Easy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile

TL;DR

Henrik Kniberg, the agile coach behind Spotify's model, discusses how AI is fundamentally transforming software development. Key takeaways: AI tools like Cursor and Claude are enabling 10x productivity gains; teams should give developers access to paid AI tools and encourage experimentation; coding will largely disappear as a manual task within 3–4 years; teams will shrink to 2 people plus AI; sprints will become obsolete in favour of continuous delivery; product owners can now write code via AI, creating pull requests instead of user stories; the key is treating AI like a brilliant intern – when it fails, the problem is usually your prompt or code structure, not the AI. Bottom line: Learn to use AI now, or risk being left behind in a rapidly changing landscape.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how software teams work, collaborate, and deliver value. But with this transformation comes questions: How do we maintain team morale when people fear being replaced? What happens to code quality when AI writes most of the code? Do traditional agile practices like sprints still make sense?

In this episode, I sit down with Henrik Kniberg to tackle these questions head-on. Henrik is uniquely positioned to guide us through this transition – he's the agile coach and entrepreneur who pioneered the famous Spotify model and helped transform how Lego approached agile development. Now, as co-founder of Abundly AI, he's at the forefront of helping teams integrate AI into their product development workflows.

This conversation goes deep into the practical realities of AI-powered development: from maintaining code review processes when productivity increases 10x, to ethical considerations around AI usage, to what cross-functional teams will look like in just a few years. Henrik doesn't just theorise – he shares real examples from his own team, where their CEO (a non-coder) regularly submits pull requests, and where features that once took a sprint can now be built during a 7-minute subway ride.

Whether you're a developer wondering if AI will replace you, a product owner looking to leverage these tools, or a leader trying to navigate this transformation, this episode offers concrete, actionable insights for thriving in the AI era.

About Our Guest

Henrik Kniberg is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur whose work has shaped how thousands of organisations approach software development. He's best known for creating the Spotify model – the squad-based organisational structure that revolutionised how large tech companies scale agile practices. His work at Spotify and later at Lego helped demonstrate how agile methodologies could work at enterprise scale whilst maintaining team autonomy and innovation.

Henrik's educational videos have become legendary in the agile community. His "Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell" video, created over a decade ago, remains one of the most-watched and shared resources for understanding product ownership, with millions of views. His ability to distil complex concepts into simple, visual explanations has made him one of the most accessible voices in agile education.

More recently, Henrik has turned his attention to the intersection of AI and product development. As co-founder of Abundly AI, he's moved from teaching about agile transformation to leading AI transformation – helping companies and teams understand how to effectively integrate generative AI tools into their development workflows. His approach combines his deep understanding of team dynamics and agile principles with hands-on experience using cutting-edge AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.

Henrik codes daily using AI and has been doing so for over two and a half years, giving him practical, lived experience with these tools that goes beyond theoretical understanding. He creates educational content about AI, trains teams on effective AI usage, and consults with organisations navigating their own AI transformations. His perspective is particularly valuable because he views AI through the lens of organisational change management – recognising that successful AI adoption isn't just about the technology, it's about people, culture, and process.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Henrik continues to push the boundaries of what's possible when human creativity and AI capabilities combine, whilst maintaining a pragmatic, human-centred approach to technological change.

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Maintaining Team Morale and Motivation in the AI Era

Tenille Hoppo: Hi there, team, and welcome to this new episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Tenille Hoppo, and I'm feeling really quite lucky to have an opportunity to chat today with our guest, Henrik Kniberg.

Henrik is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur known for pioneering agile practices at companies like Spotify and Lego, and more recently for his thought leadership in applying AI to product development. Henrik co-founded Abundly AI, and when he isn't making excellent videos to help us all understand AI, he is focused on the practical application of generative AI in product development and training teams to use these technologies effectively.

Drawing on his extensive experience in agile methodologies and team coaching, Henrik seems the perfect person to learn from when thinking about the intersection of AI, product development, and effective team dynamics. So a very warm welcome to you, Henrik.

Henrik Kniberg: Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

Tenille: I think most people would agree that motivated people do better work. So I'd like to start today by touching on the very human element of this discussion and helping people maintain momentum and motivation when they may be feeling some concern or uncertainty about the upheaval that AI might represent for them in their role.

What would you suggest that leaders do to encourage the use of AI in ways that increase team morale and creativity rather than risking people feeling quite concerned or even potentially replaced?

Henrik: There are kind of two sides to the coin. There's one side that says, "Oh, AI is gonna take my job, and I'm gonna get fired." And the other side says, "Oh, AI is going to give me superpowers and give us all superpowers, and thereby give us better job security than we had before."

I think it's important to press on the second point from a leader's perspective. Pitch it as this is a tool, and we are entering a world where this tool is a crucial tool to understand how to use – in a similar way that everyone uses the Internet. We consider it obvious that you need to know how to use the Internet. If you don't know how to use the Internet, it's going to be hard.

"I encourage people to experiment, give them access to the tools to do so, and encourage sharing. And don't start firing people because they get productive."

I also find that people tend to get a little bit less scared once they learn to use it. It becomes less scary. It's like if you're worried there's a monster under your bed, maybe look under your bed and turn on the lights. Maybe there wasn't a monster there, or maybe it was there but it was kind of cute and just wanted a hug.

Creating a Culture of Safe Experimentation

Tenille: I've read that you encourage experimentation with AI through learning – I agree it's the best way to learn. What would you encourage leaders and team leaders to do to create a strong culture where teams feel safe to experiment?

Henrik: There are some things. One is pretty basic: just give people access to good AI tools. And that's quite hard in some large organisations because there are all kinds of resistance – compliance issues, data security issues. Are we allowed to use ChatGPT or Claude? Where is our data going? There are all these scary things that make companies either hesitate or outright try to stop people.

Start at that hygiene level. Address those impediments and solve them. When the Internet came, it was really scary to connect your computer to the Internet. But now we all do it, and you kind of have to, or you don't get any work done. We're at this similar moment now.

"Ironically, when companies are too strict about restricting people, then what people tend to do is just use shadow AI – they use it on their own in private or in secret, and then you have no control at all."

Start there. Once people have access to really good AI tools, then it's just a matter of encouraging and creating forums. Encourage people to experiment, create knowledge-sharing forums, share your own experiments. Try to role-model this yourself. Say, "I tried using AI for these different things, and here's what I learned." Also provide paths for support, like training courses.

The Right Mindset for Working with AI

Tenille: What would you encourage in team members as far as their mindset or skills go? Certainly a nature of curiosity and a willingness to learn and experiment. Is there anything beyond that that you think would be really key?

Henrik: It is a bit of a weird technology that's never really existed before. We're used to humans and code. Humans are intelligent and kind of unpredictable. We hallucinate sometimes, but we can do amazing things. Code is dumb – it executes exactly what you told it to do, and it does so every time exactly the same way. But it can't reason, it can't think.

Now we have AI and AI agents which are somewhere in the middle. They're not quite as predictable as code, but they're a lot more predictable than humans typically. They're a lot smarter than code, but maybe not quite as smart as humans – except for some tasks when they're a million times smarter than humans. So it's weird.

You need a kind of humble attitude where you come at it with a mindset of curiosity. Part of it is also to realise that a lot of the limitation is in you as a user. If you try to use AI for coding and it wrote something that didn't work, it's probably not the model itself. It's probably your skills or lack of skills because you have to learn how to use these tools. You need to have this attitude of "Oh, it failed. What can I do differently next time?" until you really learn how to use it.

"There can be some aspect of pride with developers. Like, 'I've been coding for 30 years. Of course this machine can't code better than me.' But if you think of it like 'I want this thing to be good, I want to bring out the best in this tool' – not because it's going to replace me, but because it's going to save me a tonne of time by doing all the boring parts of the coding so I can do the more interesting parts – that kind of mindset really helps."

Maintaining Code Quality and Shared Understanding

Tenille: Our team at Easy Agile is taking our steps and trying to figure out how AI is gonna work best for us. I put the question out to some of our teams, and there were various questions around people taking their first steps in using AI as a co-pilot and producing code. There are question marks around consistency of code, maintaining code quality and clean architecture, and even things like maintaining that shared understanding of the code base. What advice do you have for people in that situation?

Henrik: My first piece of advice when it comes to coding – and this is something I do every day with AI, I've been doing for about two and a half years now – is that the models now, especially Claude, have gotten to the level where it's basically never the AI's fault anymore. If it does anything wrong, it's on you.

You need to think about: okay, am I using the wrong tool maybe? Or am I not using the tool correctly?

For example, the current market leader in terms of productivity tools with AI is Cursor. There are other tools that are getting close like GitHub Copilot, but Cursor is way ahead of anything else I've seen. With Cursor, it basically digs through your code base and looks for what it needs.

