welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and storytelling experiences that you want hey everyone welcome back to the channel it is so good to have you here we're back with another absolute titan of the servicenow space you might know him as a developer advocate and co-host of both the live coding happy hour and the creator toolbox playlist on youtube but before that he was still a titan widely known as one of the better and more helpful devs on the servicenow community even before his stint at servicenow ladies and gentlemen it is my honor to bring you brad the beard tilted brad welcome to the show thanks for having me it is my pleasure to have you sir okay everybody knows the protocol by now we start at the start tell us how you got your start in the servicenow ecosystem yeah so in uh 2008 i was working for an energy company that i was working on the service desk and that company was a customer of a legacy uh service uh i guess a legacy itsm provider and it was gonna cost them like to upgrade or they were gonna they could go with servicenow uh for a small fraction of that uh costs uh in a new implementation uh in about a tenth of the time it would take them to upgrade uh to the new version of this other tool uh and they asked the service desk are there any volunteers to help implement the new software and i volunteered for it and yeah in in fall of 2008 i went through my two-day admin training at that time and there was a team of us doing it and we started doing some implementations we were doing incident and catalog and change i think was what we started with and i just kind of picked it up pretty quick and i think you know we started that in october and i think by december i was full-time doing servicenow development work and we went live in like 10 weeks and then you know there was already a mountain of enhancement requests once people realized what it could do and you know i was really off to the races from there i didn't really do service desk work anymore and you know quickly became kind of the full full-time admin and developer it's crazy for the time i mean i think today everybody's like oh 10-week deployment that's the norm but i mean back in the day that was like ludicrous the idea of a 10-week implementation was insane yeah i think it was if we had stuck with the existing tool to upgrade from like version five to six or whatever it was it was going to be nine months and and seven figures to do the upgrade and you know we did that both of those in a fraction of the time and cost i had a similar experience we were switching over from hp service desk and we had literally come off of like 10 months of doing nothing but trying to get it to work and it's probably like to be fair to hp it was more like four months five months of deployment and then the rest was fixing what wasn't working guaranteed for the deployment and it was like like literally days of we're finally past the finish line and then we're already in the procurement phase for servicenow wow and uh you know everybody's so shocked we were even worried like we got the service now implementation done so fast we're like we're gonna look like chumps we deploy this so fast people are gonna be wondering what we did wrong yeah what was uh like did you have any big aha moments on that on your first uh on the first trip around oh that's a good question i mean the ability to just spin up a new table uh to like look something up or you know whatever you needed to do was just so quick uh compared to other tools and you know adding a field to something was just kind of like a you know no-brainer and service now i'll always remember though after we after we went live um and i had been you know doing some admin and development work for a couple of months and we had this we had this deal in the it department where we do these status reports where you would fill out a powerpoint send it to your manager they'd take everybody that reports to them take all their stuff put it in a powerpoint send it to their manager it was about four levels and it was basically i think probably the first two thirds of everyone's day on thursdays was status reports and the you know the higher up you were in the food chain the longer it took you to kind of consolidate everything and so i remember a lot of what my team was putting in their status reports was just like ticket details and so i was like we have all this data what if we like automated the consolidation of all of this at least for my manager and uh you know i think i i built an app to do that you know on the you know i guess 2009 version of servicenow at that point and like a half a day or something it was you know a pretty quick little thing that i threw together that just pulled all this data together and ended up generating something that could be pasted into a powerpoint and then from there we did some enhancements but i think that experience was when i really kind of fell in love with the power of the platform and how fast it is to to do things like that truth man truth and i'm just like over here completely biting the inside of my mouth off not just insert an advertisement for vivid charts here because it's just that whole thing right like let's take all the data out we could just spend all that time putting data into the platform let's pull it all out the platform again so that so what what can we do with it report on it oh my goodness so like i know you from like all over the place all kinds of different ways i remember you answering questions for me on the community like back in 1912 when we both were for partners and um but for those that i mean a lot of people will know you from your uh live coding happy hour and such but for those who don't why don't you just tell the world how they should know you yeah so i i don't know if you should know me but i definitely should let me answer that question you definitely should know brad tilton if you want to get anywhere in servicenow is just his resources are way too good not to be a part of anyways sorry for the intro go ahead no worries i i think uh like front end uh development is what i've been mostly interested in my career so i i built one of the first cms portals when the content management system came out we could finally build like some html portals and then presented on it at knowledge10 uh and uh that actually i i think i got from that knowledge10 presentation i would get people hitting me back up uh you know like asking questions about cms like up until