Values-Driven Consulting
In late 2020, I was introduced to Performance Health, a technology-focused business that provides software tools, such as incident tracking systems, to health care organizations. For years, they had successfully leveraged a legacy system to provide flexible solutions to their customers. Their success had grown their business to the point where their existing software system would no longer cut it. We spent time in 2020 learning about their needs and estimated what it would take to develop a better-suited software system, built by Red Squirrel.
As is typical with all of our software projects, one year later, we had learned a lot. We work hard to get to know our clients, and they naturally get to know us. We dive deeply into their business problems, their customers, and their internal organization. Red Squirrel thrives in projects with a lot of unknown unknowns as we build trust through transparency, authenticity, and proactive communication. I’m not going to say our estimates were wrong, but I will say that we didn’t fully understand what needed to be built before we started building. And I will venture to say that between Red Squirrel and Performance Health, none of us actually knew what needed to be built before we started. At least not at the level of specificity required to provide an accurate budget.
There are many ways to overcome the inherent complexities involved with software development projects, especially big rewrites. A firm could lean toward more accurate estimates, requiring a deeper and more costly analysis phase in order to be able to start the project with greater clarity about costs. A firm could expand estimates dramatically and then quote the project at a fixed cost to the client. Those approaches don’t fit with Red Squirrel’s values. What fits for us is showing up authentically, being vulnerable in the process, bringing a ton of empathy to each other and our stakeholders, and finally, celebrating the journey along the way.
Let’s look at this through the lens of Red Squirrel’s values to highlight how our partnership has evolved over time and how our impact has increased.
Trust
In January 2021, Senior Engineer, Torey Hickman kicked off the software development phase of the Performance Health project. Working closely with VP Brandon Bergeron, our primary stakeholder, Torey got right to work on some of the core data models and user flows. Torey is good at many things, and one of them is attention to detail. His diligent approach to software development, deeply understanding requirements, and ensuring software is developed robustly, became quickly apparent to everyone involved with the project. In short, Torey established himself as a trusted team member through his high standards and consistent effort to understand what Brandon needed.
At the same time, the collaborative approach that Performance Health took with Red Squirrel engendered trust as well. CEO Heidi Raines and VP Jessie Smith, along with Brandon, connected with me and our team in an extremely personable way. This interpersonal connection made our inevitable difficult conversations easier to navigate. There was a level of trust between us that meant we had some social capital to rely on when we learned disappointing truths along the way, and when frustration was expressed.
Vulnerability
There’s a mutually reinforcing relationship between trust and vulnerability. The people who work at Red Squirrel are willing to “expose their ignorance” with clients. In other words, when we’re not an expert at something or possibly even a novice at a new topic, we do not hide this fact. We lean into it. We told Performance Health up front that while we did have some experience with health care technology, we certainly weren’t experts in it or in HIPAA compliance. I assured them we were expert software developers, and that means we’re great at learning. As we brought more squirrels into the project, we had to lean into learning this new domain with our clients watching. Being paid to do something that you don’t fully know how to do with teammates and stakeholders watching you climb the learning curve is an inherently vulnerable position. And yet, this vulnerability also presents an opportunity.
Our team’s willingness to expose their ignorance and successfully learn how to deliver this project resulted in a high degree of trust being established between Red Squirrel and Performance Health. They learned that Red Squirrel isn’t just a health care technology firm, it’s a software development firm. We are capable of delivering any software they can imagine, provided it’s within our expansive zone of proximal development and their budget.
Empathy
We had hit that all-too-common moment in a complex project when it’s perpetually 99% done for a perplexingly long amount of time. Performance Health had customers waiting to use the new system, and our inability to be accurate about the launch date was forcing them to reset expectations with their customers. We humans really detest it when responsibility and authority get out of alignment, and in this case, Performance Health was responsible to its customers, but didn’t have the authority to follow through with their promises. That authority rested on the shoulders of the Red Squirrel team. When frustration was naturally expressed, we could have pushed back from our perspective, but instead we practiced empathy, put ourselves in their shoes, hunkered down for the last sprint, and launched the product in the second half of 2021.
Flexibility
The team of squirrels who delivered this project operated from a wide range of timezones. The high degree of geographic flexibility that Red Squirrel supports allows us to to work with a diverse mix of technologists, and our Performance Health project team was no exception. Our timezones included Pacific, Central, and Eastern in the US, as well as West Africa Standard Time.
While Performance Health is headquartered in New Orleans and enjoys working together in their main office, they were quite flexible with our remote-first approach, which has been a key ingredient to our successful partnership.
In fact, partially due to the pandemic, I didn’t meet their executive team IRL until November 2022 when I visited them in New Orleans.
Heidi, Brandon, me, and Jessie in New Orleans
Whole Self
There comes a time in any relationship, especially professional client/vendor relationships when enough trust and rapport has been established and you stop holding each other at arms’ length. At this point, you can be more of your whole self with the other person. I know this happened at many levels of this project, but the one I remember best is when my relationship with Performance Health’s CEO, Heidi Raines, shifted from vendor to peer. As someone who has the privilege of bringing my whole self to my job every day at Red Squirrel, it’s always a relief when I can bring my whole self to client relationships. Heidi and I began discussing our mutual interest in writing, our professional backgrounds, and the social impact that we wanted our businesses to make in the world. This level of authenticity allowed us to navigate our companies’ ongoing partnership smoothly as we negotiated new contract terms and a typically relationship-straining event that happened in mid-2022.
Journey
Red Squirrel’s first official blog post described our philosophy on clients hiring our squirrels. I followed it up 18 months later celebrating the first example of a squirrel departing our company and taking a job at a client. Later on, we expressed this principle in one of our most unique values: Journey. We exist to unleash latent human potential, and that means we will often be a stepping stone for people as they navigate their career. Every time someone makes a conscious choice to live up to their potential, we celebrate it, even if that means we lose something in the process.
About six months after we had delivered a shiny new system to Performance Health, we had shrunk our project team down to handle ongoing enhancements and maintenance. As Torey considered his options, he realized he really wanted to stick with this system full-time and watch it grow and evolve in the coming years. He felt the right move for his career was to do that as a full-fledged Performance Health tech team leader rather than as a Senior Engineer at Red Squirrel. With such a strong partnership already in place, there was zero friction between the firms when this decision was made. There are no “finder fees” for this sort of thing, just a heartfelt “good-bye and see you later” with the squirrel, and a smooth transition with the client.
After all, Torey is still in our Red Squirrel Slack. We still share our Wordle scores with our fellow Wordlers every day in our #games channel.
We still have squirrels helping out every day at Performance Health, and we are excited to continue evolving this and our other partnerships throughout 2023 and beyond. If you’re ready to partner with Red Squirrel, please contact me at dave@redsquirrel.com to discuss!