Consulting Spotlight

Michael Bernzweig (00:02.305)
Are you ready to unlock the secrets of consulting success? Tired of sifting through endless noise to find actionable insights that actually move the needle?

Welcome to Consulting Spotlight, your weekly deep dive into the transformative world of professional consulting. Your host is Michael Bernzweig, who in 1998 launched Software Oasis as one of the first platforms enabling businesses to download, license, and deploy software instantly across their networks with a single click. Today, Software Oasis has evolved into one of the leading communities where businesses find top consultants across the USA and Canada.

Each week, Michael sits down with industry titans, innovative leaders, and game-changing executives to bring you exclusive insights you won't find anywhere else. From emerging methodologies to market trends, Consulting Spotlight delivers the strategic intelligence you need to accelerate your consulting career and stay ahead of the curve.

Join our growing community of consulting professionals and decision-makers. Subscribe now on your favorite podcast platform and visit softwareoasis.com/subscribe to get our bi-weekly newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.

Get ready for weekly data, trends, analysis, interviews, and insights that will propel your consulting career forward.
Subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter https://softwareoasis.com/subscribe/ to stay updated with more insights from technology leaders and transformation experts.

I'd like to welcome everyone to this week's edition of the Consulting Spotlight. My name is Michael Burnsweig. I'm your host from Software Oasis. And today we're actually joined by Nicole Whittle. She's the VP of Operations at Outforce AI. So with that, Nicole, welcome to the Software Consulting Spotlight.

Nicole Whittle (00:26.798)
Thank thanks Michael, I appreciate that you invited me on.

Michael Bernzweig (00:30.483)
Yeah, no, it's great to have you aboard. And I see a lot of questions that came in from the audience prior to the episode. So I'll make sure we try to sneak some of those in. But overall, I was hoping maybe you could start with a little bit of your backstory in terms of your career journey and how you got to where you are and a little bit about Outforce for people that may not be familiar.

Nicole Whittle (00:58.254)
try to keep it somewhat short because I'm a big talker. I've got over 25 years of software technology consulting experience. I've really run that gamut of tech consulting of specific industries like insurance or healthcare. Primarily, the goal was always to stay around innovation and tech.

Michael Bernzweig (01:01.803)
Sure.

Nicole Whittle (01:27.918)
obviously later on my journey, a little more focused on AI and ML. So I've worked at a number of consulting firms and the newest one I'm at is not a consulting firm, it's a B2B marketplace called Outforce.ai. And what we do is we match clients on this side with the best of our 80,000 agencies that sit on the other side of the marketplace. And based on the different parameters that a client may have.

related to, know, tech stack or domain knowledge or, you know, in price point or location. So there's a number of different things. Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (02:07.917)
That's quite an extensive network and it sounds like a lot of vetting goes into making sure you got the right matches on both ends.

Nicole Whittle (02:19.234)
Well, honestly, being from software development, it is so hard finding a team that you actually love and can trust and feels like they have your back. And we've all had a thousand emails in our inboxes from every agency saying they can do everything under the sun. And this idea was really here to help agents or help clients not waste their time. You know, they don't want to have to dig through all that and figure out who they should deal with.

So that part has been really an interesting journey.

Michael Bernzweig (02:53.809)
And you know, I think that whole concept of the team is very important because in any rollout of any new technology or any new platform or solution, obviously it's a team effort and there are a lot of players involved. So from that standpoint, how do you find the right synergies between individuals that might be working on a specific project for a client?

Nicole Whittle (03:23.738)
so there's a whole bunch of things. We basically have a, you know, rigor around this 10 step process that we use data to tell the first bit of the story. And we're basically filtering for parameters, but that only just tells you, you've gone from, let's say 80,000 agencies down to a thousand. But how, know, this, the right team for you with the right team available at the right time.

Michael Bernzweig (03:32.289)
Okay.

Nicole Whittle (03:49.966)
Are they trustworthy? Do they have the expertise that, frankly, their salespeople say they do? That process, we go through, like assessing everything from the contractors themselves, the agency itself. We look at case studies. We do our online research. There's a whole bunch of steps that we go through, including matching for culture. Think about different culture styles without getting into geographic locations.

you've got people that are very like to the point and there's no BS. if you think of them as seeing your disc, they have a different desire to interact with people than maybe somebody who's the eye and disc or a warm culture person who is very talkative, uses their hands, you know, wants to know your day and your weekend. And so we try to match that culture as well because notwithstanding the language issues, you don't have people that think the same way.