service portal came out in you know 2015 whenever that was so i think that and then community i was really active on community especially when i started consulting and it was kind of encouraged where i was consulting to be active on the community so i really took that and ran with it and you know tried to answer as many questions as i could and write blogs and that sort of thing and you know i think at one point i was i was like number three in points now all sorts of people have passed me up i'm not in the top five anymore but uh you know i was pretty active on community i still try to be kind of active off and on on community and then at servicenow i've done some uh i was really active with technology partners for a couple of years i had a role where i supported technology partners so i knew most of the partners at that point uh and then the last couple of years i've been doing platform and developer stuff and so you know i'm i'm more active on the s dev slack and on our developer youtube and blog and things like that man you mentioned like falling out of the top five on community and i just just for some context on how easy that is these days so many people contending i fell from like i think number six to 16 in like a quarter yeah there's some just beastly people i don't know when they sleep you know i got my position because i just chipped away at it for 10 years and then in one quarter i go from like top 10 to top 20. yeah i mean i have found that over the years uh i've just tried to be really consistent i'm probably this is probably the worst i've been at it you know since i've been doing things on the community in the last 10 years but i've always tried to answer like at least a couple of questions a week and you know if you stick with it long enough you're going to outlast a lot of people who you know change jobs and it's not that important to them anymore but you're right there are some people on there now that are just all over it and uh and you know really doing a great job but just all over the place and you know i don't know how they find the time i've always thought that about chuck uh just being on the community but then i i work on the same team as chuck and so i know like all of the things that he does and i still have no idea how he how he gets it all done um but the community's part of that do you find like that the way people approach the servicenow community small c like the big aggregate community has changed quite a bit in a few years because even though you post less on community i would say your contribution community big c the website you may post there less but the contributions you make to community small c are way more prolific and profound wouldn't you say i mean lhcc takes time um or lchhh i should say and the other uh videos take time yeah but like i just feel like have you felt the shift in the way people consume learning in the ecosystem yeah so kind of a shift away from the community site to more just overall community well i mean time was and you were back there too right time was where the only place you could go was community in wiki right yeah that's the only place we could find out the new ideas but i feel like of late there's been a shift to video content especially in order to teach people macro concepts and then the community's still there and imminently useful for the oh i'm having this weird problem or i want to have a deep philosophical discussion on something yeah i think i think there's probably been i don't know if there's been a shift as much as it's just grown so much and that you we have a lot more content outside of the community but maybe the community content's growing also i i don't i haven't really seen the numbers but you know i definitely think like with the video content right now you know it's it's a a lot easier to make to make and host high quality video content than it was in the past uh so there's more of that there's some really good content you know your your stuff in addition to a lot of our other you know dev mvps and just people in the community you know there's a lot of good content out there so and i think people are looking more uh video first you know you probably get more youtube hits now than you would have five years ago where people might have just gone to the community uh and now you know they're maybe searching in more places or looking at aggregators that are pulling a lot of things together but but i do think there are more things out there you know there used to be kind of a very small handful of sites that were not the community like the the guru and you know maybe a couple of other ones uh that you might search the community and then go search those two or three sites and then you're kind of done searching and now there's stuff everywhere including the s dev slack which is an incredible resource it is and if you if you haven't heard of sn dev slack please check this description below we'll have a link to that to you great great resources for getting questions answered quickly so let's go back over your history of consulting a little bit because you must have done a wide variety of things why don't you tell us about a time that really inspired you like something where you're like gosh i don't know if the tool can do that but i'll give a shot one of my favorite projects that i did while i was consulting was this project it was a healthcare system and they were implementing i don't even remember the name of the it's like the big healthcare software that basically everybody implements epic and i yeah i think it was epic um so it was like a multi-year implementation and part of that was people had to take training so if you're a doctor in a specific department you had to take these training classes and so everybody had to take training on it and so they had a way that they could manage the classes and they know who to who took what training but they needed they didn't have a way to say this type of role needs to take this training and then and then say you're in or out of compliance and they were looking at software to do it but it was really expensive and so i i was working on another project for this customer and and they mentioned it to me and we got to talking and we're like i think we can build this in servicenow pretty easy and so we ended up building this where we just pulled in all of the historical data every day you know who took what class and then we built this system that just took in all this data and matched up you know who had