Behind the Ops S3E1
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[00:00:00] Intro: Welcome to season three of Behind the Ops presented by Tulip. This season, we are welcoming a fresh pair of co-hosts bringing a whole new energy. Russell Waddell and Madilynn Angel tackle the pointed questions challenging industrial operations as we know it, and sometimes even answering them. 

[00:00:18] Russ: Madi, how's your dog?

[00:00:22] Madi: She has recovered. Yeah, she finished her antibiotic, so she's all, she's all set. 

[00:00:27] Russ: How old's your dog? 

[00:00:29] Madi: She'll be five in April. 

[00:00:31] Russ: And she's small, right? One of those long lived dogs. 

[00:00:34] Madi: Just a 95 pound baby. 

[00:00:38] Russ: Oh, I'm thinking of a different dog.

[00:00:40] Madi: She's a Bernese Mountain dog.

[00:00:42] Russ: Did I meet your dog? There's no way I missed your dog.

[00:00:44] Madi: No, you haven't met her. She, uh, she doesn't come into the office. So, quick story. I got Elsie like a few months before I started at Tulip. Mm-hmm. . And so I brought her to the office as a puppy. And all the other office dogs were veterans and a couple of them were a little spicy and she had a run in with one of the small veteran dogs and is uncomfortable coming in the office now.

So even though she's 95 pounds now, puppy Elsie's feelings we're so hurt that she's unable to come back into the office. 

[00:01:17] Russ: She had a bad experience. 

[00:01:18] Madi: Yeah. Childhood trauma. Puppyhood Trauma. 

[00:01:21] Russ: Welcome to, Welcome to Pet Chat. Brought to you by Tulip, by the way, 

[00:01:25] Madi: new segment

[00:01:26] Russ: yeah. New segment of Behind the Ops.

What are we gonna talk about today?

[00:01:31] Madi: I think that we are gonna do a pop quiz. 

[00:01:34] Russ: Oh God, I didn't prepare 

[00:01:35] Madi: well. I'm like, I'm a striver, so I feel like I'm always expecting a pop quiz. you gotta be ready just in case. 

[00:01:45] Russ: So you, so you didn't prepare in the sense that you're always prepared, um, pop quiz, Should we make this, should we make this medium difficult or hard difficult? 

[00:01:55] Madi: Uh, let's do it hard, like a hard difficulty level. Okay. And then if we bomb the pop quiz, it was a surprise. 

[00:02:03] Russ: So, Okay. So here I have a first, Can I ask the first question? I have one that's, that's gonna be good for gauging how good you're gonna be at this. Who said, Sorry, this is a marketing question, but I think it's incredibly hard.

Who said "creativity is intelligence having fun"? 

[00:02:19] Madi: Was it Steve Jobs ? 

[00:02:22] Russ: That's a great guess. It was the Steve Jobs of Science. Albert Einstein. Okay. Okay. So that, So that, I thought that would be a basically impossible question without being multiple choice. Okay. And from your long silence, I feel like it was a basically impossible question without being multiple choice, do you wanna, do you want it to be just as hard as that or do you want me to dial it down a little? 

[00:02:41] Madi: Well if, if it's hard questions that will be fun facts that our listeners can share at dinner parties, Yeah, then I feel like that's the way to go. 

[00:02:50] Russ: So, Okay. So keep it, keep it difficult.

[00:02:53] Madi: No shame in failure. 

[00:02:54] Russ: That's a good point. What if I just feel consistent shame whether I've failed or succeeded? Cuz I only think about the failure. 

[00:03:01] Madi: I have some good counselors that I can recommend to you. 

Welcome to Mental Health Cast, brought to you by Tulip. Do you want another one? I got another one queued up, or do you have one?

Let's keep them coming. 

[00:03:11] Russ: Okay. This micro blogging site's iconic bird logo was named after Celtics legend Larry Boer. Larry by not Larry Boer. Larry Bird. This is, This is a Boston question for you. 

[00:03:23] Madi: Can you repeat the question? 

[00:03:24] Russ: Yeah, sure. This micro blogging site's iconic bird logo was named after Celtics legend, Larry Bird.

[00:03:31] Madi: Uh, is it Twitter? 

[00:03:33] Russ: Nailed it. Twitter. Amazing. Larry Bird, Not a Tweety bird or some other bird. Do you want you want another one? I got another one queued up right here. It's good. 

