senior software engineering jobs out there. And then the second thing we did was actually created those job titles. So we had, we had, we called our software, we called our programmers, um, application analyst. Yeah. Yeah. You had the analyst name in there. Yeah. So just by changing that, we started seeing, uh, um, a whole, you know, we started seeing better candidates. Yeah. And then the third thing we did, so, so since we have those out there perpetually, we created that really small team of people we trusted to that could, could interview them. So on Thursdays we do senior, we do software engineering interviews and we kind of, we can take in about four, we can do about four interviews at once. Okay. And what we do is we'll do a culture session with

them in one room while there's a, there's some software engineers pairing in another room. And we do it in a real friendly way. We're not like trying to fool you or trick you, you know, with crazy logic questions. Yeah. We're just trying to see. No, like you're saying, you're trying to find compatibility. Yeah. Right. And then on the coding side, you know, do you know, this, does your knowledge on your resume match what you, you know, you're understanding in person. And so, and then we'll just switch. And so we, we, we do that and it creates sort of a, a pipeline, doesn't go super, super, super fast. Right. Um, we, we probably need 25 engineers right now and we can only hire, you know, maybe one a week. Yeah. So it could take a while to get there. Yeah. Yeah. Being deliberate, we've found is a lot better running out and just grabbing 25 on demand or whatever. Yeah. That's like where you're starting off as an interesting, uh, build up to what seems like common sense, which is if, if you want to hire good people, good people want like a career. And so you should create a career for them. Right. Instead of like, we need a Java person, like, no, you need to like, you need a developer, right? Like, and you need to have just, uh, a stable of them. And that's like something that as a company, you need to cultivate and just have ongoing. And then there's the patience. So that's helped, man. We've even got, you know, we got feedback from the candidates, even the candidates we didn't hire, uh, have said, Hey, that's the best interview experience I've ever had. All right, right. We didn't even hire them. Yeah. And so that, that was really, really good feedback for us. Yeah. So that's played a big role. And obviously this place now that we have it, we've been talking about it, of course, uh, this, this place is really a great environment, I think for engineers. Yeah. Y'all have a big auditorium over there. That's it. Like we were talking about start a meetup or something. Right. That's always, I always like that when a company does that, cause they're like giving back to the community, which, uh, you know, also has extreme self-interest, but those are the best when you've got self-interest and also like you help the community out. Right.

Like it's, it's nice to bring that together. Well, great. Well, well, thanks for, uh, well, thanks for giving me a tour and I had some nice rotisserie chicken. So that was good. And those avocados with the quinoa. Sorry. I didn't come through on the pimento cheese, but you stocked up it from the airport. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've got plenty of them. You know, I don't actually, there must be some pimento cheese place around town here instead of in the airport, but that airport pimento cheese is pretty good. Oh, so the guy that we saw on the train platform, his friend started the pimento cheese business here. So I haven't actually met him, but it's a great startup story. Yeah. Tell them they need some stickers and then they can send some, some die cut laptop stickers to me for it with pimento cheese. All right. Well, uh, if people wanted to follow you around on Twitter or whatever else, where would you send them? Where would you send them to? Oh, goodness. Uh, well, you have something, don't you? Yeah, I do. Uh, um, probably the best thing. Just shoot me an email. All right. Right. Yeah. Well, what's your email? John Mitchell at deep dash energy.com. There you go. And maybe if they're interested in a job or hosting a meetup hiring, check out deep energy.com and see our software jobs, software engineering jobs. Oh, we're also hiring designers. Yeah. Well, perfect. All right. Well, thanks again. And, uh, see everyone next time.

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