taken classes with who had you know who needed to take classes and it was like a pretty small project and you know it was just another one of those like the power of the platform was just so huge compared to what the other options out there were and you know we did it for a very small cost compared to everything else i think that was one of my favorite things that we did just because it was kind of a random thing that came up and we built it and implemented it and the you know the customer loved it and it was a fun project to do as well yeah that's probably my favorite thing that we did did you find that there's places where like i in the early days when i was doing those itsm implementations i feel like i get part way through the itsm implementation and then like once people could see the capabilities it would be like pause no we got a we gotta we got a real problem for you to solve with this that's what gave me my my assurance is this was this was always gonna be bigger than i t yeah it was a it was a nice thing you know you're working on a project with somebody i really loved the implementations that we did that were more um like enablement to where it was like you would do a lot at the beginning but by the end of it you weren't really doing a lot of hands-on keyboard you kind of trained the customer admins on how to work everything and like long term that's what was most successful i think but it was always great to see like the more people used it the more they liked it and you know i hope that's still the case uh but that you know that was something i always enjoyed which is not you know absolutely not always the case with software so one one question my audience loves just because we have all the titans like the true titans on on the show but i like to show that everybody gets those points where they feel cornered their backs against the wall those moments where you have to wonder am i gonna make it like can i survive this did you ever have any of those situations while you're out in the field yeah i had uh i had a particularly challenging product when i was when i was consulting that i i had helped scope which makes it worse because there was nobody to blame for it but it was an integration that we did with another uh another system that um you know we we had kind of thought we could use most of this other integration that had been done in ours and it turned out not to be the case because the system was just this really rigid um thing that didn't return uh really really any like error messages uh and so you would build something and then and then try to send it to the external system and they would just send back an error and so there was this one person at the customer that knew the system really well and basically i had to get on the phone with this person every day and say okay this is what i tried and it gave me an error and they're like oh yeah you're missing a piece of data and then but there was all of these different variations and you know it was one of those where like we went crazy over hours and it was just kind of a terrible like by you know three quarters of the way through the project i was like should i just quit and then i don't have to finish this project or you know it was one of those where it was it had just gotten so painful and i don't even know you know i shared some blame i think the blame was all shared around it was no no one person to blame it was just one of those like hard situations and i definitely learned a lot about scoping projects and doing better due diligence at the beginning from there but but that was a rough one so knowledge 21 is coming up in a hurry are you involved in that at all it is and i'm involved in a few different places one of the big ones is the hackathon is running on may 8th that starts at 10 a.m pacific runs for 24 hours we did something kind of similar last year where we ran it for a whole weekend but we we think this 24-hour time period is going to be good and have gotten a lot of positive feedback on it so what we're going to do is we're going to run it for 24 hours and then we'll have the announcement in a knowledge session i think about a week and a half later so hackathon is a really big one and then i actually wrote a session a lab for the first time in a couple of years around using ui builder to build a blog portal somebody can consume a blog and then we also have another ui builder session that's a lab on building the author experience through workspace for that for the blog app so i think that'll be a really neat thing to work through there's two different labs you can work them in any order but i would encourage you do that and then we have a ton of other content for that we'll be doing a live coding happy hour chuck tomasi is going to be doing a build with chuck we're also going to be doing some jeopardy sessions where you answer questions about servicenow and then one of the things i'm most excited about is the last i think the last thing that happens on the last day is chuck is going to do a karaoke session where he does karaoke for up to four hours he loves doing karaoke has written this big karaoke app which is what we'll be using but it's a charity thing so i think the more that gets donated to charity the more songs open up servicenow will be donating money so that'll be a fun thing i think you might even be able to like make him sing songs that he doesn't like singing or pick something really hard so it'll be a fun way to end the conference so we have a lot going on there's a ton of content and again this year it's just going to be tuesday wednesday thursday next week and then tuesday wednesday thursday of the next week so the 11th through 13th and then 18th through 20th and then we've got a great keynote as well uh and i can't remember what date it runs on sorry i have some construction going on in the background so there's no way i can avoid that so it's gonna be in the background sorry about that oh no problem you must have been to a ton of knowledges have you been to the mall since since you've been in this space so i've i my first one was in 09 and then i missed new orleans in 2012 i had like just started consulting and i didn't didn't get to go to that one but i've been been to i can't i counted it at one i think it's 11 or 12. um counting the virtual ones or this will be 11 inches what was your favorite knowledge moment ooh um so knowledge 11 i remember really vividly um you know at the the paradise point where it rained even though