[00:03:43] Madi: Go for it. I'm sure I'm in the right place for this. Oh wait 

[00:03:47] Russ: mentally?

[00:03:49] Madi: Yeah. Call those counselors.

Yeah, go for it. Go for it. 

[00:03:52] Russ: Okay, here we go. This is a marketing history. In what year did the United States ban advertising cigarettes on TV and radio? And I'll give, I'll give you multiple choice. Was it 1960, 1970, or 1980?

[00:04:09] Madi: 1970. 

[00:04:10] Russ: Nailed it. Two in a row. Two outta three. What's your, tell me about your marketing, like your marketing credentials and why we can trust you as a marketing person and your expertise here.

What's your cv? 

[00:04:22] Madi: Well, the, the first thing that I think makes me trustworthy is I didn't study marketing in college and tip to all the kids don't study marketing in college because the professors and programs are 10 to 20 years behind and it's a waste of time. 

[00:04:38] Russ: I was not expecting that answer, I'll be honest with you.

[00:04:40] Madi: Yeah. I studied anthropology. I care about understanding people and what they do and culture. I think that's a great background for marketing, but I'm biased. And you know, I, I went through kind of the, the agency flow for years, uh, before coming to, to Tulip, wanted to join a mission driven company.

[00:05:01] Russ: And when you took, when you were, when you were in school, how many semesters of marketing anthropology did you. 

[00:05:09] Madi: Zero. 

But ask me how, how many semesters of Mayan writing and archeology I took and the number's pretty high . So we, we all learn fun, fun things in liberal arts schools. 

[00:05:23] Russ: Did it stick? 

[00:05:24] Madi: There are a few Chipotles that have really great mind writing installations that they've obviously stolen and I can identify them when I walk in there. And I love visiting. Central America, but I have very poor qualifications there as an adult. 

[00:05:41] Russ: That's, it's just, it's one mind blowing fact after another amazing work. Do another question or is it my turn in the hot seat? 

[00:05:48] Madi: I think it's your turn in the hot seat.

And I'm going to, uh, focus on some Manufacturing questions. Is that fair? Okay. 

[00:05:55] Russ: Please. Well, the whole point is not to be fair. The point is to be tough and give good trivia . 

[00:06:00] Madi: Okay, so I'm gonna start with like a softball just to like get you ready, 

[00:06:05] Russ: Okay. I'm act, I'm terrified of this cuz see, like, right what I said about my failure, my relationship with failure, Please.

[00:06:12] Madi: What is a bill of materials? 

[00:06:16] Russ: Can I use the words bill or materials? In the answer? 

[00:06:20] Madi: The one rule is gonna be, you can't use the words in the answer. 

[00:06:23] Russ: The bill of material is a list of all the things required to make a thing.

[00:06:28] Madi: That's a good enough definition.

[00:06:29] Russ: Am I close? What's the textbook answer that we're going for here?

[00:06:32] Madi: So textbook says, "Complete inventory of the raw materials, assemblies, parts, and quantities of each needed to create a specific product". 

[00:06:41] Russ: Okay, So I'm gonna answer in plain English and the technical English will be the officially correct answer this. We're gonna put this in the show notes. By the way, the Manufacturing questions are from the Tulip glossary, right?

[00:06:52] Madi: Yeah, yeah. We'll, we'll share the Tulip gloss. Can I throw you a more difficult question? Maybe a more contentious question. What is Industry 4.0? 

[00:07:03] Russ: How long do we have ? Because there's also, so I'm gonna cite to a source. Industry 4.0 is a term coined by a program of the German government in the mid 2010s.

Where they created an industrial policy that said, you know, here's eight pillars of our official industrial policy of the country of Germany, and what we'll spend money on and what we wanna accomplish. And that was published as Platform Industry 4.0. And, um, after that it went crazy. In Industry 4.0 has been used for all sorts of non-cited uses where there's no actual traceability of what the definition means.

So I, I don't know. No one knows. I, I, I go with the formal definition based on German industrial policy and I disavow any other definition because there's not a source other than the tool of glossary of terms, which I feel like you're about to tell me what that definition is. 

