Easy Agile Podcast Ep.20 The importance of the Team Retrospective

"I absolutely loved my conversation with Sarah, she shared some amazing advice that I can't wait to put into practice!"

We spoke about the agile mindset beyond IT & development teams, how teams such as marketing and finance are starting to adopt the methodology and the benefits of doing so.

In celebration of international women's day, we discussed the future of women in agile, and steps we should be taking to support one another towards an inclusive and enabling environment.

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Transcript

Caitlin Mackie:

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast for 2021. Each episode, we talk with some of the most interesting people in tech, in agile, and in leading businesses around the world to share fresh perspectives and learn from the wealth of knowledge each guest has to share. I'm Caitlin and I'm the Graduate Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile and your host for this episode. We are thrilled to be back and have some amazing guests lined up this season. So to kick us off, I'm really excited to be talking with Sarah Hajipour.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sarah has so much rich and diverse experience in the agile space. She's an agile coach, a business transformation leader, a project and program manager, and more recently a podcast host and author. She's the jack of all trades and has been in the business agility space for over 10 years. In this episode, Sarah and I chat about the significance of goal setting and in particular goal setting in unpredictable times. We chat about her most recent projects, the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour and her book on Agile Case Studies.

Caitlin Mackie:

And of course with International Women's Day coming up, Sarah shared some amazing advice and her thoughts on the way forward for women in agile. She highlighted the importance of raising your hand and asking for help when you need it, as well as embracing qualities that aren't always traditionally thought of in leaders. It was such a thoughtful and insightful discussion. I got a lot of value out of our conversation and received some great advice, and I'm really looking forward to putting into practice. I know those listening will feel the same. Let's jump in.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sarah, thank you so much for joining us and spending some time with me today.

Sarah Hajipour:

Sure. Thanks for having me.

Caitlin Mackie:

So being our first guest for the year, I wanted to ask you about any new year's resolutions. Are you on track? Are you a believer in them or do you have a different type of goal setting process?

Sarah Hajipour:

That's a great question because we discussed this with a couple of friends and we realized new year's resolution is always going to be some kind of like a huge goal that we don't know if we're going to meet it or not. And thinking agile business agility and as an agile coach, I believe in the fact that let's have smaller goals and review them every three months, every six months and see where we at. Instead of looking into huge goals that we don't know what's going to happen because there's always a lot of uncertainties, even in our personal lives regarding the goals that we set up for ourselves. So yeah, that's how I look at it. Quarterly, quarterly personal goals. Let's say that.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I think if the last year has taught us anything, I think we can all agree how unpredictable things can become. So those original goals.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's true.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. The original goals might have to take a couple of detours. So what would be your advice for setting career goals in uncertain times?

Sarah Hajipour:

That's a great question. For career goals I believe it really matters that you do something that you're interested in at least. If you still haven't found your passion, that's fine especially people like young professionals. It's okay if you haven't found your passion yet, but you can still follow a basically career path starting with things that you like to do, kind of you enjoy and you learn through the way.

Sarah Hajipour:

I was listening to one of the fashion icons on YouTube a couple of days ago and the interviewer was asking her, "What was your career path? How did you get to this place you are now?" And I loved what she told everybody, the students, and that was go and find a career, find a job and learn. You first need to learn a lot of skills before you decide what you're actually good at. You decide, you understand what's your weaknesses and your strengths, right? Because not all of us have these amazing ideas all the time and that's fine.

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm not very much pro-everybody has to be a visionary and everybody has to have like big, shiny goals and ideas. I think that's perfectly fine to just find the kind of job that or the kind of career path that you're comfortable with and then sometimes get out of your comfort zone and then discover as you go. Life is to explore, not to just push yourself on the corner all the time and just compare yourself with everybody else.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I love that. That's great advice. So you've recently added podcast host and author to your resume. Were they always career goals of yours?

Sarah Hajipour:

No, absolutely not. Well, I'm a little bit of an introverted person. So kind of sit in front of a camera even talking and having people hear me was always like, "Oh my God, I know I need to talk about this even with my teams and stuff," but I will do it only if it's necessary. What got me into podcasting was that I figured there's a lot of questions that I'm finding answers when I'm having conversations and meetups and in different groups, professional groups that I'm in. And I wanted other people to hear those as well. I talked to people who have great insights and have been way longer than me in the career. So I'm learning at the same time. And I wanted to share that learning with everybody else. That's the reason I'm doing the podcast.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I love that. And I think you kind of touched on this earlier, but I think being in the agile space, sometimes it can be a nice reminder for you to have a bit of a focus, but then reflect and understand sort of where to be more effective and adjust accordingly. I know you mentioned that with your career goals, do you think that those agile principles can be applied beyond the usual use case?

Sarah Hajipour:

I do. I believe that it's a very intuitive like agile is a very intuitive way of working and a way of thinking. That's why now it's expanded to other industries. They didn't stay with DevOps and IT and development. It is now a lot of different industries adopting this because it's a mindset change. And just not just using scrum. It's not just using Kanban. It is about understanding how to be able to reflect on and adapt to the faster changes that are happening in the world. And that also applies to our personal lives as well.

Sarah Hajipour:

I mean, I used to have set goals when I was 18-years-old, I'm going to be this at 30, but did they happen? No. In some aspects I achieved much, much more. And in some aspects I just changed my goal. I think the changes that are happening in the world that are more rapid, it demands us to change as well. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. So just to circle back a little bit there for your podcast just for our audience listening, what platforms can they access your podcast on?

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm on all of the main platforms. I'm in Apple podcasts. I'm in Spotify, I'm in Amazon. Most of the prominent podcast platforms.

Caitlin Mackie:

Awesome. And then just again, for our audience, your podcast is called the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's correct. Yes.

Caitlin Mackie:

Awesome. That's great. What do you think has been the most valuable lesson you've learned from your podcast so far? Is it something a guest has shared or something you've learned along the way?

Sarah Hajipour:

What I have learned, I have learned a lot from the people that I interview because I make sure that I talk to people who know more than me and have been in this field more than me, and in different industries. The main thing I would say is that agile business agility is about mindset rather than the tools and processes. And the fact that the world overall is moving towards a more human-centric way of working.So basically that's why I say agile is more intuitive rather than just following ABCD. Yeah. This is the core, the main thing that that I have learned from my interviewees.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, amazing. You've also started writing a book at the moment. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How did that project begin?

Sarah Hajipour:

I actually love this project. In this book, the way I actually started writing the book was the book came first and then the podcast happened. I attend a lot of meetups. So for young professionals and even for professionals who are very much skilled in what they do, meetups are great place to meet and expand your network and learn from your peers. So I was attending all of these and I was learning from people. And then I decided I really want to have one-on-one conversations with them. And eventually I figured that a lot of the agile coaches, a lot of executive levels and a lot of consultants, they have a lot to share, but I didn't see any platform that kind of unifies that.

Sarah Hajipour:

I said, "Okay what are the learnings that we can share?" A lot of the mistakes because of the meetups groups, people feel safe to share and be vulnerable. And I was in multiple meetups so I heard very similar stories from people, the mistakes that have been repeated by a coach somewhere else. So I thought that'd be a great idea to put these in agile cases. So it's going to be Agile Case Studies and share it with everyone so. Especially the young coaches or stepping into the business, there's a lot of unknowns. I don't want them to be afraid. I don't want them to think, "Okay, this is a huge task." There's always going to be a lot of unknowns.

Sarah Hajipour:

Yes, I just see that. I kind of want to give that visibility that everybody else is experiencing the same, even if they have 25 years of experience, which is amazing, right?

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah.

Sarah Hajipour:

And that's the reason I started writing the book. So I interview with agile coaches and agile consultants that have been around at least five to 10 years and led agile transformation projects. And then from there, one of my interviewers once said, "You should do a podcast. I like to talk about this too." I'm like, "This is great" and that was like the week after I was like running around looking for tools to start my podcast.

Caitlin Mackie:

Oh, amazing. Sounds so good. What's the process been like? How have you found from ideation to where you are now, and then eventually when you're publishing it?

Sarah Hajipour:

For the podcast?

Caitlin Mackie:

For the book.

Sarah Hajipour:

For the book, so I go to these meetups and I listen to what's the coaches and the executives are sharing. The ones that are exciting for me are kind of a new for me, I will ask them, I connect with them over in LinkedIn and people are so open to sharing their experience with you. I've never had even one person said to tell me, "No, I don't want to talk about this or anything." People want to share. So I approach and I say, "Hey, I have a book outline or guideline. It's a two pager." I send it to them and I asked them if they are interested to talk to me about this and they let me know and then I'll select a time.

Sarah Hajipour:

And first session, it's like a half an hour. It's a kind of a brainstorming session. What are the key cases that they feel they want to share? Then we pick one and the session after that, they'll actually go through the case with me. I record it, draft it and then share it on Google Drive back and forth until we're happy with the outcome.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. Do you have a timeline at the moment? When can we expect to be able to read it?

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm looking forward to around the end of 2021, because it's 100 cases and I think that I'll have that.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. It's so exciting. Lots to look forward too.

Sarah Hajipour:

Thank you.

Caitlin Mackie:

Now, I also wanted to touch on International Women's Day is coming up and you've been in the agile space for a few years now. I assume you've probably witnessed a bit of change in this space. Have there been any pivotal moments that have sort of led to where you are today?

Sarah Hajipour:

Well, I think that a lot of women are being attracted to the agile practice, the different agile roles. And I have seen a lot more women as scrum masters, as product owners and as agile managers or agile project managers. A lot of different roles are being kind of flourishing in this area. And I've seen a lot of women contribute. One my goals actually in my book and on my podcast is to be able to find these women and talk to them regardless of where they are in the world. Yeah, I just feel that women can grow really in this area in the agile mindset, because women are more the collaboration piece.

Sarah Hajipour:

I can't tell we're less competitive. I haven't done research on that, but I have discussed it with people. Do you think that women are more collaborative rather than competitive? Because competition is great, but you need a lot of collaboration in agile and a lot of nurturing. You need to have that nurturing feeling, the nurturing mindset, that's what a scrum master does. One of the key characteristics of a scrum master has to be they have to have this nurturing perspective to bring it to the team.

Caitlin Mackie:

It's funny you mentioned because I actually have read some stuff myself about women typically possessing more of that open leadership style and that open leadership seems to complement the agile space really nicely so.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's exactly, yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. That's great and I think there's lots that we can take from that, open leadership and the direct leadership. So men and women coming forward and finding that middle ground and yeah, I feel like agile is a great space to do that in?

Sarah Hajipour:

Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. So what drove your passion? I guess what made you want to pursue a career in this space?

Sarah Hajipour:

I love the collaboration piece and I love the vulnerability because like people are allowed to be vulnerable and in the teams that they work in. And it is a culture that is more human rather than super strict. We're not allowed to make mistakes. We're not allowed to be wrong. Leaders are supposed to know everything right off the bat. But in reality, that's not the case. Leaders have to feel comfortable not knowing a lot of things that are not even known. But a lot of times I always say we're in the unknown unknown zone. And in that zone, even leaders are not supposed to know everything.

Sarah Hajipour:

So a lot of it starts with what are the other things that I learned from my interviewees is that it all starts with the leadership. So the agile transformations, the leaders have to first create that atmosphere of collaboration and of trust and psychological safety among themselves. And then only then they can help with teams to be able to thrive in those kinds of atmospheres as well.

Sarah Hajipour:

Women in agile and women in leadership. I like to say and what I see is a lot of men and women both that are changing their perspective from process of tool-centric to people-centric because it works better for everyone. And I see change really happening in all industries. I see it in retail. I see it in construction, obviously in IT, in finance system. And there's men and women like hand-in-hand trying to kind of embrace this way of thinking and this way of working.

Sarah Hajipour:

And women are being more comfortable to grow and kind of raise their hand and say, "Hey, I can make each page. I can take this role" because they understand because they bring that psychological safety that women for ages, it has been a workplace has been something that was mostly men and we're gradually getting into the workforce or the business world as females. So that psychological safety has allowed women to raise their hand and grow in different roles and leadership roles obviously.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. Has there been any resources or networks, things like that that have helped you along your journey?

Sarah Hajipour:

Learning from everybody else like creating a network, expanding my network to kind of coming in and saying, "Hey, I don't know. I want to know." There is all of these amazing things that are happening. I like to understand how this works and I remember it was one of these founders. Who's the founder of Apple? Oh my God. Don't tell me.

Caitlin Mackie:

Steve Jobs.

Sarah Hajipour:

I love this quote from Steve Jobs that says, "There has never been a time where I asked for help and people didn't help me." So just raise your hand and say, "I need help." And what does that help that I need? I need to know about this. What does it mean? What does scrum mean to you? How does it work in your industry? How does it work? And really I think that was the key for me up until now to connect with people and just be vulnerable and let them teach me.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I think my next question would be about how do we amplify that diverse and empowered community of women and our job in increasing the representation of women in agile? And yeah, what do you think is key to achieve a supportive and enabling environment?

Sarah Hajipour:

What I have seen and realized is that women really need to be and are being more supportive of each other. There was a study in HBR, Harvard Business Review in 2016 that said, "If there is only one woman in the pool of the interviewees, there's a zero chance for that woman to get the job, even if she's the best." So this calls for not which women are actually working great on that. Not being the queen bee, but also engaging and including other women. Because the more women in different roles, the more we are going to be receptive in those communities. That I think is a key that we understand that and support each other, help each other, build the communities around it.

Sarah Hajipour:

There is a community Women in Agile that is in different cities and different parts of the world that I'm a member of as well doing a great job. It's not just women actually in those groups. I see men participating as well, but it's predominantly women are trying to give each other insights from all aspects of the agile practices, the agile ways of working and stuff. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. So I think what's the way forward? I guess what's your prediction for women in agile? What do we need to do to continue that momentum?

Sarah Hajipour:

I think women will do great in anything and everything they put their minds in, regardless. We're human bottom line and we all have this potential to be able to grow in whatever we put our mind and heart on, regardless of our gender. So I would love for women to kind of be able to get that holistic perspective that regardless of their gender, they can do anything and they are, we are.

Sarah Hajipour:

We read about other women who have been successful in the fields of business that you felt that probably women can't do like women astronauts. There are women physicists. Women engineering leads and all of these that have been less common. The world is changing for the better and that's great.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love that

Sarah Hajipour:

It's a great time to be alive.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah Hajipour:

Yes.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I definitely think that we are beginning to see a huge increase and the visibility of female role models across so many industries. So it's great to have that. But Sarah, this has been such a great conversation. I wanted to finish with a final question for you and that was if you could give one piece of advice to women just starting their career in their industry, what would it be?

Sarah Hajipour:

I would say maybe the best advice that I can give is that we do have the power. And we need to look, number one, beyond gender and kind of have that belief that we can do anything that we want. And second is don't be shy to open up and build your community like build a community, join a community of agile practitioners of agile coaches, even people, specifically people who know more than you.

Sarah Hajipour:

And don't be afraid to ask help. Don't be afraid to say, "Hey, I'm new to this and I love to learn from you guys." Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and you're going to learn a lot that you wouldn't even expect. Just like you're going to get the result so you're going to hear things beyond what you've expected. There's a lot to human potential that could be unleashed when you just put yourself out there and let others contribute to your growth.

Caitlin Mackie:

That's amazing. That's great advice, Sarah. Loved every minute of our conversation. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Hajipour:

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

"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.

Dave Elkan, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Easy Agile is joined by Jean-Philippe Comeau Principal Customer Success Advocate at Adaptavist.

"Hearing from JP is a sure-fire way to get excited about Atlassian Team '23. We spoke about where we are hoping to see conversations focus + more."

JP is passionate about teamwork, meeting new people, presentations of all kinds - loves a microphone and a captive audience, new technologies and most of all problem-solving.

In this episode, JP and Dave are talking about one of the most anticipated events in the tech calendar - Atlassian’s Team23! They’re talking about what to expect, tips for first timers and what they’re hoping to take away from the event.

They also dive into the future of work and the significance of coming together as a team.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript:

Dave Elkan:

Hi, all, and welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Dave Elkan and I'm co-founder and co-CEO here at Easy Agile. Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres State Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Today I am joined by Jean-Philippe Comeau or JP. JP is the principal customer success advocate at Adaptavist and is passionate about teamwork, meeting new people, presentations of all kinds, loves a microphone and a captive audience, this podcast definitely fits that mold, new technologies, and most of all, problem-solving. JP, thanks so much for being with us today.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Thanks for inviting me.

Dave Elkan:

Hey, no worries. It's great to have you on. We want to take some time today just to talk through Atlassian Team '23. The ecosystem is gearing up for one of the biggest events of the calendar and the ultimate event for modern teamwork. You've been to a few Atlassian Team events before and last year being the first one back in a while. Quebec to Las Vegas is quiet a gear change. What are your tips for people attending Team for the first time?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Ooh, yeah, that's a good question. I mean, yeah, Teams to me is a massive event. It's a beautiful moment to actually take in everything that has happened in last year for Atlassian. What I mean by that is actually more and more what's happening with Atlassian is actually what's happening in the world of work. So I think it's just a great time to reassess where you're at. So for me, it's about planning out the main things you want to hit and don't overcrowd your schedule. That's a mistake I made the first time was just I wanted to see the most of everything and I was like, "Yeah, I can absolutely do back to back to back. It's going to be fine. I'll be walking from one thing to another." Truth is after talk, you'll have some questions. Some things will popped-up. "Oh, that's interesting. I could maybe explore that."

You're going to want to do maybe some floor hunting, which is like, hey, looking through the partners. Maybe you've heard about something like an app that you really want to go look at or something like that. So, that's always going to happen and then you're going to miss that next talk. So make sure that what you highlight is really things you want to see and plan according to that. That to me is the number one thing. Don't try to do it all. Do what you feel is really, really important than the rest. Try to make it work because it's going to be a lot of walking, a lot of listening, a lot of talking. The second thing which I remind everybody is to hydrate, get a bottle of water. There's going to be plenty over there, but everybody's going to have their own branded bottle of water, so don't worry about having one or not, but get one and just hydrate. I mean, we all get very busy during the day and we all know how the nights can go, so keep drinking some water. Yeah, those are my two tips.

Dave Elkan:

That's great advice. I think hydration is certainly something to consider. I remember particularly a wall of donuts at one point distracting me from good habits like that. So yeah, it's really important to make sure you've got the basics in line. What are you most looking forward to from the lineup at Team '23?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah. I mean, every year the keynotes are what's going to hit the most. Obviously, getting a chance to hear James Cameron talk is going to be very, very interesting. I think especially in the year of Avatar 2 is just great timing, obviously probably planned. He's probably on a tour, but it's going to be really great to hear some stories of how that movie came about. It's been a long time in the making, probably the closest thing we got to really long development on a film. It feels like a long software development cycle thing. That's a very long time. And then hearing Van talk about some of the things that he's seeing in today's world. Van Joseph, I believe, is the name of the second talker, and remember seeing him a lot on the CNN broadcast and stuff during the elections and the impact that he brought to the whole broadcast was quite something. It'd be very interesting to hear them talk.

And then as far as maybe not the big ticket items, really interested to... I think this is the year where the practices on the different tracks that Atlassian usually promotes, I think this is the year what they really start to hit. What I mean by that is I think before this year, so when you look at last year's Team and then before that, tracks were kind of like wishy-washy. Now, they actually have the products to back them. I think JSM's in a very, very good spot. I think their agile tooling is in a very good spot. I think their DevOps, which is what I expect, is going to be pushed the most, or DevOps tooling with the Jira product discovery and all their Point A stuff is got to be where it's at. So I think you're going to get really good talks on those practices. I think that's going to be the year where the tracks actually make a ton of sense and are very valuable to people.

Dave Elkan:

Absolutely. Thanks for sharing. It's really interesting. Yourself, you're a Canadian and James Cameron is a Canadian and he's talking about creating the impossible, and I think that's a theme that's coming through and what Atlassian is promoting and bringing that through. It's really interesting to see or hear you talk about the both building movies and media and CNN, the reference there, and how that can apply with a strongly software development-based audience. It's really interesting to see that building a movie is a very much a waterfall process in that you have this huge deliverable at the end, but I know that there are Pixar, for example, use this concept of Demo Trusts, we call them, or the Pixar Demo Trust. Yeah. So essentially you can test along the way as you go before you deliver this huge thing. It's really intriguing to think what we're going to hear from James in regards to how he builds these amazing projects.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, I think you're spot on. So I'm actually a huge Marvel fan. I don't have my book with me, but the Creativity, Inc. is a book that I love by Ed Catmull and how they built Pixar as a business, as a delivery team, not just about the movie side of it, the creative side of it, but how do you bring creativity into a more structured world that is the corporate world kind of thing, which they're now a part of? So, very interesting that you bring that up because I'm very fascinated by their process as well. I think they were the pioneers in the movie-making business or industry into bringing the agile methodologies or thinking to movie-making.

Now, what would happen historically in movies? Okay. So you don't know this, but my background is actually enacting. So when I started, when I studied, when I was a young lad, young adult, let's put it that way, I wanted to be an actor and then things changed. Obviously, I am not a prolific actor. So I'm very, very passionate about the movie-making industry. Movies historically has always been about you shoot, you shoot, you shoot, to develop, develop, develop, and then at the end, you cut it. So you make mistakes. So like we said, very, very waterfally. I think now that technology is almost like 50 to 60% of a movie now more days... If you look at Marvel movies and all that, you could argue it's 50 to 60% is going to be computer-generated, which can be a bad or good thing. Now, that I'm not going to get into that debate.

The nature of previz and all the animation work that goes behind it makes the process more agile, meaning that what they're going to do is they're going to build for a week and then they're going to review the film that's been made and then they're going to correct and do it again, right? So already you got your feedback loop going. You got your process. You got your sprints going. I can map all that out to some agile processes and I wouldn't be surprised that you're looking at something that are looking to scale up. You could even argue what are you guys going to do for your scaling methodologies? There's a lot of things that are very interesting.

I think going back to our first point, sorry, I really went on a tangent here, but going back to Avatar, when you have such a long cycle and you have a movie that's built, that one is heavily computer-generated. I mean, every actor has stuff on their face and they're acting in a blank studio. Now you're talking about agile processes because if you're building hours and hours and hours of work and you're just building and building and building and never review, I can't... Maybe James will say that's how they did it, and I'll be like, "Well, you guys were... It's very difficult. You made your life very, very difficult." But it'd be very interesting to hear because I cannot imagine them not going into some type of an agile way of building this movie.

Dave Elkan:

Oh, of course. I think that if you imagine the cutting room floor, it's an old adage and literally they used to cut the film and they'd leave it on the floor as that's something we're not doing anymore. And so, I dare say that there's a vast amount of film which is thrown away and redone. I feel that if we could see past that to this beautiful thing that they're doing behind the scenes, which is testing and iterating on their shots, it's actually quite a simple concept to apply these agile processes to filmmaking. It's just at the end you have got this big bang, same in game production. When you produce a game, you cut back. People do early access, which is fantastic. You can't early access a movie.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

No, exactly. Yeah.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. Going back to Pixar, that reference, I actually made the mistake. It's not actually the Demo Trust. So this is the Playbook by Atlassian. There's a play called Demo Trust, but it's the Brains Trust and it's bringing together the team to talk through does this fulfill the vision of Pixar? Does this make Pixar Pixar? And helping the team understand, so directors get that ingrained Pixarness through that process. So yeah, there's a whole team behind the scenes here. There's not one person who's just driving this at the director level. There's actually a whole team of people collaborating on this movie. So I'm really intrigued to hear that from James to hear how the teamwork comes out.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah. I think when you look at a movie like Avatar, again, another thing that we don't think about is the connecting remote teams, which is a big, big part of what we do in 2023 is connecting remote teams so that they feel they're working on one project. When you have a movie like Avatar, your VFX is going to be somewhere. Your actors are going to be another place. And then you're going to have music and sound's going to be somewhere else. Your editors are probably going to be somewhere else. And so, there's a lot of remote work that you do. How do you bring all that together?

I remember watching the old documentaries around the Lord of the Rings movies, and they were literally flying people in and out with the actual roll of films because they were so afraid that people would steal them and so that they wouldn't put it on the internet and they would actually carry them around. So they had to fly from London to New Zealand to... It's kind of nuts when you think about it in 2023. Really, you had to take a 10-hour flight just to get your film across? It's probably easier also with the data, just the bandwidth and everything. So I think that's also going to be an interesting part is how did you connect teams?

You brought up a great point around the Pixar way or that's how they call it, the Pixar way. When you think about that, there's some really, really cool ideas behind bringing a team together and rallying them around one project. I think as teams get more remote and distanced from products and things that they're working on, and I do it myself at work. Things become generic. At some point, you're just doing the same thing over and over again. You lose touch a little bit with the work that you do. I think it's a beautiful thing to be able to rally a team around a project and say like, "Do you believe in this project? I believe in this project. Do you believe in this project?" And making sure the team does and if they don't, why don't you? What's preventing you from that? I think there's a lot of good conversations, sorry, that can come from that. Yeah.

Dave Elkan:

Absolutely. So yeah, you talk about going more remote. Is that a trend you're seeing, that we're continuing to see more and more teams go remote, or are we seeing a reversal of that to some extent?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

It depends on what sphere you're working with, or in my position, I get to touch everything. I tend to gravitate towards the more creative teams of gaming and software development and stuff. I do work with banks. I do work with, well, corporate America, the classic suit and tie kind of places, everything. I see everything. There is absolutely out right now a battle of old versus new, old ways of working, new ways of working. There's a huge clash happening. I to this day do not know who's going to win, because even the big Silicon Valleys, I mean, we are all seeing what's happening with Apple and them putting mandatory office dates and stuff like that. You see that from an executive that is leading maybe one of the more bleeding edge companies in the world, but he's still an old school vibe of creativity.

I hate bringing it back to Pixar. I'm going to bring it back to Pixar. They have such a great office. So like I said, I'm very fascinated about what they do. They call it unplanned creativity. They truly believe that unplanned creativity happens in the office, and when you have unplanned meetings, unplanned interactions. So one of the things that they did, it's now very common, but when I was 14 years old and I was reading about them, I was like, "Oh my God, these are such cool things to do," they were doing those ping-pong places and activities and games to get people to play together and start talking about what they were doing.

And then all of a sudden you got an engineer talking to a VFX artist that's talking to a 3D or conceptual artist, that's like they would never meet in a meeting or anything like that. But because they're playing ping-pong and throwing ideas around and all of a sudden they're like, "Hey, maybe we could build this thing. That'd be amazing." Because the artist saying, "Well, now I could do clouds this way. Yeah. Nuts, I could create clouds that look like this." Then the engineer goes, "Well, you can just tweak a little bit of things."

Anyways, so I think there's this old school mentality at this. It's a question I've asked myself in our Slacks and where we talk about work. I don't know what the future is for unplanned creativity. I don't know how you recreate that in a virtual world. I think it's a big problem that some software companies have tackled with some tools. I don't know how you force someone to sit behind a computer and do something that's unplanned. How do I stumble across some... I don't know. But yeah, I think there's a bit of that in the old school mentality. I need people in an office so that they can meet and they can interact together. I still struggle to find where they're wrong, let's put it that way. I don't know where they're wrong about that theory of when you're with someone, when you're with people things happen in a different way.

Dave Elkan:

I can't agree more. I think that if I have any perspective on this, it's that there is not... Often, it's not a black and white or a zero sum kind of game. It's a combination of things that will occur and that will move forward for better or for worse. You can look back in history to Bell Labs and the creation of the semiconductor and the way that the building was designed essentially to allow people to walk past and have cross-collaboration and cross-functional conversations. Have you ever considered that the unplanned creativity that Pixar was talking about was actually planned-unplanned creativity, so they made these spaces on purpose? How can we make things on purpose to have things unknown to us happen?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, you're absolutely right. I mean, yeah, they built the Pixar offices this way because of that. To me, that is the secret. If someone finds it, it's like the caramel milk or whatever, just bottle it up and sell it to people, I guess. I don't know. I have no idea what the answer is. I've looked and it's... There's an app out there. I can't remember the name of the app, but you're like a 2D sprite and it looks like an NES game and you're moving around from places to places. You can decorate your office. It's got this vibe of Animal Crossing, which is a game by Nintendo where you can just create stuff and people can visit your island and all that.

You can do that with your office space and then you can create a common area where people walking. When you look at it in a video, it's brilliant. Great, I can actually be in the office without being in the office. It has this whole technology of proximity. So if you're having a conversation with someone in an open area, people could walk by and hear what you're saying and join in. Beautiful technology, doesn't work with the humans when you really think about it. Why would I go online to walk around an office to go talk? I'll ping you on Slack, it'll be easier. All right. I don't need to walk through your office. So it's like I don't know what the secret is.

Yeah, you're right, it is planned in a way. I think we do that. I don't know for you guys at Easy Agile, how you do it. In Adaptavist, we do like to travel with teams. So whenever we do things, even if it's customer work or if we're going for an event or something, we try to make it a point to make it about also us and what we do. So we rarely traveled alone. If I'm going to a customer, we're trying to get two consultants in there, or what I'm trying to say is bring more people. It's a point, I think, Adaptavist is trying to make and I think that's what Simon, our CEO, is trying to make is use these opportunities to be with people. I think it's a beautiful thing, but it's one of the myriad of solutions. I don't know. I really don't know. What do you think? What are your thoughts on this?

Dave Elkan:

Oh, I can share how we work at Easy Agile. So here I am today in the office. This is a great place for me to do this recording. We have a room for about 50 people here in the office in Wollongong, south of Sydney. We have about 10 to 15 who usually arrive on a daily basis, and that's great. We don't mind. We love people working from home and working away, which is more convenient and relaxing for them. At the same time, we do have quarterly plan, like planning sessions that we go to. We have Advanced Easy Agile every quarter. We come together in person. We've strategically ensured that we hire in a way so that's possible, so people aren't flying across vast sways of ocean to get to this conversation. In a way, it's planned-unplanned. So we do our planning ahead of time.

When we come for Advanced Easy Agile, we'll have something that we want to either upskill the team with or whatever, and then we'll have some team bonding where people can choose from a range of different activities they want to do together. And so, for us, it's more about getting together in person because we know that's really valuable to both build an understanding of each other as a team and to build that rapport. It can't be done over Zoom to an extent. So, absolutely, our business runs entirely in a remote-friendly way and we don't rely on people to be in person, in sync in person to move forward. However, we do see there's a great value there. So we try to live in both worlds and we get the benefit from both of them. Yeah. And so, that's one thing that can work. It's not for everybody. If you have a truly distributed global business, it's not exactly easy or affordable to bring everybody together on a quarterly basis.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah. I think it's beautiful though. So I've been in Adaptavist for close to six... I'm on my sixth year now and we used to be able to do... We didn't do quarterly. We did a yearly thing at the end of the year where everybody would get together. We called it Winter Con for the last two years, which I actually loved the idea, which was very much we could pitch ideas of what we wanted to talk about. It could be about work, could be about customers, could be about last year, whatever you wanted to talk about, could be about yourself, could be about a cool thing you did this year, whatever. We had a voting system, but really pretty much anyone that said any, you could get in.

You could just walk around and it was literally a conference center. We'd set up some rooms and you could walk in, look at a presentation, literally like Teams or whatever. It was the best experience every time that we did that. I love these because there's value. There's an ROI in having everybody learning and upskilling and breaking down these silos of, "Hey, I never worked with marketing, but here's an hour talk around something we did in marketing. I really want to join," and all these things. That's great. There was also the unplanned ROI, where you were coming out of there with multiple ideas of like, "Oh, I could explore this. We could explore that. I got this meeting set in Jan now that whenever I come back in January, we're going to be talking about this thing that we talked about for cloud migrations." All that was happening at Winter Con.

Now, we grew exponentially post-COVID, well, during and post. So while COVID was happening and all of a sudden everybody wanted work. And then as companies that were remote, I think a lot of the companies that were remote grew during COVID versus because companies that were local or anything, they slowly diluted down a little bit, let's put it that way. As we grew, we can't support that anymore as a one-time thing where you'd have... We're close to a thousand now. There's a lot of people to move and a lot of conferences, a lot of conference rooms and presentations and stuff that we just can't accommodate. So, I miss it a lot. We've been doing it remotely, but like you said, it's not the same to go on a Zoom call.

I remember sitting down in these presentations and you're sitting down next to people that someone from Arkansas, someone from Cambridge, and you start talking. Yeah, you're listening to conference, but we all know what happens when you're listening to a presentation. You start talking like, "Yeah, that's an interesting idea. What did you do last weekend?" You start talking. Those are things you can't do on Zoom. You can't really reproduce that on Zoom. It's not going to happen really and I miss that dearly. I don't know what the solution is when you have these kind of global distribution. I mean, I guess you do in a smaller way, maybe all of North America meet up or things like that, but it's just not the same, not the same at all. I think it's beautiful that you guys can still do these because everybody's close by. I think it's really nice.

Dave Elkan:

Oh, thanks. Yeah, it's something we're hoping to hold onto as long as we can. We understand that these things don't scale. At one point, we'll have to break it into different events so that people can have, I think, a higher level of involvement in that. If you have too many people at the same time, it can be just a bit read only, the way I see it. It's as if to seek participant.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

That's nice. Yeah. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. Yeah, you're right.

Dave Elkan:

So I'd love to just quickly touch back on Atlassian Team '23.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

I'm sorry.

Dave Elkan:

You did mention at the beginning... That's all right. We'll get there. There's these new apps, especially in the DevOps tooling space that Atlassian's working on, so Discovery. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about what you see there and why that's coming to fruition now?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, I think it's all about cloud. I'll be the first to say that big fan of data center, big fan of on-prem. That's how I learned the Atlassian tool set. So, a little skeptical when cloud came about. As it grew and it got better, it got better, that was great. I think it's now at a mature spot where the Point A program, which is where all of these tools are coming out of, so the product Discovery, Atlas and all that, those are the fruits of cloud. That's because now that we have cloud, they can churn out products and try things and see if they stick or not. I think that's why I think this year is the year where I think the program is mature enough. Migration's ready. I mean, we're one year out of server end-of-life. I think we're finally in a place where we can actually talk about all these opportunities. Most of the people at the conference will be able to get value from it.

I remember last year where talks were heavily around JSM and all the cool things it would do, but you still had a lot of people on server, still had a lot of people on data center. So it fell a little bit on deaf ears. A lot of people in the crowd were just like, "Yeah, it's not for me." Both keynotes were about that. So anyways, I think this year it's going to be better because of that, because everybody's bought in. I think it's right now because yeah, it's cloud. You can ship easier, faster. You can ship better. You can iterate better. You can get a product ready much, much quicker than if you're on-prem, and I think that's why you're seeing this blow up. I also think they're great ideas. Big fan of Atlas specifically. Big, big fan of Atlas.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. Fantastic. So, how are your customers seeing the migration to cloud? On the larger end, is that something that they're open to? Is that something that they support?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Everybody is intrigued, I'll start there. Everybody's intrigued. Now, the level of interest depends on the industry and the size. When you have a massive... I'll use banks because to me, banks are kind of like countries. So if you look at a massive bank where you have 30, 40,000 users, usually they have solid infrastructures. They have solid administrators. They have teams that are kind of living off this. It's built its own economy, basically. It runs itself. When you go in there and you try to teach them about cloud and all the great things it'll do, they start asking questions that are very technical and they're very good. There's not really an answer in cloud for yet, and so it gets skittish. Whereas if I go to a 500,000 people organization and they start asking questions about cloud, and usually we have more answers for that. It's just easy, an easier conversation. They don't have the same worries or the same thing troubles on their mind than the admin of 40,000 people. It's just not the same reality that they're seeing.

So I think for now, and I know Atlassian's making a big push into that enterprise space, I think for now you're going to see that growth. But as long as we don't have full autonomy of where our data is and how accessible that data is, it's going to be a problem, as long as FedRAMP isn't available to all, as long as all these different SOCs and compliances aren't available to all. These are very difficult because you've built an ecosystem around a lot of integrations and Easy Agile being to me, one of those integrations because their third-party app, however you want to look at it. Adaptavist has their own third-party app. So you have script runner and all that. We all have third-party apps. So Atlassian can't be like, "Oh, yeah, I'll make a blanket statement. We can do all these things." It's not really true. I'm like, "Hold up, you got to take into account all these different app partners out there that are doing their things and you can't put us all into one roof."I think they're victims of their success. What still making Atlassian great is the partner ecosystem, apps, solutions, sorry, everything, but it's also what's causing the adoption and the speed to which adoption of cloud is happening. It's making it slower than they would want to. I think that was maybe the misstep a little bit when everything got announced was like, "Oh, you guys do rely on these apps a lot." Yeah. A lot of our customers actually would say that the apps are even more important to them than the core. It's just a thing that you're seeing. So to go back to your question, depends on the complexity of the instance. The bigger the instance, usually the more complex it is. So if I go to over 10,000 users, it's going to be a very long conversation. Very, very long conversation.

Dave Elkan:

Yes, it is. It's funny that Atlassian did ship this and say, "Hey." Well, actually, there was a presumption that the apps were covered by SOC 2 or the like as well, and that was a missing... But it was this misunderstanding. But I say as a business owner going through SOC 2, it's a very rewarding and good process to go through. It's hard. We are doing it far earlier than Atlassian did in their own journey, but the sooner you do it, the easier it is. Ideally that as a smaller company, you have less things to worry about and the processes you put in place will be easier to maintain and monitor. So we're excited to really go down the SOC 2 path and to provide that peace of mind to our enterprise customers. So yeah, very good process to go through.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, you guys are going through it right now. Have you acquired it yet? Did you get your compliance yet or you're on your way to getting that?

Dave Elkan:

No, we're on the way to SOC 2 type 1 at the moment.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Wow. Nice.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah. Yeah. We got security group now in and they're handling all that. I'm not good with the compliances. I'll say it right now, right off the bat, I don't know them very well. I know they're like letters I would like to see next to every apps. That's what I know. I don't know how in depth the processes, but I know it's very involved to the point where you need to have a team dedicated to making that happen. So what have you guys seen so far? It's coming along great. What are some of the challenges that you've seen maybe? I'm just intrigued.

Dave Elkan:

Yeah. Oh, look, so our cloud apps are all architected in the same way, so they all use the same code base to an extent, like the deployment methodology. We haven't done any acquisitions which have bolted on to make that more complicated, so we're making the most of that situation. We've done a fair bit of work over the last quarter or so to put in all the checks and the controls around that deployment. The next thing is to really put in place the processes to ensure that our team understands how to deal with different situations and the like. So, that's something we're going to tackle in the next quarter. I'm excited to go through that and do a bit of a sprint with Nick, my co-founder and co-CEO, to really see how much we can get done in a period of time and really focus on that. I think that the benefit will be that we have a much more understood and clear way of running our business, which is obvious to our customers as well, which is a very good thing. I'm all in favor of it. Yeah.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I think we're seeing some of the similar things, but we did acquire a bunch of stuff and so that is making everything a bit more difficult, for sure.

Dave Elkan:

I can understand. That would be very tricky to try and bridge those gaps and to homogenize enough to be able to have a really clear statement going forward. Yeah. Okay. So we touched quickly on the Atlassian apps that they're bringing. Are there any apps in the marketplace that you have got an eye on that you'd love to go and talk to, of course, Easy Agile aside?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

I mean, of course. Yeah. A big need that I'm noticing now in the market... I don't know if it's a secret or something, I should wait because I know Team '23, they're going to be doing some stuff and I'm really excited for them. So one of the things that we're noticing is... So backups, so enterprise support, basically. Right now, when you're on the cloud, most companies, again, in the 40,000 and plus have strong backup needs and they actually have requirements, laws, things that they need to abide by as far as how long they maintain data, how long they have backups of data and all that. Right now, the way that it's done in cloud isn't nice at all. You actually have to go into the UI. You get a backup. If your backup is large, it's going to take multiple days to process and you got to remember to... It's all manual. There's nothing that really automated.

So, there is a growing market for these kinds of apps. I've been talking all that to these people at Revyz, R-E-V-Y-Z. What they do is they basically automate that process for you and they host your data. Right now, they only do it for a year, but it's still much better than what we're seeing out there. There's a lot of need for services like that, where they... Because I mean, part of the appeal of cloud is obviously hands off, don't have to worry about things anymore and Atlassian only guarantees backups for 21 days. So if you're an enterprise and you're looking for six months at least of data recovery, at least you're not going to get that. So by having a partner like Revyz or all these, there are other apps out there, I'm talking about Revyz specifically because I talk to them a bunch, but a lot of interesting things are happening.

Also, what's amazing about these apps, what these developers have found, and once they've have that process, they now get access to the structure of the data and they've started building tools around that structure. So for instance, that app can actually restore projects and issues and custom fields and configurations. So you don't need to do a full restore. You can actually pick what you want to restore, which is brilliant. It's something that even in data center wasn't easy to do. You couldn't just say like, "Hey, give me that issue." You'd have to restore the snapshot, go into the system, find your stuff. Now being able to go into my UI and Jira, go into my backup app, go and look the issued I deleted by mistake, find it, restore it the same day, it has comments saying, "This was restored by revisits, so make sure blah, blah, blah, yada, yada, yada." It's just brilliant and I'm really excited to see that grow this year.

Dave Elkan:

That's amazing. Yeah, it's a really intriguing part of this piece that I've never really thought through that that's actually a really important part of running an enterprise, that you have those continuous backups. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, that's a great insight.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, it's going to be an interesting market to dive into because we've been asked, even as a service partner, "Can you deliver on this?" The truth is without an app, you can't. There's no real way for me to get a backup. I'd have to go into your instance every day. I don't think you want a consultant going into every day your instance, downloading a backup and throwing it. I'd rather spend my money elsewhere. So these apps are going to be very... I think they're going to be big and I'm really interested to see what happens with all these different ventures.

Dave Elkan:

Well, certainly, a booth I'll be popping by to see if we can include the Easy Agile data in that backup as well.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yes, exactly. So they are looking at other app partners and seeing what they can do. So I think, yeah, absolutely, if you want to have a chat, they're great people.

Dave Elkan:

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time today, JP. That's a wrap. Hey, is there anything else you wanted to touch on before we wrap up? Is there anything you are hoping to get away from the event, to take away from the event? Anything on the sidelines you're going to see when you're there?

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

I mean, obviously, App Day is going to be a big thing. Really excited to meet y'all in person, see everybody. So App Day is the time where I get really technical, get my hands dirty. I don't do that a lot these days. I miss it sometimes just sitting down and doing some good old admin work. So anyway, the App Days are usually when I really get back to the nitty-gritty of let's talk about script runner, where we're at now, and let's meet with Easy Agile, with Temple, with all these different app vendors and talk about what's coming up and what they're seeing. So really looking forward to that. But other than that, no, just looking to have a good time. I'll hopefully get some good social time as well at the evening. Like I said, we won't get ourselves half the fun is also after the events every day, so really looking forward to that, for sure, and meeting all my fellow ecosystem partners and talking to everybody and seeing what they've seen in the past year.

Dave Elkan:

Likewise. I'm at least 1,000% more excited now having talked to you about it. So thank you so much for taking the time today, JP, to talk through that and I can't wait to see you there.

Jean-Philippe Comeau:

Yeah, I can't wait to see you. Thanks for having me.

Dave Elkan:

No probs. Thanks, mate.