Michael Bernzweig (04:24.513)
Right.

Michael Bernzweig (04:38.529)
Right?

Nicole Whittle (04:49.1)
And I don't mean group think, I just mean like they align, they know how to communicate in the way that the client needs them to. They're not going to be set up for success. So that's a big part of what we try to do as well.

Michael Bernzweig (05:02.219)
So can you give me an example of, either a client example or general or specific of what life looked like before working with Outforce versus after in terms of where they were at and what kinds of problems you were able to help them solve for?

Nicole Whittle (05:23.534)
I see me mean the client I think the biggest thing is you know clients and and I was a client to dealt with the same thing is There's a lot of noise out there and you don't know who really tells a good sales story I come from sales as well who also There's so much noise happening you don't know who is real so you literally need to like elbow a buddy and be like

Michael Bernzweig (05:25.6)
Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (05:41.163)
Right.

Nicole Whittle (05:50.85)
Hey, who have you worked with? Like who's good? Who's who, who do you know out there that's trustworthy? And clients don't always have that option. And so they want to make sure that somebody is doing the heavy lift of all that due diligence. That's figuring all that out. Like we're not a recruiter. We're not a dev agency. What we really are is that marketplace that does all that vetting and assessing. And there's not really anybody else out there that does like the B2B teams like we do. And so.

what they would have to do is have all those meetings and interviews and proposals or RFPs processes themselves. And what we do is we take that all off of them. But then often with a process like that, that's it. The client is then left to their own devices and, you know, crossing their fingers, hope everything works out. And so what we do is we act like that accountable executive, the life of the project and make sure that things like co-quality is there. The communication is a

sort of a raid log, red, green, yellow communications there that we manage the budget. You we manage all the resources, time sheets, everything like that. So we know that everything is on track and there's some wow moments that happen after they actually do the kickoff that we're able to help them improve. Not only that the team is coming in, but often they have their own team.

You know, they're they're getting embedded with and we want to make sure everybody rises to not just good But like good with all capital letters or good to grade So that whole process very different for them normally they would have to manage everything not only themselves But they have no one Sort of again behind them coaching both sides of it the the market saying or both sides of the project saying okay guys How are we doing on?

Michael Bernzweig (07:23.83)
Yeah.

Nicole Whittle (07:43.862)
you know, some of the metrics that we need to make sure that we're going to hit our outcomes. We think about developer experience, all sorts of different things.

Michael Bernzweig (07:54.347)
So as you're working with clients, obviously you have the overall strategy, they have their operations, you have technology, kind of like a triangle there. What are some of the key challenges that you see business facing when they're trying to align all of those different elements into a cohesive opportunity to get the project off the ground?

Nicole Whittle (08:14.414)
you

Yeah.

I think part of it is really, it's sort of that coaching I was talking about where you are helping them understand what good is. And just because somebody's enterprise or maybe they're on the opposite end of the spectrum and they're a series A or whatever, doesn't mean that they are sophisticated in the way they need to think about all these things. Sometimes it's just the way the organization has been run and they just need some blinders off.

just saying like, hey, have you thought about it this way? So we really try to look at, I talked about developer experience, like how are people working? What is the process like? Is there rigor to it? Not just how we work with them as an accountable exec, but also making sure that those outcomes that I talked about before are being hit in every stage. How do they measure success? We have a separate session.

usually it's right around the kickoff where we just talk about measuring success and what does that look like and how are they going to know it's successful other than just tada it works. And so we kind of go through that and we give them all those tools that they can then take back to their own team. Like if they've got a engineering team that maybe is not involved in this project. So it's the people, it's that process and it's the technology. So introducing tools that

Nicole Whittle (09:43.598)
help give them metrics like Dora or space or other, even just like raid logs and Monday, we do all sorts of different things to be able to elevate the team and give them all of the facts and data at their hands. That is both just like, let's call it pure metrics, but also that developer experience at culture side to make sure that they are successful and they're communicating well. And, you know, everybody feels all, super excited to be on this project.