[00:07:54] Madi: No, actually, I just like decided to pull that one out. This one, it's not in the glossary

[00:07:58] Russ: and it shouldn't be. Cause what would we even cite to ? You picked a real bur under my saddle of a question there 

[00:08:05] Madi: well, I like that you talked about it historically. I'd say this is a, a contentious topic. Like what is mes? Yeah. So you know, you can give like really technical definitions that are agreed on, which is great for pop quiz.

You can give some nuanced essay questions, which are great for, you know, more of a final exam, midterm situ. 

[00:08:25] Russ: Do you know what my favorite terrible rhetorical mechanism is? Digital twin. I saw this lot for digital twin. What's the, what's the definition of the digital twin? Well, the thing about digital twin is everybody's got their own definition.

I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. They don't. They don't all have their own definition. There are places that you can cite to, whether that's academic papers or companies or uh, international organizations or governments there, just cite a source, like pick one, because as soon as you say everybody's got your own definition, what that means is what you're about to do is make one up off of, like just out of thin air, you're about to make another one. So you're literally complaining that everybody's got a different definition and therefore you will contribute to that problem by making your own new definition. 

[00:09:08] Madi: I think to challenge it a little bit, I think that people can also want to take a position and so they share their own definition, knowing like, Hey, you might challenge this, but I actually maybe have looked up the Google Scholar papers and I just have a perspective that is not necessarily commonly held. 

[00:09:28] Russ: Right. That makes sense. Yeah, that works Perfect. That makes perfect sense to me. I should stop complaining. People can say whatever they want.

[00:09:35] Madi: Oh, well the best thing about strong opinions is that you can disagree with them . 

[00:09:40] Russ: So you disagree. Do you know who defines robots? That's almost, almost nobody. It got, the term was coined a long time ago in a, in a work of science fiction. But then it got picked up across a whole bunch of different things.

And at this point there is no universally cited definition of robot, and yet most people know robot when they see one.

[00:10:01] Madi: I love this story. 

I just wanna like google more about robots. 

[00:10:04] Russ: Because it's a anthropological story. Yeah, it's an anthropological story. Through and through. What's my next question? I was, I was actually, to be honest with you, I was kind of stalling cuz I didn't want the next one cuz the first one was too hard.

[00:10:14] Madi: So the next one, uh, is I think in your wheelhouse, what does no code mean versus low code? So I'm gonna change the format a little bit. What's the difference between no code and low? 

[00:10:26] Russ: That one I can handle. No code is fully graphical with no, well, I can't use no, uh, without any typing out code in a specific language.

So you don't actually have to write, you don't have to know any syntax. You can drag graphical elements or use menus. Low code is still mostly graphical or mostly accessible to non-professional software developers, but also does involve some amount of knowing syntax. Often for a, a simpler language like JavaScript, where you can do a little bit of actual writing out, uh, typing out code, and then also that fits seamlessly in an environment with, you know, drag and drop blocks and menu items and stuff like that.

[00:11:10] Madi: So from your definitions, no code and low. They can coexist. 

[00:11:15] Russ: They, they do coexist. Yeah. I don't think that's my definition. There's a bunch of places where Tulip is a good example, but I'll use a non Tulip example just to be semi fair, unbiased about this. Like Squarespace, you can drag things from place to place to make a website.

And if you get to a point where you have the ability to write HTML and or JavaScript and you wanna do something that is not a built in feature, you copy somebody else's code or you write your own code and you basically have a block that you put, you drag that block and that block is an empty space where you're gonna have code execute in what would otherwise be a no code website.

And Tulip is the same thing with custom widgets. You have a no code environment, you add a custom widget, and I let you inject the piece of code into the Tulip platform. So yeah, they definitely coexist. The marketing term for no code would be a Wysiwyg editor, and by marketing term, I mean circa 2012 when I was aware of these things.

[00:12:12] Madi: Yeah, it's kind of amazing that we're still talking about definitions as a quiz for these, but you also asked me, Larry Bird Twitter question earlier, so I feel like it's all open for, for discussion. 

[00:12:28] Russ: Oh my God. What else were we talking about besides pop quiz? Look at how desperately I am I am to leave the, the pop quiz that I proposed as the segment.

[00:12:36] Madi: Well, there are a few things we wanna talk about, um, that people feel passionately about. Kind of like the low no code piece, um mm-hmm. , but maybe going into something that I know developers care a lot about and that is dark mode. Pros, cons, importance. Why do people care so much?

