Episode 54 - The “Modern” Trap: Why It's a Lazy Differentiator

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: It's the SaaS brand strategy show with DRMG. I'm, um, Mike Juraci with my friend and partner, Dustin Robertson. And today we're talking about modern software. Modern software engineering. The term modern, the traps, the perils, the alternative, the fixes. Why would you call something modern? What do you hope to get out of it and why that's wrong? How's that?

Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, it can be right if you're lazy,

Speaker B: if you're running a lazy business or you have lazing lazy, uh, positioning.

Speaker A: Because it does say old way, new way in one word. So you could be like, oh, that's actually smart. That's concise. Yes, I want modern. I don't want old.

Speaker B: All right, you're the one that flagged this. You've been running across this frequently more and more out in the marketplace. Do you have any examples of people that are being lazy?

Speaker A: Yeah. And, uh, that was what triggered it. I just kind of kept seeing it show up on people's homepage and they were describing what they do as. So the biggest one is, I think, Datadog. So they're the modern data platform. And again, I think some of this has to do with who they're selling to. So their ICP is developers. So I dug deeper. I was like, okay, why is Datadog, who's definitely probably one of the largest privately held companies, like, they're supposed to go public multiple times. I don't think they have. So they're worth hundreds of billions of dollars, have been wildly successful. And so when you get big and successful like that and you're the market leader, maybe you can be lazy if you can just say, we're the modern, everybody else sucks.

Speaker B: That's super interesting how you get more conservative with your positioning, the bigger you get.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think they did create the new paradigm for data etls. And I'm probably talking over my skis at this point because I don't exactly know what they do, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do here, uh, with cleaning and prepping data so that you can then do cool stuff with it. And they came up, I believe, with the new way to do that, the developers got really excited about. It was much easier to use and everybody kind of converted over to them and hence they're the leader. And now they're saying, well, that that's because we made the modern way to do it and it doesn't say anything. And, you know, looker, like, made a modern way to do data visualization that was better. Than tableau. And so, uh, again I think they're saying what it is, is like we're the best in class and when you use it, you'll just see that we're better is what modern means. But it doesn't stop anybody else from saying they have the modern data platform as well.

Speaker B: That's the trap. Because it's not, it's ill defined. It's too broad to mean anything. Anybody can use it. It's not ownable. It's not differentiating. It's kind of a step away from saying you're better. But it's like not enough steps. It's really, it lacks a lot of things, a lot of punch. But to your point, like I think that's the more broad you get, the bigger you get like who you appealing to. If you have to start thinking about like going public and you have investor relations on your mind, like maybe if you use a vernacular that's too specific, investors will see the market as too small or. And that you're trying to find a way to like broaden that lens. So we get to see that, I guess. But it doesn't, it loses the value of being like really clear and compelling about the opportunity. Because modern is just, it's just such a meh word.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of like, it's kind of like the word, like the word strategy. It's like, it's like a 10,000 pound word that people like to throw around. But yeah, it has like nothing behind it.

Speaker B: I did a super quick search. I had a uh, ring central empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces. DocuSign talks about modernizing the agreement process. So it's out there. Um, there's probably a ton more but I didn't look that hard because I didn't.

Speaker A: I mean one of them that I think like broke the camel that broke the straws back. Straw that broke camel's back. That's what.

Speaker B: There you go.

Speaker A: So one of our uh, most successful clients had put it on their homepage and so Mosaic, uh, who recently got acquired, that's why I was like cruising around their homepage checking out what was going on. And I noticed that they were calling themselves a uh, modern finance platform for strategic finance professionals. And we had created the strategic finance category and they were a strategic finance platform. And they. So this is five years ago we did that in 2020. They. And I don't know if it was when they got acquired and they're going to be part of this bigger stack with hibob and Maybe they needed to like reposition. There could be things behind the scenes where they changed the platform from being a strategic finance platform to targeting strategic finance professionals. Yeah, but that wasn't a thing. Before they started, there wasn't anybody targeting strategic finance professionals. Like they created that. Um, but it was interesting to not

Speaker B: a pivot, but trying to refine it even further because of the success of the strategic finance category, that they felt the need to actually drill down a little bit deeper to find something more ownable because more people were saying they were strategic finance.

Speaker A: Yeah. And knowing a bit about the nuts and bolts of that business and discovering that modern in software is actually a development mantra or cult. Uh, or something.

Speaker B: There's a book on it Approach, philosophy, aesthetic.

