If your career was a product, what would the current release notes say? Just as product managers launch a minimum viable product (MVP) and enhance it based on customer feedback, Daniel Lemire unknowingly began building his career this way starting in high school.

This week in episode 323 you’ll hear about Daniel’s early aspirations to be a pilot in the Air Force and the phone call that forced him to change directions. It was a reliance on his faith, his aptitude for computers, and an openness to feedback from friends and teachers that prompted Daniel to study management information systems in college. Follow along as we explore the timeline over which Daniel decided to become an independent consultant, gained technical expertise and experience through building systems to deliver value, and ultimately decided to pursue an advanced degree. With each decision along the way, Daniel chose to take a step forward very much like a product release adds features and enhancements.

If you thought of where you are now as a MVP, where could you go from here?

Original Recording Date: 03-20-2025

Topics – Meet Daniel Lemire, An Early Deviation from the Plan, Self-Awareness and the Gift of Explanations, A Tinkering Instinct and the Cycle of Confidence, Consulting and a Return to the Familiar, The System Builder, Thoughts on Product Management, Getting an Advanced Degree

2:31 – Meet Daniel Lemire

• Daniel Lemire is an AI Consultant working for ServiceNow. He gets to speak with senior leaders about the use of artificial intelligence in their organization specific to the ServiceNow platform. It’s a pretty popular topic of conversation these days.
  • Daniel enjoys driving influence and helping organizations create value, and throughout the course of his career, Daniel has learned to calibrate the use of technology against the creation of value.

3:39 – An Early Deviation from the Plan

• How did Daniel get into technology in the first place?
  • Daniel’s middle school had a computer lab, and he and several others were part of a computer club. In addition to this, Daniel was fortunate to have a computer at home in the early 1990s and play games on it and discuss computers with friends.
  • Going into high school, Daniel wanted to be a pilot. He wanted to attend the Air Force Academy and eventually become an officer. Daniel was working to do everything he could to hit that goal.
    • Daniel tells the story of a phone call from an Air Force recruiter during his sophomore year of high school. During the course of that phone call, Daniel learned he was disqualified from serving in the Air Force because of his asthma.
  • “So immediately I found myself in this position of…if it’s not the Air Force, what are my plans? …Am I just going to go find a school to become a pilot and continue down that path with a different means, or am I going to do something completely different? …Honestly, I kind of threw up my hands, and I said a prayer. I said, ‘God, this is what I wanted to do, and this is not how I thought this was going to go. What should I do?’ And, over the next few weeks, the computer thing became increasingly an area of focus.” – Daniel Lemire
  • Conversations with friends and some teachers helped Daniel realize he had some talent when it came to computers. They encouraged him to spend time in that area.
    • From then on, Daniel would find ways to do different things with a computer because it was something he enjoyed.
    • “Any time you can take something you enjoy and turn that into value is really great.” – Daniel Lemire
  • As a senior in high school, Daniel took a computer maintenance course and learned all about computer hardware.
    • Taking this class provided things to Daniel that he did not know he needed.
    • Daniel was good at using Microsoft Office software and really enjoyed programming after taking a course on it.
    • Daniel also took a typing course from a typewriting teacher. Students took it as if they were using a typewriter. Making 3 errors meant you failed the typing exercise. Daniel says he was not great at not making mistakes back then but understands he would not type at the speed he does now without the experience of taking this course.
  • High school courses set Daniel up nicely to choose a computer-related course of study in college – Management Information Systems (MIS) or Computer Science.
    • When taking tours of potential colleges, Daniel would visit the computer lab on campus and make sure he visited both computer science and business information systems personnel.
    • Since math was not Daniel’s primary interest, the business side of computing was better suited for Daniel.
  • Daniel ended up at the University of North Texas (or UNT). Daniel says one of the biggest benefits of their program was learning both new and older technologies. When he entered UNT in 1999 it was one of only a few colleges that allowed students to work on a mainframe.