[00:12:54] Russ: I don't know if it's funny to me or ob just an observationally funny thing or just amazes me, but the strong opinions that people feel about dark mode versus light mode, and the extent to which choosing one or the other reflects on people's, you know, like their core identity and value as human beings. It kind of boggles my mind a little.

[00:13:15] Madi: It is shocking. 

[00:13:16] Russ: People who love dark mode, they just love dark mode. 

We were evaluating a tool a couple years ago and they only offered it in dark mode. 

[00:13:25] Madi: A marketing tool only in dark mode.Shocking. The power the engineering organization had at that company, was easily represented to the market by their dark mode only product. 

[00:13:38] Russ: Um, that's a really subtle and good point you're making. Yeah, you're right.

[00:13:42] Madi: Well, I think that you can probably dive into this a little bit more. Like it, it does seem like, you know, engineers have a strong preference for dark mode and there are benefits of it. So, you know, maybe you can kind of talk through like why people are so zealous. 

[00:13:58] Russ: I can, I mean, it's speculative, right? But I can, I can talk a little bit about it.

It's basically like, it's a combination of wanting to make a thing your own and there being an objectively right way that it should be. In certain circumstances and then like wanting that to be applied rigorously because of things like, you know, the time has come for light mode to go. I have another example that I actually know better than dark mode/ light mode. So when you're looking at online texts, like text presented on a screen, everybody who does any design or web design or anything like that, they al they all know, like text on screen supposed to be sans serif. That means it doesn't have the little dangler at the end of, of your t or the end of your letters.

It's just plain letters. Think about Helvetica or Arial. That's sans serif font. But if you have print on a page, actually physically on a page then serif fonts are easier on the eyes. I have no, like, I don't know if this is even all the way true, this is just from like way back when, when I was learning about, about layouts and stuff like that.

It was, you know, the rule across the board was sans on web, serif on print. And that was just like a thing that everybody knew. But until everybody knew that, You know, Times New Roman was the font online, so I think Dark Mode is in the same fit, and I'm like, I'm totally punting on this because I, I'm not a dark mode expert, but the phenomenon of there's a right way, there's a wrong way.

Everybody knows the right way. It just takes some time to transition from one way to the other. I think. I think that's, that's mostly where we're at. Dark mode wise. When did you run into Dark Mode the first time? Do you remember your first dark mode? 

[00:15:31] Madi: I do. It was when we were redesigning the Tulip website, we needed to have, Dark versions of the, the pages a nd light versions. It's not something I opt into. I like, feel like I can't see true or not, it just feels like I can't see in dark. 

[00:15:48] Russ: I had a, I had a first interaction with it that was pretty minor in passing, and then I had a second interaction that was much more stark and I think a lot of other people shared this, this experience.

So the first interaction was, this is not the shared one I think was a little more uncommon. So there was this text editor, Notepad ++, and I saw somebody else using it and they had set up a completely different interface and I was like, I didn't know enough to realize that all they'd done was change their setting.

So I didn't even realize they were in the same application that I was in. And they just applied a theme to their editor. Text editor. Yeah. So then like, Oh, everybody I knew that was a developer, they all had some dark variation of the theme and all of the social scientists such as myself, all had light mode.

And I'm like, Well, what, what do they know that I don't know? I need to find the secret. 

[00:16:35] Madi: The Secret Club. 

[00:16:36] Russ: Yes. Yeah. So that was the first time, which made me feel like a failure for not knowing what was going on. And then the second time was way, way, way after that was Slack versus Discord. And people would would ask like, Oh, you're, you're on Discord.

What's, What's Discord? I'm like, Well, think about Slack. But dark mode , like I, the very first thing I used over and over again for distinguishing, you know, Slack versus discord was, well, you know, it's, it's dark mode. Which I feel like that would drive me bananas if I worked for either of those companies to know that people were out there distinguishing it that way.

[00:17:12] Madi: Well, I think Slack would probably like the comparison, just like bring Slack up as much as possible, and I think they'd appreciate it. Bring it up as the reference for messaging apps? Yeah. Like the more that they like are, you know, referenced to define a category of tool, like a messaging app against other messaging systems.

I feel like that's a win for Slack. Just don't mention teams, don't say that Discord is the dark mode of teams that that would offend. 

[00:17:36] Russ: Am I allowed to share it a completely based on nothing vision of the future of what that's gonna look like with teams? It's teams related.