Michael Bernzweig (10:12.201)
Yeah, and I guess, I guess at the end of the day, obviously, the final deliverable is what the client is excited about, but getting there is obviously a journey in a lot of these different, different situations. Is there, is there a foundation that you try to build upon that's

Nicole Whittle (10:24.225)
yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (10:30.603)
consistent across projects and clients and engagements that helps you get to that final endpoint in a very methodical way that seems to be reproducible.

Nicole Whittle (10:41.39)
Yeah, yeah. So it depends where they are in their journey. If it's, let's say, pre-approval or pre-kickoff, there's some definite rigor in there. Literally, it's 10-step process that we go through. With every client, it's always the same, and there's multiple team members that take on different roles. But as that project kicks off, even the kickoff is unique. I mean, I have all those years of software consulting.

And I've never seen anything like what we've developed here where it's, and I know they're giving away the secret sauce. You know, there's, there's a very specific way that we go through introducing the team, building a bond as we start off so that everybody starts off on the right foot and feels like they can share good or bad, like what's going on with them. And then we kind of move through this process of not just functionally, what are we building, but

the whole process of, what's happening with each of our meetings, who should be in them, what's happening, what's a successful meeting look like, you know, working with them to even brainstorm things that we see that aren't necessarily to do with our project or not our engineers, the engineering team that comes in, it might be related to an issue they're having in their organization.

Oftentimes, again, because of my consulting background, I'll lean in and we'll talk about what are some operational things that they may be doing that are actually holding them back from success or holding them back from scaling as fast as they want. Oftentimes we have organizations that are building, it's an enterprise product that is like the core of their business. And, you know, they've already commercialized it, but they really want to scale it up.

talk about like what does it mean and what are other ways that you can monetize this or you know build this product to look a little bit different so there's there's some high touch in there we don't build for that stuff it's more just a value add.

Michael Bernzweig (12:50.613)
And are there typical starting points that you see with different clients in terms of are they usually doing a lot of this in-house and it's just not working out? Or do most clients start from a point of they've been doing something like this outsourced and it's not worked out and they're looking for a better solution? What's the starting point for most clients?

Nicole Whittle (13:13.902)
Yes, yes, yes, then yes. It is everything you can imagine. is clients that have been burned. Today I was on what we call a health check meeting with a client who's gone through four agencies, not through us, like prior to working with us and loves working with us because the experience is so completely different. We have other clients that are large banks and they have very specific processes that they want to follow. And this

falls outside of their team. So they want to either do like innovation that their team is not set up for, maybe they just don't have those resources or they want to do some POCs. We have other clients that have an in-house team and this is often the most common, but not like 80%, like it might be 50 % of our clients. They have something they build, they are refactoring.

that it's an earlier version. They've been funded. Maybe they're a series B or series A or something. They've got some extra funding and they need to really sort of clean out the bad debt and put something new in place that truly is scalable to hit that $100 million or whatever it is that they're trying to hit as their revenue goal. And this is a big piece of it. But there's everything. There's...

Michael Bernzweig (14:25.238)
it.

Nicole Whittle (14:39.842)
I mean, that's probably the biggest things. They've got a team and they're not, they don't, they need to round it out. So it's more like embedded teams as opposed to a blog or they have a project and they're like, we want you to run with this project. And that project may be fully in-house or they may actually say, you know what, come back in two weeks, every two weeks and you tell us how you did. It's every gamut. And we've seen, we typically don't work with startups like a pure startup, like a seed.

We would work with like a series A, B, C, but, you know, as I mentioned, we've got banks and telecoms and all sorts of large enterprise companies. So what you see in that is always so different.

Michael Bernzweig (15:20.577)
Hall range, yeah, I can only imagine. And obviously, organizations are coming to you for your expertise in these different areas and pulling all the details together and quite frankly, making it easy, right? Are there certain elements that you think from your end as an organization?

really help out for us to shine in terms of what the organization does best to service clients that may be in a space where they're trying to figure this out.