Speaker A: Yeah. So developers, they can enroll themselves into modern software development and really all that means. And again, it points back to like, man, how lazy. This guy wrote a book on this and didn't take the time to actually define what it come up with a better word. But it just means that it's usable, scalable, connects APIs, is secure, and will scale for the future. I think we like the five things. You're like, okay, cool. So basically just any great software is modern, is what you're telling me. And, uh, I think he built the, Wrote the book to say, hey, here's the principles if you want to build great software. And he called it modern. And so when you look at Mosaic and how it's built, it's all those things. It's got like great ui, it's foundationally built to connect to other systems. It scales really good. And so I think possibly like the, you know, the fact that they had built to a T what modern software is, might have gotten into the Lexiacon and maybe they just found themselves selling to strategic finance professionals, but then having to get the money from the IT department, like, so if we call it a modern finance platform, we'll get their attention because they don't want to have things that aren't modern in their stack.

Speaker B: So, uh, we'll get to the reason why modern's a man word. We kind of touched on a couple of them already. But I think the book you're referencing is called Modern Software Engineering. It was by Dave Farley, it was published in 2021. And I don't think Dave got the category strategy memo, because modern software engineering, if that's what people are anchoring off of again, could be too far out over our skis here as, uh, oh, okay. This established a new paradigm within development. And so now we're just going to name it but like the whole concept of modern as a strong ownable and a unique IP or aesthetic or what have you just kind of is just super soft. And so it's like modern can represent like a uh, paradigm shift in philosophy or aesthetics, which is totally fine. But again you have to start drilling down into that. And then like the way I think of it, like modern refers to an era which is like a specific period of time, but there are bookends on that specific period of time. There's a defined start to this based on technology, culture, current events, what have you. And then like generally it comes up to the now we're still uh, within this based on the beginning of that bookend at the beginning of it. And so it's like super open ended. And so if we're saying the modern software engineering started approach, started in 2021 with Dave's book, then okay, I guess I'm just kind of like poking around on this thing. Then if you have success with that and everybody's using it, it loses meaning because people are like, what do you mean modern? Like talk to me about modern. Unless you're just talking about developers and they totally understand this.

Speaker A: Yeah, I don't know. Because that's a funny way to look at it. Like, okay, so it's going to end. I like mid century modern architecture. I would like to have a mid century modern M art. But that's an era, right? Yeah, it's defined, there's dates to it. I mean people, you could build one today I guess, but it would be inspired by the designs of that period.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's uh, I looked up the historical era in historical, in history. When people talk about the modern era, it's used to describe the period following the Middle Ages, often starting around 1500. So there you go. I mean my thing about this is. Okay, granted there's two sides to this conversation. One is okay if we're talking about modern software engineering by Dave Farley, 2021. Okay, great. But he totally misses on um, actually coming up with a name that's unique and ownable. If we're talking about positioning on the other side of it and just trying to like open up the lens and say you're like contemporary and you're really, you're on it, then that misses detail as well. Like you're totally missing an opportunity to differentiate yourself because all you're doing is playing the comparison game. Right. Like we're better than the old way, we're the modern way.

Speaker A: Yeah. What Is the story you're so for Datadog, what is the story their customers are going to tell and sell about them using the modern framework? They got to go get approval to bring this in for 100 grand and be like, well we're using X, Y and Z and it's built on this code base and it connects these ways. And it's not modern where Datadog is modern. It's a weird thing to pivot off of, but maybe to play the other side, maybe it is an easy word for everybody to understand and as long as they do fill in, backfill it with like easily connects, scalable, secure, great ui, then maybe it is a word that does help them. Talent cell as I just uh, flipped on myself, you ah, have to follow it up.

Speaker B: If you think about this in terms compare it to Agile as a paradigm shift in a philosophy of development. Agile. Go ahead.

Speaker A: They list Agile as part of modern software development. I think it's one of the pillars.

Speaker B: I mean just Agile's got so much more power to it and ownable and there is some sense of what that means. But if you compare Agile with modern, I would see Agile is kind of coming out on top of that.

Speaker A: When we were building software backcountry, so this would have been like 2007. I mean we started well for that, but we were fully, we had a dev team of a hundred people. Like we were building real software. We got trained in first it was like Scrum was kind of this approach to managing software projects. And then we got trained and this is probably 2007 or 8 in Agile and it was Agile project management kind of software development. It was a, it was a mix. But yeah, that's how long that's been around. And that did have a story to tell and sell with it. That was different. That is a good way to say look, you can use a uh, common word but it needs to be a word that is ownable.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I like that it's anchored in the benefits. Right. Like uh, who wouldn't want to be an Agile development team? Right. And that gives you something to shoot for and it gives you a way to start shopping for tools to enable that.