[00:17:43] Madi: I think so, yeah.

[00:17:44] Russ: Can I speculate? And also sort of trash three companies at the same time. teams is gonna win out. Like IT directors, they wanna bundle, so they're gonna buy office and they're gonna get teams and they're gonna say, Zoom's done, cuz it can't be bundled And Slack is done cuz it has to be deployed separately and discord.

What even is that? My kids use that for chatting about video games. That's how it's gonna shake out. I'll bet. I'll bet you $50 we can, We can document this bet in the show notes if you wanna take My bet. 

[00:18:12] Madi: What does winning mean? 

[00:18:14] Russ: Okay. You're right. It's a very poorly framed bet. Maybe I should rethink this.

[00:18:19] Madi: I just wanna be able to collect 50 if I'm gonna put some money down, I don't leave checks on the floor, you know? 

[00:18:26] Russ: Okay, so action items for today. Revisit the bet and put some terms in place. The reason dark mode came up was cuz it was listed on community, uh, community.tulip.Co. Speaking of people on the internet talking to each other.

That's frothy. There's a lot of conversation on there about Tulip stuff. There's a good amount of conversation about Manufacturing stuff. It is a fast way to get in touch with people who work at Tulip on the engineering team and the product team. Basically, the product team is watching all the time and listening and taking in inputs and feedback and putting it into the sausage making machine to make the better Tulip that never, never stops getting better. And so the other thing I wanted to bring up from community besides dark mode was looping. So we were talking about low code and no code in the quiz show. And I have this idea in my mind about what Tulip does for people and it puts code, One of the things it does is put coding concepts in front of people that don't have to then learn syntax and they don't really have to learn to code anything, but they're still led to things that are inherited from coding best practices. So I thought it was really interesting that we had a ton of back and forth and comments on this idea of looping in Tulip. And can you build something that loops through a series of steps or through a, a series of lines in a table?

do you use the Looper as a substitute for like a batch upload process? Can you use the looper as one off, can you loop forever? It didn't come up on community, but it came up in my mind that if you create an infinite looper in Tulip that it's possible we would open an interdimensional portal.

[00:19:58] Madi: Love that.

[00:19:59] Russ: Which could be a liability for both our, our company and the universe. Do you mind checking with engineering on that?

[00:20:06] Madi: Yeah, I will message them right now. In a dark mode slack window. 

Dear Engineering team, I have a metaphysical question for you today. 

[00:20:16] Russ: Can I wrap us up? Yeah. I had this wrap up in my mind even before we did the episode because I have nobody knows all the stuff and my feelings about not knowing how to do trivia, just gotta get past it, right? Like everybody needs somebody else to help them out. And we're all in this together on some level. And there are the gaps in, in other people's knowledge are as big as the ocean and bigger. But if we focus on the stuff that, like Madi knows how to do all this amazing marketing stuff and I know how to do things that I know how to.

To be revisited later. The, the idea is match. One of the things that's really fun about Manufacturing is getting diverse skill sets together to solve big, interesting problems in a systematic way. And that's only possible when you have the people that that can work together and the tools and approaches that facilitate that teamwork and that working together.

So better visibility into what's happening, and then the ability to communicate about what's happen. and then pick the problem apart. I mean, that's one of the things that kind of kept me in Manufacturing to see out what's, you know, what's beyond Industry 4.0. And I'm very optimistic, and I know a lot of people in Manufacturing are, they're, they're like optimistic curmudgeon where they are spending all their time and, and think the things that are messed up and they're trying to get to the things that are better.

But at the end of the day, they're like, I see the light about what this is, what's good about this and why I enjoy it and, and where we're gonna take things. And I think a lot of that comes down to the people. 

[00:21:45] Madi: Yeah, and we want people to feel like you do though, Russ, where you know they might be uncomfortable getting it wrong, but they still try to answer the question and learn what the textbook definition is.

[00:21:56] Russ: Cite your sources. See you next time?

[00:21:59] Madi: See you next time. 

[00:22:00] Outro: Behind the Ops is brought to you by Tulip. Connect the people, machines, devices, and systems used in your production and logistics processes with our frontline operations platform. Visit Tulip dot co to learn more. The show is produced by Jasmine Chan and edited by Tom Obar.

If you enjoyed listening, support the show by leaving us a quick rating or review. It really helps. If you have feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at behindtheops@tulip.co.