Nicole Whittle (15:59.118)
I like to call them wow moments. really is. We spend a lot of time thinking about not our competitors, like it's not about like trying to beat a competitor. It's trying to stand on our own two feet and be unique. But it's like, what aren't we seeing out there? Like what is, we literally dive into the problems that the client has. When does he waste his time? When does he not know the right answer? When does he not have the right data? You know,

When does he just physically, he's got a job to do and it doesn't involve like figuring all this other stuff out. So we try to like create the people and the processes and yes, the tech, cause we have our own software, custom software, but we try to look at all that and say, okay, how do we solve that problem ourselves instead of pushing it back on the client? And what could we do differently that they've never seen before? And so.

I'd literally slice every part of the journey, every person they touch, every step that they take. And we try to put something in there that's different and unique. whether it's, like we have this thing we call a money ball report and it shows everybody, every agency and all their contractors. So you can actually compare apples to apples because before you'd have to compare proposal A and proposal B and proposal C and then you have to hope.

that the team itself is as good. If you think about our traditional RFP process, they get a proposal, they get a little bio on somebody, but they have no idea if those team members are really truly the right team members. So we allow them to do interviews with the agency. So we do all sorts of different things, pre-kickoff and then post-kickoff. Yeah, a post-kickoff is like, again, there's wow moments through every slice of the journey, even an invoicing, month end, like,

Michael Bernzweig (17:41.803)
Sure. Yeah, and that obviously helped.

Nicole Whittle (17:56.134)
know, kickoffs, how we communicate, which tools we use to communicate is all very, I want to say customized for that client to make sure it makes their life easier. Even sometimes it makes our life harder.

Michael Bernzweig (18:10.173)
And one question I think a lot of people would be wondering, what is the interface like between you and the client versus you and the team that you're managing?

Nicole Whittle (18:21.078)
Yeah. So, everything from, let's call it lead to, to client when they've actually chosen the team, fallen in love with this team and they're like, we're going with them. We are driving that process and everybody's sort of behind us. And then only those best 10 are presented. And of that usually only about the best three are interviewed, but best three agencies. So we're sort of managing all that process. Once you hit kickoff.

What we are, easiest way to explain it is like that accountable executive. So we're there to provide that oversight, but we don't get deep into the day to day. We're not typically on standups or, well, we're on the odd meeting, but really it's about assessing what's the data telling us? What's the client telling us? What's the agency sometimes helping them navigate if there's a bump in the road or whatever, but it's really,

The agency now works directly with that client and we don't interfere with the day-to-day of software development, but we are there to make sure that code quality is good and they're doing their tickets and no one's missing because they didn't know they were on vacation. So we manage all of that kind of stuff.

Michael Bernzweig (19:40.555)
Sure. And what would a typical project, I don't know if you can even say typical, but what would be an example of some types of projects that you might be working on for clients? And what would the teams surrounding that project look like? Are they globally dispersed? Are they typically individuals that have all worked together on other projects? What does it look like?

Nicole Whittle (19:46.764)
Hahaha.

Nicole Whittle (20:04.558)
I'll say 90 % of the time it's a team that's actually, so let's say it's agency A or AB and their team has worked together on similar projects together. So they almost like are short cutting all the problems they already saw or learned on somebody else's project. They have that sort of shorthand speak that they don't have to go down and experiment as much. So they all work together.

the odd time there's like a super specialist, like a security specialist or somebody who may be brought in on a contract, but it's under the umbrella of that agency. And then that team is working on everything. It could be a pod. So when we say team, we like to think of it as a pod. So it's got the full stream of Scrum or a project manager. It's got all your, you know, front end full stack backend developers.

it's got QA folks, it's got the full team together. Sometimes a client has a couple of those roles and we're sort of embedding in that. But project wise, honestly, as I said, it's everything from clients wanting to build like MVPs or POCs to, you know, it's a full platform implementation.

major integration or they had an NNA issue and they have two instances of something and they need to merge them and only end up with one instance. So there's really, really big and then there's really small. The traditional stuff, which again takes about 50 % of our business, are I'm building a product. I've had something, it's not scalable, it's got a lot of tech debt.

And we need to build it and scale it and make it bigger. And so that's that sort of a mid-market client that is wanting to build something and has a, you know, defined timeline of whatever it is, six months, a year, whatever it is. And they're like, start to finish. This is what the box looks like. That's that. And then the other side is we've got an embedded team. They're going to be here for two years. This team is going to be in there and there might be like five of them and they might all be full stacks. It could be.