it was in san diego and i felt like that was the first uh the first knowledge where servicenow really put some some money into like the visual effects and everything that was really when i was like oh yeah this is this is a big deal and it's becoming even more of a big deal i think that was like my third knowledge and then all you know i remember like the first creator con in 2015 uh it was actually after the knowledge conference uh but in the same the same place kind of like okay now we're getting serious about developers and creators and then just the last couple in person they're just so huge there's there's so many people there now and you know it's crazy that you can walk around the whole expo hall floor and uh you know i i've been around for a long time but i could make a lap around the floor and see maybe one or two people that i knew and that was it um so it was uh it's just kind of nuts how big it's gotten and i am really looking forward to possibly be being able to do it again in person at some point which hopefully true a truth you know i was just making a video today about memories of knowledge11 and i found this tweet and somebody's like standing room only a thousand people under the tent yeah two words you just wouldn't you couldn't you couldn't possibly use anymore a thousand intent yeah i remember actually my first knowledge uh was i think it was less than 500 people it was in the omni at san diego and i remember going to a session on um project management because it was maybe it was coming out later that year and the developer that wrote it was giving the session because he was like the only person involved in project management i just remember like cornering him afterwards and asking him a bunch of questions about you know what how to use it and how to implement it and you know it's just one of those things where yeah it's the the project developer so i'm gonna go ask that person that one person a bunch of questions there's a there's one question i like to ask all my guests and that's if you could change like based off of all your experience if you could change one thing about the product or the ecosystem what would it be oh that's a good question this is a hard one for me because i like i kind of know our road map for a while so there's some stuff that i like i can think of and i think i i want us to hit that target right because like you know things get de-prioritized or moved around or they end up being harder to do than other things so i have to think of something something that i would really like to see that was actually i think it was uh sort of demoed in a creatorcon keynote and then we ended up changing directions is being able to work in multiple scopes within studio kind of in the same studio window and not having to switch scopes to to do different things i think would make it a lot easier for people just to kind of live in studio especially if you know if we're able to update that at some point so that's i have no future information on that but i think that's one thing that i would really like to see uh because we we kind of got a glimpse of what it might look like in the past and that would be a good one what's been the most common answer to that question i don't think there has been a commonality i think a lot of uh a lot of people have just had really unique perspectives i mean it's a question i love asking the old-timers right because yeah you know because you said that volume of experience and and just the myriad of perspectives that they have and i do like to get a different variety of people here like i've had sarah weeks and she's a recruiter right and sorry getting back to the question i don't know i don't know if you could if you could nail down a common theme sometimes it's yeah it's a feature sometimes it's i wish it was a way the ecosystem worked i wish it was something more people knew people tend to take it a lot of different directions which is why i ask it that's why i ask it another one i love to ask and a lot when a lot of people enjoy is there's a lot of nuclear there's probably more new people in the space than there are everybody else what would you say like what would be your advice to somebody newly learning the tool yeah so so my favorite thing to tell people to do especially so you know i'm i'm kind of focused on creator workflows building apps with app engine so if that's what you're doing my favorite thing to do is just to have somebody think about a a problem that they want to solve that maybe they can solve with software that lets you spin up a database and automate stuff quickly and then try to solve that problem and so for me i have a lot of fun when i do like personal things like what we've done you know the cooking management app to manage long you know meat smoking times on life coating happy hour and that was a fun one to work on because it's a thing that i would not say i'm an expert but it's an area where i have some expertise and knowing how the process should work uh and so i can take this like process expertise and apply it to developing on on the platform and i think that's a good you know that's a good thing to try so you know if you have a hobby that you're really into and you know maybe you're managing something through a spreadsheet see what you can do in a pdi you know use integration hub see if you know you want to send some emails out and integrate with some external things but yeah solve some problem uh try to solve some problem on the platform you probably want to start with doing some learning content um but from there you know nothing beats actually getting into it and and trying to do something with it one of them one of the most inspiring things i've seen in this ecosystem is just that how easy it is for people who come from outside of it to pick up the tool and then they bring such a richness in thinking about other ways of working or nuances of work and i just had um this lady i know in my network and she was she was a you know a homemaker for years and years and years and she's decided to get into having a career and learn servicenow and she's kind of like oh well what do i know i'm a homework are you kidding like first of all that's like four full-time jobs right but when we sat and thought about what could you build on service now to practice and just think about you know it was this idea of like okay there's certain tasks that you have to do every day but if you don't do them that day the tasks they have to go away on their own