Speaker A: It had a Runway for it because when we first started doing it was mainly just from a project management perspective and standups and like trying to be quick to changes. And then it evolved into like a continuous release dev Org which was like the ultimate where there was no more code pushes. The teams were releasing all day, every day.

Speaker B: Yeah. Which is what modern is supposed to

Speaker A: be I'm assuming that's part of it. It wasn't in the five pillars

Speaker B: because

Speaker A: ultimately out of my software org, that's all I want is code pushing and nothing crashing. And so I want continuous release. Like screw. I don't care what you call it, it needs to be continuously releasing.

Speaker B: Well, uh, are there other benefits? Like what were your five pillars of

Speaker A: modern cloud based, easy to integrate, user friendly, agile or continuously updated. Okay, so he does have that interchanges those secure and scalable built using newer frameworks. So meaning like react or some. Whatever the hot code language is of the day.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's probably something in there.

Speaker A: Go GoQL or whatever. My engineering friends I go mountain bike with pontificate about the newest software stuff that's out there.

Speaker B: Fascinating.

Speaker A: There's new stuff all the time. It's crazy for sure. Like every, every once a month there's like, uh, whoa, we're trying this out. Some of it doesn't stick. Some of it does. It's interesting.

Speaker B: So this is kind of turning into kind of a teardown of modern software engineering by Dave Farley that he kind of missed the boat on naming. Um, what this thing is.

Speaker A: Sorry, Dave, we should. Come on. We discovered that this book existed after we were like, wait, why is everybody using the word modern? So we backed into it because then

Speaker B: he funked the entire, like, if everybody's using that in that uh, context as a category, he's funked the entire category because it's vague, it's going to age, it's used in all sorts of other contexts. It's kind of, it's a better, they're playing the better game and it's just flat, like there's no emotion, there's no identity to it. It's just like this big bland stance for everything word. And when you get one of those, it doesn't really stand for anything.

Speaker A: Right. But people are out there using it, so there is something about it that's working.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah, that's interesting.

Speaker A: So I guess we'll have to check in on is. Does this stand the test of time? We're saying absolutely not.

Speaker B: I'm saying absolutely not. And I think the opportunity here is to kind of fix datadog, fix Mosaic. Like if you're feeling trapped and that you have to use modern in your positioning to kind of align with Dave's philosophy on development, which is totally great, awesome. Like do whatever. Like how do you actually improve your positioning in the market so it has more, more impact? How do you fix that?

Speaker A: It's the formula the customer doesn't care about your problems. They care about their problems. They don't care that you made the software with a modern framework. They care about, how am I going to be able to slice and dice and feed this data into my org to take over X, Y and Z? How is this going to keep my data safer? Like what? Whatever problem they're trying to solve, that's what they care about. They don't care that it's modern. And so it feels like just a lazy filter to be like, okay, well, it's our homepage. We don't know what industry you're in. We don't know if you're in security or if you're in analytics or if you're in data, whatever, bartering. Uh, so we're just going to say it's modern until we figure out who you are. Like, maybe if you're in the market for that, they have the tags to know what we're shopping for. And they would change the homepage. That's entirely possible that we're being fed the generic one because we're not the customer. And for the generic one, they just go with that.

Speaker B: Big and broad.

Speaker A: It could be, but that's how you fix it, though, is you go after, like, what your customer cares about, which is their problem. Not the software mantra that you use to make the code base for

Speaker B: copywriting or from a positioning perspective, from a writing perspective. Anytime you get one of these bland words, I just call them shit words. It's just the goal is to be more specific. And how specific do you get before you lose? Uh, you throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Like, you have to be able to drill down and be like, there's a couple different ways you can approach it. If modern represents new technology, then ankulin trip, try to get specific on the transformation you're bringing to the table. If modern represents a value shift, try to get to the specific value or belief. Like, lead with that. That's what's compelling and that's what's different about you. If it represents a new kind of problem that's emerging in the market. And what we always talk about is promote the problem, anchor in the problem that you solve, try to find, get down and be like, what are we really solving for here? What is our modern approach really solving for here? And lead with that. And then there's always the approach of like, who's the enemy here? Like, who's the villain? And define the villain. And then anchor in the villain again, what is Modern helping you battle. If you take any of those three or four questions to the table and keep asking yourself those questions, you're going to come with terminology that's way more specific, way more impactful, way more interesting, without losing that kind of context that you're trying to establish m within the market about what makes you different 100%. Uh, that's the mental exercise we always go through. It's just like, okay, how specific can we get before we go too deep? Like, where is that sweet spot? Because Modern is way too big and broad and there's probably going to be some other things that are way too specific, but there's a sweet spot in the middle that gives you the space to play and own.