Nicole Whittle (22:27.404)
all sorts of permutations.

Michael Bernzweig (22:31.445)
And are there certain types of scenarios that are quite honestly just the most fun for your team to work on where they have certain scenarios that come up that they're like, yeah, we got that one.

Nicole Whittle (22:45.166)
I would say there's kind of a couple of things. I think everybody loves building a product from scratch or reimagining a product. I think that's always fun because you're able to dive into areas like UI UX is always really interesting. And so they're able to sort of look at that whole journey. But more and more, we're doing like really meaty security projects and

Michael Bernzweig (22:54.123)
Pray.

Nicole Whittle (23:13.258)
ones where clients are looking for AI or gen AI to separate like the more traditional and embedding that in it. might be they have a bunch of developers that are wearing too many hats and now they're creating that rigor and so they're bringing in those DevOps and security specialists and the sort of more specialized role and they get to

Michael Bernzweig (23:25.089)
.

Nicole Whittle (23:41.966)
I almost want to say like play with the Play-Doh of again, it's, you know, it's the kind of where you get to roll up your sleeves and you're like, okay, this is actually what this should look like. And they get that sort of fun way to sort of architect a new way of doing business or a new way of infrastructure or, you know, how their data works or whatever. But I those are probably the most interesting ones.

Michael Bernzweig (23:44.449)
Right.

Michael Bernzweig (24:05.907)
Yeah, and obviously it's a whole range, but so sitting on this side of the mic, one of the things that I hear day in and day out from, you know, industry to industry is the whole disruption of AI. And obviously no industry has been more disrupted than, you know, tech and programming, you know, in terms of a lot of these no code and low code tools and development platforms that are

seem to be popping up every day. Has it impacted a lot of the work that you're seeing for your clients overall, or what are you saying?

Nicole Whittle (24:45.666)
I mean, prior to Elf Wars, I came from a number of innovation, like AI, ML companies. And so I saw day in and day out, lots of innovation, lots of AI and ML. But we weren't up the era of of Gen. AI even because it's just really popped up.

Michael Bernzweig (25:05.59)
Right.

Nicole Whittle (25:07.054)
I see less of it than I would like in this world. Between 80,000 agencies and clients and all that, I see less pure, I'm gonna imagine something and we've never done it before. We're gonna start using cameras and we're gonna do this and identify the metals in a scrap.

I see less of those kind of like experimental AI, ML, even DL stuff. But Gen.AI, 100%. I see it in everything. I mean, even for our own company, every single employee uses it, you know, more than 10 hours a week where it's doing something different. And that's not even like where we've embedded it in our job. That's just like the new stuff.

Michael Bernzweig (25:39.777)
Right, right.

Michael Bernzweig (25:53.547)
Sure.

Nicole Whittle (26:00.91)
So I do see that, I do see clients saying, how can we use some sort of AI? And it doesn't have to be like that. The coding piece is a huge one. Just assessing code and making sure that it's clean and it's right, I think is fair. I wanna say it's common with everybody now. I don't see projects that don't have that. But I still honestly am surprised that I don't see more

Michael Bernzweig (26:18.625)
It's really a good tool that a lot of people use.

Nicole Whittle (26:30.798)
clients experimenting. I think they're playing it very safe.

Michael Bernzweig (26:35.349)
Yeah, no, it's interesting. And yeah, and I think at different levels, you know, of clientele, obviously, I think that the smaller firms are a little bit more nimble in terms of experimenting with technologies that...

Nicole Whittle (26:50.798)
Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Bernzweig (26:52.425)
larger organizations may be still setting up all the protocols and checking twice and measuring multiple times before cutting and moving forward. So it's always interesting.

Nicole Whittle (27:04.481)
Yeah, and I, you're right, because I am thinking about like some of the banks or telecoms that we do and it is, they are safe as clients and for good reason, they hold all our money. So, you don't want them going willy nilly. And it is more, it's actually, yeah, those series B mid-market kind of clients, they've got enough funding, they've got enough infrastructure in their business to know where they're going. And now they can kind of carve out.

the ideation that says what could we do, what should we do?