they're not useful anymore but you have new new versions of them the next day like did you take the garbage out no if you if you missed the last one it's missed that task must close and you'd want to see it close as a failure but this week if they did it you want to see it because there's this a whole idea of like scheduled recurring tasks with an expiry date and you know point accumulation so that you can match benefits to work performance and i'm just thinking like who would have thought 10 years ago 15 years ago that homemakers critical as they are would teach it anything about work it's just like no sit you sit and listen you know and learn something something incredibly valuable so i'll just echo that man just like if you don't come from i.t if you don't know servicenow embrace that that's such a benefit that nobody really has to come at it with fresh eyes and to just not know the biases and just don't judge your past experience by anything and just take all that bias away and approach servicenow with fresh eyes i would kill to have that again i just i'd love to go back with fresh eyes but i'm old and tired anyway yeah and i mean having having uh and you you know this better than anybody but like having having that type of perspective like on a hackathon team is hugely valuable like people that are not necessarily i don't even like to say super technical because who even knows what what that means at this point but don't have a lot of experience in servicenow still have a lot to contribute because they are bringing that fresh perspective where you know they they haven't there are things that i do on on the platform that are less efficient than somebody coming right into the platform and doing it because that's how i've been doing it for 12 years and it's just hard to change where somebody can come in now and just say oh this is the best way to do this thing and just do things that way so yeah you know i totally agree that fresh perspective is great especially in a team i think it's so important to have that in whatever team you're working on whether it's a hackathon team or you know a consulting team or whatever that is well let's go there on the hackathon thing because we have hackathon coming up obviously you know we want to promote that knowledge21 i've always thought hackathon is one of the most important things at knowledge so let's kind of promote that for a little bit right now i've always said it takes all types to do a hackathon right like don't worry there's gonna be hardcore developers there you don't have to be a hardcore developer to be on a team and contribute i would know i'm not a hardcore developer by any stretch of the amount i've done the weakest dev in the dev mvp program buy a long shot okay it's not even close okay i don't think that's true but like there i mean but there's been hackathons brad where it's like i literally like i didn't touch the code i didn't build anything it was just me for eight hours practicing that five minute story that we tell so it's like it it needs all types so if you're a person just like oh i come from the pest control industry whatever right come with that story get three or four deve developers who could just build it whatever it is and then just immerse yourself in the the horrificness of what you had to struggle with in that labor immerse yourself in the bs the bs of it like i hated working on this because blank there's your hackathon industry anybody who can feel passionately can win a hackathon yeah that that i mean that's a great point as you know i i did a lot of judging last year i'll be doing a lot of judging this year the way we're doing it is i think three to five minute pitch videos so nailing that is like just as important as what you actually build right you have to be able to communicate what it is that you're building and what problem you're solving why why it's a problem how you solved it and and why that is important and then you have to be able to communicate that to somebody like me you have to be able to communicate that to you know a solution consultant to our you know vp of of product who's going to end up being the the final judge this year and was one of the judges last year and so you know being able to communicate something like that is just as important as actually building the app um and so yeah you're absolutely right like you need somebody in the team that's that's good at doing that all right brad we are approaching time so last word goes to you anything you want to tell anybody oh i shoulda i should have planned this better no i i would say you know my role right now is really you know community driven and and enabling developers and advocating on behalf of developers and advocating on behalf of our platform uh and so you know i i would say you know we have this really incredible developer community both on the big c community on slack you know there's discord and reddit and twitter and linkedin there's a facebook group you know that you can get you can get help in a lot of different ways and you know i would encourage you to reach out uh however that is and get help with something and if you don't need help just find one of those platforms or more than one of those platforms and try answering you know answering somebody's question every now and then i know i have learned a ton from answering people's questions you know more from doing that than asking my own questions probably so yeah be involved in the community and then we also have developer meetups that happen in most geographies they're all virtual right now which makes it even easier to find a developer meetup you don't have to live in the geography of the meetup that you go to we have some people that join all developer meetups and you know get involved in a developer meetup when we when they do start meeting a person try going in person uh and meeting other developers and you know those those connections uh and relationships uh will help you out later on whether that's like job hunting or just you know needing help with a problem so that's you know one of the things that i think i've learned over you know the 12 plus years in the servicenow community especially is like people want to connect with you and and and help out so all you have to do is get out there and ask amen and amen brother all right so we're at time brad thanks so much for joining us and uh we'll see you out there yeah thanks so much for having me if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching