September 26, 2019

Success story from Jeeva Nadarajah

Sent by Jonathan Stark on September 26th, 2019

List member and TPS participant Jeeva Nadarajah wrote in with a success story about doing discovery, providing a roadmap, and using the “language of business” (i.e., numbers) to provide extraordinary value to a client in a very short time (shared with permission, bold mine):

Hello Jonathan, 5 months after I started listening to you, today was the first time I did a real cost analysis with a client. A client invited me to give them a recommendation of a roadmap for their tool. I interviewed members from 5 different departments and was able to help them articulate the problem and assign a weekly cost to it. While working through the individual interviews it became apparent that they had an internal software team though strangely none of the software team members were asked to join the discussion. I asked them why that was and they said their internal software team didn’t understand their need for this tool. Within 4 hours I had a rough idea that not having 2 primary features of the tool was costing them roughly 25 to 28 thousand dollars a month. As I was leaving their office, one of the primary users-to-be of this tool quietly pulls me aside and says... “ If we’d figured out the cost, this would have been an easier conversation with our internal software team and our leadership. Thanks for helping us articulate our problems using the language of money.” It felt good to practice a skill with the client and leave with that feeling of having put something of real value in their hands. You my dear teacher friend, are causing a ripple effect of goodness in the world. Thank you! Jeeva Nadarajah

Thanks for sharing, Jeeva!

Yours,

—J