How we work at Easy Agile
Easy Agile’s purpose is to find a better way to work. Back in 2018 we consciously acknowledged that what got us here👇🏼, won’t get us there 👉🏼. In other words, we have to change to achieve our goals. The real challenge is to proactively seek change rather than being forced into it.
"We believe there is a better way to work"
What got us here
When Easy Agile (then Arijea) first started out in 2016, Nick and I would spend a full third of our day discussing what we were going to do and how we were going to do it, (which is a pretty good idea when you don’t know what you’re doing!). It was these conversations, along with reading Thinking Fast and Slow, Deep Work and Small Giants which formed the basis of some of our company values and how we work at Easy Agile. We still talk a lot, not quite a third of the day, but it’s more around how we’ll work, rather than what we’ll work on.
A quick history: 2016 - 2018
A lot happened in the first few years of Easy Agile’s existence. We created some successful products, travelled around the world to Atlassian events and generally had a bunch of fun. We also built huge backlogs of work we’d never, ever start, let alone finish.
Back then our situation was a little different to most other software companies. We had more products than developers! At one point we had 5 products and 1 developer. This improved to 3 developers and 2 products, but even still, our internal systems and other non-customer-facing work never seemed to get started.
These early years were chaotic, which was entirely my fault. It was my reluctance to give up coding that meant I was lost in the weeds rather than zooming out and attempting to build a fantastic team. We were just plodding on, looking at our shoes and getting distracted by little things instead of stopping, reflecting and committing to our core purpose. I needed to change my ways to help the team improve. Thankfully I remembered a really cool video which eventually would become the impetus for me changing my focus from code to the team...
I’ve watched this video countless times over past few years. Every time I do, it makes me feel so lucky that I worked at Atlassian and was able to partake in ShipIt and Innovation Weeks. I highly recommend you take the time to watch it if you haven’t already.
The importance of Autonomy, Master and Purpose
The ideas this video presents around autonomy, mastery and purpose propelled me to think beyond simply how we work to think about the reasons why we work. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is money. Having enough money is vital to live a fulfilling life (which I’m proud to say we strive to provide at Easy Agile), however, as covered in the video above, more money is not necessarily a great motivator. It’s autonomy, mastery and purpose which provide that.
So whilst I was taking a step back to create a better way of working, I figured we may as well try to bake in autonomy, mastery and purpose along with a provision to prevent some undesirables from creeping in. The main culprits I had in my sights are bureaucracy, red tape, sacred cows, legacy systems and politics.
If you’re going to the effort to building an amazing team of talented people, taking time out of their lives to work for you, the last thing you want to do is get in their way with pointless rituals which just stifle their creativity and waste their time!
Gaining perspective by zooming out
Being a software company, Easy Agile’s heart beat is our software development process. However nowadays we do so much more than develop software. All of our team communicate directly with our customers daily via customer support, we have fantastic marketers, product managers and a data analyst. We needed a way of working which went beyond backlogs and estimation and brought everyone together to push in unison towards our goals.
We do our best work together in cross-functional teams so I wanted to bake that in from the start, rather than build silos as we grew. We started out by having everyone work off one backlog and scheduled all of our work in Jira (including Sean, our first marketing hire). However, as you can guess, this doesn’t scale. The details discussed at our planning sessions became irrelevant to most of the team. We ended up only skimming over most of the details which made planning and estimation mostly irrelevant.
In early 2019 I made it my mission to get serious about finding a better way to work. So I stopped coding (it was frightful founder-code anyway). Since then we’ve been through four revisions of our development process. We’ve even made “finding a better way to work” our motto.
The details of this transformation is beyond the scope of this blog post, however, let’s just say that we’ve gone from a chaotic, unmanaged backlog to a far more organised and considered approach to work. The current revision of our development process allows us to work on (and dogfood) our products and our internal systems simultaneously. It scales with us as we grow, encourages cross-functional teams and bakes in our company values as well as autonomy, mastery and purpose for all team members.
Shape Up by Basecamp forms the foundation of how we work
I was first made aware of Basecamp’s Shape Up in a comment Nick made on a blog post I wrote announcing one of the aforementioned revisions of our development process. It was 4 months later when I’d started my hunt in earnest for a better way to work that I remembered it and, upon re-reading it, felt it might just work.
In Shape Up you work in 6 week cycles which is just long enough to do something tangible, but short enough not to feel that the deadline is too far away. This is followed by a 2 week “cool down” where everyone is free to fix bugs, try out something new and gather themselves for the next six week cycle. At Easy Agile, we already worked in a “product” cycle, where we would focus on one product after another, so this idea fit in well.
Six weeks is long enough to build something meaningful start-to-finish and short enough that everyone can feel the deadline looming from the start, so they use the time wisely. The majority of our new features are built and released in one six-week cycle.
Shape Up goes on to propose the concept of “pitches” and “bets”. A pitch is a refined description of a feature or change large enough to have a meaningful impact on the company if it is successfully delivered.
Shape Up takes its name from the “shaping” process applied to forming a pitch. Shaping a pitch is simply taking the time to focus on the problem and define a good solution. You are encouraged to pull in people you trust to “hammer the scope” of your pitch so it is very clear what it does and does not do. This appeals to our “Engage System 2” and “Commit, as a team” values.
I’m not a betting type of person, and seeing as that viewpoint seemed fairly prevalent in the team, we came up with an alternative vernacular: Opportunity.
What is an opportunity?
Opportunities ratify the work of our Product Managers. They may take up to four weeks or longer to shape which is in stark contrast to other workplaces where product managers are responsible for “feeding the beast” (finding, or making up, work to keep the development team at full capacity).
Opportunities represent either 2 or 4 weeks of work. Anything less and it’s probably not really worth doing, or it is a small improvement, which is done by our Small Improvements team (more on that later).
Our cycle
Where Shape Up’s cycle is a total of eight weeks, we’re currently experimenting with a six week cycle. We have four weeks of work on Opportunities followed by a week of paying down Technical Debt, go to market and final Opportunity shaping. We round out with a couple of Dash Days (more on that later too).
1. How we shape and select Opportunities
Shaping opportunities primarily falls on the shoulders of our Product Managers, Teagan and Elizabeth. Anyone can raise an Opportunity ticket in Jira, but by doing so it also means taking complete ownership of guiding it through development, testing, production and monitoring its health and metrics after launch. For this reason we usually recommend working with a product manager to flesh it out.
The process of shaping and scope hammering is generally done with a few collaborators who can provide perspective on all of the moving parts involved in what you’re attempting to do.
Currently we attempt to select the Opportunities which will put Easy Agile in the best possible position to achieve our goals (aka our quarterly and annual OKRs). Opportunities which are not properly scoped or shaped will be sent back to the drawing board to come back around in another 6 weeks.
We are currently exploring how we can improve the Opportunity selection process. The betting table meeting described in Shape Up is one way to select what to work on, however we feel there is a better way which we haven’t quite put our finger on yet. Ideally each Opportunity will help us move towards of one or more of our top-line goals. Baking our OKRs into our work planning keeps them at top of mind throughout the year.
2. Opportunity team formation
The autonomy part of our development process really sings when it comes to team formation. With only one exception**, all teams are self-selected and formed of exactly three development team members (a senior, mid and junior team member - something we are still actively hiring for). Team members from product management, data analysis and marketing join to create truly cross-functional teams. This means when the Opportunity goes live, all of the required marketing material, documentation and other non-development work is ready to be rolled out allowing us to move on to Tech Debt / Go to Market / Shaping Week.
We chose three team members per Opportunity as this allows each team to self-serve their own pull requests. Our pull requests require at least two approvals to be merged. Having three team members reduces the disturbances and context switching being forced onto other teams.
**A small team works on bugs and small improvements on a 2 week Opportunity which is always selected. The team members for this team work on a rotation so everyone gets their go.
3. Tech Debt / Go to Market / Shaping and Selection week (yes - we need a better name)
In the week following the completion of our 4 weeks of Opportunity work, the development team takes a week to focus on technical debt or improving their development environment. We also use this week as a rollover buffer to close out any work which was not completed in the Opportunity weeks. We try to keep rollover to a bare minimum.
The marketing team will roll out any of the initiatives they built in the prior four weeks to support any new features which were shipped.
The Product Management team will crack on with finishing up the shaping of their Opportunities and have them ready to work through with the team for the next Opportunity cycle.
4. Dash Days
Dash days (formerly Inception Week) is a period of freedom and autonomy to work on a pursuit of your choosing which, when successful, will ideally lead us to think “How did we live without this before!?”. They are essentially a mix of ShipIt / Innovation Weeks / 20% Time which I experienced at Atlassian. They’re a great avenue to release the creativity of our team.
Some recent successful Dash Days projects.
- Easy Agile Personas
- Our Dev Container vscode setup
- “Mr. Tulip” (our Slack bot which almost does everything)
- In-product NPS
- The Easy Agile Podcast
- Our deployment dashboard (showing the number of days since a Cloud or On-premise deployment)
- Powering our website with Sanity.io CMS
- ea-kit (our own component library)
- A new random forest churn model to better understand our customers frustrations
- Our own logo/brand design framework
As you can see, there’s a great deal of diversity in the Dash Days projects we have shipped. Shipping is not a requirement of Dash Days, though. Quite often it’s best to take some time to try out some new ideas or build a prototype to put in front of customers.
A great example of that is a feature refinement developed by Sam and Angad, two of our newest front-end developers. They worked with our Product team to build a new way to create issue dependencies in Easy Agile Programs. Their definition of done was not releasing to production, but to get it on a test server which we used for customer interviews run by our Product Managers, Teagan and Elizabeth. The following Dash Days Sam and Angad took this feedback, refined the feature with the product teams' help and shipped a version to the Cloud version of Easy Agile Programs. So far the new dependency creation approach appears to be 10 times more popular! Success!
Dash Days is also a great time for team members to take advantage of their $5000 Learning and Development budget which each team member receives every year.
Shaping a new way to work
Introducing a Shape Up flavoured process here at Easy Agile has allowed us to gain focus and certainty in the work we choose to take on. It allows us to have long term goals without the need to build inflexible roadmaps. Our Product Managers are encouraged to take the time they need to focus and design amazing new solutions for our customers. The 6 week cycle grants us the flexibility to react to external changes or take advantage of new opportunities which arise without derailing the plans for the remainder of the year. We can take the learnings from our past Opportunities and feed them into the plan for the next, increasing our chances of success.
Easy Agile’s development teams are flexible and choose who they work with and what they work on. We constantly pay down tech debt and shun red tape, legacy systems and sacred cows. We work in cross-functional and fluid teams.
We’ve been able to adopt Shape Up and bake in things like Dash Days and our company values. We love that the way we work allows us (and encourages us) to stop, take a breath and express our creativity every 6 weeks. Tech Debt Week and Dash Days are also a great way to increase the focus of our development team on their main projects by deferring any small tasks which interrupt and distract them.
We believe a steady, life-inclusive and balanced approach where we bring our whole selves to work each day is better than burning ourselves out in the pursuit of unrealistic deadlines.
And finally, as we grow, we know that the system which runs Easy Agile will continue to change to help us find a better way to work.
Related Articles
CompanyOwnership at Easy Agile
💬 “We know we’ve created something special, an ESOP like no other…”
Nick and I started Easy Agile after returning home to Australia from living and working in San Francisco where we witnessed the good and not-so-good sides of startups.
We were lucky to experience first-hand the amazing career opportunities and growth that working for successful companies such as Atlassian and Twitter can provide. On the other hand, we also saw companies start-up, consume vast amounts of funding and flame out. There was a terrible toll taken on our founder friends and their families who put life balance aside in pursuit of success at any cost.
We took all of this into consideration when we started Easy Agile. We didn't want to default to the standard VC-backed journey so we set our own pace. We wanted to learn what it was to build a customer-funded, sustainable growth product business, even if that meant a more difficult learning curve as we carved our own path.
Well, that was 6 years ago and here we are happily customer-funded for over 5 of those years, growing at an exciting rate, we believe is healthy and sustainable. We're proud that we're bootstrapped and we're not really looking to change that.
💬 “We can do things differently”
One part of the common startup playbook which we did want to retain is employee ownership. We have been dying to introduce an ESOP for a long time, however, being bootstrapped and customer-funded makes creating an Employee Share Option Plan a bit more complicated. Off-the-shelf plans are usually based around the concept of a planned (or hoped for) exit event, as it’s the only time cash-burning companies can realise value for shareholders. This would not work for us and we were looking to provide a more accessible way for our team to realise the value gains as we grow.
We also knew in our hearts that our ESOP had to be a reflection of Easy Agile's values. We understand the wonderful people that make up Easy Agile are all at different stages of their careers and have different needs financially so we designed our ESOP to take this into consideration.
Our ESOP also had to be generous. Nick and I really want to continue to pay forward the generosity we’ve been privileged to experience and enable our entire Easy Agile team to have the opportunity to achieve financial freedom. We hope one day many of our Easy Agile team will find themselves as founders of successful companies and continue this tradition with their own ESOPs. 🤞
Now our ESOP is live, we know we’ve created something special, an ESOP like no other. There’s no standard template for what we’ve built as very few startups or scale-ups in Australia are in our position. We’re growing fast, we’re profitable and we aren’t constrained by investor demands.
It means we can do things differently.
How the Easy Agile ESOP is different
1. Generous valuation from the start
For our initial grant of options, we valued Easy Agile using a super-low valuation. This gives our initial option grant the highest immediate appreciation of value on paper we can give.
This type of valuation based on our "Net Tangible Assets" (NTA) is made possible by the Australian Start-up Tax Concessions. Being a software company, our assets are limited to the cash in our bank and some laptops. We have no debt.
At the same time, we also have a “Fair Market Value “(FMV) calculated similarly to other SaaS companies. It worked out that our NTA valuation for our initial grant was 44 times lower than our FMV valuation meaning by accepting your options, on paper, your options are already worth 44 times more than you will ever pay to exercise them.
We feel this is pretty special.
2. Real $ value for our team more often through an Option Buy-Back
We understand that our team members all have different needs financially. Some have mortgages. Others want to buy a house. Others are happy to rent and invest in other things.
We’ve ensured our team has the opportunity to realise an exit at a time more suitable to their personal needs.
Our Option buy-back scheme allows Easy Agile, to offer to buy back vested options from our team at the Fair Market Value. Our team can choose to take advantage of the company’s growth and turn some of their Options into cash far more readily than waiting for an exit event (IPO, secondary, sale, etc). This is a profoundly different concept from most SaaS companies. They can also choose to hold onto their Options for the long-term gains we all work together to achieve.
3. Dividends
Most SaaS product companies don't really get to a dividend issuing phase. They simply don’t have the profits available. Once again, we're different here. We have a sustainable growth trajectory enabling Nick and I to issue dividends to shareholders over the course of the life of Easy Agile. We will continue to do this in the future and so Easy Agile shareholders will benefit long-term with dividends and voting rights that come with Ordinary shares.
4. You can nominate a trust
We allow you to nominate a trust to hold your share-holding. Nick and I are fans of getting serious about financial planning and literacy (just ask our team!). We wanted to give our team the most flexibility we could, so we allow for our team members to nominate a trust to receive their options instead of themselves personally.
What’s next?
We’re thrilled to be at this stage in our journey as it enables Nick and I to better reward the team who have built Easy Agile with us.
We’re even more excited about the journey ahead. We have big plans, the ability to invest in our team, our products, our growth and most importantly the impact we are having for our customers.
We’re always hiring so please reach out if you want to be part of the team that’s leading the way in helping companies around the world be agile.
💬 “We hope one day many of our Easy Agile team will find themselves as founders of successful companies and continue this tradition with their own ESOPs”
ProductRethinking our UI: How Easy Agile innovates for a better user experience
At Easy Agile, we’re constantly looking for new ways to improve our products, and one of the ways we foster innovation is through Dash Days—a focused period where our team steps away from daily tasks to experiment, explore, and reimagine how our tools can better serve customers.
During our most recent Dash Days, we took a fresh look at the user interface of two of our flagship products, Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs. The goal was to enhance interaction and discoverability, so users can experience the full value of our tools without unnecessary complexity.
Here’s a glimpse into our thought process, challenges, and the exciting solutions we explored.
The challenge
As Easy Agile TeamRhythym and Easy Agile Programs have evolved, we’ve introduced powerful features designed to give users more control and flexibility. However, as new capabilities have been added, the interface has become more elaborate. For us, this presents an opportunity—an opportunity to take a step back, simplify the experience, and help users unlock more of what our products offer.
To address this, we brought people from across the business together to brainstorm how we could improve the experience in both products. Through these sessions, we identified a few core opportunities:
- Discoverability: How do we make it easier for users to find and use the powerful features built into our tools?
- Visibility: What’s the best way to surface the right information and features when users need them?
- Consistency: How do we create a more uniform experience within and across our products to make navigation intuitive?
Armed with these insights, we then set out to explore solutions tailored to each product’s unique challenges.
A more personalized experience with Easy Agile Programs
For Programs, we focused on three “how might we” questions to reframe our challenges into opportunities:
- How might we create more focus on the actions users are trying to complete?
- How might we make navigation more intuitive and easy?
- How might we help users with more context about where they are in the app at any given screen?
Out of the many solutions we explored, the one that got us the most excited was the idea of an Easy Agile Programs Home Screen—a personalized dashboard designed to guide users based on where they are in their planning cycle.
Conceptual sketch of the Easy Agile Programs home screen This home screen could adapt based on where users are in their journey, offering relevant guidance and actions.
- For new users, the home screen could provide clear onboarding steps and easy access to help, so they can get started quickly and confidently.
- For experienced users, it could offer insights and key actions related to their progress, so they can stay focused on what matters most. Users might even see data summarizing their accomplishments, which makes it easier to share successes with their teams.
Whether someone’s brand new to the product or deep into execution, the home screen could be a great way to guide and coach our users—helping them answer questions like, "What should I be doing next?" or "What extra value am I missing out on?".
A more focused interface for Easy Agile TeamRhythm
For TeamRhythym, our three key “how might we” questions were:
- How might we provide more focus within the User Story Map during sprint planning?
- How might we improve the discoverability of issues without epics?
- How might we enhance the layout to highlight key features and improve overall usability?
With these questions in mind, we explored a range of ideas to simplify sprint planning and make it easier for users to prep, plan, and review their work, whether they’re using Scrum or Kanban.
Three steps to simplify sprint planning on Easy Agile TeamRhythm Sprint planning can sometimes feel overwhelming when you have multiple sprints competing for attention. To help users focus, so we explored the idea of introducing a focused view during sprint planning.
- This would allow users to zoom in on a specific sprint and the backlog alone, while collapsing others.
- Each issue would have its own row in the detailed view, and users can drag and drop either an entire row or drag individual issues to quickly rank them based on priorities.
- The sprint view will also hide epics that don’t have linked issues in the current sprint, giving users a cleaner view of what’s relevant to their current work.
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's focused view for sprint planning 
Conceptual UI of TeamRhythm User Story Map's detailed sprint view We also looked at ways to enhance the User Story Map interface to bring the most useful tools and features to the forefront. By improving how key functionality is presented, we’re helping teams quickly access what they need, when they need it, enabling them to stay productive without interruption.
.gif)
Conceptual UI of a more condensed top navigation for TeamRhythm User Story Map This way, we can create a smoother, more focused experience for teams using TeamRhythm, so they can focus on what’s in front of them without being distracted by everything else.
Your turn. What do you think?
At Easy Agile, we’re always thinking about what comes next.
These ideas aren’t on our official roadmap just yet, but they’re the kind of innovations we’re excited to explore.
If you think these changes would improve your experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm and Easy Agile Programs, let us know! Your feedback helps us decide what to prioritize, so we can continue building tools that truly make a difference for your teams.
Agile Best PracticeHow Practicing Kindness Creates High Performing Agile Teams
Psychological safety is the key to high-performing teams. But how is it created?
Agility is the response to a complicated situation where unknowns override the knowns. A high-performing team is one where all members have their say, and there are multiple decision-makers. Psychological safety is the belief that the workplace is safe for speaking up about ideas, concerns or even failures.
But where does kindness fit in?
Kindness is the foundation for psychological safety.
Kindness is essential at each of the first three stages of Dr Timothy R. Clark 4 Stages of Psychological Safety model.
Stage 1: Inclusion Safety
Humans long to feel accepted before they need to be heard. As a leader, you can create inclusion by showing kindness by being aware, sensitive and curious about an employee’s life. A good starting place is; how was your weekend? How is the family this week? Have you got any exciting celebrations coming up? You seem a bit quiet today, is everything okay?
Stage 2: Learner Safety
Humans need to ask questions, give and receive feedback, and make mistakes whilst feeling safe. Showing kindness creates the trust to do so.
Stage 3: Contributor Safety
Humans need to feel safe to participate as team members. A commitment to kindness ensures greater information flow, higher quality connections at work, and an increase in collaboration.
Individuals thrive in environments with psychological safety. Fear triggers the self-censoring instinct, holding us back. When the environment nurtures psychological safety, there is an increase in confidence, engagement, and high performance.
3 Tips for Implementing Kindness in Your Team Today
Tip 1: Model kindness yourself. No matter your role, kindness is contagious. If you start acting kindly, this will soon spread to your whole team. You can serve with kindness by listening, working with forgiveness, offering a helping hand, showing concern, or celebrating significant events in a coworker's life.
To celebrate random acts of kindness day and live our Give Back company value, our team donated to Kind Hearts Illawarra.
Tip 2: Incorporate kindness into your team's ceremonies. Each team member can say one thing they are grateful for in the morning huddle. Each ceremony can leave room to give thanks to a fellow team member. At Easy Agile, we put this into practice by encouraging everyone to share a 'good thing' each day.
Tip 3: Implement Good Thnx in your company Slack. The Good Thnx Foundation provides a link between people and corporates that want to give and charities. As our team send “thanks” to one another, the recipient is given $50 to donate to a charity of their choice. Our contribution via Good Thnx for FY21 was $15,201.
Simply put, be kind today; it is free and enables high-performing agile teams!