Value-First Delivery - Feb 25, 2026

[00:00] **Introduction** Chris Carolan: Good afternoon, LinkedIn friends, Value First Nation. Welcome to another episode of Value First delivery here with Aaron Wiggers, uh, talking about natural value flow over control and handoffs and just all this other stuff that tends to get in the way. Uh, how are we doing today, Aaron? Erin Wiggers: Doing awesome. Super excited to, to talk about this as we were chatting earlier. My in a previous life, I was a scientist, and so, um, thinking about things in kind of a scientific way is always fun for me.

[00:52] **Natural Value Flow vs. Control** Chris Carolan: Yeah, and this, um, this is kind of the the principle, the commitment that started value first. Um, and I'll give some backstory there after hitting on uh, the the principle itself. Um, so we will enable natural value flow, not just manage handoffs. We understand that value emerges continuously. We will create seamless delivery experiences rather than enforcing rigid stage gates and transitions that interrupt natural progress and create friction. Chris Carolan: And when I was uh, when I started the conversation with Claude about that led to value first, it was from a place of, okay, silos suck. Like, whatever we'd been doing is not working, because the handoffs are often the worst moments of like customer experience. And so uh, from an AI native perspective, how would you build an organization uh, if you didn't know about marketing and sales and the whole industrial perspective, like start from scratch. Chris Carolan: And in inside of the first response what it was, do anything possible to not get in the way of the flow of value, right? And like now that now that we can be enabled, with just like asking, you know, AI, or it's always been asking humans to to to help do the next step. Like how did we get here to this place where we we develop so much complexity around the process where it it it creates just this these moments of friction that when you can step back and if you're not a part of that process, it's like, of course, like why are you doing that? You're just getting in the way of all these people who are interested in participating, and like you're not letting them. Chris Carolan: Literally, like how did, how did we get there? Erin Wiggers: For sure. I I wonder about this a lot, especially because it's so deflating when because I've always kind of sat in between the sales and service sides. And so I'm, I'm talking to people and and translating what they want into technical specs and then helping the team. So like I I've always kind of felt like it was my job to make that uh, a more seamless uh, kind of transition, because that's just something that has always bothered me. It's like if the team is super excited, you just closed a new deal, they're going to have their kickoff, the team, you know, gets into the meeting and then you're just like blindsided because you didn't know XYZ detail that was discussed kind of upstream from you, and then it's, you know, everybody's mad at everybody because, you know, who who drops the ball? And it's like, it's really not it's not so much that any one person dropped the ball, it's that we didn't set up systems to capture and persist that value, um, as you move downstream. Erin Wiggers: And so it feels very disconnected. It feels like, you know, I've heard clients say things like bring back my sales team. And it's like, the sales team is not going to be able to help you do this. Like I, I really hate, like they're great people, but um, and but I, but I get it. I get it, because you in, in the discovery process, a lot of times, you know, with these kind of longer procurement processes, you are getting input from the C suite and getting input from a lot of different people, and that's the value. Erin Wiggers: Like that is the true value that you're, that you're capturing. And so to not be able to then translate, like, uh, for the game of telephone to break that quickly is, is just so deflating. And so, um, so yeah, I've, I've kind of always seen it as my personal mission to um, cut, cut down on that. Um, but yeah, it's, it's really it's about building systems that almost like, um, I don't know why my mind went here, but like the old school like Aztec um, like waterways that they built like into the mountains so that it would like collect upstream and and trickle all the way down. Erin Wiggers: You know, that's really, that's what I think about when, when I think about like enabling that natural flow. It's like you've got to, you've got to work with the landscape that you're in. You've got to be able to capture it where it's kind of coming into the system, and you've got to be able to carry it forward in some meaningful way. Uh, and, and so, yeah, I think that's, that's, I don't know why that's the image that comes to my mind, but um, that's kind of how I picture what needs to happen um, versus what actually we've seen play out.

