Easy Agile Podcast Ep.11 Dave Elkan & Nick Muldoon on building Easy Agile

"Lieschen's wealth of experience is absolutely incredible! Not only did she provide invaluable advice, but I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation."

In this episode Caitlin Mackie is joined by Lieschen Gargano Sr, Release Train Engineer at Scaled Agile. They delve into the role of the Release Train Engineer, sharing tips and tricks, FLOW activities, lessons learned and how to get started in the role. With SAFe Summit 2023 just around the corner, Lieschen also takes some time to talk about what she’s most excited about for the event and shared some advice for first time attendees.

If Lieschen's expertise and passion have piqued your interest, be sure to explore the Scaled Agile RTE course. It provides comprehensive training, equipping you with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel as an RTE.

Scaled Agile RTE course

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript:

Caitlin Mackie:

Hi there. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, your host for today's episode. At Easy Agile we specialize in developing apps for Atlassian Jira that help your team move from simply doing agile to truly being agile. Our apps have gained recognition and trust from over 160,000 users across top companies worldwide. With our products, teams can transform their flat Jira backlogs into something visually meaningful and easy to understand. Whether it's sprint planning, retrospectives, or PI planning, our apps are designed to foster seamless team alignment.

Before we begin the episode, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment towards reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Let's jump into today's episode. So today I'm joined by Lieschen Gargano, a senior release train engineer at Scaled Agile. Lieschen is a highly experienced professional when it comes to change management, system design and stakeholder engagement, and has a passion for developing teams and connecting strategy to execution. Lieschen welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast.

Lieschen Gargano:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Caitlin Mackie:

So Lieschen, you are a release train engineer. For our listeners, can you explain a little bit about the role? For anyone that's not familiar, how would you describe a Release Train Engineer?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I think one of the easiest ways for people to think of a Release Train Engineer is kind of like a coach or scrum master for the art, for the Agile release train. A servant leader facilitating all of those art events, facilitating the processes and process improvements. And really measured in value delivery, and using flow metrics to measure those improvements and support of the arts.

Caitlin Mackie:

So you mentioned flow metrics there. I've heard a lot about this recently and optimizing flow. What are some of those flow activities that a RT is responsible for?

Lieschen Gargano:

I like to look at feature flow and cycle time. So really looking like are we bringing all of our features in progress at once or are we managing our WIP, not just at the team level but at the art level. Are we taking the whole PI to get a feature through the system, or are we able to finish something before we start the next thing? So I look at that a lot and also just are we making and meeting commitments. Those PI objectives that we set, are we in that 80-100% range? A lot of people want full credit, extra credit and to be in the 120, but for us, predictability really means you tried really hard and you stretched, but you also still made and met commitments. So I look at that really closely too.

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. You mentioned just then quite a lot of different responsibilities that a RTE has. Do you think that there is one in particular that you really need to get right from the start?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, as an RTE, I think the biggest thing is building the relationships and intention. As a servant leader, we really are there to help make the art better, to make being on the art enjoyable and productive and flow. So building that trust and those relationships as a servant leader is the first thing. If you get that wrong, no one will help you do the rest.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah-

Lieschen Gargano:

And you need a lot of help. You're not doing anything alone as an RTE.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes. Yeah, for sure. I can definitely imagine that. Let's go a little bit deeper on that servant leadership that you just mentioned. Can you share your approach and what servant leadership means to you?

Lieschen Gargano:

Servant leadership to me is helping people understand the direction, communicating early and often so that they know where you're going. And then not just saying, "how can I help you get there? What can I do?" But saying, "how can we go together?" A lot of coaching and understanding the problem to solve and connecting it to how it benefits the people. Just like we ask them to connect their work to how it benefits the customer. As the RT, they're my customer. How does what I'm asking you to change benefit you? Not changing is always easier than changing even if we don't like our current state. So why is it worth it?

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. Yeah, always asking the why and being really clear on it. Yeah, I think that's great. I've done some LinkedIn digging of your profile, as you do, had a little bit of a stalk and noticed that you hosted a webinar recently on tips and tricks and lessons learned as an RTE. Can we start with maybe some tips and tricks? What can you share?

Lieschen Gargano:

The first thing I will say is lean on the Scrum master team, and if you're lucky enough to have an Agile coach or another RTE, lean on that team. Your lean Agile Center of Excellence, those people have the expertise. They're also building the relationships. They're there to help you. Don't try to just prove yourself or go it alone, it's not possible. That team is your team for success. So 100% go to them. They're a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of relationships, and the best support.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I know it's so important to have that support network around you. You just mentioned the Agile Center of Excellence. Maybe for some of our listeners aren't familiar, could you explain what that is?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah, so the Lean Agile Center of Excellence can look a few different ways depending on your organization. At our organization, it is the coach, release managers, RTEs and Scrum masters or team coaches. And some larger organizations than ours might have that hub and spoke model of a centralized change leader. And then RTEs and Scrum masters that are in different arts and around the org. And some even have separate laces in different parts of the organization if it's really big. But really they are that community of practice that holds your lean Agile practices and the standards of those practices and talks to each other and debates and evolves them to make sure that it's consistent throughout the org. That the org is getting consistent coaching, consistent guidance, and they're not being told five different things about how to transform. Because again, change and being lean is so hard. If you add too many voices into that coaching, it gets really overwhelming for folks.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes, 100%. And an Agile transformation is already overwhelming as it is, so you can imagine that laid on top. I suppose speaking, if we explore a little bit around those on an agile transformation journey, at what point would you say it's important that that lean Agile Center of Excellence is formed?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, I think it should be in place pretty quick. I mean, we talk about training your leaders, training your experts and then doing safer teams and launching trains. You need that Center of Excellence there from the start so that they can go out to the rest of the org that they can do all that training and they can be there to support people through title changes, role changes. Launching an art can feel very scary to folks. If you don't have that in place beforehand, you're going to have a lot to reel in after the fact.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I really like that. It's almost having this really solid foundation and unified voice to sort of go forward and support the rest of the org.

Lieschen Gargano:

And it's so great to have consultants support, to have partners come in and help you and to have the right tools, but they need the help of people inside. They need that lean Agile Center of Excellence of employees inside the company to help you be successful. As an RTE, you need your team. Anybody, any tool, any people trying to do a change, a transformation are going to need that Center of Excellence because all those parts, that's what makes the whole.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you mentioned as an RTE, a big tip or trick is to rely on that lean Agile Center of Excellence. What do you think has been your biggest lesson learned as an RT?

Lieschen Gargano:

There are a few things that have been particularly difficult for me. One of them is that I don't like to say no and not in that I take on too much or whatever, but more in that if someone has passion for something, I want them to be able to take it on. I want them to be able to move forward with it. And there are times where we really have to say it's too much change. It's too much for this group to manage. In particular, the Scrum Masters and RTEs people come to us for a lot of things and they need that consistency from us, and they need predictability in a change to feel like we know where they're going and if we introduce too many things or if we try to hold too many things at once, it's easy for us to forget about it later or drop something else. So learning when and how to say no, again not necessarily in that capacity way, but just in the width of change, if that makes sense.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. I think that what you just said there, learning how and when to say no. I think that's not even exclusive to the RTE role as well. I think that's an amazing piece of advice for anyone listening and to share across our audiences, because I know it's definitely something I struggle with as well. So that's my takeaway from this is to, okay, I'm going to constantly imagine like 'no Lieschen told me to when and how to say no', and just focus on that. So yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. What was your journey like to an RTE? I know we caught up last week and I got a little sneak preview into this, and I know it wasn't straightforward, so if you can share a little bit about that, that would be great.

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I actually started in conflict resolution. I worked in public private reconciliation doing a lot of natural resources facilitation, so hundreds of people, governments, companies, private landowners, residents, trying to bring all those people together to get to consensus or at least to build relationships that allow them to move forward. So really strong foundation and facilitation in particular, and just day-to-day conflict. When we say conflict, we get so worried, 'oh, I don't do conflict', well conflict's everything all the time. It's all the disagreements we need to succeed in life. So that gave me a great foundation when I became a scrum master, and I did that for a few years working with development teams. One of my favorite teams was our infrastructure team, 10 foot pole because no one wanted to touch their work or the 10 foot pole, and I learned so much there and eventually became a coach and started doing more strategic planning and coaching parts of the organization that weren't used to being on arts. Marketing and other groups, which helped me transition to Scaled Agile, where I started working with our CMO and as he grew the marketing team, helping coach that marketing group into an agile way of working, a safe way of working, before actually becoming a product owner, because I loved organizing around value, and I loved those different topics that we were working on internally.

And one of the people I work with at Scale Agile said, "well, help us develop the product then for everybody else". So I did that for a little while, which gave me so much power in that learning how to say no and prioritize and coaching people to decisions is one thing, but as the product owner, I had to practice being where the buck stopped. There are five right decisions, just make one so that people are unblocked, and that prepared me really well for transitioning into RT.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You have such a wealth of experience there across so many different roles, and you can really see that each of those key roles have taught you something valuable that you can take into this RTE role. So I think that's amazing. It's so cool to see that even though it's not this straightforward linear journey, there's all these parts that there's traits within each that ladder up to helping you succeed as an RT. So I think that's really cool.

Lieschen Gargano:

And I know people are afraid to make some of those lateral moves sometimes, but the skills that you can build might just be that thing that gets you other open doors that you didn't even think about.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love that. Yeah, just embrace every opportunity for what it may be, what it may not be. You don't know until you give it a shot. So I think, yeah, I love that. I think that's really great advice. So everything we've spoken about in regards to being a Release Train Engineer may have really hit the spot for some of our listeners. How does someone get there? Were there certifications, courses? What's the process that way?

