Adrian Moise 0:00

We saw situation in which uh in professional services you have some peaks, businesses booming, and then we strive to keep up with the demand. We actually had years when which literally we doubled the business. And then we had periods in which revenue wasn't coming in on the timeline that we were looking for, and then we had to sort of make some hard decisions. Obviously, when COVID happened and so on, for example, at that time we decided to keep everyone and then weather the storm because one of our bets at that time was that while the knee-jerk reaction from any company is to stop investing in technologies, you know, put all the projects on the shelf. You're asking what makes a winning organization. Is like instead of basically saying, I will weather the storm by doing nothing, by conserving resources and energy, the winners what came up is saying, actually, this is the time when digital is making the biggest impact.

Angela Robertson 0:58

Welcome back to the Stormy Stories show. I am your host, Angela Robertson, the CEO of Ace Tech, and I'm delighted to be joined by today's guest, Adrian Moisey, the founder and CEO of Equilibrium, a digital transformation and software innovation company helping organizations build remarkable customer experiences. Adrian has a PhD in computer science and executive education from both Harvard and Warden. He brings deep expertise in technology leadership and scaling high-performance teams and has been a proud member of the Ace Tech community. So we're very pleased to have you on the show. Adrian, welcome.

Adrian Moise 1:39

Thank you very much for the invite, Angela. I'm looking forward to our conversation today.

Angela Robertson 1:42

So let's start. You've spent decades helping companies build winning digital products. In your opinion, what separates organizations that innovate successfully from those that get stuck?

Adrian Moise 1:54

When I started a company, I I remember reading this book called Lean Startup, and then I actually got to meet Eric Reese a few times. As somebody who, you know, in academia and my master did my PhD, I I kind of had this idea about, you know, if you want to get towards a certain result, you come up with a hypothesis and then you design an experiment to validate is that hypothesis correct or not. So I was like, oh, it's great when you have a framework like this called Lean Startup that now allow tech founders, CEOs, like recipes on how to hypothesize, build, test, measure and test, and then improve. So I felt like uh part one is like, do you have a model that is repeatable? Because if every day is like ad hoc, then there isn't much that you can optimize. Second, I found that success is not for people who come up with an idea and get it right or get it right from the beginning, but people who have the ability to take what they produce first and then learn and iterate fast. So as opposed to I got my solution, somebody got an even bigger, better solution out, that's the winner. It's actually if I can increment and improve and I get real feedback from actual users as opposed to product managers inventing features, I feel like those organizations are more likely to succeed. And part of that success recipe, it's also I feel it's about alignment because some organizations have a culture in which decision is by consensus, and then there's a number of problems with this approach. One is it takes forever to make a decision. And second, I'm also feeling that when everybody has a voice and everybody throws in the two cents, there are no owners. And and some of the decisions that are being made, as opposed to having a vision on a product, it's more like the lowest common denominator. Okay, I late your need, your comment on my need, and then what comes out of this is is is something like, as I said, lowest common denominator as opposed to a vision for success. And then people in product in tech, they're passionate. They have a vision, is like I I I look at the ecosystem, I see where the white space is, and then this is how we're gonna win, this is how we're gonna win for the early adopters, this is how we're gonna get to scale. And they they wear this chip on their shoulders, right? You know, when you enabled this high performance team to achieve this this this uh challenging but you know exciting goals.

Angela Robertson 4:40

Said that you were inspired by the Lean Startup written by Eric Reese, and you've met him a few times. You know, he has had several prominent publications since then. Do you feel like even though you've been an early adopter of the lean startup model, does it still apply in today's world? Do you think that's still driving your business today?

Adrian Moise 4:58

I I think the concept still applies, but we're gonna talk probably more about some of these newer technology when you have AI, when you have virtuality and so on. One is like to think about the difference between incremental innovation versus disruptive innovation. So example, every year you get a new iPhone, and then most of the iPhone changes have been incremental. The camera is a little bit better, you can do better photos, you can, you know, correct some of the signatures, but there was nothing major in the last few years. So people are actually excited to see, like with the change in leadership on Apple, would we see some of that product leadership being manifested again? I'm excited, for example, about the launch of the Apple Vision Pro. And then while they didn't have a clear vision or application on how this Vision Pro, a very expensive device, will actually succeed in the market. It's great to see that Apple and now Google, not just Meta, are playing in this space. I'm definitely passionate about the metaverse and this spatial computing. In terms of, you know, Eric Reese and his framework, there is version 2.0 of the book and so on. I think some of those basic concepts still exist. They can continue to be refined. I like other leaders, for example, at Google, they have this kind of um five-day sprint in which they go from a concept to, you know, implementing a vision or product, and then using design thinking, and then doing usability testing with user real users, and then having within a single week some concrete feedback for leaders, for founders on how the original hypothesis translates into market fit. Yes.

