The Best of Season 1

0:00Season 3 of the Built Right Podcast is right around the corner, but we've got one big change coming your way. The Built Right Podcast is now the Talking AI Podcast, and we got a lot to talk about in AI. In the Talking AI Podcast, we'll be having in-depth conversations with both AI experts and early adopters of AI. That way you can understand how the technology works and how early adopters are beginning to implement and more importantly, get value from AI. Our guests range from AI research scientists to founders of AI products to industry leaders putting AI to work in their business. While you're waiting for season three, go ahead and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode and make sure to leave us a comment about the AI topics that you want to hear about.

0:45So get ready to talk some AI in the new Talking AI Podcast coming your way August 6th.

0:58Welcome to Built Right, a podcast by Hatchworks where we help you learn to build the right digital product the right way. In each episode, we'll deconstruct the layers of successful product development, break down popular trends, and offer real advice to help make sure your product is built right. We may not have all the answers, but we've built a lot of digital products across a lot of industries, and we've seen a thing or two. Let's get into it.

1:33Welcome, Built Right listeners, to a special episode of Built Right. We're going to take a moment to look back through Season 1 at the discussions, the breakthrough ideas, the shared wisdom from all of these great guests we had in Season 1, from the rise of generative AI to the importance of user experience. We covered a lot of ground on a lot of topics shaping the digital product landscape here in 2023. So let's get into the top 10 clips from season one. Starting out at number 10 is our episode with Jason Slachter, founder of AI Empowerment Group. Episode name is Generative AI Playbook, How to Identify and Vet Winning Use Cases.

2:15Jason gets into the creative element of generative AI. Let's check out this clip. So for a long time, we've often said that creativity, and creativity is hard to define, but like creating things is the human quality that machines will never have. And now they're doing it. And so there's questions like, what is art? What does it mean to compose something like who can win an Emmy? Who can win a Grammy? And so this is like really what's, what's causing the hype. So, so generative AI is artificial intelligence that generates content. And the kind of content that can generate in today's world is text, like, like documents, words, phrases, code, because code is text.

2:57So it's just a certain type of text. It can generate images, videos, 3D content, like for games. It can generate music. And in slot number nine, we have episode four with Hatchworks' own Joseph Meisemer, titled the episode, MVP Trap, Why You Need a New Approach to Modernization. Joseph gets into when you're actually modernizing a product, your users are used to those workflows. Let's kick this one off. But one of the ones that I think is really worth considering a lot is the question of whether you're starting from nothing or starting from your existing solution, right? You may have already won over a bunch of people to doing, you know, whatever they're going to be doing on the platform that you've built for them, which is great.

3:42It's such a powerful place to begin. But you can't pretend they don't have that experience. You can't pretend they're not used to something. You can't pretend that they're not comfortable maybe with the workflows that they've built around it. And if you try to take that away without making a really strong argument in return, you're going to end up with a bunch of people who are unhappy and who might walk. All right. At number eight, we have Hatchworks own Andy Silvestri. In the episode where we covered the five ways generative AI will change the way you think about UX and UI design. And that's episode number 10.

4:14In this one, it's actually me talking about how you think about strategy with generative AI, how you think about building emote. And what's that going to look like as generative AI evolves? Let's take a listen. Yeah, you hit on the core thing. It's all about value at the end of the day. And we talk a lot about that at Hatchworks, delivering and owning the outcome. But it goes back to the dot-com era. You slap dot-com on anything. The concept of value just completely got ignored. And there's some of that going on today where it's the hype train of, you know, there's a new generative AI tool out every day, multiple ones, but do they provide value?

4:54Are they defensible? Do they have some kind of differentiated moat when you can spend something up on a weekend? Probably not. I think that it's that back to first principles is still going to hold true, even with this. Quick break in the pod. If you're listening to this podcast, chances are you've been thinking about how to actually use AI inside your business. That's exactly why we built the AI Opportunity finder. It's a free tool that helps you uncover high impact tailored AI use cases based on your business, your goals, your pain points, and your industry. No fluff, no generic use cases, just real ideas that fit your business and the ranked by ROI potential.