Michael Bernzweig (27:37.321)
And do you see clients congregating in certain industries where you're seeing the most growth in terms of new clients onboarding without force, or is it still pretty scattered at this point?

Nicole Whittle (27:50.862)
No, I would say it's probably fairly similar for everyone. It's fintechs, it's health techs. We do a lot of agritech and sort of eco, like think of batteries and stuff like that. And I would also say the other sort of angle that we do is we work through the PEs as a sales channel.

Michael Bernzweig (28:02.432)
in

Michael Bernzweig (28:06.273)
Sure.

Michael Bernzweig (28:16.417)
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Whittle (28:17.568)
and then work down through to their portfolios and work with those organizations. And so that's, we see a lot of growth there and there each of those PEs specializes in different things. But in all cases, it's usually a tech enabled company, the backbone of their product. Like it's a product, it's not services. You know what I mean?

Michael Bernzweig (28:42.847)
So are a lot of companies kind of struggling with like, guess, balancing innovation and execution in terms of getting projects off the ground and all of that, or what are you seeing?

Nicole Whittle (28:56.142)
no, I think that's not really something we see that much. I think, where I do see them struggling and it's okay, cause we've got a safety net for it is they don't always know what they want and they don't always know what good looks like and what the outcome should be. They just think of it as pure play. need a thing. But then when you peel back the onion and you put your sort of like,

Michael Bernzweig (29:21.281)
Yeah.

Nicole Whittle (29:26.094)
I don't know if that's an operations or consulting hat on to sort of peel back and say, okay, well, how will they know what to do here? Like, do we have enough meat on the bone for them to understand how they are successful or are they set up to fail?

Michael Bernzweig (29:39.765)
Yeah, and it's hard when you start with a blank slate to figure out where you want to, what direction you want to go.

Nicole Whittle (29:46.062)
Honestly, sometimes I will get a note this big in an email saying, is what I'm looking for. And you're like, to do what, like, what's the outcome? Like, what do you need? Like, you're just giving me roles and we're not a recruiter. So like, what, is the thing that we're building? And then other times we have these wonderful clients that give us like full on, they've done the UI UX, they mapped out all the architecture, they come on mass with all this wonderful documentation.

Weirdly, it does not mean either one of them is gonna be more successful than the other. It's how we approach the whole process and making sure, can we fill in the gaps where they don't have them? then can we actually get to the point? Because sometimes a client that develops the whole plan, it's really easy to poke holes in it because I've seen so many and I'm like, what are you doing here?

Michael Bernzweig (30:21.601)
Great.

Nicole Whittle (30:42.67)
Okay, that's an e-commerce platform, but like, how is this happening here? And then you start like doing this and they're like, Oh, we never thought of that. Cause it just takes an outsider to look at it. And now you start smoothing all those things away. So that before we even get started now, everybody's on the same page. Everybody's aligned. So we do spend a lot of time making sure that we know how to, how to help the project be, have the right outcomes and not just like,

Michael Bernzweig (30:49.382)
Good.

Nicole Whittle (31:12.078)
check, check, check, I did it, but did you do it the right way? Did you do it well? Were you thoughtful? Did you challenge the client? Did you challenge assumptions? You don't kind of go through a lot of that. So there is a lot of the consulting side of what we do, which we don't have consultants, we don't charge an extra fee. It's just sort of built into the process that we have. The clients get to benefit.

Michael Bernzweig (31:34.687)
Yeah, because you're looking to provide the best ultimate outcome on both ends. Obviously, a client that is successful is obviously going to refer other friends.

Nicole Whittle (31:39.586)
Yeah.

Nicole Whittle (31:45.42)
That's exactly what I was going to say. Yeah, then we look like heroes and who doesn't want that?

Michael Bernzweig (31:50.129)
Absolutely. So I guess one other question that came in over and over from the audience. What role does data play in kind of aligning operations with overall business strategy? What do you see there?

Nicole Whittle (32:06.158)
Oh God, that's like, got an answer that's as long as my arm and I have to think about how to like condense it. You know, when I think about it, the easiest way to do it is think about it, even though everything doesn't live in a single department, the use cases I'm to give you are a little bit easier by explaining them that way. So if you think about data and ensuring that on the engineering side or product side, that we have data to make decisions.