Angela Robertson 6:44

Being able to get to that market fit is so much faster now, right? So, and I mean, even in your own company, you work across so many different sectors: fintech, healthcare, XR, AI. I think one of the challenges today with the fast pace of everything is you can test a lot of things out, but how do you decide where to place the big bets as a founder and CEO?

Adrian Moise 7:04

Indeed. You know, I I think strategy is about choices. And as a leader, as a CEO, one of your mandates is how do you allocate resources, being your top people, being funding, because there can be so many other destructions, right? You can get greedy and then you spread yourself thin. I was talking to the chief digital officer from one of our clients, a multi-billion dollar financial institutions, and he was mentioning they have 50 projects running in parallel, and they're feeling like they spread the steam so thin, you know, like that butter that only smells like butter because it's like, you know, so so one of our priorities, one is we have this framework called the AAA, which stands for alignment, autonomy, and accountability. It's align on where we're going, what's our big hairy audacious goal, what are these one or two major bets that we're taking at one time, versus things that are secondary in importance. We actually use this term, what's your Picasso? If there is one thing that you do for the day, for the week, for the year, what would be that one thing you'd be known for? Versus a bunch of other stuff that are required for the daily activity. They are still important, they are still required to accomplish that offs, look after the team, look after the clients. But in the big schema of things, you know, you gotta have to see like this is the one thing that rules them all, right?

Angela Robertson 8:28

Yeah.

Adrian Moise 8:30

So taking bets, it's also looking into how do you pay to your people's strengths, right? And then what does the landscape look like? And especially right now with AI, when we're talking about, you know, the former model or what's old school, even like six months ago, because this changed so much. We're not talking about what happened 10 years ago. So the uh pace of change is increasingly faster, and then organizations, you know, like the heartbeat, like the ability to react has to change because if you doing those three to five years annual, the ability for somebody to accurately predict these five years business plans and strategies is is is very unlikely because yesterday weather is no longer predicting tomorrow weather. So you need to actually continue to adjust. Keep in mind your vision doesn't have to adjust every day. If that's what your company stands for, that's your this big carriage, audacious goal, it doesn't have to change daily. Like your North Star scan continue to remain what it is, but how you get there needs to take into account that the the world is is is changing. And and I think when there are these challenges and a lot of people are trying to figure out what this means for their organization, how their fields, how their jobs will be disrupted, they're also opportunities. And we're excited about this.

Angela Robertson 9:54

That's great. I want to follow on that thread a little bit because the fact that you're excited about this tells me that you're driven in a slightly different way than I think other founders and CEOs that I've been speaking to recently who are worried about this pace of change and keeping up. So, how would you advise those leaders to move quickly without creating chaos inside their companies? You know, you have to be ready to adapt and change, but how do you do that without people feeling like they're waking up to a new world order every day?

Adrian Moise 10:23

Yeah, I remember some of these questions, for example, when we were pioneers in introducing agile development, and then was this idea, okay, we're struggling with this emerging project using the traditional waterfall methodology. Agile came out, it was sold as a new kid on the block, and then it's silver bullet, whatever problem you have, you slap some agile on it, and then all the problems go away. And that's not how things work. And then people started misinterpreting what agile meant. People were like, I'm agile, I can change my mind, I can do whatever I want. It's like, well, that's not agile, that's chaos, that's shooting from the hip. So there is a process, there is there is a rigor. One thing that we're seeing in terms of successful organization is they have these two components. One is called getting the basic right, they have a solid foundation to build on. And then they're looking into, okay, so what is the X factor? What is our differentiator? What do we need to do to not just survive, but to strive? It's tempting to go is like, I just need to sort of hunker down, do these things I'm comfortable, do the basics. But if you don't have that discipline to have like, well, sure, this is a bit of yin and yang, it's not like a consistent, stable allocation in time and resources between the two of them. But you do have to have a mentality, I do have to pay attention to these things about innovation. And in the past, they'll be like, oh, all this cool technology, all these things happen. It's like, oh, I'm a laggard. Let some people kind of try it out, let basically then make the mistakes, and then when the dust helps are gonna go, just adopt the winning strategy and then move forward. With things such as AI and now AI life virtual reality, for example, if you wait for a couple of years to see how the dust settles, and then you want to try to kind of rejoin the game, you you'll be left behind and your ability to recover is is gonna be compromised.