Lieschen Gargano:

Another thing I probably did backwards. I started with a scrum master cert and then actually ended up getting a SPC certification through Scaled Agile when I was a coach. Because I was a coach before I was an RTE, and I learned about so many other parts of the business that way. But then to become an actual RTE, taking the safe RTE course, but then actually there's a community of RTEs... Which we didn't really talk about this, but being an RTE is a lonely thing. I said earlier, if you're lucky to have another RTE, this is a lonely role. You're really kind of on your own. So not just getting that cert, but being part of that community and being able to send people messages and ask them crazy questions was part of my certification process, but also just community building to where I could feel like I had the connections and competence. So yeah, I found all of them similar to holding each of the roles, also getting that certification, just another tool in the tool belt.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, for sure. I don't want to touch on something you said there about an RTE being sometimes quite a lonely role. What do you think makes it lonely?

Lieschen Gargano:

It's a role that a lot of people have strong opinions about what they need and what success looks like based on where they are in the organization. And there are usually few of you, and even if you're in a large organization with many, you're with your art, you're very focused on your section, and so having all of those pulls and expectations and not having anyone who understands what that feels like just makes it kind of lonely. Now that we have two RTEs and a coach at Scaled Agile, it makes a big difference for me because they are right there in it with me and it's very helpful.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You can see in that scenario why that community of RTEs is like you said, so important to lean on them as well. Yeah.

Lieschen Gargano:

I find even just connecting to RT's outside our organization too. I grabbed beers with one a couple weeks ago. Those little things, even if you can find that person, meet them at a summit, meet them out in the wild, find them on LinkedIn and just say, "Hey, we live in the same area. We have the same role". It can go a long way because it may seem weird to reach out like that, but they probably are looking for that connection too.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thank you so much for sharing. And for any of our listeners, I might pop some links to any certifications and some scout Agile courses. I'll pop that in our episode notes, so feel free to check those out. You mentioned about connecting with other RTs and meeting at summits, which is a really nice segue to the next part of our conversation. Just around the corner is the 2023 Safe Summit and we're heading to Nashville Music City. What can we expect from Safe Summit? What are you looking forward to?

Lieschen Gargano:

Well, what I'm most looking forward to is that I am putting together an RTE breakfast. So all RTEs are welcome, or even if you're a solution train engineer or you do the role of an RTE with a different title. I'm really excited to meet with those folks over breakfast and just chat it out. And my goal with that really is to have people to connect with so that as we go through the rest of the summit, listening to the talks that we have people enroll, that we can check back in with over drinks and stuff on the later days and say, 'oh, what do you think? How might that work?' So that's what I'm most looking forward to.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing.

Lieschen Gargano:

But obviously there are going to be some great talks and the product labs are always really fun. We get to play with the product together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, cool. Tell me a little bit about the product labs, what's involved in that?

Lieschen Gargano:

The product team puts it together and they have computers set up and you can bring your own and they talk through some of the new releases or things they're working on and help you log into it and use it in your context, but also try to get some feedback on how it works or how you might use it in your organization. So it's a nice two-way street. It's sort of, 'I need this, how might I do it?' And then them saying, 'well, why don't you try and let me see how it works and how we should change it based on how you interact with it'. So it's just really fun. It feels really practical because it's so hands on.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, amazing. I love that. I'm definitely going to have to try and come along and suss that out. It sounds really great. Where do you hope or where do you think we'll see a lot of conversations focused at this year's Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

At Safe Summit I think the conversations will be really focused on just the day-to-day of Safe. We have new topics that come up. We obviously have new ideas that are going to be presented. But every time I go to one of these, it really is the connecting one-on-one to say, here's where I'm stuck, here's what I'm trying to learn. So we'll hear a lot about Flow, we'll hear about Team Topologies, but we'll also hear those 'I'm just getting started and we're stuck, we have change fatigue. We don't know if our arts are set up correctly'. A lot of those classic conversations that are just really impactful and why people come together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I love that. Creating these spaces for people to bond over shared experiences and problems they're facing or wins they're seeing and sharing them. I think that's where these events are amazing for creating that kind of environment. Lieschen, this is my very first Safe Summit. I haven't been to one before and I'm really excited. What advice would you have for first time attendees, returning attendees, what's the way to get the most out of Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

If you're attending with other people from your organization, the best thing is to split up so you can cover more ground and then come back together and share. The second advice is find people with a similar role as you, because again, you can do that same thing with those folks and split up and then meet up again and try to talk about it in your context. It's great to do that at the parties too, because we throw great parties, but that's the best because no matter what room you end up in, what talk you end up at, you're going to get a great nugget. But where it really sinks in for me is talking with someone else about what I heard and then thinking about, 'okay what does that mean?', when I go home.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing, great advice Lieschen. If anyone listening happens to also be attending Safe Summit and they see Lieschen on the floor or myself, make sure you say hello, and if you've got any questions for Lieschen about the podcast episode, I'm sure she'll be more than happy to answer and engage in a great conversation. And anyone looking to get advice around the RTE role, make sure you find her and have a chat. Lieschen I'm really excited to meet in person. We've done this podcast with yourself in the States, myself in Australia, so I'm excited to connect over in your world. And yeah, really thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I know, I sure did.

Lieschen Gargano:

I did. Thank you.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thanks, Lieschen.

On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, join Nick Muldoon and Dave Elkan, Co-CEO's and Co Founders of Easy Agile. As they look forward to the next phase of growth for the company, they wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on their journey so far.

Nick and Dave talk growing a start-up in regional Australia, finding the right people, sustaining a positive team culture and the importance of having values driven teams.

"Our purpose is to help teams be agile and in doing that, we're doing that for ourselves, we're constantly trying to learn and adapt and experiment with new things. I hope that was a useful little tidbit and journey from Dave and I on how we got Easy Agile to this point."

- Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO, Easy Agile

"There's these funny little hacks and analogies and I think that's a longterm vision thing. If you are running a business which doesn't have that longterm vision and purpose, then you can go actually in multiple directions at once, and you're not going to make any progress."

- Dave Elkan, Co-CEO, Easy Agile

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

Good day, folks. Nick Muldoon with co-founder, co-CEO of Easy Agile, Dave Elkan. Before we kick off, we'd just like to do an acknowledgement to the traditional custodians of the land on which we broadcast and record today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal Nation. We pay our respects to elders, past and present, and extend that same respect to any of our aboriginal folks that are listening today.

Nick Muldoon:

Dave, just a bit of a reflection on five and a half years of business?

Dave Elkan:

Business? Yeah, a rollercoaster. It's been great fun.

Nick Muldoon:

It is a rollercoaster, isn't it? I guess, where's the best place to start? The best place to start is at the start.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, I mean we can go before the start. There's always a good prequel. We can do a prequel episode later, I guess. But I guess the earliest I remember working with you, Nick, was at Level 15 at Kent Street, at Atlassian. There was this redheaded guy down the one end of the building, working on Atlassian GreenHopper and I was busy working on the Kick-Ass team at the time, building the new issue navigator, which is now the old issue navigator, back in 2011. And then you screwed off to San Francisco and I followed eventually, and then we hung out there for a while, didn't we?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, I remember that because we sat down, I was back to get married, and we sat down and had a coffee and a yarn about you and Rin relocating to San Francisco and how it had been for Liz and I, and what the process was like and all that sort of stuff.

Dave Elkan:

That's a great opportunity to acknowledge our lives in this amazing journey as well and if it wasn't for those, we probably wouldn't have gone to San Francisco in the first place, because a large part of the promotion of going overseas and doing that for me anyway, and for yourself, I'm pretty sure.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Well, Liz was this big conversation of go overseas and experience something new and I was quite comfortable in Sydney and enjoying my role with product management at Atlassian, but it was really a push to try and experience and do something a bit different.

Dave Elkan:

Absolutely, same here. And you were there for over four years, in San Francisco, and I was there for three. But you came home, you got married, and I just grabbed you for a coffee and we sat there in Martin Place and had a chat, and you said, "Yeah, it's great. Come over, you can stay with me for two weeks." And I'm like, "Oh, I barely know you."

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, but it was so much. I mean, even not knowing Liz or I, it was way better than the alternative. So for folks listening in, the Atlassian apartment, at the time, was in a fairly rough part of The Tenderloin in San Francisco, and it probably wasn't the greatest introduction if someone was relocating to San Francisco.

Dave Elkan:

No. But to cut a long story, there's a lot of good stories here I'm sure we can tell one day, but eventually, we both had daughters in San Francisco and we wanted to be home and closer to family. Then we came home to Sydney and found that the traffic is 20% worse or 50% worse than when we left and we were uprooted. So once you've been uprooted, you've got to plant yourself back somewhere and it's quite easy to change at that point, and you've chosen to go outside of Sydney.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, this Wollongong regional lifestyle.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, where you can have a full block of land to yourself without breaking the bank and you can, relatively speaking, like times have changed a bit in that space, but since then, that's what we were chasing, wasn't it? And we looked at Newcastle, and-

Nick Muldoon:

Looked at Newcastle, looked at Brisbane, Adelaide, we even went through Wagga Wagga. We had the most amazing Indian meal in Wagga Wagga, we were almost like, "This is the place. If we can get food like this in Wagga, we're sweet." Bit too cold, but we ended up settling on Wollongong, in large part because of the proximity to the beach and the Early Start Discovery Space for the kids and just a pretty cool, chill place to raise a family. There are aspects of it as well, I think, that really reminded Liz and I of San Francisco. We used to go to the farmers market down at the Ferry Building a lot on a Saturday morning, and we found the farmers market on a Friday in Wollongong on Crown Street North, so there were these similarities to kind of enable us to transfer from one city to the other fairly easily.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. It's a pretty easy place to live and to be. The way I like turn it, is it's just far enough away from Sydney.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, a nice little national park in between.