5:33It takes about three minutes to run and it's like having your own personal AI strategist for free. If you want to try it for free, check out the link in the show notes or go to hatchworks.com backslash AI dash opportunity Dash Finder. At the number seven spot, we have Arda Bulat, the CTO of HockeyStack. This is episode number nine for any of those folks wanting to go back. In this one, Arda really talked about where the weight should be put on you or your customers and some really good insight here for how you should think about product development. But for us, it's actually like making sure in the background that everything works according to the generalized model that we have for our data.

6:12So it's like, it's about who is it going to be hard for either you or the customer and I will always prefer for it to be hard for myself, better than the customer. Yeah, I'm stealing that. I love that concept of putting the weight on your shoulders and not your customers. That's, that's such a great way to think about it. Because it really, you have that trade off, right? It can be on your customer's shoulders or it can be on yours. at number six, one of my favorites, the episode with Erica Chestnut, the head of quality at Realtor.com. The episode is quality driven product development. And in one of my favorite quotes, she talked about the concept of shift left and what that is in the world of QA.

6:55Let's take a listen. Oftentimes, when people think about quality, they think about the end state and therefore they think about the thing that happened right before the end state, which is oftentimes testing. And so when they say our quality is not good, they say our testing is not good, or we are not investing in the right type of testing, i.e. manual versus automation, or we don't have enough coverage. We don't have enough code coverage. We don't have enough functional or non-functional testing. But the reality is actually that it starts much further up the stream. And you started to hear about this when we, you know, when, when the industry was like shift left with testing, but then just like most buzzwords, right?

7:38Innovation, innovative, right? Like it, it, it's not unpacked. And so now it's like shift left testing. Okay. Well, what does that genuinely mean? And what is the impact of that? And at the number five spot, we have Hatchworks own Andy Silvestri, head of design at Hatchworks. And in this clip, he gets into how generative AI is impacting the world of design from ideation all the way to prototyping. Let's give it a listen. This is probably, at least in my opinion, one of the biggest upsides to at least currently using generative AI in design. And from both the standpoint of low fidelity, medium fidelity, high fidelity, all those things, I think the idea is why not use these tools when the stakes are low, If you're in an ideation phase or a concepting phase, grinding out multiple iterations of flows, wireframes, interface concepts, components, anything to support a proof of concept, it's not really going to be a slog anymore.

8:40Using these tools to get directionally correct will take a lot less time. Probably in an interesting way, people are afraid of this idea of, oh, it's going to replace designers completely. But I think it's actually going to open up the door for designers to become even more exploratory in those early ideation and concepting processes, right? Because you're going to have more time because you're not necessarily doing all the heavy lifting the back end. All right. And at the number four spot, we have Hatchworks CEO, the first episode, talking about how software is not just eating the world. It's been eaten.

9:16It is the world. A great quote here from McKenzie in the clip. Let's give it a listen. McKenzie, I think, just did a study recently saying that 70 % of top economic performers are using their own software to differentiate from the competition. So that's compared to just half of their peers. But it's just no longer enough to build something, take something off the shelf, bolt it on. Digital and your digital solutions have got to be actually part of your strategy as a business today. Yeah. And I mean, I was reading that report as well and a couple others where it's, you know, it's software is the world.

9:49It's no longer kind of gaining ground. It is the world. If your business doesn't have some software component to it, whether you're in manufacturing or regardless of your industry, digital and software specifically has become a key part of businesses. All right. Now we're down to the top three with the three spot. We have Ebenezer at Cox. He's the VP of product development there. And he talks around this great mindset of how you give the work back to the people. This was a really cool episode where he went into this whole process and thinking and methodology around adaptive leadership. If you're a leader or aspiring to be a leader, give this one a listen.

10:29Give the work back to the people. Hopefully this is a bit self-evident. This is really saying like the adaptive work needs to be done by the people. and you hit on this, I think, when you're making the comment that, you know, you need the people who the change needs to be done by the people ultimately. And so giving the adaptive work back to the people is making sure as a leader in this context, you don't step in and say, hey, I got to make all these changes by myself. In a sense, it's not really practical, but I don't know if you've worked for a product micromanaging product person in the past who wants to do everything by themselves.