Angela Robertson 12:17

Yeah, it's almost becoming more comfortable with that hypothesis mentality, with that experimentation and building that as a reflex, right? Because if you're not testing, like you said, if you're staying in your stability, you will be left behind.

Adrian Moise 12:33

And and then if you think about it, speed amplifies whatever systems and direction you have. Because if the approach is like, let's move fast, but if you don't have the ability to course correct, you know, then you're going faster than direction, right? So I love, for example, um Formula One, and one of the reasons is because of that balance between strategy, experience, and technology. To win a Formula One race, you don't have just one thing. I've just got speed. No, speed is not sufficient. You need cornering, you need to have a good race strategy, you need to have a great driver and so on. So these combinations of specialties, you know, from engineers to drivers to strategists to tire technicians and so on, it's it's it's what makes it unique.

Angela Robertson 13:20

And then you throw the weather in there too, right? And it completely changes the race.

Adrian Moise 13:25

And now, you know, this year in particular, they introduced some major changes in Formula One because there is also energy management. So drivers are not just basically need to drive these cars over 300 kilometers an hour and past each other safely in the coordinates, but they also need to actually look at deployment of resources. Remember, like you were asking a moment ago, right? Like they have to be strategic about when they deploy this extra energy, right? And then if they deploy too much too early, they will left leave themselves vulnerable for being picked up at a later time. So it's an extraordinary analogy to the question you were asking earlier.

Angela Robertson 14:04

Yes, I agree. I've learned so much from watching Formula One over the years, and I appreciate that connection. I also want to know a little bit, you've been building this company over over 14 years, and we know that any company, any transition, no matter what stage you're in, involves storms or stormy periods where you can't see what's ahead of you. What has been one of the hardest seasons you've navigated as a founder?

Adrian Moise 14:31

So, on one hand, we saw situations in which uh in professional services, you have some peaks. It was busy is businesses booming, and then we start to keep up with the demand. We actually had years when which literally we doubled the business. And then we had periods in which revenue wasn't coming in on the timeline that we were looking for, and then we had to sort of make some hard decisions. Obviously, when COVID happened and so on, for example, at that time we decided to keep everyone and then weather the storm because one of our bets at that time was that while the knee-jerk reaction for many companies is to stop investing in technologies, you know, put all the projects on the shelf, you're asking what makes a winning organization is like instead of basically saying, I will weather the storm by doing nothing, by conserving resources and energy, the winners what came up is saying, actually, this is the time when digital is making the biggest impact. Because a lot of traditional, like we work, for example, in financial services, we work in retail, and what happened is people stopped coming, meeting in person. They were not shopping in presses anymore because of the health constraints. Seemingly they are not going to the banks into the branches anymore. There was this government, you know, allowancing funds, you know, uh that were released, and then they had to find a way how to get those digitally, but also distribute them digitally. What I'm saying is after you know, a very scary dry run for us for a few months, where where a lot of our customers basically pick up the phone, hey, you know, those projects we're doing and so on, we're gonna put that on hold, and I'm just focused on making sure our team, our customers are safe, and that makes a lot of sense. But then others quickly pick up to say, I actually need to intensify my spending and the efforts we're doing into technology because we believe that's the winning strategy. They also started to implement this type of system, queuing system, people being able to book employments online and so on. A lot of this transformation, remember, a lot of the stuff people had to do, even signatures in person, and you have to go to somebody's office and so on. It's like, oh duh, now everybody's thinking like DocuSign or some other alternative electronic signature are the norm. So this is an example in which due to unforeseen or external conditions, business um change, you know, intensity drop dramatically. Um, and that's an example of a bet we made is like we will keep going, we will adapt to these difficult conditions, and then it paid off because keeping the team will allow us when the client started to call again and actually saying, we have actually more ideas, more projects, more needs to deal with this type of situation. We saw that the organization who actually came back and started investing in technology sooner, they went from difficult years to like a huge improvement and record years, you know, in the years right after the COVID. So that's one significant example. The other one is when we kind of shifted a bit from the work that we're doing, working with well-funded startups, to go from one idea, a concept, a strategy to implementing an MVP, implementing phasing one, and building these products from scratch. We got the entire team from strategy to experience to taking this product life. When we move from these small companies being entrepreneurs with an idea back of a knap, like here, I have this vision, help me implement this, and then we help them reframe the growth to market, the product strategy, and implementing things very quickly. Or intrapreneur within an organization like WhoSuite, like other technology companies here, IQ Medics, they had new product ideas, and then we helped them launch those. To working into regulated environments like healthcare and financial services, it requires a different time frame, a different horizon. In in financial services or in healthcare, you don't do a lean startup and come up from an idea to launching something, hopefully, like it's an MVP, maybe the person doesn't die if I deploy this app into a hospital. That's not how hospital and or financial services adopt new technology. So there is a different, there is a different environment. There are more approval processes that need to take in place. The horizon for launch is longer term. So two things. One is the people who, the developers, the product team, we used to work on these small projects. We are the entire team. We envision this, we design this, we build it together, we have no external dependency. It's always everything is built from the ground up. When you go into the enterprise space, there is legacy code. There are different technologies, platforms that are already in place that you need to start with. You know, there are more approval processes. So the people who used to work and were successful in one agile startup environment were different from the people who were comfortable working in this longer-term project. Sometimes we're using platforms. Those platforms are pre-built, they have constraints. You need to learn that platform well and then work within those limitations as opposed to no, no, no, I want to build everything from scratch. You know, it can work like that, build everything, bridge by build when you have like a townhouse. When you have a sky riser, you cannot build like breed by build. You have to take these pre-built components, use this platform. So the point here is the people who were successful, our employees, the team structure had to evolve to basically meet the new demand and the new type of projects and working in different industries.

Angela Robertson 20:26

And it also sounds like you were able to then set that tone for the level of adaptability you wanted to see from the teams, right? Being able to encourage them to move into that new paradigm because that's not an easy shift to make and the direction needs to come from somewhere. So, how did you build that muscle over time? How did you start to build that adaptability into how you approach the work and the paradigm shift?

Adrian Moise 20:51

Yeah, it's hard to find somebody this analogy. A startup is like somebody when they go into a jungle with a machete and then they have to fight for every inch of someone. There is alligator coming in, this is kind of an Indiana Jones type of situations. And then, okay, so if you go from startup, you started to see that the company is growing, you find validated some of that markets fit, you're seeing some of the clients coming back. It's more like driving um Jeep into the forest. There are some rivers you need to cross, and and then it's like you reach skill, and then it's just a matter of like going there faster, and then it's like driving on the highway. This analogy is the type of people, resources, and the team communication that is successful in one environment is different from what's required in a different environment. So we need to adapt as the company reached these points from like when the company was 10 people or more, we are just a team. There wasn't much of infrastructure, reporting structure, and then we're working together towards this goal. As the team starts to increase after a certain size. And so you need different communication structure. You need different managers and leaders that need to keep the teams in sync. Multiple projects need to be run in parallel. So you need to create the right processes, the tools to enable the team. So when we move from more of these well-funded startups and then MVPs and working a team, bringing everything from scratch into this more regulated environment, I think the part that basically helped the teams through the transition was showcasing the purpose, the vision for the team. We actually chose to work in financial services because the research showed that money is one of the number one stressor in people's lives. So us partnering with progressive institutions, in particular with credit unions, to move from transactional sending money from A to B towards focusing on people's financial wellness, it's both complicated but also rewarding. So part of our big Harry Audacious goal is to the type of work that we're doing, is to impact 100 million credit union members to the work that we're doing. And how's that possible? For example, we build uh with Center One this platform called Forge that was deployed afterwards to 300 credit unions and over 10 million Canadians that were banking using this type of technologies that we help put in place. And that's not like sending tweets and then look at this and sum these things up. This is about daily necessities for them to receive the payments, to send the kids to school, pay for tuition, pay their bills and so on. So this is very complex and also very important. We all know the risk about digital identity being stolen, people not having access to their accounts when they need it most. So this is meaningful work that is making an impact with a scale. We have millions of members in Canada, in the United States, and in Latin America that are benefiting from the services that we're doing. So while it seems, hey, this is exciting, we love to work and make this impact with the smaller startup organizations. The fact that now we can affect organizations of larger scale and interacting with them because we work business to business to have millions of members that benefit of services is very wording. And our original vision, which is basically enriching people's lives by building this amazing digital experience, has not changed. We just shifted in maybe other verticals, and then the impact, the scale is even bigger.

Angela Robertson 24:41

I think that beautifully illustrates what we started with, right? Which was that notion of having that vision, being able to stretch it all the way through the Indiana Jones startup phase into scaling, driving down the highway. I think that's incredible the amount of impact that you've been able to make. Adrian, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. It was a true pleasure to listen and learn from you. And I'm sure our listeners also gain some knowledge. Very grateful for the time.

Adrian Moise 25:09

Thank you very much for having me over. I appreciate what you're doing and how you're sharing this type of practices and learnings with other founders and the community. I look forward uh to hear what's next.

Angela Robertson 25:20

Amazing. Thank you.

Adrian Moise 25:22

Bye, Angela.