Dave Elkan:

That's right, it can't really encroach on us, it's not allowed. You can't build there so you're always going to have that buffer. But I do remember going back to Sydney for a niece's birthday and having been charged $9 an hour for parking at the beach, considering you don't even have a parking sticker anymore because I wasn't a resident, and I was like, "Wow, it's really expensive." But for anyone coming to Wollongong or the other way, you can park for free at the beach. That's just kind of like a good litmus test of the difference that we're talking about here.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I guess this regional life, like we didn't really have a tech industry here. We come from Sydney where, 10 years ago, there was this emerging tech scene and SydJS, SydCSS, other meetups up there, and in San Francisco we were thrust right in the middle of it. I remember, we were chatting the other week about a meetup where we met, the Ruby Creator at a Heroku meetup, I think it was, and a session on [detrace 00:06:17] at that company that's gone bust now, whose name I can't even remember, but we were in the heart of all the meetups in San Francisco. Then in Wollongong, there was none of it, and so it was like a question of what could we do to build a community here as well, try and meet other like minded folks?

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, it was definitely that desire, wasn't there? And we set out to do that, and I think it was Rin who termed it Siligong. I remember we were actually talking about Siligong Valley before we actually left, and we just decided to make that the name of the community. I was actually looking back on my old emails the other day and I was like, "Oh, we actually talked about Siligong before being in Wollongong," so that's pretty cool.

Nick Muldoon:

I remember early days because I think you and Rin returned on flight with [Umi 00:07:08], and Umi was six or eight weeks old.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, October.

Nick Muldoon:

If I'm not mistaken, I dropped you at your mom's place so that you could catch up with your mom and Ken and that was kind of like home base. And it was a couple of months after that or something, where we finally had you down here. I think you stayed with Liz and I when you came down here-

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, again for two weeks.

Nick Muldoon:

... for another couple of weeks, and we were really talking about the genesis of what was, at the time, what was termed Arijea Products, and a brand that we never ended up sticking with. What do you remember about those early days and trying to get the business off the ground?

Dave Elkan:

Actually, come to think of it, you were staying in, not Coniston, [Carmila 00:07:59], it was actually less than two weeks because we all had little kids and it was just a bit crazy. So I think Rin and I organized... we came down and did inspections and we stayed with you whilst we're doing that, and then we were able to secure a place in Fairy Meadow and we moved down, so we were going back and forth a bit at that point. And then it was this six months of just literally... I didn't have a bike, I just walked to work, which is super new to me. I've always caught the bus or ridden my bike.

Dave Elkan:

Some of you may know I've never commuted to work and I hopefully will never have to do that, and we've engineered our lives around that kind of concept. But I think that it was really great, I was just living within two kilometers' walk of work, and that was for at least the first six months until I moved to Balgownie, but it was great time of my life and we had a brand new baby and just concentrating on the business, trying to [crosstalk 00:09:00]-

Nick Muldoon:

I remember, we really didn't have much of an idea of what we were doing in early days. We chased down one area and we said, "No, that's not appropriate," and then we kind of turned our attention to something else.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. We were chasing our tails a little bit. We, at one point, had five products with two people.

Nick Muldoon:

That's right.

Dave Elkan:

I think that, that's too much, but with good conversations with the fellows around us at IXI, that we were able to have... like they were asking good questions and I remember Rob and Nathan asking us, "What is it you're good at?" And I think it was Rin, was like, "Okay, you've got this app idea, who're you going to market it to? Look at your networks." And it was, all those arrows started pointing towards Agile.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, I think it was this idea that Rin had like, "You can build it and they will come, or you can figure out your go-to market and your distribution piece, and what's the audience that you've already got, and how do you leverage the audience that you've already got in Agile Software Development to kind of seed and build that audience, and get some momentum?" And that's what really kicked us along and got us going. If I'm not mistaken, I think we'd actually... not that we had a lot of outgoings, but I think we were actually break-even by June of 2016, and it was kind of like this, "Hurray," moment because we were not going to have to get on the train and commute to Sydney for working at Atlassian or something like that. We'd found product-market fit and we could kind of pursue and go to the next stage.

Dave Elkan:

That's right, yeah. There's a lot in that story as well, like how we found product-market fit and the steps towards that and lots of learnings from that time as well, which is great to share eventually, I guess, but we might go down a rabbit hole if we jump into that one. But I certainly do remember good considered conversations that were held by lamingtons and tea in the Mike Codd building at the Innovation Campus at University of Wollongong, where we started. And that was really just a time to... it felt different to my prior, at the time 15 years of experience, where you actually, it's okay to stop and talk and think about what you're doing, whereas in the past, it's just been, "Go, go, go, build this thing." And it's like, "Oh, okay," so that was really refreshing for me and I think that, that was a really good step in opening up what became the story map, which was our first really successful product.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). You mentioned the lamingtons and tea, it was probably at least 50% of our time getting the business off the ground, was lamingtons and tea. It was chatting about stuff, it wasn't writing code, we didn't have customers to speak of. It was really trying to figure out what sort of market did we want to pursue, what solutions did we want to provide and what sort of business did we want to create? That was a large part of our time getting it off the ground.

Dave Elkan:

Absolutely. And for those listeners out there who don't know what a lamington is, it's actually a delicious piece of sponge cake dipped in chocolate sauce and then coconut, shredded coconut, so I know you can buy them in US, we actually did that at Atlassian and they were a huge success, especially because they had cream inside them as well, so real good for a cup of tea or coffee, whatever you take. But the thing is that it's a good idea to sit down with a co-founder and talk a lot more than you type, that's the kind of rule I took out of that.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting because it was kind of like that approach to talking instead of typing that was kind of like the genesis of one of our values, this engaged system, too. And I don't think you'd read Kahneman's book at that time, and that was something that came later, but even just this idea of, "Now, let's just take the time to think and process this sort of stuff," and the context [crosstalk 00:13:09]-

Dave Elkan:

No, I do remember. Sorry, yeah. I did a presentation at Lansing Summit in 2017 on Engaged System too.

Nick Muldoon:

16 or 17?

Dave Elkan:

16 or 17, I can't remember which one it is.

Nick Muldoon:

'16 because you went to Barcelona in '16.

Dave Elkan:

Barcelona, and that's what I did there, wasn't it? Yeah, so that was early on that I read Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I highly recommend.

Nick Muldoon:

And the context around this, for folks listening; in mid 2016, Dave had a nine month old daughter. My daughter was two years old and I had a newborn and you were to have... your number two was on the way, right? So we were building a business as we were starting and establishing our families as well, so it was, "Let's do it all," in a new city. Like, "Let's do it all at once."

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, you might as well, right? Just bite it all off and rip the Band-Aid off and get it done. I mean, my daughters were only 18 months apart, so that kind of... just get it over and done with. Get the hard part done and then you can go and enjoy yourself afterwards, just kidding. It's great to have lots of kids at a young age, like I really do miss that time. But yeah, we were pretty crazy, but we got through.

Nick Muldoon:

It gave us a constraint as well, didn't it? Because we couldn't burn the midnight oil, we couldn't flog ourselves from 05:00 AM to midnight because we simply did not have the energy and we had to get kids fed and bathed and off to bed and all that sort of stuff. So it brought a cadence and now that I reflect on that, there was another value that was kind of coming out of that, which was with respect to our balance and establishing balance in our lives.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah I do remember, sorry to interrupt, a tweet idea, I can probably dig it up, which was me hanging out cloth nappies or diapers on... it must've been, it was in Balgownie so that must've been after six months. But I was hanging out nappies and I must've been working from home that day or something like that, but that was just like me balancing life like that, with work. And I think it came back with like work, life, family balance or something like that. We would expand that to work life, family, community balance, is what we try and chase.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). How did we get on this journey around the values and kind of establishing the values? When was that in the life of the business?

Dave Elkan:

I can remember the place we were in, we were actually in our Crown Street office when we really sat down and really hunkered down into that, so that would've been 2018.

Nick Muldoon:

I think in November 2018, we held our first advanced Easy Agile, and that's where you ran the session, "What got us here won't get us there." And so at that point in time, we had the two products, we had Easy Agile User Story Maps and Easy Agile Roadmaps, and we had changed our brand from Arijea Products to Easy Agile, to kind of focus our energy on the Agile space. We divested the other three products that weren't focused on Agile, so we'd sold those off to another Atlassian Solution marketplace partner. I think that's where we started having these conversations around the next evolution of the growth of the business. Then it was in 2019 where we were back in Crown Street, back in the office, where we were having that conversation about codifying, establishing, writing down our values.

Dave Elkan:

That's right, and it's a highly valuable process to go through and to really just pause on the day to day, and really focus on it. That's something I've always had trouble with, like I've always got things to do, but once you just extract yourself from that process and zoom out and look at the company and what you've come up and what you hold dear, that's when you can really start having those conversations, but making it an actual thing. I think that you can't just do it on the side, you can't just do it as well as other things, it's really got to be like the priority as I like to say. Priority is not a plural, it doesn't make any sense if it's pluralized, but that should be the one thing you do in an ideal circumstance, like you just do it and really focus on it, because it's really hard.

Dave Elkan:

And it shouldn't, I guess not in one sitting, but at least when you do it, make it a serious thing because if they're real values and you live them, like they just are pretty immutable, they just keep moving forward with you. If you found you're not living them, then you should absolutely revisit them, but we've been lucky enough in that the values we put forward have stayed true and I really feel like, of all the companies I've worked at, even Atlassian, like these ones I've lived every day in very distinct ways.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). So what are the values we've got? We've talked about better with balance, and we talked about that a little bit. We also talked about engaged System 2 like this System 2 thinking. What are our values?

Dave Elkan:

Be the customer, give back, and [crosstalk 00:18:30]-

Nick Muldoon:

[crosstalk 00:18:30] was a big one, and commit to team. So better with balance, give back, be the customer, punch above our weight, Engaged System 2 and commit as a team. Go back to the conversation that we were having in 2017 around give back, that was something that was really System 2. How did we think about giving back to the community and what that meant to us as a company?

Dave Elkan:

I think it goes back to what you said before about the community in San Francisco we experienced and what we did here with Siligon and just making that a focal point for us to give back to the community. It doesn't build itself, like the community has to be actively built by somebody has to put their hand up and start it, and I think we did that. Since then, like we've enabled heaps of other people to be able to give back in a really easy kind of way like, "Let's host a meetup," "That's fine, here's our framework to go build that on." And also just the daily communication we have amongst each other on our Siligon Slack, which is just super valuable.

Nick Muldoon:

Super active, too.

Dave Elkan:

Oh, super active, especially in lockdown, lots of people on there talking about all sorts of things.

Nick Muldoon:

I think maybe one of the other things, so Dave and I experienced this at Atlassian, which was this idea of the Pledge 1%, but in our first or second year of Easy Agile, Atlassian along with Salesforce and a bunch of other companies came together to actually codify and build the foundation around Pledge 1% and ask other companies to commit to that. And we made that commitment in 2017 if I'm not mistaken, to do Pledge 1% donations and now, where I guess we're kind of doing Pledge 2% donations, but what was the drive behind our Pledge 1% to Room to Read?

Dave Elkan:

It's in part laziness, because I really want a system to these kinds of things and unfortunately, when you're starting a business it's hard to dedicate the time and to think about that. So I took the easy System 1 option, which is to go with what we experienced at Atlassian, which was to back Room to Read, which is a great initiative to help ensure that young ladies, specifically in third world countries, get at least a higher education, get out of primary school, get into high school, and once they've gotten to that point, it's far more likely they're going to be independent. And with that kind of thing, like that investment, it's like restarting at the beginning and enabling countries and people to help themselves. If they're educated, that's a huge step in the right direction to both fighting overpopulation, climate change, all these things which benefit from those people doing well in life.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, continually improving their lot in life, right? Like raising standards of living through education.

Dave Elkan:

That's right.

Nick Muldoon:

And if we think about punching above our weight as one of these other things, I mean I remember that was something that we talked about before we wrote down our values, that was something that we really did focus a lot of energy on. You mentioned before, there were two of us and we had five products in the marketplace. I'm not exactly sure that was a great example of punching above our weight, because we might've struggled a bit, but what are some examples of where we've punched above our weight as a small team from regional Australia?

Dave Elkan:

One of our products that we built initially was really a bit of a thorn in my side, it was continually breaking and it wasn't playing to my strengths, which is traditionally front end development. So after that and getting burned by that and having to stay up all night and fix it, I opted towards apps which are more front end focused, and so we've built Easy Agile User Story Maps and Easy Agile programs and Easy Agile Roadmaps primarily as front end apps. As a matter of fact, Easy Agile Roadmaps, for the first two years, didn't even have a server, it was just a static file in a bucket in CloudFront. That's the way Atlassian Connect works, it allows you to host apps that way, and that really can't break, it's just providing a different view on Jira in essence, but architecturally, it's quite simple. So therefore, we could easily... that was a way of punching above our weight, which also allows better rebalance, so they're kind of complimentary in that respect. What other ideas [crosstalk 00:23:24]-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, if not much can go wrong, then you don't have to be on call, and you don't have to fix things out of hours, so you don't wake up blurry eyed and fat finger and have a bug the next day that compounds the problem.

Dave Elkan:

And if you take the analogy too far, like you could think punch above your weight is like being able to punch someone really hard and then knock them over, but this is more like just definitely, you're running around the big [fur 00:23:44]. You're not even engaging in babble, you're just sidestepping it. That's why we've run those products, and until recently, we actually do have servers now for them, and once again, it's still very simple, but they're very well monitored so if something does go wrong, that we're on top of that.

Nick Muldoon:

I think one of the other aspects with respect to technology in punch above our weight, is we've quite often... I think maybe you mentioned before, with respect to Room to Read and the give back, the laziness, but we are lazy in certain respects and we just want to automate things. And I remember the XKCD comic that you share, with what is the right time to automate something and when do you automate it to get the return on investment that you want? But I feel like we've made some fairly good decisions around when to automate things and even around how we provide customer support or the old test and deploy, toying around with products, we've done these things at pretty good times so that we can deliver products to a global audience of a couple of thousand customers, from Wollongong out of timezone with those customers.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. It's also being ahead of the curve as well, so I think Inception Week, which is something we do every fifth week now, we give up one week to provide the team with the space to explore new things. Amazing things have come out of that, which otherwise, if you would just week to week, week to week, you would never actually realize, but when it comes to mind is our dev container, which is a docket container which contains all of the parts which are required to develop our apps. So you just check out this one repository, run a script and it sets up your entire develop environment. It's a great way for the team to share the tools that help them punch above their weight, so it's a huge punch above our weight thing and that came out of Inception Week. So I think Inception Week's a punch above thing, and also the dev container's a huge punch above thing.

Dave Elkan:

We used to have so many problems with individual versions of this or that on everyone's computer, and now that's just all gone, it's never happening again, it's never come back to bite us since, and I think it's an overwhelming success. Sure, it does need an all new RAM and all new CPU, but it does... we'll get there, like it's going to get better.

Nick Muldoon:

RAM and CPU are cheap, it's okay.

Dave Elkan:

You can never get time back, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about these things, how intentional do you think we were around the values in our approach to building and scaling a company versus things that just kind of happened?

Dave Elkan:

For a large part of the starting of the business, there was a lot of, "Just get it done," kind of mentality stuff, which has to happen. However, I want to hop back to when we started, everything was chaos. I remember this, early 2018, mid 2018, we'd come in on Monday, go, "What are we doing today? What's this week? Let's look at the backlog and have a look." And there was no forethought whatsoever.

Nick Muldoon:

And we'd kick a couple of things off the backlog and we'd just work through on that weekend. That was it, right?

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, pretty much. And so you proposed the idea, it was at the beginning of the year, it must've been 2018. Was it 2019? Either way, let's just do one week on clarity, which is our internal CI room, essentially, and just knock out a bunch of products and problems. That was the first time we started really focusing, because since we had so many products, I think we actually might've sold them by now at this point. Yeah, I think we definitely had. However [crosstalk 00:27:28]-

Nick Muldoon:

But we still had Roadmaps, Story Maps, Clarity Week, EACS, like we had other internal systems that we used and the team was actually growing beyond Dave and me, and it was growing. There was Jared and Satvik and Rob, and so the team was growing at that point in time as well. So it gave us the opportunity to put a number of people onto one problem for a period of time, like a week.

Dave Elkan:

That's right, and from that came this idea of focus, and we started doing focused sprints, so product focus sprints, which highlighted another terrible problem of run over, if you did run over in your estimates, then you would have to come back like in nine weeks or something and it was just [diabolical 00:28:12].

Nick Muldoon:

That's right.

Dave Elkan:

So we dropped [crosstalk 00:28:14]-

Nick Muldoon:

What did we do? We did two weeks on Story Maps, two weeks on Roadmaps, two weeks on internal systems, two weeks on something and then one week on Inception Week?

Dave Elkan:

Inception Week. Yeah, I think [crosstalk 00:28:26]-

Nick Muldoon:

I can't even remember now, what that other thing was.

Dave Elkan:

It was nine weeks in total, wasn't it?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Dave Elkan:

[crosstalk 00:28:31] Roadmaps-

Nick Muldoon:

If you missed it and you didn't ship it, then we went onto the next product and moved that forward, and then we'd come back to it.

Dave Elkan:

In ages away. And it was super stressful for the team and we quickly destroyed that, the week we went with a more flexible approach to it, where we dropped the hard mandate of you have to exchange products now, we let them run over a bit and then we'd adjust the story points to the next one, blah, blah, blah. And then eventually, I'm scratching my memory, but essentially, we got to a point where we introduced opportunities, which was based loosely on Shape Up by Basecamp and we took a bunch of things from that, but most things of that didn't really gel with our way of working and our values.

Nick Muldoon:

I mean that whole opportunity cycle, we've evolved three or four times now.

Dave Elkan:

And they were ideally just two or four weeks of work, and then we'd do Inception Week and Tech Debt week, and we have a dedicated Tech Debt week as a mandate. We dropped that since, and we've got to now we have four weeks of work, which includes Tech Debt and then we have Inception Week, and that's kind of cool, right? Like we still have this mandate of Inception week, not Tech Debt week. That's the last thing; I feel like the mandates... because it's like kick starting your motorbike, you've got to really give a good kick and that's essentially what we've been trying to do over the last three years, is like get this thing running. I think we've-

Nick Muldoon:

Built momentum.