Michael Bernzweig (32:25.249)
Sure.

Nicole Whittle (32:34.232)
For us, just selfishly, I use that data to help find the right team. when I think about the client side, that data on their team, it's not an us versus them, it's how does the team interact? So today I was looking at, as an example, some metrics that come from Jira and trying to look at all of their developers and saying, okay, what's the bottom 10 % look like? And why is that happening? What's going on there? And sort of digging in.

to find out what is the experience. Is it just a skill issue or is it, I don't know, something going on with this family? Like, who knows? So using data and having tools that help them optimize the department based on how well the project is going, how are their engineers doing, what's their experience like, is super, super critical. And we try to share that all the time. But I can look at any department. I can say, okay, you know, just

purely from a data perspective, financials are data. We manage all the budget, we look at that and we start to notice little pockets. What's going on over here? Why is that happening over there? And so, just coming up from an off standpoint, as an organization, not just like as a marketplace, but just as an organization, I'm using data all the way through. I'm using data to understand my marketing. How does my marketing help me with leads? How do my leads...

What's the data from that? Where are they coming from? What are the patterns I can see? So all those patterns and insights that you pull out of data is the most important piece. If I don't have clean data, I obviously can't get the right insights. But just showing me data or just giving me a dashboard sucks. It's not helpful at all. So if you can pull the insights up to say, okay, like, why does this matter? And who does it impact?

Michael Bernzweig (34:21.921)
Yeah, it's not enough. Yeah.

Nicole Whittle (34:29.666)
that's where the real magic of data comes in and being able to like pull things from different place and have it in one complete story and using like for us as an example, using Gen I, Gen AI to also help tell that story and define those patterns that maybe aren't visible to a mid career or an early career person is super important as well. So that if I was giving advice to someone, I would say,

up your usage of GenAI like you wouldn't believe. Understand which tools are better for which. Like we love Claude and Chad GPT. We also have Deep here. so you want to be able to understand what's the use case. And sometimes we take the data from one, move it into something like another GenAI tool, and then move it back to reinterpret something. And so that would be the biggest thing is feed data into

a non-training tool because you don't want training data, getting all your data and there's all sorts of rules. And I do have, by the way, an AI policy. If people don't have an AI policy, I'm happy to give it out for free. I've done that on LinkedIn already. But getting all that data and getting those rich insights, mean, there's nothing you can't improve without having the data at your fingertips.

Michael Bernzweig (35:53.855)
Yeah, it's invaluable. So, and this is probably something you see day in and day out in what you're doing, but if you were to bullet point a few suggestions or pieces of advice for organizations that are seeing, you know, resistance within their organization from changes in technology or operations, what do you suggest as to some good strategies for overcoming internal resistance to change?

Nicole Whittle (36:25.07)
Um, so one of the things actually in that, that AI policy that I wrote is, uh, reaffirming right at the beginning of the policy that this is not about replacing someone. This is about giving them a superpower. It's about giving them their own assistant right next door. So if you could turn to somebody and you'd like, Hey, go be my lackey and go do all these things for me and go figure all this stuff out. And they came back like that. You would be like, this is amazing. There is.

Michael Bernzweig (36:53.17)
Yep.

Nicole Whittle (36:53.826)
not a single role that I don't think AI can help. Not a single role. I'm bread, I don't care. What I think from a resistance standpoint is people are scared that it will, they don't know enough. And we all have that imposter syndrome and like, I don't know how to do this thing. And they're afraid to play with it. And so I think that permission to fail and to try and...

Michael Bernzweig (37:17.43)
Right.

Nicole Whittle (37:21.41)
giving them use cases and saying, go play with this and try to see if you can solve that issue. Is that permission to fail and to use? I'm talking strictly gen AI at this point because I'm trying to think about business as a whole and not engineers. But I think that's the biggest piece. Just letting people know that you're not going to be the expert at it. So just try it. You didn't know how to drive a bike when you were three years old and you got to go through the process.

Michael Bernzweig (37:49.665)
Thanks

Nicole Whittle (37:51.438)
And so I think that's a little bit of it. It's giving them the permission to know that they can play and try and test it out and also letting them know that it's not about them not being good enough or not knowing how to do something or that they're going to be replaced. It's that you're giving them wings, a cape, whatever, superpowers.