[09:08] **Analogy of Climbing the Mountain** Chris Carolan: Yeah, and where my mind went, like based on that analogy, what often happens is like because usually the, there's a great pain related to whatever the new thing is, and people have banded together to like, like, yeah, let's, let's do this, right? So imagine like bringing them all up the mountain, which was hard. Erin Wiggers: Right. Chris Carolan: Right? And then getting up there, and people got to get back down the mountain, but like we're not letting them go. Like somehow going down is harder than it would, than it was to go up. And as we think about all these struggles that we hear about, like 50% adoption rates and like the, in my opinion the problem with SaaS is like they don't, they're not going back up the mountain like the next time, right? So now it's just one person up there, and they've got to try and figure out how to how to deliver value without the help. Chris Carolan: And then it's just this like, because they, because they can't, because they don't have the people there, right? So I'm going to hit these bullets. You've already hit on some of them. Like if we're actually trying to enable value flow instead of controlling it, that means we're eliminating, you know, unnecessary steps of approvals and gates that slow down the value delivery, rather than maintaining control through complex processes. Chris Carolan: We're going to share information openly rather than restricting it, to maintain artificial competitive advantage. We're going to create direct connections between teams based on value creation needs, rather than forcing communication through formal channels. We could design flexible pathways that adapt to how work naturally wants to flow, rather than imposing standardized processes. Chris Carolan: And we're going to remove artificial boundaries between provider and customer organizations, rather than maintaining separation for project management convenience. I imagine you have some thoughts on that last one, but any of those, like what stands out to you? Erin Wiggers: Yeah, all of them. Um, I think what, what it really boils down to for me, um, is is trust. Um, I've I've always worked in, in like the kind of documentation that I do, in uh, the solutions that I pitch, uh, I think in order to build a foundation of trust, you really need to demonstrate like I listen to you, I understand your problem. I know how to solve it. Erin Wiggers: Here are the exact steps. Um, and people buy into that. And so when there's any kind of friction down the road, you're really just chipping away at trust. And when you put up those artificial boundaries or um, you know, have hoops to jump through to to get anything going. again, you're just chipping away at that, at that trust. Erin Wiggers: And once that's gone, you know, it's kind of like you said, when you're climbing the mountain top, it's like that's your like peak amount of trust that you have, when they say, okay, I'm going to pay you to do this thing for me. Um, that's like the ultimate uh, demonstration of trust, and you really can only go down from there. And, and so the more you can do along the way to kind of facilitate trust the way you would with anyone else, you know, the way you would with, you know, it's like if I had a full on conversation with you about my my dogs or something, and then two, two days later you forgot, you thought I was a cat person. Erin Wiggers: Like the the discontinuity of that experience is what really kind of like jars you out of that um, you know, kind of trust mindset. And then once you're not there, things just become combative. Like it's, it's an unfortunate like human human nature kind of thing where it's like if I don't trust you, I'm now I'm micromanaging you. Erin Wiggers: Now I'm, now I want to be involved in decisions that I don't I don't really have, like it's a struggle for control rather than this kind of like cyclical flow of, you know, what is your need? How do I meet it? Here's the result. And then kind of, you know, keep going. Um, so yeah, I think that was kind of what came, what was top of mind as we were going through that. Erin Wiggers: I was just like, yeah, if if I was having conversations with my friends and and couldn't remember you know, what we talked about from one moment to the next, um, chances are they're not going to see us as very close friends. Um, so uh, yeah, and then you know, they're trusting you with a lot. These projects are a lot. Um, it's a huge undertaking throughout the entire organization, and we there has to be that like mutual, I got you kind of vibe.