Dave Elkan:

The engine is now running... yeah. The engine is now running and we're pulling the clutch out. It's just that the mandates slowly fall away and the team finds their own way, but I still feel that, that cycle is the most important thing, that five weeks where we stop, everyone knows what's happening. Because if it just runs off into the future forever, you can't compute that in your mind, but you can see forward five weeks and go, "I'm going to plan this work, it's not going to be done to a Nth degree because that's kind of a bit weird," it's just like, "Let's try and achieve this and let's bite off one bit at a time." Then we have a break with Inception Week, let our creative juices flow and then we'll come back to it the next round.

Nick Muldoon:

Right, so I have to call timeout here. So this is a sidebar for everyone listening at home; Dave just used this analogy of kick starting the motorcycle and then pulling the clutch out. So one of the things that Dave does tremendously well, is he grabs these analogies and he uses these analogies to simplify what I otherwise feel can be fairly complex kind of concepts, and simplify them and communicate them really nicely. That's not one I've heard before but there's a new one we can add to the repertoire, Dave. I love it.

Dave Elkan:

Thanks, mate.

Nick Muldoon:

What other sorts of things? Because I guess we're charting this journey over five and a half years, where it's gone from Dave and Nick and the addition of Satvik and Teagan and Jared and Rob and Brad, and a few people over time, to the point today where we are 27, 28 people. What are some of the other markers along the way, that we've kind of gone through, that have shifted or evolved how we operate? Like the Easy Agile operating system that we've talked about in the past.

Dave Elkan:

Well, it's something that we've just discussed in the execution kind of level. Obviously, every six months, everything just goes and explodes and you have to fix it, like there's always some major thing that happens every six months, and I feel like that's good and that's healthy, and that continue to run into those things. Either they're internal or external and I feel like we're dealing with an external one right now, which I don't really want to touch in this podcast, but I think that they're healthy for the business to adapt to. But certainly, I think in that time, like really understanding that it's the people that count, right?

Dave Elkan:

The business is in there, like it's a thing, but it's nothing without the people who worked for it, and it's in service of the people who work here, as well as the customers. And so that's something we've come out of it. What do you think, Nick? Like the cultural aspects of what we've built, what do you think stands out to you?

Nick Muldoon:

I certainly think there's these inflection points. I mean, I remember a conversation with Jared when we were in Crown Street Mall, and it was in 2019 and we were talking with the team around the kitchen table there, and we could get eight people around this kitchen table and we were talking about growing the team to take advantage of the opportunity and responding to requests from customers and all that sort of stuff. I think Jared said, "Well, I quite like it the way it is."

Nick Muldoon:

And then I fast forward to an interview with Jared, which went into the five year video that we saw just before Christmas and that was around his trajectory and how he's evolved and adapted professionally and personally along with the company. I think that's the story for all of us as team members, we've all kind of been on a journey together and we're all learning and adapting together. We do live, in many respects, we do live this Agile approach where we do reflect and we take the time and we think and we experiment with new approaches to getting work done.

Nick Muldoon:

Even, I think... and we've been talking about this a bit recently with respect to pace, that first version of our learning and development program, where we wanted to provide funding for people to go and pursue something that they wanted to learn about. But we got that out, "Hey, that was a morning's worth of work," we put out an L&D, people started using the L&D program, and we called it our Version one of our L&D program, and today we're on Version, I don't know, 1.4 or whatever it is, of our L&D program. There's a lot of things that have gone out and we tweak and we improve them over time to make them ever better and better suited, perhaps, to the current state of play within the team. Is that fair?

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, it is. It is, and I think that; A, I've never worked at a business who has anything like that, and where they actively encourage you to use it, spend the money, make yourself better. If you make yourself better, the team will get better, if the team gets better, the customers get better outcomes, and the company continues to improve, and it will be probably a better place for you to work in the future. So it's really a holistic kind of perspective, rather than, not narrow minded, but myopic or focused on just output. It's outcomes of output and I think that could be another value of ours, if we were to have seven, it'd be outcomes over output. So really stopping, having that permission to stop and think, and system to it and think about what it is you're trying to achieve, rather than just blindly doing stuff.

Dave Elkan:

So from a developer's perspective, the fastest code is the code that doesn't exist, and so if you can do something differently, which doesn't require 100 steps or just decide, "Hey, this is really tricky right now, this bit of code we're trying to work on or this feature is really hard. Can we just delete the feature?" And we did it on notice, I know that sounds pretty bold, but quite honestly, that kind of discussion is really healthy to have. I want to encourage the team to think that way and I think that learning development is also something you can do to bring people into it, look at their trajectory as a way of gauging their abilities, and giving them really... throwing fuel on the fire in that respect and seeing them ramp up in their ability, and help those around them.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, so take us through that, because that's something that we definitely talked about a few times, like when we've been looking at candidates and in a hiring huddle around candidates, we've talked about those that are on a certain trajectory and that we think that we can accelerate that trajectory. Where did that come from?

Dave Elkan:

Where do thoughts come from? I'm not sure, that's a good question. I couldn't tell you, but I think it's pretty obvious when you look at someone's CV and you see... now, there's nothing wrong with people who have long tenured positions, but if you talk to someone and they can't really say what they've done in the last 10 years and they've donned that one position for 10 years and they haven't really got anything striking they can tell about how they've made that better, that kind of says a lot about that person. Maybe they would come in and they'd just coast... they're a coaster, right? If they're coasting, that's fine, it's their call, but at the same time, we look for people who are actively trying to make their impact bigger through their work, help those around them. And you can see that, you can see, "Oh, look. They've been at the same company, that's fine, but they've gone and done these different roles or they've seen this kind of improvement in their approach."

Nick Muldoon:

This comes back down to that article, that Financial Review article, the mid-career annuity, so this was an article that we must've been kicking around in 2016, 2017, and it was around a Japanese term, mid-career annuity. You could have 20 years of experience in a role or you could have 20 first years of experience, and I think early on, and maybe it still occurs these days, I think it probably does, but it felt like we were getting 20 quarters of experience. Over that five year period, there was always some big, new challenge that we needed to learn and adapt and incorporate into the business over the first five years. So we were always learning and adapting, and we wanted folks that were on a similar journey and they were learning and incorporating and adapting and experimenting themselves.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah, it's something definitely, that can be learned, and I think that if you bring on new stars, they can just get that, this is what they do by default because you've put them into that environment. But some environments, especially older companies, can be fairly stagnant and static, so that just reflects on people's CVs. Either there's some kind of reason why the company won't give them a promotion or give them opportunities to chase, how we have a different approach where we throw too many opportunities at people, I think sometimes, and I've seen people using their L&D so much, it is actually impinging on their better with balance value. I'm like, "Whoa, this is fantastic but don't forget you've got kids and you've got to help look after them," and [crosstalk 00:39:41]-

Nick Muldoon:

Temper your enthusiasm, yeah.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. So that's something to look for.

Nick Muldoon:

Stopping and reflecting on five and a half years, what's the purpose of the business, what's the goal over the next couple of years?

Dave Elkan:

Have fun, learn, what about you?

Nick Muldoon:

Definitely learning.

Dave Elkan:

Stay in business.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, yeah. Stay in business, sustainable growth is always a good one. I think that's important. Yeah, I don't know, it's interesting. I feel like some days, it can be really fun and other days, it's not fun at all. That's probably due in large part, like when we started this, we were not in service of anyone but ourselves and one another, and now I feel like we are in service of a team of people that are themselves in service of the customer because we've got a couple of thousand of them. So it's the responsibility and the accountability's changed, and the way that fun comes about is, these days... it used to be fun to have lamingtons and chat, and these days, typically, there's someone else in the crew that is organizing the event that often participate in that I find fun and enjoyable with the rest of the team, rather than being able to carve out that time and do that.

Nick Muldoon:

I remember when we roped in a bunch of folks from iAccelerate and we went into town and we'd go into town and we'd go and we'd get a Laksa in town and we'd get a bowl of Laksa. It's been harder to do that in the past 12 months, given the global environment and all that sort of stuff, so hopefully we can find a bit more of that in 2022.

Dave Elkan:

And maybe ramen. There's ramen now.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, and it's great, you know it.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. I think refining what we do and continuing to think more about that, so specifically with the engineers, I like to use a goal based... goals are big at Easy Agile, I think you should talk a bit about goals, but we use them to help guide people in chasing down things they want to achieve, and we can align those things with what the business does to an extent. Then, you can actually go and achieve your professional and goals through the business and the business is the vehicle to do that, rather than having to it outside. That's really cool, like find that harmony there so both Easy Agile can succeed and the people who work here can succeed.

Dave Elkan:

I think it actually is quite difficult, like you go, "Hey, take a step back, think about what you want to achieve, give that to me, and then I'll see what I can do to change the course of the business to help you accomplish that. What can we do? Maybe there's a middle ground we can chase down together." And that's something new to me and I'm kind of using that instead of performance reviews so make sure you do your goals, people. [crosstalk 00:42:44]

Dave Elkan:

But yeah, also you've made sure, you want to look back in time and you want to see yourself in the future, reflecting with the team. When they've gone and moved on, [crosstalk 00:42:56]-

Nick Muldoon:

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I was even chatting with Elizabeth Cranston this week and I was saying, "I can picture in the future, you're living down at Narooma down the coast and I can come down and have a cheese and biccies with the families and you're looking over the bay at Narooma or something, and we're reminiscing on this period of time at Easy Agile." I can totally see that. Yeah, I think it's great and I think just on the goals, the goals are important personally, and we've talked a lot about goals in the past, with respect to tenure vision for the families and that sort of stuff.

Nick Muldoon:

But it's also for the business, I remember we had okay hours in place from getting the business off the ground, we've revised them every year, we've learned and adapted a lot over the last couple of years in how we think about our objectives and our key results. And the fact that we write them on a quarterly basis and we review them on a quarterly basis, but we've got these objectives that align with a business goal that's three years out, and it all kind of flows. I mean, I think we're a lot more mature around that aspect of our... I don't know, would I say strategic planning? Vision goal setting over an extended time period? We're a lot more mature around that today than we were two or three years ago. That's really exciting as well. [crosstalk 00:44:33]

Nick Muldoon:

Come back to what you were saying before about the backlog. We'd come in on a Monday morning, and we go, "What are we going to work on this week?" And we kind of worked over a couple years, we worked it out so that, "Ah, here's the vision for the product." It was a longer term thing, and we've elevated that and it's not like, "Hey, what are we doing for the business this month?" It's now, "Here's our longterm trajectory for the business." We've been elevating that, that's pretty exciting, I think.

Dave Elkan:

And at the same time, trying to get the team to lift their line of sight as well.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dave Elkan:

And look out further afield, but not too far. You want them to be looking at what's happening next week and next month as well, but also what's the goal, what are we chasing down? What's the bigger picture? And I think that's starting to happen.

Nick Muldoon:

What's the analogy there about golf, Dave?

Dave Elkan:

Oh. No, can you tell me? I can't remember.

Nick Muldoon:

It was this analogy about golf, like you've got to look where you're going to hit the ball and you've got to look up. You don't want to look at the tee, you want to look beyond the tee so that you... not beyond the tee, beyond the hole, sorry. You want to look beyond the hole.

Dave Elkan:

That wasn't my analogy, that's why I don't remember, but I do remember someone telling us that one. But it's a good one, like it wasn't even an analogy, isn't that the literal thing that the golf tutor would do? It's like, "Where are you looking?" And then they go, "Oh, I'm looking at the hole." "No, no, you've got to look further than the hole. Look up where you want the ball to go, and then away it goes."

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, raise your sights.

Dave Elkan:

Raise your sights, yeah. And if you are looking at your feet, then you're probably not going to go far, but if you do look up and take stock, you can probably... that's actually a soccer analogy I can give you, like from my soccer coach, like you've got to point your toe where you want the ball to go. And that's just the magic thing, it just works. You just put your foot next to the ball with the pointing at the corner of the goal you want it to go in and you kick it, and then it just happens.

Dave Elkan:

There's these funny little hacks like that and I think that's a longterm vision thing. If you are running a business which doesn't have that longterm vision and purpose, then you can go actually in multiple directions at once, and you're not going to make any progress. I think a good analogy I read was like with a team, if you imagine all the team members are tied to a pole with a rubber band and they're all heading in different directions, the pole's not going to move because everyone's just... and the company's going to stay static and still. But if everyone just goes in the same direction, then it's going to move along.

Nick Muldoon:

Shift it, yeah.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. And that's something that we've bitten off recently, is our purpose.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative), to help teams be agile.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. It's one of those funny moments when we we're talking about, and we talked about it, we set ourselves a deadline for the sake of a better word, like we had our planning session coming up in a couple of weeks, so we sat down and talked about it. And we went around and around in circles, trying to discover what it is, not to be agile, but just, what is Agile? And we know [inaudible 00:47:45], but we were trying to codify that in words. And when you said that, like it's being agile, it was kind of one of those... the way I like to describe it is, an upside down A-moment, which is our logo as you can see on Nick's jacket there.

Dave Elkan:

So when that was proposed to me, I was like, "No, that's so silly." But I was like, "Oh, but I love it." And I'm not saying that being agile is silly, but the fact that it's so simple, that's what I like about it, it's easy, it's simple, and there's a lot there if you dive into it.

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah. Well, why don't we wrap it there? I think that's a good place to end.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Our purpose is to help teams be agile and doing that, we're doing that for ourselves, we're constantly trying to learn and adapt and experiment with new things, being Easy Agile and as our team members here. So I hope that was a useful little tidbit and journey from Dave and I on how we got Easy Agile to this point, and some of the things that have been on our mind.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Thank you, Dave.

Dave Elkan:

Thank you, Nick. That was fun.

Nick Muldoon:

That was fun. Oh, goody.

‍

‍

"Really enjoyed my conversation with William and Riz, I'm looking forward to implementing their recommendations with our team" - Angad Sethi

In this epsiode I spoke with William Rojas and Rizwan Hasan from Adaptavist about the ways we can enable high performing agile teams:

• The significance of team alignment
• When and where you should be using tools to assist with your team objectives
• Prioritizing what conversations you need to be apart of
• Advice for remote teams

Subscribe/Listen on your favorite podcasting app.

Thanks William & Rizwan!

Transcript

Angad Sethi:

Good afternoon/evening/morning everyone. How you guys going?

Rizwan Hasan:

Oh, good. Thanks Angad.

William Rojas:

Yeah. How are you?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, really good. Really, really stoked to be having a chat with you guys. Should we start by introducing ourselves? Riz, would you like to take it?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. My name's Riz Hasan, I'm based in Brussels, Belgium. Very newly based here, actually used to be based in New York, not too far from William. We usually used to work together on the same team. My role here at Adaptavist is I'm a team lead for our consulting group in EMEA. So in the European region and in the UK. So day to day for me is a lot of internal management, but also working with customers and my consultants on how our customers are scaling agile and helping them with tool problems, process problems, people problems, all the above.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds awesome.

William Rojas:

As for myself, William Rojas. I'm actually based out of a little suburban town called Trumble in Connecticut, which is about an hour plus northeast of New York, basically. And as Rez mentioned, yeah, we've worked for a number of years we've worked together, we were running a agile transformation and scaling adoption team for Adaptavist. My new role now is actually I took on a presales principle, basically a presale principle consultant these days. It's actually a new role within Adaptavist, and what we do is we have, actually all of us, I think most of us are all like ex-consultants that support the pre-sales process, and work in between the sales team, and the delivery team, and all the other teams that support our clients at Adaptavist.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome, awesome.

William Rojas:

I help find to solutions for clients and make the proposals and support them through, get them on through delivery.

Angad Sethi:

I'm Angad, I'm a software developer and I'm working on Easy Agile programs and Easy Agile roadmaps, two of the products we offer for the Atlassian marketplace. We're super excited to speak to you guys about how your teams are operating in, like what's a day to day. Riz, would you like to answer that?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. Yeah. So apart from like the internal management stuff, I think what's particular to this conversation is how we walk clients through how to navigate planning at scale, right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I'm working with a client right now who's based in the states, but they're acquiring other software companies left and right. Which I think is also a trend that's happening within this SaaS ecosystem. And when that happens, they're trying to bring all that work in together. So we're talking through ways of how to visualize all that in an easy way that isn't really too much upfront heavy with identifying requirements or understanding what systems we want to pull in, but more so what do you want to pull in? So really right now, in this phase of the data that I'm working with this client, it's really just those initial conversations about what are you planning? What are you doing? What's important to you? So it's a lot of these conversations about that.

Angad Sethi:

And so you mentioned it's a lot of internal management. Are some of your clients fellow workmates, or are they external clients?

Rizwan Hasan:

They're mostly internal because I manage a team, so I have different people who are working on different types of projects where they might be doing cloud migrations. They might be doing some scripting work. In terms of services, we cover everything within the Atlassian ecosystem, whether it be business related, process related, tool related. So it's a big mix of stuff at all times.

Angad Sethi:

Cool. And is it usually like you're speaking to all the team leads, and giving them advice on agile ceremonies, and pushing work through pipelines and stuff?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, actually, so a story of when I first moved to Brussels, because we've... So professional services started at Adaptavist in the UK, and this was maybe like seven-eight years ago, and it's expanded and myself and William were part of like the first group of consultants who were in North America. That expanded really quickly, and now that we're in EMEA, it's almost like a different entity. It's a different way of working, and a lot of leadership has moved over to North America, so there's new systems and processes and ceremonies and then all that's happening. But because of time zones there's a conflict.

So what I started to do when we got here was to reintroduce some of those habits and consistent conversations to have, to really be much more on a better planning cadence. So interacting with people who would be, say, bringing work to delivery in presale. So folks who are, who work similar to William's capacity over here in this region, and then also project managers who would be responsible for managing that work. Right? So on the equivalent of like a scrum master on an engagement or like an RTE on a big engagement. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yep. Yep. That's awesome. Just one thing I really liked was your terminology. You used conversations over ceremonies or speaks about the agile mindset in that sense, where you're not just pushing ceremonies on teams, where you actually embody being agile. Well, I'm assuming you are from your conversation, but I guess we'll unpack that. What about you, William? What's your [crosstalk 00:06:32]

William Rojas:

I was going to say, one of the things that's interesting challenge that we face, because Adaptavist has an entire branch that does product development and there are product developers, and product managers, and product marketing, and all sorts of things like that. And they set plans and they focus, deliver and so forth, as you would expect a normal product organization to do. On the consulting side, one of the things that's very interesting is that a lot of our, like we have to answer to two bosses, right? Like our clients come in and say, "Hey, we need this," and we have to support them. In the meantime, we have a lot of internal projects, internal procedures and processes and things that we want do as a company, as a practice, but at the same time, we still need to answer to our clients.

Angad Sethi:

I see.

William Rojas:

So that's actually one of the interesting challenges that from an agile perspective, we're constantly facing having to balance out between sometimes conflicting priorities. And that is definitely something that, and although consulting teams at different levels face this challenge. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So as Riz mentioned, we're constantly bringing in more work and like, "Okay, we need you to now adjust and re-plan to do something different, then manage." Yes. It's an ongoing problem that's just part of this part of this world kind of thing.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Okay. I see. And so if I heard that correctly, so it's, I guess you're constantly recommending agile processes, but you may not necessarily get to practice it?

William Rojas:

But more so we're both practicing for ourselves as well as trying to tell our clients to practice it or trying to adjust.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yeah.

William Rojas:

You know, a client comes in with needs and says, "Okay, now we have to re-plan or teach them how to do it, or re-accommodate their new emerging priorities as well." So we ultimately end up having to practice agile with and for our clients, as well as for ourselves. It's that constant rebalancing of having to weave in client needs into internal needs, and then the constant re-priority that may come as a result of that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And then we're constantly looking for like, how do we make this thing more efficient, more effective? How do we really be lean about how we do the work and so forth? That is definitely one thing that we practice. We try to practice that on a daily basis.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. And I guess that's a very, a tricky space to be... not a tricky space. It can be tricky, I guess, but adding to the trickiness is remote work. Do you guys have a lot of clients who have transitioned to remote work? And I don't know, has it, has it bought to light problems, which can be a good thing, or like what's your experience been?

William Rojas:

So that's interesting because so I've been doing consulting for over a couple decades, and traditionally, so I've done a lot of that, that travel warrior, every week you go travel to the client to do your work, you travel back and you do that again next week, and you do that month after month. In coming to Adaptavist, Adaptavist has historically always been a remote consulting company. So five years ago it was like, wow, we would go to clients saying like, "Okay, we need you to do this." And we're like, "Yeah, we can deliver that. And no, we don't need to, you know. We may come in and do a onsite visit to introduce ourselves, but we can deliver all this work remotely." So we've always had that history.

Angad Sethi:

Okay.

William Rojas:

But nonetheless, when COVID hit and everybody went remote, we definitely experienced a whole new set of companies were now suddenly having to work remotely, and having to establish new processes and practices that basically forced them to be remote. And I think we've had the fortune of in a sense, having always been-

Angad Sethi:

Yep, remote start.

William Rojas:

... S8's.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

I know whenever we bring on people into the company, into consulting particular, that's one of the things we always point out. Remote work is not the same as being in the office. It has its ups and downs. But we've always had that benefit. I think we've been able to assist some of our clients, like, This is how this is how it's done, this is how we do it." So we've been able to teach by example type of thing for some of the clients.

Angad Sethi:

There you go.

William Rojas:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. That was actually going to be my next question is what's the working structure at Adaptavist and what sort of processes? I'm sure that it's a big company and therefore there'd be tools and processes particular to teams in themselves. Just from your experiences, what are some of the processes or tools you guys are using?

Rizwan Hasan:

So, in terms of planning and work management, because we started off as a remote first company, and since COVID, business is good. I'll be frank there, it's been good for us because we specialize in this market. We've had a huge hiring spurt in all these different areas, and one thing that I noticed internally, as well as problems that... I wouldn't say problems, but a trend that we're seeing with a lot of other clients is that because of this remote push, and the need for an enterprise to be able to give the teams the tools they need to do their work, there's a lot more flexibility in what they can use, which has pros and cons.

On the pro side, there's flexibility, the teams can work the way they want. On the con side, administration might be difficult, alignment might be difficult. So we're seeing a lot of that with customers and ours. So we're almost going on this journey with customers as we're scaling ourselves, and learning how to navigate this new reality of working in a hybrid environment.

William Rojas:

I think in terms of some of the tooling and so forth that we get to do. So we obviously internally we have, we're pretty, pretty much in Atlassian. Atlassian stack, that is very much how we work every day. All our work is using Atlassian tools. All our work is tracked, all our client work is tracked in JIRA, all our sales work, basically everything we do, we use JIRA and Confluence, we're really big on Confluence. We have a lot of customizations we've done to our instance over the years, things that we just have developed, and so that's internal.

I think the other aspect is often, depending on the client that comes to us and the type of work that we're doing for that client, then the types of tools that we use can pretty much run the full gamut. We have a lot of Atlassians, we do a lot of work in JIRA with our clients, like work in Confluence. Sometimes we're working on helping them scale, so we bring on some of the add-on to support some of the scaling practices within to support JIRA. We'll do a lot of JSM work. We do often DevOps work, and then we'll bring on a lot of the DevOps tool sets that you would expect to find, so things to support delivery pipelines.

So it really depends quite a bit on the client. We even do some agile transformation work. And then there, we do some a lot of custom build things, practices and so forth. And we bring in surveys and tools that we've been able to develop over the years to support that particularly. So a lot of the tools often are dictated by what the client and the specific engagement call for.

Angad Sethi:

In my personal experience recently with COVID, I find myself in a lot of meetings, we are experimenting with, with Async decision making. Have you experimented with Async decision making processes yet?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll start by saying I hate meetings. I think most meetings are a waste of time, and I tell my team this. And I'm like, "If we don't need to meet, like we're not going to meet."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

And I think that really comes. Yeah, awesome, for sure. Awesome.

Angad Sethi:

I love it.

Rizwan Hasan:

But it comes down to really is when you do meet, are you having the right conversation? And I think a key component being like an agile team, quote-unquote, is you have an understanding of what we all are doing collectively and what the priorities are. Which is tough to actually get. So when we talk about like asynchronous decision making, with a team that has some degree of understanding of what priorities are, what goals are, it gets easier. And you can have more low impact interactions with people.

So we use Slack a lot and we have a lot of internal bots on our Slack to be able to present information and collect feedback at asynchronous times, because there's voting features, there's places where you can comment. And I think when we talk about teams that are growing across the globe and also time zones and flexible working, that's a real thing now. There's a practical way of how to do that, that we're starting to dig into what does that look like?

Angad Sethi:

Do you find yourself in a million Slack groups?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yep.

Angad Sethi:

Yep. You do. Do you see any extra hurdles you've got to skip because of that? Because you maybe, do you find yourself hopping from conversation to conversation, whereas it would just be easier if everyone was in the same conversation? Does that happen a bit?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. Yeah. All the time.

Angad Sethi:

I hear you, yeah, there you go. Okay. Cool.

William Rojas:

But I would say we have a lot of impromptu. I think we do have a lot of impromptu meetings. And sometimes we may be in a Slack typing away. It says, you know what? [crosstalk 00:17:29]

Angad Sethi:

Just jump in a huddle.

William Rojas:

Into Zoom and then let's chat or Slack conversation, and then just face to face conversation, and then just address it then and there. But I think we have been looking at, it's almost like I think a balance between the time spent on the meeting, and the amount of people that need to be in the meeting, and the benefit and value that comes out of that meeting. And a daily meeting where work was people would pick up work or support from a sales perspective. And it was very, very much necessary as per part of the work coming into the consulting pipeline. But it felt very inefficient.

So that's one of the means, for example, we did away with, and it's now a completely asynchronous process, by which work comes in and it gets allocated, people pick it up, people support it, we deliver things, we track where things are and so forth. And we now use all of that is basically all done through Slack. So we did away with all the meetings around, "Hey, who can help with this?" But meantime, we have another meeting where we're trying to get people on projects. And that is very much a, we need to negotiate on that often. So that's a meeting that's still very much done.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

Everybody comes in, we all talk, we decide what we need to get done. People balance back and forth. So that trade off I think is really important to really understand what, there are meetings that are necessary, very valuable, and they should remain. And there's ones that really a Slack is a much better mechanism to be able to make those kind of decisions

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true. Yeah. And does it well, sorry, firstly, pardon the location change. I'm sitting right next to the router now, so hopefully the iPhone holds. What sort of a scale are we speaking about here in your Slack? The reason I ask is with larger organizations, it can be harder to scale. Therefore I'm just trying to get a gauge of what scale your Slack is at.

Rizwan Hasan:

So we just hit, we are just over the 500 mark, that'd be in terms of employees. With basically our general, which seems to be, I think, I don't want to say universal, but the standard across any organization that has Slack general as the best indicator of how many people you have logged on. So we're just about the 500 mark, which I would say is probably around mid-size, but it's definitely getting to the point where we're starting to see, it's almost a little bit too much in order to disseminate information, find their information, etc.

We're actually partners with Slack also. So we work with them pretty closely on some opportunities. [crosstalk 00:20:39] Yeah, exactly. And we're starting to talk with customers also about the same problem, about how much is too much, and when do you start to form communities around people that are delivering the same type of value. So those conversations are more aligned and there's not just a whole lot of chatter and people get confused, like when they read Slack and like, "Oh, is this the priority now? Or am I supposed to be doing this or change in process?" That communication is harder now, I think, really. And this is where a lot of folks, I think, who are moving to this remote environment are struggling with, is that alignment communication.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true.

William Rojas:

And it is, I would say fairly organic, like our channel proliferation. We do have, I would think even for company of our size, we're pretty loose about how channels get proliferated, who gets to create them, what they're for and so forth. But then it gives the flexibility of based upon your interests or the context of what you need to communicate on, then you can either join a channel that supports it or create a channel if necessary to support it. So it is, in that sense, pretty organic. But it is true that there are hundreds, if not thousands of Slack channels that we have, and so kind of staying like which one should you be on, is definitely one of our biggest challenges.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Well, that just blows my mind just because like 500 people on a Slack. Our whole company is 35 people and I'm pulling my hair out being in too many Slacks. So well A, that blows my mind.

William Rojas:

It does allow us, for example, to have client specific Slack channels. So anybody, if you need to talk about, if you're working on a particular account, you're working for a client, then there's a channel for that. And if you're working on another client, there's another channel. The thing I find helpful about it is that it gives you that context of if I want to communicate with so and so, if I communicate with Riz on a particular account, I will go to the account channel. If I want to talk to Riz one-on-one, I go to a one-on-one chat.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yep, the flexibility.

William Rojas:

So we do have that benefit of where to put the information. But it does mean that I have probably over a hundred channels in my roster of things that I follow, and I'm always behind.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Well, yeah. So the next level of it is, then you begin to prioritize which channels should I really be notified about, and which ones are most important. I want to track those. And I try to keep that list to a minimum in terms of unread messages, and the stuff that I try to get to, and I'm bored and I have nothing else to do so, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I've been leaving a lot of channels too. I've been just really cutting the cord with some channels. You know, I had some motivation to really help out here, but I just can't and it's just too much noise. And just got to cut the cord and be like, if it's empty, there's no conversation happening or if it's slow, then move on.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

We also have the ability to, you can get added back in. So sometimes you leave and then somebody will put you back in, like, "I need you to talk about this." But it is pretty organic. I know we do leave it up to the individual to decide how best to manage that.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

We had a instance today, actually, where there was an old, it was basically a sales opportunity, a customer who had reached out to us for a certain ask, and we hadn't heard from them for months, like eight-nine months. And someone posted, someone who I'm pretty close with on our sales team posted, "Hey, this is kicking back up again, but I don't have the capacity." And I just left immediately as I saw that message. I was like, "I can't help out. Sorry."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. The old so-and-so has left the group is a bit of a stab in the heart, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

We will get over it. Just coming back to a point you mentioned, Riz, you said you used the words, alignment and communication. Both of you when consulting with clients, are those the two main themes you guys like to base your recommendations around?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll give you a very consulting answer and say it depends.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

But when we engage with a customer, one of the toughest parts of our job is understanding if there is even alignment in the group of people that we're talking to as well, because at the scale of projects that sometimes we work with, we have like 20 to 25 people on a call. And of all of those people, they may have different motivations or objectives of what they're wanting with their engagement with us. So I would say, that's primarily what's driving what we're trying to find out, what we're trying to do with them is get some alignment between the group and ourselves, and communicating that is not always easy.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Let's say, adding on what Riz, that also depends quite a bit on the specific engagement with that client. So in particular, if the engagement, because if an engagement is like, "Get me onto the cloud." Okay. You know, come in. Often there's much better alignment for something like that. If the engagements are more about, "Hey, help us scale agile, help us get better at how we deliver." Then the need for alignment, the need to make sure that we're all communicating correctly, we all understand, we all come to the meeting with the same objectives and so forth, is so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So in those kind of engagements, we're constantly realigning. Because it's not even like we had the alignment. It's like yeah. Okay. We have it, next week it's gone. We got to go back and get it again. So that keeping, making sure that everybody's marching towards the same set of objectives, defining what those objectives are, letting them evolve as appropriate and so forth, all that becomes so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And that's where the tools, that's where things like JIRA and then again, like how do we scale? How do we show what everybody's doing? And so forth, that's where it becomes that much more important. And in those kind of engagements, the tooling becomes essential. Not that the tooling's going to answer it, but the tooling becomes a way by which it helps us communicate, yeah. This is what we all agree we're going to do. Okay. The tool says so because that's the decision we've made.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

It's really interesting that you say cloud migration, William, like when you say, "Okay, I'm moving to cloud, we know what the alignment is," but even then, I'm finding is that, especially within the Atlassian ecosystem, because that's what we're exposed to all the time, but when we're moving data from a completely old infrastructure to something brand new, it's not going to be the same. And you have folks who are thinking that, "Oh, we're just going to be taking all this stuff from here and putting it over there." But what usually doesn't come along with it is that you're going to have to also change the way you work slightly. There's going to be changes that you're not accounting for.

And that's where the alignment conversation really is important because we work with small companies who understand, okay, moving to the cloud will be completely different. We also work with legacy organizations like financial institutions that have a lot of red tape, and process, and security concerns, and getting that alignment and understanding with them first of what this means to move to a completely different way of working, is also part of that conversation. So it's a constant push and pull with that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, yeah. It's really heartwarming to hear the two of you deal with the JCMA, which is the geo cloud migration system.

Rizwan Hasan:

Quite a bit, yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome, because yeah, that's something we are working on currently as well. So I'll end with a super hard question and I'll challenge you guys to not use the word depends in there. And the question is the number one piece of advice for remote teams practicing agile. Start with you, Riz.

Rizwan Hasan:

Get to know each other.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, okay.

Rizwan Hasan:

Keep it personal. I think one of the hardest things about this new reality is making that connection with someone, and when you have that, that builds trust, and when you have trust, everything's a lot easier. So I'd say that. People really aren't... The enemy. That's not the right word, but work shouldn't be a conflict. It should be more of like a negotiation, and if you trust each other, it's a lot easier to do that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

So yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

William Rojas:

It really is.

Angad Sethi:

I'm going to definitely take that back with me.

William Rojas:

Yeah. And just if I could quickly add to that. That's like looking for ways how to replace the standing around by the, having a cup of coffee. How do you replace that in a remote setting?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

How do you still have that personal interaction that maybe there's an electronic medium in between, but there's still sort of that personal setting. I think that's one of the things you're looking for. Because yeah, it is very much about trust. And I think to that, I would also add, back to the alignment. Right? Because in some ways that strong interaction helps build and maintain the alignment, because often it's not so much that you get alignment is that you stay aligned.

So it is this constant, and having those interactions, having that trust and so forth, is what in a sense allows us to stay aligned. Because we know each other, we know how to help each other, we support each other, so we stay in alignment. So the trust and so forth are a good way to help build and maintain the alignment itself that you're looking for. That's absolutely. In remote world, you don't have the benefit of seeing each other, the whiteboard, all those things are not the same.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. Getting cup a coffee, yep.

William Rojas:

But we still need to stay in sync with what needs to get done. That's so important.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. And so would you guys want to drop any names of tools you're using to facilitate that trust between team members in a remote setting?

William Rojas:

So I would say, like I mentioned from my role, one of the things that we do is in the presales area, we support some of our larger accounts, almost as more of like a solution account manager, per se. So we come in and help make sure that the client is getting the solution that is meant to be delivered. So we work with the delivery teams, we work with the client, we sit in between.

There's one large client that we've been working on for years now, and we basically, to the point that they're moving towards some flavor of safe. That I wouldn't call it fully safe, but they do have a lot of safe practices, but they do PI planning, and so we come in and join the PI planning. That's actually one of the, like I said, how do you stay alive?

Angad Sethi:

That circle. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:33:15]

William Rojas:

You pull up your program definition, you look at what features you want to deliver in the PI, who's going to deliver that feature in the PI, and then in your readout, go back to the tool and say, "Look, this is what we've agreed to." Others can ask questions and so forth, and constantly going back to... For example, just last week, we're doing now sprint planning and saying, "Actually, okay, this feature's going to drag on another sprint. Let me go back and readjust in," this client is using the Easy Agile programs. The original plan of saying this features not going to be, not two sprints, but the three sprints instead, for example.

So that habit of getting into using the tool to communicate what we decided and what we just had to make changes to. So it becomes this, a communication vehicle, it's really important. Yeah, they use programs, they use the roadmap piece of programs to help them do their PI planning, and stay in sync with what it is that ultimately gets communicated out at the end of PI. And then during the sprints of the PI itself, and it's very helpful for them. Again, there's I think they have seven trainings, and they all use that to help stay in sync, stay aligned.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. Awesome.

William Rojas:

One other quick thing I'll say is, I think there will be, some of where we've gone will now become status quo, become permanent. So I think that this has been as shift across the market, across the industry, across company, how people work. So the idea of remote work, the idea of using tooling to really establish communication, and help facilitate communication, all that, while it's been around, I think the big difference is now everybody, like you have no choice. Everybody has to do it.

Angad Sethi:

Has to. Yeah.

William Rojas:

And I think we've definitely seen a big shift across the entire industry because of that. That will now solidify and let's see what the next level brings. But I definitely think that we've reached a new stage of maturity and so forth pretty much globally, which is pretty cool.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, it is. Thank you guys. I won't keep you too long. I think, has the sun set there, Riz? I can see the reflection going dark.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. It is getting there. Yeah, for sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. I won't hold you guys for too long.

Rizwan Hasan:

All good.

Angad Sethi:

But thank you so much for the conversation. I honestly, I took a lot away from that. And yeah, I hope I can add you guys to my LinkedIn. I would love to be in touch still.

William Rojas:

Definitely.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Trying to establish a point of contact, not to add to one of your Slack channels, but yeah. Just so that we can be in conversation regarding the product and improving it.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure. And we have a partner management channel. I know we've been talking to Haley a little bit.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

She was reaching out, that's about some other stuff.

Angad Sethi:

Beautiful.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, happy to. We engage with your product and it's in our white papers too, and we're going to put out another white paper this year where we're going to talk about Easy Agile too. So yeah. We'll stay in touch.

Angad Sethi:

Cool.

William Rojas:

I just gave you, so my LinkedIn is under a different, my LinkedIn is not with my work email. Because that way I can keep the same account place to place.

Angad Sethi:

Sounds good.

William Rojas:

Yeah. You can look me up on LinkedIn with that.

Angad Sethi:

Wicked awesome. Thanks guys.

William Rojas:

Awesome. All right.

Angad Sethi:

Have a good day.