What Do You Do?
When we pitch Real Kinetic to potential clients, we sometimes struggle to articulate what it is exactly we do. We’re not coders for hire, but we write code. We’re not software architects in an ivory tower, but we design systems. We’re not management consultants, but we mentor engineering leaders and managers. All of this culminates in the question: what do you do?
When we started Real Kinetic, we envisioned helping companies solve problems around system performance, scalability, and fault-tolerance. These were all problems that we tackled at Workiva and problems that excited us. In reality, as we started working with clients, we realized that this was actually a small fraction of what companies really needed, whether they knew it or not.
In practice, what we really do is twofold: help companies get “unstuck” and provide them capabilities to remain unstuck. While many companies focus on delivering a system or enhancement or some technical item that will allow them to go-to-market, we’ve found that often they are missing the forest for the trees. Worse yet, their instinct is to bring us (or some other team) in to quickly build out said thing and hand it off. Generally speaking, there are a couple things wrong with this.
First, it’s unlikely any one thing is going to be the silver bullet that solves all your problems. This is probably the hardest lesson for some clients. We see this over and over: getting on Kubernetes, building a CI/CD pipeline, or rewriting this one particular system is unlikely to be the key to unlocking success. That’s not to say these aren’t important tactical steps in some situations, but there are usually broader issues at play. We want to make sure we are putting our clients in a good position with respect to business outcomes, not just tactical implementation details.
Our approach is to look at the intended business outcome — what is it, as a business, that your company is trying to accomplish? This is why our engagement process begins with an in-depth assessment where we review the customer problem a client solves — the business value — and a discussion about where the company is trying to go. As we talk with different groups in the organization, from senior leadership to engineering teams, we piece together a picture of the current situation and a plan for getting the client to where they want to be. These discussions and the resulting assessment tend to be very illuminating to clients who frequently get fixated on implementation minutiae and amplified within the echo chamber of company culture.
Real Kinetic uses what we call a holistic, team-based mentorship approach. Our view is that you cannot disentangle organizational structures and processes from technical challenges. We don’t just come in, blindly address a specific technical problem, and leave. Similarly, we won’t just dump some vendorware or custom-built software onto clients and leave (or worse, become a critical dependency for the business). We will look at the whole picture, find solutions that fit the business, and help the client own these solutions with a hands-on approach. The real problems tend to be at the intersection of technology, people, and business objectives — we address all three.
Second, by having our team build a solution in isolation and hand it off, the client is jeopardizing itself on a more prolonged time horizon. We do not tell our clients how to solve problems, nor do we build bespoke solutions. Instead, we facilitate discussions to help teams arrive at solutions they fully own. This is critical because it enables our clients to be self-sufficient and on a path to continuous growth and improvement.
We are not Accenture or IBM where you bring one of us in, turn around, and then turn back to find there’s 50 of us that you’re now dependent on. We use what we refer to as a declining-engagement model. That is, if we’re doing our job right, you should need us less and less over time until you get to the point where you don’t need us at all. This is not in our best interest, but it is in yours. This is why mentorship is an essential part of what we do. So essential, in fact, that in our engagement contracts, we typically require our clients to have their engineers and other staff work with us in some capacity. Anything else will result in us being on the critical path. Our goal is to provide clients with capabilities, not one-off solutions.
What kinds of clients do we work with? We work with companies of all shapes and sizes, from small, capitalized startups to large, Fortune 500 enterprises. We see lots of different problems (and lots of common ones too), but stuckness does not discriminate between size or culture or technology or industry.
Occasionally I get asked why I went into consulting. There is a bit of a stigma when it comes to consultants for some of the reasons mentioned above. We started Real Kinetic because the transitions we led at Workiva were the most challenging and rewarding times in our careers. We want to help other companies achieve similar transformations. In doing so, we get to experience those things repeatedly, on a much shorter timescale, and without tying our self-worth to a single company for years as is often the case with startups. We also get to experience a wide range of industries, problems, and technical challenges. One day we’ll get back to doing product, but right now we’re having too much fun.
So what do we do? We write code, we build prototypes, we architect systems, we debug problems, we optimize performance, we guide decision making. Our blog gives you an idea of the breadth of what we do, but what we really do is mentor. We don’t coach as that implies a one-way relationship with someone on the sidelines telling you what to do. We help develop teams and organizational capabilities by being directly involved and hands-on. We get companies unstuck — accelerating delivery — while helping them become self-sufficient at the same time — building a sustainable execution.
Part of why we struggle to articulate what exactly we do is because, in the end, we’re a team of engineers. We’re not salespeople. We’re not vendors. We’re not freelancers. We are a small team of experienced problem solvers. Our reputations are built on solving challenging problems using a business-centric perspective. Our pitch is you get access to our seasoned team — a team with highly diverse skills ranging from technology executive to architect to infrastructure engineer to manager — and we help share that experience with your team. We think it’s important companies take a long-term approach to developing their engineering organizations beyond just the near-term deliverables. We mentor engineering teams to unleash your full potential.
Real Kinetic is committed to helping clients develop great engineering organizations. Learn more about working with us.