Michael Bernzweig (38:14.565)
I love it. And then as we're wrapping up, what, like if you were speaking directly to, you know, an organization that has never had, you know, this type of solution provider in terms of outsourcing some of these functions and achieving great things in this way.

What would you bullet point us to some of the advantages to this type of model over what they may be doing currently?

Nicole Whittle (38:47.217)
I mean, really the advantages are we have the data, we've got the to know who's good. We've got the rigor as part of that due diligence process of understanding it's not just about people who work for an agency. It's like all of the are they the right people, the right time, all that kind of stuff. And then the other thing is speed.

Basically, how we go through this process is the first five days are to deal with the requirements of the client. The next five days are to connect with those teams, get back there, or connect with the agencies, get back their teams. And the last five days is to actually do the interview and choose the team that you want. So to be able to do that in 15 days is like pretty remarkable. having that technology behind us and the data behind us helps with all of that. But I would say the biggest thing is it's also that

the people like people are so excited in our company to be like, my God, you know, like I get to work on this and I know this and I'm helping with this client is that energy that infectious energy that everybody has that this is we're actually helping somebody, you know, we're taking stuff off their plate and we get to be heroes at the end because we found them this awesome team. I think those are probably some of the bigger things. I think the other thing is most clients, when they think about a process of

trying to find their own agency or going through an RFP process, it's a pain in the ass the whole time. It doesn't matter which venue you choose. Putting everything in someone's hands and frankly not having to pay for that first process until you find that perfect team is like a gift. You know what I mean? Like they didn't have to hardly do any work. They didn't have to pay anybody. They got these amazing teams back and it's only when they choose that team. So...

Michael Bernzweig (40:18.177)
Sure.

Nicole Whittle (40:37.176)
So de-risking that whole process is exactly what we do.

Michael Bernzweig (40:41.417)
I love it. love it. Well, I really appreciate the deep dive on everything going on over there at Outforce. Really a great way to, you know, get some insight out there. And we have a lot of different organizations listening to the podcast and kind of poking around, exploring different opportunities and different ways to grow their organization efficiently and to really

focus on what they do best, is whatever their core mission of their business is. And obviously, this is the core mission of what you're doing here at Outforest, but you're obviously in a space where you're doing this better than most. So that's very, very exciting.

Nicole Whittle (41:25.838)
Well, I have two things. I always like to leave a gift for when I'm on a podcast or if I'm hosting one. And so the one is, A, if you want that AI policy, remember that what I will say is it's not legally heavy and should always be passed through your legal team, but it is very practical about how you use it and what those use cases are. And I'm happy to share that somebody just needs to find me on LinkedIn and I'll send them a hyperlink. And the other thing.

Michael Bernzweig (41:32.282)
sure.

Michael Bernzweig (41:52.403)
And we'll leave a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes. So for anybody that would like to reach out, obviously.

Nicole Whittle (41:58.926)
Sure. I also have a copy of this book. It was given to me by a couple of guys I know. It is such an amazing book. I have a spare copy. I'm happy to give it to somebody again. First person who sends me a note on LinkedIn. I will ship out a book to them. And it's all, it's really for those companies that are building software or SaaS products. And it's the building blocks, everything from, you know, sales to customer success to marketing.

all through, not heavy tech, it's really about how to scale and grow the business, but I'm happy to give a copy of that out too.

Michael Bernzweig (42:34.177)
That's a very nice, tangible and physical offer. I love it. well anyways, Nicole Whittle from Outforce AI. Thank you so much for joining us on the consulting spotlight this week. Like I said, we'll leave a link in the show notes. For anybody that is just tuning in, maybe for the first time, if you're not already subscribed, go to softwareoasis.com backslash subscribe to get on our weekly email newsletter list where we have.

all kinds of data and insights that we produce each week. And we do have two other podcasts. We have Career Spotlight and Software Spotlight. So be sure to check out all three. And once again, Nicole, thank you so much for joining us on the Consultant Spotlight.

Nicole Whittle (43:19.766)
Awesome. Okay, super fun today. Thanks so much.