[15:50] **Trust** Chris Carolan: Yeah, and this has been, I'm glad you brought, brought that up, because two things come to mind. It's like this is the reason that I changed the name of the fifth stage of the value path from customer to value creator, right? Because most teams, like one of the places we go terribly wrong is like, oh, you signed the contract, you're a customer. Chris Carolan: Now like trust doesn't matter because you're signed up, your company paid for it. So I'm not going to go through this trust building activity like, here's the checklist you got to go do, do it, right? And that doesn't usually work out. So understanding that people come into that point of the process, if you can understand that they need to create value, now you it it keeps you from assuming that trust has been built in any capacity and that there is a relationship to be built, whether with them directly, or making sure the internal champion who brought you in knows that that needs to be built and we're not making assumptions, right? Chris Carolan: And um, on the other side of this, uh, this is why this is the most insidious trap, managed services trap. It is so hard to start from a place of trust when you look at these managed services contracts, like that are built. I understand where they're coming from, but they are built from a place of that you cannot count on trust, like anywhere. Chris Carolan: So all these decisions get baked in that are all cover your ass, which inherently puts everybody in a place of distrust, right? So this is why it's so hard and you can look at these contracts and look at the system, and we keep building on these systems and the only way it's so hard to build trust into them, and not just continue to build gates and supervision and enforcement and all these things that we just want to work, mean meanwhile, like they just, they just climbed the mountain with you. Chris Carolan: Like they want to get back down too. Like can we not just come to an agreement that nobody's going to push each other down the mountain at the expense of other people, right? And when you can get there with, with clients and I, I think I've mentioned this before, at least emergence scopes, right? Like creating the space to embrace, like, hey, by the way, this creates a lot of trust, when you just say it. Chris Carolan: Like we don't know what's going to happen in three months. Can we just create a relationship that's prepared for that? Like that we don't know what's going to happen. So let's embrace what might happen. Right? And that's where you start to be able to make decisions from a place of if if some new value shows up, like somebody who wasn't participating is now participating, and they're engaged in a way that we didn't expect them to be, can we enable them to be like, yeah, go do your thing. Chris Carolan: Like we were going to implement that and that's a part of the scope. But if you want to do, if you want to, especially now, if you want to go use AI and just knock that out, like we can put something else in the scope. We we don't have to do that. We don't have to spend hours or effort on that, right? Especially when you get to these teams and they've already built solutions, like usually in the form of like magnificent spreadsheets, Right. so they know exactly what the scope is of that thing, we're now in this discovery process of trying to refigure everything out and people have already figured out. Chris Carolan: And those are, those are the people that like they didn't come with you. I'm, I apparently I'm all in on this mountain analogy. they didn't come with you, but they see that you're up there, and they've already built out their whole thing. And if you think you're going to come back down and say like, oh, here's the new thing. We're going to do this. If you think that's going to go over well, like it doesn't, Right, right? Like that's where so much of this getting um, like share information openly, right? Chris Carolan: There's transparency that can created can be created by self-service, you know, portals, but just being open in terms of like you have to remove the guard of like, oh, this is me, this is what I'm getting paid for. This is my expertise, it's on the contract that I'm spending these hours on this thing, right? There's so much to to unravel there. Erin Wiggers: For sure. Erin Wiggers: Yeah, and I think I I think I misspoke earlier when I said, you know, you get to the mountain top and and there's nowhere to go but down as far as trust. But I I think the more I think about it, it's actually that you can, like you should be able to go up further from there, if that makes sense. Like if you're doing your job and delivering on the, the value that was promised, then it you do continue to go up and and build that trust and bring more people with you. Erin Wiggers: I think that's kind of my, my favorite leading indicator of success in a project when someone who wasn't involved in the sales process comes to me with, with an idea of just like, hey, all this other stuff you've been building, like that works, that works great. I also have this other thing that maybe we could, we could solve for. And like these are your boots on the ground in the system every day, people. Erin Wiggers: They are going to have a ton of value to offer um to to what you're doing. And so I I think in, in kind of locking yourself into one understanding of the project, you do a disservice to the value that you bring along the way. Um, because then you kind of have to shut it down and say like, oh we'll, we'll put that on the road map or like we can't, we can't prioritize that because it's not in this bank of hours. Erin Wiggers: And it's like, yes, correct, but the outcome that we're trying to achieve. And I think we've talked about this in, in previous episodes. Like the the outcome that we're trying to achieve is better served by this other thing that we just found out about. Uh, and, and you need to be agile enough to to work that in, to to make it happen one way or another. Um, and so having more of like a dynamic understanding of where the value is coming from and that it, you know, it it it may not be one to one with what you thought in the scoping process. Erin Wiggers: And that doesn't necessarily mean that the scoping process failed. It it means that you you didn't have kind of all the pieces. Um, and, and so I think kind of reframing it in that way and and being able, you know, one of the things that I like to do is kind of give everything a score of like time, effort, expertise, like what is what's going to go into it and what is the expected ROI. Um, because even if I'm making those numbers up in my head, um, it's still a good way to kind of get thoughts on paper and figure out like strategically is this a better fit and and what does that mean for the next, you know, week sprint, two week sprint. Erin Wiggers: Um, and that's kind of the other thing that I I like to think of things as like sprint based. Um, there's a lot of people who are not a fan of of agile frameworks for a lot of reasons and I don't, None of them good. I don't just, I don't dispute anything. Uh, I just, I think the terminology is helpful to me. Um, in, in understanding like here, here's what, you know, here's the next big kind of value that we're, that we're shooting for, and and breaking it down into, you know, the the sprints helps me kind of figure out, okay, when can we prioritize these things? Erin Wiggers: Um, how quickly can we get this in the pipeline? Um, and just, yeah, it it gives me a framework to kind of be a little more flexible with um, the ongoing nature of the work.

[29:15] **Communicating value back** Chris Carolan: Yeah, and just to be able to communicate it back, right? Like because so much of it's at this point with AI just sitting there waiting to be activated, right? Sometimes the person that like they have all the context that in their head, but they haven't been a part of the process. And if you say something like, oh, yeah, that's not that's not a scope. Chris Carolan: I mean, we can consider it. We'll put it on this list, we'll do this, we'll do that. That's like shut. You just shut down. There was value like punching you in the face, right? And they might not have any knowledge, technical knowledge of the project or how to get it done. But if you can say, okay, here's and I'm not going to belittle it to prompts, but here's some things that you can do if you're open to using AI, just share your expertise. Chris Carolan: And now all of a sudden this thing that was going to take a ton of effort over here from people that didn't really have the true expertise to get that. So that person was going to be coming into the conversation at some point. And they show up and with the ideas, and we're not agile enough to say, okay, is this a should this be a priority? Chris Carolan: This brand new resource just showed up that we were not planning on. And if we don't find a way to let this, I'm not, I don't I'm not scripting this, but if we don't find a way to let this value flow in, like we're creating more work for no reason, and we are disenfranchising the person who was just like willing to be involved. Right? Right. And those kinds of resource handouts. Like man, that those they can make or bake, they can make or break projects. Chris Carolan: And it's the difference between like three months and 12 months sometimes, right? Because not only can you not receive it, like it went, the flow went back the other way, and now you got to manufacture ways to re like contain it and reuse it by bringing that person back to, you know, back to the conversation. And uh, there's just so much of our process in these delivery mechanisms that are designed to plan for that part, like, like help us say it's out of scope, and then have a backlog and a like a whatever to make sure it gets prioritized. Chris Carolan: And like heaven forbid you got to get IT involved, then it's guaranteed to be like six months out, right? And then by then the world's changed, like motivation's gone, people have changed. You're like, oh yeah, like let's do another let's discover this other thing that got put on the backlog six months ago. Right. And it just this vicious process, right? Where if we like that's why these commitments, like if you can see them at face value and you're at that decision point, this is whether it's on the agency side, but definitely on the expectation side of the customers. Chris Carolan: Like do not be okay with out of scope like responses without at least a conversation of like, hey man, this is a resource. There is value happening right here. What are we doing to enable it? Right? And if you can come at it from the perspective of, let's enable it, like instead of control it, manage it, like put it into this process that it clearly wasn't prepared for, right? Chris Carolan: That can help. Like just start the conversation, because a lot of times when everybody's in CIA mode, there the the default is out of scope.. But when you can clearly define, oh, this chunk of work can now move over here. They've agreed. There's responsibility there. Now it enables other stuff to happen over here and everybody starts using their natural expertise to solve things. Man, just there's so many so many additional benefits that relate to like team buying, team alignment, culture change, like all that stuff just starts to be enabled at a level that you know, you don't usually see. Erin Wiggers: Right, right. Erin Wiggers: And I think, yeah, it's so much of it is that it's it's a it's a human nature kind of issue where it's like people want to feel heard and included and they like if they don't feel part of a solution, they're not as bought into it. And so I think that's been kind of a, a big aha moment for me just in, in dealing with um so many of these different types of projects that it that's really like it really just boils down to these very human like I need to trust you. I need to feel like you're I feel I need to feel like we're rowing in the same direction. Erin Wiggers: Like I need to feel like we are aligned in in the outcome and not in the method. Um, because clients don't care about the method. Like they didn't come to you for a method. They came to you for an outcome. And um, yeah, and so being able to manage the very human side of things where you know, because at the end of the day, and maybe, maybe I'm overly sensitive to this, but when everyone's in CIA mode, like you can feel it. Erin Wiggers: Like those meetings are different and it's it's not collaborative, like combative is probably a little extreme, but like it there's just, it feels like the whole vibe is just nothing but friction where and and that's not, that's not a telltale sign of people who are rowing in the same direction. It's like more like kind of playing tug of war. Um, and yeah, that's just not, that's not conducive to anything. Erin Wiggers: Like that's not helping anything. And, you know, one of the things that I've learned in having a lot of these conversations is like if you immediately say, oh, that's that a scope and shut it down, that is one way to deal with the problem, but now, you know, you're, you're setting yourself up for for more of these conversations. Whereas if you, if you kind of hear them out and understand, you know, what the actual outcome we're trying to achieve here. Erin Wiggers: So just kind of recentering on the outcome and hearing them out, like a lot of times I have found that like, oh that's actually not that big of a deal. That's not something that is going to take me a long time. It's not something. Uh, and sometimes it's like the more they talk about it and say it out loud, they realize, oh well we're also, we're, we're kind of already doing that over here. And so yeah, it's like you don't want to just everything is worth a conversation. Erin Wiggers: Like it's not worth shutting it down and saying out of scope and hiding behind contracts. Um, if that's going to make the road ahead harder. Like it's worth it in the moment to have the conversation and and just and treat it like a conversation and not a like battleground where, you know, there are winners and losers. Um, because if you're truly aligned on the outcome, like we win together or we lose together. Um, Right. So yeah, that's the reality of the day to day anyways. Chris Carolan: And it's like just everything that we build in order to prevent that during the meeting scenario, somebody stand offish and then you know they're going to gleave the meeting and start effectively destroying the process, not intending to, but starting to share how they feel about the situation. This is where I understand how SaaS like can miss this, but when you're in an office, like in manufacturing and I'm trying to, you know, train on HubSpot and there's a lack of engagement, it doesn't take long after the training session to hear feedback indirectly from people sharing about how they felt, right? Chris Carolan: So are you designing a process that creates the space to have those challenging conversations up front and in like there's nuance to all of this, of course, but creating the space and bringing people into the process versus trying to separate because they're going to slow things down or whatever the reason we, we tell ourselves or we don't know how to like they're going to distract the process and then we're going to focus on their thing and not the main mission, like all of this is an effort to say like that everybody is a value center. Chris Carolan: And when you can focus on like I love that scenario when people can share it in their way, the way that they know it, but it's actually just like the thing that we're already doing, which is happening all over the place right now between HubSpot and AI and data and context, like it's like, yeah, we're doing that. You just see it as the HubSpot project, not the AI project. Right. And if we step back, right, and that's where I'm continue to be reminded of like the outcome of a unified customer view, because I think the challenge of saying, okay, great, we're we're focused on outcomes. Chris Carolan: It's either super high level of, hey, we need revenue growth. Right. Right? Or to make it tangible for everybody, it's like we need to send an email that has this level of leads that come back because I'm measured on leads, and that's the outcome I want as a marketer. Well, that outcome's going to be different from sales and you start to create, okay, let's have all these different outcome conversations that we can like natural misalignment happens. When all of those situations where I think that we can be innovative with the outcomes and people are starting to respond to is a unified customer view, these unified view scenarios where visibility and transparency over what's happening naturally enables this these kinds of flow and naturally disables the possibility of certain things getting in the way because somebody doesn't know it or doesn't trust the situation because it's right there in front of everybody all the time. Chris Carolan: Like that is a is a it feels like there's an art related to finding outcomes like that. Because of something you said about people wanting to be seen and and heard, every business there is a there's an opportunity for standardization because every business serves customers and all those customers want to be seen, they want to be heard, they want to be understood and they want their expectations met. No matter the industry, no matter what you're selling, like that human on the other side wants that. Your humans on the inside want the same thing and everybody needs visibility to understand that that is actually like happening. Chris Carolan: Right? So even today as I was, I was just on a, you know, a new client call and it's like can we just change from everybody wanting to reporting to everybody wanting visibility? Because that's usually why we want the reporting to understand what's going on, right? And that is a mechanism as I try to put all these pieces together in the moment, like asking for reporting versus asking for a unified customer view, reporting has to go through all these like build channels to make sure everything's talking to each other when and I love doing this live. Chris Carolan: Like you have pre-built in the in terms of HubSpot, pre-built CRM cards that when you just drag them in, the data is already in the system. You drag them in, there's a customer lifetime value, here's a health score, here's like the last email. It's like, bam. Like there's your report. We're calling it a unified view, but that's the that's exactly what you asked for, what you're reporting on. Right? And that's where it's like getting teams aligned to understand like there's usually almost always value sitting around, like in the data, in how we do things. Chris Carolan: We just have created these like hand off designs where it's like, oh yeah, I didn't want to bring that in because, you know, it's not a sales contact. sales doesn't need it, right? Meanwhile, sales is asking for all of that context, right? So finding these moments of I just wanted to be this easy. Like find the value and let like figure out a way to let it go. Like, I don't know. Erin Wiggers: It sounds so like yeah, much easier said than done, for sure, because people are complex and tech stacks are complex and you know, putting those two things together is infinitely more complex. So it's like there's a lot of, there's a lot of moving pieces. And, you know, I think you know, your point earlier about there's there's like an art to defining these outcomes. Erin Wiggers: Like I think that's so true and like maybe we should do like a whole episode deep dive on like how to come up with something that is a measurable outcome that is not constricting value. Um, so like an example would be not just like the outcome is not automate your process. It's automate 80% of manual input to this process. So now I can start there's probably 50% that's like not low hanging fruit, but like you have a high degree of confidence that this is going to move the needle in some way or another. Erin Wiggers: Implement that 50%. Now let's go talk to people. Let's figure out what, what ideas did that first 50 per 50% kind of spur uh, and then build the next 20%. And then do do the whole thing again where, you know, you're not saying I have mapped out 80% of, of what we're going to do. It's like we're going to find out along the way what 80% needs to get automated. Um, and, and yeah, I think being able to to put things in those terms is not intuitive at all. Erin Wiggers: Um, because especially like we want things to be either super broad or super specific and it's kind of this like middle ground where like there it it is specific enough. Um, but it but it leaves room for uh, learning something new. Um, and actually that kind of that really sums up my approach to to most things. Um, and I've I've kind of always been like this. Erin Wiggers: It's like I I just don't assume that I know everything. I I kind of assume I don't know most things. And so, um, at any given time, I'm I'm trying to plan for the 10 different possible outcome, like, you know, the the quantum state of the future. Um, and, and really just trying to get like a probability of like what's more likely to to be helpful, what's more likely uh, to to move the needle. Erin Wiggers: And so again, like I I do not feel like this is an an intuitive way of thinking, but it is like a a muscle that you can train where you can, you know, it starts with kind of recognizing like is this outcome too broad or too specific? Um, and then kind of working backwards from there and and figuring out, you know, what what's going to enable that value flow. Erin Wiggers: Like what could I possibly learn in the future that's going to make something more or less valuable and and just kind of like hedge your bets until, you know, the the answer becomes more clear because more value has come into the system or more information. Um, yeah, it's it's it's more about being willing to say, hey, we didn't know that before, but that changes things. Erin Wiggers: And here's how. Um, and not being afraid of that and not letting that feel like failure um, of some like upstream process. It's like really if you're doing things right, these kinds of things are going to come up. And, and so being being of a different mindset about that, I think is, is really important to make the whole system work.

[46:36] **Adapting to emerging needs** Chris Carolan: Yes, and that is man, that's a perfect segue. Uh, that's what we're going to be talking about next week. Um, commitment number three is we will adapt continuously to emerging needs rather than enforcing rigid plans. Like I swear we don't script this y'all. Like it it really is just that like it's a natural conversation that Yeah, yeah, so. Chris Carolan: And, and this is like how simple it could be. Like there's so many pillars in all these commitments, because they're just nuanced to all of it, right? Like it's hard to adapt continuously if you're trying to control everything, right? Uh, it's hard to enable natural value flow if you're prioritizing requirements over outcomes, right? Like so all of this stuff ties together. Um, and that's what we're going to be diving into uh, next week. Chris Carolan: Uh, this has been a fun conversation, as always. And we hope it was valuable for you uh, who are watching. Um, and until next week, thanks so much, Erin. Erin Wiggers: Yeah, thank you.