How to Train Devs to Disrupt Industries w/ Lessen's CTO Chris Bee

**Chris Bee** (0:00)
But as an engineering leader, understanding the big picture, especially if you're in an early stage company, right? And how the company makes money, how revenue is generated, where the growth opportunities are, and keeping that frame of reference in mind as you're making prioritization decisions for your team, I think is really important.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:14)
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Hey everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your co-host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm joined by Chris Bee, the CTO at Lessen. Chris, welcome to the show, and thanks for being a LinearB customer.

**Chris Bee** (1:05)
Yeah, absolutely. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:08)
It's our pleasure. I'm really excited to dig deeply into your engineering team and the work you're doing. We often hear about disruptors in tech, and many companies say that's what they aspire to be.
Lessen has actually earned that title. It's shaking up the $400 billion real estate industry, and we'll get into the specifics of what your engineers are doing to disrupt that industry and all the great work you're doing there. But before we dive in, I want to kick off the conversation with something you said to us before the show started.
You said there's a growing opportunity to solve less and less obvious problems, not just incremental improvements. What did you mean by that?

**Chris Bee** (1:44)
Yeah, it's a great question. I think if you look broadly at the SaaS landscape, a lot of the more obvious problems have been solved over the last couple of decades that we've been building software at scale.
And I think what you're starting to see is that there's still lots of niche opportunities. There's going to be plenty of successful SaaS companies in the future, no doubt. But the sort of low-hanging fruit or easier rocks to overturn have mostly been overturned, I think. And then there's this growing crop of no-code, low-code tools that allow you to build applications pretty quickly and easily. Then there's, of course, kind of the generic one-size-fits-all platforms, like the Salesforce is only.com somewhere where you can stand something up. So I think there's a little bit less opportunity in those areas, broadly speaking, a lot more opportunity in some of the harder businesses and some of the more kind of traditional areas that have a software element but also have a really big operational element.
I think industries like professional services, healthcare and, of course, real estate, mortgages, transportation, there's these really big industries that still have massive, massive problems that are commuted by software. And I think a lot of the breakout companies we'll see in the coming years and coming decades are going to be a little bit more of the real world augmentation with software versus just pure software. Like I said, there's still going to be plenty of SaaS companies that are going to be successful, but I think there's a real growing opportunity in some of those spaces.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:08)
Yeah, like we hear about this as digital transformation, right? Of, hey, let's take these industries that maybe have real world problems that aren't as software-savvy yet and take it to the next level.
How do you think about those processes and steps? Like what, let's say you're an entrepreneur, you know, engineering leader who's listening to the podcast. What would your message then be about? Like here's how we should approach these problems.

**Chris Bee** (3:33)
Yeah, I think the mental model that a lot of people need to have is really purely around solving customer problems, right? And understanding the user very deeply and understanding that there are embedded ways of working that arguably are successful, right? I mean, our industry and property services, right? There's construction work and property service work being done every day. And it has been done that way for hundreds of years, thousands of years since people had places to live. So, you know, understanding that and really appreciating and building that empathy for the customer and for the user I think is where it starts.