8:59 – Self-Awareness and the Gift of Explanations

• Nick likes the way Daniel handled the setback related to being a pilot and putting his effort into an alternate path. Most people would have had a lot more trouble.
• Daniel says he didn’t have enough life experience to dissuade himself from taking the next right action.
• Nick points out Daniel had enough information to select a course of study that fit with his strengths and his interests in the best way.
  • Daniel says self-awareness is not something we talk about enough.
  • “I’m very much a striver. I will do things that are very hard for myself just because I want to accomplish something really big, and there is absolutely a time for taking on those big things. But you also have to do it from the context of…what am I good at, and what can I get started with right here where I am?” – Daniel Lemire
  • Daniel says it wasn’t just his interest in computing that drove him to it. It also had to do with other people’s observations of his interest in it. As a result of both, he was open to pursuing computing in his course of study instead of continuing to search.
  • In high school, students were given some recommendations for future courses of study – something in thr arts, something in science / math / engineering, or some sort of specialization in a different area.
    • Daniel says he was ok at math but really enjoyed physics because it was very conceptual. He would work on math problems and make simple mistakes.
    • “…so being able to capitalize on the part that I was good at in getting into that computing career I think was the other piece of it – knowing that I was good at it and being convinced in the shortest time possible that that was the path for me by being open.” – Daniel Lemire
• Did someone encourage Daniel to look at both the computer science and management information systems options when he was visiting colleges, or did he naturally investigate both on his own?
  • Daniel listened to the feedback he was getting from high school teachers, and he specifically mentions his typing teacher.
  • Daniel took the typing course as a sophomore in high school, and that teacher recognized his aptitude with computers. Daniel would help her from time to time and would later become her teacher’s aide.
    • In a number of their conversations, the typing teacher would ask about Daniel’s future career plans.
    • Daniel says it was not a coincidence that he had this teacher in his life at the same time the Air Force said no to him.
• John says around this same time many people might have said they were good with computers, but they likely meant they were good at playing computer games. This is very different than using computers to solve problems and seeing them as systems because you’ve taken the time to understand the internal mechanics of the system.
  • Daniel says having access to computer technology at home what critical in all of this.
  • Daniel tells the story of trying to tweak configuration files on his computer to get a game to run and breaking everything. Daniel’s mother had a friend from church who was able to come over and fix the computer problem.
  • “He could have showed up and been like, ‘Daniel, what an idiot. I can’t believe you would do something like this.’ He could have fixed it and just walked away, but he took the time to sit me down and say, ‘ok, I see what you did here. Now let me explain it to you so that you can understand it.’ It was that taking of the time that really made a difference, and I haven’t forgotten that because we get so tied up in ourselves that we forget what it is to give that kind of a gift to somebody else. That’s an invaluable opportunity, and I learned so much through that and was able to convert that into a win time and again because somebody invested those few minutes in me by explaining something I just didn’t understand.” – Daniel Lemire

16:28 – A Tinkering Instinct and the Cycle of Confidence

• John says listeners recognize the tinkering instinct, and the experimentation we participate in through it ends up benefitting us. Losing some of the fear of doing irreparable harm to a system allows us to learn even more.
  • Daniel feels this played a big role in his story and has told people he is addicted to the “undo” button.
  • “The further up in the career you get the more likely it is you’ll get yourself in trouble by making a bad decision, but if you’re able to identify those areas where you make mistakes less often or you can set things up in a way that you can make those mistakes without them being harmful…I really think that is a key to success.” – Daniel Lemire
  • Daniel stresses the importance of opportunities for iteration. How often do we put ourselves in situations where we don’t have to get something right the first time so we can take advantage of an opportunity for growth and learning (i.e. a new skill, a new system, etc.)?
    • “Any time you can setup a scenario where you don’t have to get it right the first time, but you can benefit from it if you do is so essential to the journey…. You can really get ahead when things are going well but avoid yourself getting into an unrecoverable situation from there on out.” – Daniel Lemire
    • Daniel mentions the Agile methodology and cites a quote by Jeff Bezos about making decisions that are easily changeable if they start you in the wrong direction.
    • “I don’t need to know that this is the right answer right now. I just need to know enough to make the next step. That’s where I was in the early part of that career…. That showed up again and again as I continued my education…. It really became critical when I got out of college.” – Daniel Lemire
• Going into college, Daniel didn’t know the world was about to have an internet bubble burst.
  • He was very excited about working for EDS (a premier IT company many people wanted to work for) and felt he was well-prepared to do that.
• Daniel talks about taking an internet computing course in which students had to build a business plan for an internet-based company and then execute on it. There was a competition as part of the final exam involving a mock proposal. Daniel was on one of the 3 teams which had to deliver a presentation at the offices of Sabre. He learned 3 things from that experience:
  • One doesn’t need to know everything to do something impactful or interesting. It’s about knowing enough to build a business plan and a prototype you can showcase for feedback.
  • Near the beginning of Daniel’s presentation at Sabre, the computer crashed. He had printed out the speaker slides and notes and knew what points to hit to finish the rest of the presentation.
    • The very first time Daniel needed to present in front of a group, his hands were shaking. It took many presentations in front of people to get over it. Doing the presentation at that time was a huge deal for Daniel because he was not comfortable as a presenter. Having those notes eased his anxiety.
    • We should not underestimate the value of preparation when going into an intimidating situation because it can boost our confidence.
    • “It’s funny how your current experiences can crystalize that looking back on those moments. And I can absolutely tell you from a career perspective, what I didn’t appreciate at the time was how much a difference that confidence made in my success…. I totally understand that now because I had to go through the entire cycle of you’re confident, you’re not confident. How do I get that back to do and tackle the next big challenge?” – Daniel Lemire

23:12 – Consulting and a Return to the Familiar

• John points out Daniel’s willingness to attack something he was not comfortable with. We’ve previously seen a pattern John refers to as Smart Kid Syndrome which hinders growth when people do not invest in weak areas so they can be perceived as being good / highly skilled at things (i.e. the opposite of a growth mentality). In Daniel’s case, he found the things that made him feel comfortable in uncomfortable situations and went back to them.
  • Not long after the presentation at Sabre, Daniel obtained his degree but could not enter the workforce. There were no job openings, and it was a time of many layoffs. Daniel had no choice but to fall back on some of the things he knew to make himself successful.
  • Daniel had proposed to his wife before that last year of college, and they were married the summer after graduation. His wife got a job as a graphic designer to provide planned family income.
  • “I fell back on what I knew, which quite candidly, was what I learned in that ecommerce course.” – Daniel Lemire
  • Before most people really knew what building a web presence for businesses would mean long-term, Daniel knew it was something he could do. He began a journey as an independent consultant. It was something he knew how to do and a place he could create value without a full-time job working for a specific company.
    • “I kept looking for that opportunity to work for somebody else, but it never materialized. And I made the best of the situation I was in…. I have a marketable skill. I just have to find somebody that wants to pay me to build a website.” – Daniel Lemire, on going into consulting after college
    • Small jobs here and there helped Daniel improve as a consultant.
  • Daniel tells the story of moving back home for the summer before his last semester of college. At his father’s medical clinic, the systems manager suddenly quit.
    • This was 2002, and the clinic adopted an electronic medical record system. It was critical that the systems stayed running to handle the patient load.
    • Daniel’s father asked him to fill in until they could find someone to take the role of systems manager full-time.
    • Daniel understood what his father’s business did at a high level, and he chose to take the opportunity, knowing he would learn something from the situation, even if he was only needed for a short time.
    • “I wound up spending nearly the entire summer there, and while I was there, we kept finding things that I could help out with. I could build a database for tracking the number of patients they were caring for. I built a payroll management database where they could keep track of time off and holidays…. I built a whole bunch of systems, actually. It was well more than just doing the networking and the PCs. And of course, there were things that I was out of my depth at. But you make those mistakes, and you learn. And in an operational environment having the wherewithal to just fight through and not give up on the problem and stay late until you get it working was really the key to the success in doing that…. I carried that into the consulting business…. That had convinced me…that I do know enough about this and that I can do the things that need to be done. Now, I just need to find the right people to do it for.” – Daniel Lemire

28:41 – The System Builder

• Was Daniel finding the problems in that environment that he could solve and providing the solutions because he decided to go have conversations with people about what they were doing, or was it based on ideas he got by being put into the environment?
  • Daniel says it was a combination of both.
  • For example, he could see a process and the amount of labor it took to complete the process like working with patient records. Daniel cites some early daily conversations with one of the head nurses about the work she was doing.
    • Daniel could see the head nurse was reinventing a solution for the work she needed to do each day. He knew it was a repeatable process that could be turned into a database system that would make the nurse’s job easier.
    • “I wasn’t afraid of that because I had done enough in the college courses to know that I could do it and that it was going to be a functional system that would add value.” – Daniel Lemire, on building a database system for one of the head nurses at a medical clinic
  • The head nurse began to tell other people in the office about what Daniel had built for her. The accountant / payroll specialist asked Daniel if he could build her a system to track nurses and their time off.
    • Daniel says this was much more technically involved than what he did with the head nurse.
    • The accountant knew what she wanted and knew enough about how the system should function so that Daniel could ask deeper questions to capture the requirements and how data should be tabulated and calculated.
  • “Reflecting back on that journey, one of the things that I have a much better appreciation for in my late career is that idea of getting quick success on something that’s going to get you momentum in the right direction.” – Daniel Lemire
    • We can often get into something that is too much of a challenge or something so valuable that we won’t do it unless someone pays a high price for it.
    • To Nick, this sounds like perfectionism.
    • Doing great work without thinking about how to make it perfect seems like a dichotomy on the surface. “But the truth is, no one ever does anything perfect the first time, so the art of perfection isn’t about how you get it right the first time. It’s about how you keep at it until it’s good, and I understand that now in ways that I couldn’t comprehend back then.” – Daniel Lemire

33:12 – Thoughts on Product Management

• John says Daniel’s colleague in payroll sounds a lot like what we might call a product manager today. Product managers guide the product vision, help establish a minimum viable product to release and then foster feature enhancements and their priority over time.
  • The idea of a minimum viable product and adding features over time is to get feedback along the way instead of building something huge and fully featured without any feedback until its release.
• Daniel tells us about being a Windows guy from the beginning. When his wife had to use a Mac for graphics, he didn’t understand why someone would want a more expensive computer with less flexibility (i.e. computer games).
• The growth of computing has a ton of lore behind it. We can’t really think about the PC without thinking about Bill Gates and the work he did. Daniel mentions what Bill Gates did with the acquisition of DOS.
  • Gates developed a reputation early on for developing applications (Windows, Office) that worked well enough to do a job despite not being particularly well engineered.
  • Daniel says Microsoft was likely as successful as it has been from the willingness to put products out there to create value, even if the products were not perfect.
  • “I want to call out to all of my friends in technology not to underestimate how important that value proposition is for everything that you do. We get so caught up in the technical that we don’t think about that. That’s why that role I think has become so essential…. We know what we want sometimes, and we’re just frustrated if we can’t get it…. You need somebody that can sit between those two positions and sort of negotiate between multiple different parties…. And that’s what they master – that balance between being the best and getting something done.” – Daniel Lemire, on the role of the product manager
  • A product manager consistently calibrates between being technically great and getting something completed. This takes into consideration the needs of developers and the demands of a business end user. Daniel feels the product manager’s role is becoming more important and not less when it comes to nascent technologies.
  • Nick thinks a product manager is a personification of the inner struggle with perfectionism.
  • Daniel says sometimes the product manager acts as a tiebreaker when there is gridlock between 2 sides so action can be taken.
  • “I think that’s the key. Whatever it is, be taking action.” – Daniel Lemire

37:47 – Getting an Advanced Degree

• Daniel had some success with consulting and making money. He built a content management system before WordPress was a thing and expanded it into tracking customers and contacts. Daniel is still very proud of this work.
  • In a lot of ways Daniel is a contemporary of the ServiceNow founders, but the ServiceNow founders were way better at product market fit.
  • “Sometimes it’s not how technically talented you are. It is finding the right people to work with that makes the big difference…. When I found a customer that would let me really geek out and build them a big system, we both won…. That’s what I wanted to do. I just wanted to build great systems. I didn’t want to be a sales guy. I didn’t want to be a marketing guy. That was not something that I was prepared for or had a desire to do, and I also recognized that I just wasn’t any good at it. Sometimes you have to cut your losses and go with the things that excite you.” – Daniel Lemire
    • Daniel learned about moving toward interesting things during his high school experience (i.e. how he got into computers).
  • Once Daniel got a job doing work for a client, he would get so into it that he would stop doing marketing and sales. After finishing a job is when Daniel would start thinking about his next consulting engagement. He might spend a month or more trying to figure out how to land the next customer.
• At this point, Daniel started talking with other people about his path forward from the current state of consulting.
  • “I wasn’t finding great success at doing the consulting thing, and I knew I had the aptitude to really create value. I just wasn’t…in the right place.” – Daniel Lemire
  • Daniel recalls someone older (probably from church) asking what he was doing to allow himself to grow while he was in this “middle space.”
  • Daniel thought about the question and said he would like to get an advanced degree at some point, but he knew that would be expensive and really needed to make money to support him and his wife (who had just enough to make ends meet at the time).
  • “If you’re thinking about an advanced degree, your life is never going to be less busy because you’re going to add all of these things that you want to do. You’re going to have kids. You’re going to have a career. You’re going to be doing things with your family and your church and your community. If you feel like you have time to take something else on…just go get that advanced degree now while you have the time.” – Daniel Lemire, on advice he was given
  • Daniel started to look into the advanced degree and learned a program at UNT would let him double dip from undergraduate coursework and reduce the number of hours for a master’s degree significantly. Daniel was able to complete the degree slowly over about 3 years, feeling it was a much better use of his time.
  • “It gave me a much better appreciation of how businesses worked. The challenge was I didn’t have the context of experience to put with it.” – Daniel Lemire

Mentioned in the Outro

• There is an element of humility involved when we realize we cannot solve a problem by ourselves. Daniel said a prayer to ask for wisdom after his plan to go into the Air Force wasn’t going to happen. He was also open to receiving feedback from other people who had ideas about what he should do.
  • Part of the humble attitude we need to have is this openness to accepting suggestions. In Daniel’s case, it made sense to act on the suggestions. It may not mean that in your case, but be open to the feedback so you can process it before making a decision.
• The idea of taking a step forward even if you need to reverse it later sounds like a way to fight against perfectionism. We talked about product maangers doing this. It’s persistence without perfection. Listen to complimentary advice on perfectionism from the following episodes:
  • Kellyn Gorman spoke to us about – accepting work that is good enough and calibrating the quality of our work based on time constraints in Episode 320 – Becoming DBA Kevlar: Roadblocks, Perfectionism, and Technical Orienteering with Kellyn Gorman (1/3).
  • We did a 4-part series to review Finish by Jon Acuff full of strategies for fighting against perfectionism:
    • Episode 272 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 1 – The Day after Perfect and Cut Your Goal in Half
    • Episode 273 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 2 – Deliberate Time Investments and Avoiding Distractions
    • Episode 274 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 3 – Get Rid of Your Secret Rules and Use Data to Celebrate Your Imperfect Progress
    • Episode 275 – Book Discussion: Finish, Part 4 – The Day before Done and Perfectionism’s Final Roadblocks

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