11:12That's just not a scalable approach. People need to have a sense of ownership. This is a part of like almost, you know, be letting people be citizens in a way. Right. Just having people be active in shaping the outcomes that we all desire. And so giving the work back to the people. All right. And for the number two spot, we have our most recent episode with Nick from Relational AI. Episode title, How Generative AI Works. And as told by a PhD data scientist, Nick's a super smart guy. We got into what's the difference between the human brain and AI models. Really interesting stuff here. Let's give it a listen.

11:55You know, I always go back to like how the human brain works. Do we have true knowledge to an extent, or are we just doing the same kind of computational thing in our head with probability of what's, you know? One of the things that we know is that the transformer architecture and the language model is not how the brain works. This is an engineering, it's not how the brain works. There are some commonalities and there are some kind of analogies, but I think it's wrong to think about or to try to, you know, like when you're working with language models and you're trying to tune them or you're trying to explain or debug them to have in your mind how the brain works.

12:40Don't do that. If you are a prompt engineer, if you're trying to build a model, try to understand how the system is built and use that knowledge. Don't use the cognitive neurology here. now unfortunately we are very you know the human brain is still much more powerful given the fact that you can eat a slice of pizza and do very complicated mathematical computations while if you were trying to do the same thing with gpt4 you need the power of a village or something even for inference okay so we are we are very energy efficient you know we use signals that takes milliseconds to transmit, not nanoseconds, whatever it takes for a GPU, and we still do things faster.

13:31Okay. So there's a completely different world. Even if we could make an electronic brain like simulated, I think it would be very different. You know, your biology comes into place. And at the number one spot, drum roll, please, we have CEO of HyperContext, Brennan. This was episode 15, where we talked about how AI and EQ play together. Really interesting clip here about the evolution of AI and how it could actually make us more human leveraging AI. Let's give the number one clip a listen. All of these things, the world's best manager would do if they had infinite time and they don't. what's neat about AI is you can give those people, all of the people, infinite time in certain directions.

14:25And all of the directions the AI wants to go are the ones humans don't want to go. And so in a way, bringing the AI into some of these tasks allows you to do the things that are innately more human, do that way more. Because you have all this knowledge, you can go and be more empathetic with this person, right? Because you now have the notes needed and some of the questions needed to be more empathetic. So yeah, I think a lot of people have fears about maybe AI taking over jobs or AI removing some of the humanity in certain things. And I think often the stuff that AI might end up doing is the things we knew we should always do, but we got too lazy, right?

15:06And now that we have this most infinite willpower source to pull from with AI, What are we now able to do knowing that we're doing the best job ever in some of those places we were previously lazy? And often I think that's being more human, being a better person in many ways. Yeah. And AI has that potential to, if we do it the right way, to actually make you more human in and of yourself. AI done the right way enhances EQ for the individuals using it. It's kind of like this co-pilot, good name for GitHub, right? But it's like a co-pilot instead of how AI is used. Thanks to the Built Right community for all the love and support in season one.

15:45We're going to take a short break for winter in the holidays here. And we'll be coming back with season two starting off on February 6th in 2024. A lot of good stuff we're getting into there. Heavy focus in AI and how it's impacting the world of software development. Don't forget to listen to our past shows while we're gone. We'd love to keep in touch on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, wherever you may be residing. thanks for listening to our podcast it means a ton having you in our audience here we can't wait to come back with new stuff we're going to iterate to improve make built right even better see you next year thanks for listening to built right if you enjoy the show give us a follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to leave us a review for more info on built right visit us at hatchworkbuiltright.com.

17:08and executives to training engineering teams on our generative driven development methodology. Or if you've already identified your AI use cases and want to just prioritize where to start, we offer an AI roadmap and ROI workshop to help you build a quick plan. It's all about going from we should use AI to actually driving real value with it. Head over to hatchworks.com to learn more.