Speaker A: I always like to go up the approval stack. And so you're bringing this into the Org and eventually it's got to go through, like, finance, right? And they've got to approve this purchase. And you're going to go say, hey, I want to rip and replace our data platform for Datadog. It's modern. They'll be like, well, it's twice as much. So I think we're going to go with the old one. You got to frame it in a way that they got to be like, wait, what? Like, I thought we already had one. This should be something new, right? Not something they already have.

Speaker B: And so I, uh, kind of referenced this already, and this is a bit of a departure, but my least favorite word is good. It's another shit word. And no offense to anybody who works for this fine company, but Cotopaxi's do good tagline, it's so meh. I'm just like, oh, man. Like, come on, we can do something way more interesting than that. That's an example of how not to do it.

Speaker A: Yeah. They are trying to create a movement with that, though, that is fair just to double click on. Because living in Utah, I see that die cut sticker on a lot of windows and it's just like do on one line and then below Good. Yeah, it's like separated do good. And there's no. Codapaxi doesn't put their logo or associate themselves with it. So it's just a, uh, mantra they put out there, which from that perspective, it's kind of nice, you know, it's all right. There's positivity. It's positivity too.

Speaker B: Good.

Speaker A: And give it.

Speaker B: Give it some teeth, man. I am always about teeth. Give it some teeth. Do good is like, just like.

Speaker A: If you double click, though, that's Their whole company was Built on. On trying to, you know, fall in the foots of pat.

Speaker B: Sustainability, impact, all that good stuff. Yeah, yeah, there I go. I use the freaking word, so I get it. But I would say do better, but,

Speaker A: uh, that's just me. I think that's funny because I think do good because, uh, that you can't, like, do better doesn't tie back to philanthropy, I don't think. I think do good does. And it's. I think it's rooted in that category. So I think you got to go peel that apart and be like, well, why do they say, yeah, Well, I

Speaker B: would imagine that their customers are aligned with that sentiment, and they're already doing some quote unquote, good things, and the opportunity for movement is to push them to do more, is to do better. Like, yeah, you're doing something, but apparently it's not enough. So what else can we do that's better? And then you've got this whole movement behind there. You can teach people how to do better. Like, yeah, you're recycling, but what you really should be doing. Or, yeah, you're doing this. Things like that, uh, anyway, baseline sticker. One thing that just sticks in my craw, man. Anytime I see that sticker, I'm like, uh, killing. Sticker says. It says, like, I'm not a company for you. Although my wife did buy a jacket.

Speaker A: She likes the colors, and she drives a Subaru, which appears to be what the sticker says. Do good. Must be. Must mean buying a Subaru.

Speaker B: Yeah. And Subaru is all about love, right? Love. What makes a Subaru a Subaru? I think that's their tagline. Yeah.

Speaker A: I don't. I don't know what they're pushing for anymore. I mean, they have a bunch of funny marketing positioning things that have become, like, folklore.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Around the Forester launch. And maybe someone's sexual orientation was a, uh, was a thing. It was like a real marketing thing they did.

Speaker B: Oh, totally. They owned it. They had fun with it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: All right, back to B2B.SAS. Anything else we should talk about around Modern that would save our listeners from hurting themselves?

Speaker A: Well, it's probably a separate pod, but the exact same thing is happening with AI So I think we're coming out of the. Just put AI in front of it so people know that we have it. Because it would just say, I just had a, uh, software platform that we churned off of for Catis, and it was like the Hail Mary call with the sales team to keep us. And they're like, well, have you used the platform lately. He's like, no, that's why we're not. We're gonna not get anymore. We don't use it. They're like, oh, well, it's got AI Now. It's basically just this whole AI tool. I was like, that's how you're gonna pitch it? Just this whole AI tool? Like, the problem it solves for me is landing pages. It didn't solve that very well. Maybe AI could solve that better. But you would need to frame it that way, not just tell me that the platform is all AI and this is more, way more rampant than modern. So, you know, at least AI is, uh, saying, hey, we've hooked into some of the large language models and you'll have access to that in the tool, and it's helping the tool, whatever. But again, it doesn't tie back to, like, how does that make the problem we solve more powerful.

Speaker B: Tom Fishburne, who's the market Tunist had his. One of his latest posts was talking about AI first, and he had this like, checklist or crossing off list of somebody crossing off mobile first, cloud first, social first, digital first, content first, blockchain first, data first, influence first. And now it's AI first. And the guy says, maybe calling it this will magically fix our strategy, which I thought was pretty compelling. If you look at people chasing the tech trends, the tech novelty of things, and leading with that, if you followed that trajectory, uh, of that chronology, your customers and the market's like, I have no idea what you are now, because who knows what you're going to be next.