Problemattic Sean Tierney

This is a special interview with my father David Tierney on lessons in psychology, trial strategy, persuasion and communication from his 50+ year career as a civil litigation attorney.

For transcript, links and show notes visit Problemattic.

Today Josh Strebel former co-founder and CEO of Pagely joins the show to talk about lessons learned from building and selling a 7-figure business to one of the largest hosting providers in the world. We talk about early days of getting it off the ground, transitioning from a consulting service to a products company, hiring and firing, leader-leader culture, pricing lessons and more. Find transcript, links and show notes on the website here.

Methodologies like Lean Startup and Customer Development can help us short circuit the long journey of getting to a product that customers love. Aaron Eden tells us how.

Aaron Eden is a world-renown expert in innovation having helped a number of large companies make new and disruptive products as well as radical improvements to existing, marginally-successful products. Today he talks us through a scenario of how he would work with the winner from our last event on de-risking aspects of their proposed talk buddy system to combat the mental health crisis in universities. We cover frameworks like the value proposition designer, business model canvas, D4D Next Tool and skills like conducting effective customer empathy interviews, researching a landscape of alternative solutions to find your potential place within it and how to construct effective experiments. By the end of this interview you will have a good overview of the mindset necessary to approach large-scale, intimidating problems.

For links, show notes, transcripts and to join one of the project teams mentioned in the show, visit Problemattic.app.

The Internet of Things is making it possible to not only log and analyze data from myriad sensors after the fact but with pervasive connectivity via LoRaWan technology it enables real-time interventional measures as well. In this episode Tiago Marques of Green Metrics explains how they’re using their technology to mitigate forest fires, foods, drought and species extinction.

These are just four use cases of how this tech can be applied both for long-term diagnostic / academic purposes as well as a way to enable real-time interventional measures. You will come away from this episode with a better understanding of ways in which micro sensors and pervasive low-power connectivity can help us address these formidable challenges and ultimately respond effectively to climate change.

For links, show notes, transcripts and to join one of the project teams mentioned in the show, visit Problemattic.app.

Ted Williams was an incredible human being and I’m proud to have been his godson. He grew up in Kansas City during segregation and against adverse circumstances earned a law degree and then went on to be partner in a law firm and eventually run the Arizona Department of Health and Human Services under the term of six different governors. He launched and ran Arizona Behavioral Health Corporation and Arizona Behavioral Health Foundation, a tandem of entities that served the homeless and mentally ill in Arizona and continues his legacy today.

This interview doesn’t follow the typical format of the podcast. I recorded this with Ted back in 2011 for a pod I had at the time called “Can of Awesome” as a way to capture Ted’s incredible life story, his philosophy and his heart of service for helping the homeless and mentally ill. Ted’s life’s work is a reminder that even in the most adverse circumstances we have agency over ourself and can become whatever we put our mind to. I hereby dedicate our next Fixathon in Lisbon in memory of Ted Williams. RIP Ted you were my second Dad.

For links, show notes, transcripts and to join one of the project teams mentioned in the show, visit Problemattic.app.

Food and Communications inequity keeps low-income families down over generations. Learn how Creighton Community Foundation is using SMS to bridge the Digital Divide and level up their community.

Poor access to nutritious food and lack of internet connectivity are two anchors that keep many low-income families out of the game and without a chance to get ahead.  Most people in these communities don’t have computers in their household but they do have a cell phone. Jeff Boles of Creighton Community Foundation has created an SMS-based interface that allows them to interact with the 15,000 constituents in their district and gives them access to food box distribution, medical and community-building initiatives.

In this interview Jeff explains how they’ve built their proof of concept SMS-based communications platform and what they’ve learned from the experience. They’re looking to Problemattic to help port their app to a more polished, abstracted system to address key man risk and make it more resilient to changing requirements. Learn more via their project page.