But if it fails to find what it needs, you need to think about why. It probably failed for the same reason a human might have failed. Maybe your code structure was very unstructured. Maybe you need to explain to the AI what the high-level structure of your code is.

"Think of it kind of like a really smart intern who just joined your team. They're brilliant at coding, but now they got confused about something, and it's probably your code – something in it that made it confused. And now you need to clarify that."

There are ways to do that. In Cursor, for example, you can create something called cursor rules, which are like standing documents that describe certain aspects of your system. In my team, we're always tweaking those rules. Whenever we find that the AI model did something wrong, we're always analysing why. Usually it's our prompt – I just phrased it badly – or I just need to add a cursor rule, or I need to break the problem down a little bit.

It's exactly the same thing as if you go to a team and give them this massive user story that includes all these assumptions – they'll probably get some things wrong. But if you take that big problem and sit down together and analyse it and split it into smaller steps where each step is verifiable and testable, now your team can do really good work. It's exactly the same thing with AI.

Addressing the Code Review Bottleneck

Tenille: One of our senior developers found that he was outputting code at a much greater volume and faster speed, but the handbrake he found was actually their code review processes. They were keeping the same processes they had previously, and that was a bit of a handbrake for them. What kind of advice would you have there?

Henrik: This reminds me of the general issue with any kind of productivity improvement. If you have a value stream, a process where you do different parts – you do some development, some testing, you have some design – whenever you take one part of the process and make it super optimised, the bottleneck moves to somewhere else.

If testing is no longer the bottleneck, maybe coding is. And when coding is instant, then maybe customer feedback – or lack of customer feedback – is the bottleneck. The bottleneck just keeps moving. In that particular case, the bottleneck became code review. So I would just start optimising that. That's not an AI problem. It's a process problem.

Look at it: what exactly are we trying to do when we review? Maybe we could think about changing the way we review things. For example, does all code need to be reviewed? Would it be enough that the human who wrote it and the AI, together with the human, agree that this is fine? Or maybe depending on the criticality of that change, in some cases you might just let it pass or use AI to help in the reviewing process also.

"I think there's value in code review in terms of knowledge sharing in a large organisation. But maybe the review doesn't necessarily need to be a blocking process either. It could be something you go back and look at – don't let it stop you from shipping, but maybe go back once per week and say, 'Let's look at some highlights of some changes we've made.'"

We produce 10 times more code than in the past, so reviewing every line is not feasible. But maybe we can at least identify which code is most interesting to look at.

Ethical Considerations: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

Tenille: Agile emphasises people over process and delivering value to customers. Now with AI in the mix, there's potential for raising some ethical considerations. I'm interested in your thoughts on how teams should approach these ethical considerations that come along with AI – things like balancing rapid experimentation against concerns around bias, potential data privacy concerns.

Henrik: I would treat each ethical question on its own merits. Let me give you an example. When you use AI – let's say facial recognition technology that can process and recognise faces a lot better than any human – I kind of put that in the bucket of: any tool that is really useful can also be used for bad things. A hammer, fire, electricity.

That doesn't have so much to do with the tool itself. It has much more to do with the rules and regulations and processes around the tool. I can't really separate AI in that sense. Treat it like any other system. Whenever you install a camera somewhere, with or without AI, that camera is going to see stuff. What are you allowed to do with that information? That's an important question. But I don't think it's different for AI really, in that sense, other than that AI is extremely powerful. So you need to really take that seriously, especially when it comes to things like autonomous weapons and the risk of fraud and fake news.

"An important part of it is just to make it part of the agenda. Let's say you're a recruitment company and you're now going to add some AI help in screening. At least raise the question: we could do this. Do we want to do this? What is the responsible way to do it?"

It's not that hard to come up with reasonable guidelines. Obviously, we shouldn't let the AI decide who we're going to hire or not. That's a bad idea. But maybe it can look at the pile of candidates that we plan to reject and identify some that we should take a second look at. There's nothing to lose from that because that AI did some extra research and found that this person who had a pretty weak CV actually has done amazing things before.

We're actually working with a company now where we're helping them build some AI agents. Our AI agents help them classify CVs – not by "should we hire them or not," but more like which region in Sweden is this, which type of job are we talking about here. Just classifying to make it more likely that this job application reaches the right person. That's work that humans did before with pretty bad accuracy.

The conclusion was that AI, despite having biases like we humans do, seemed to have less biases than the human. Mainly things like it's never going to be in a bad mood because it hasn't had its coffee today. It'll process everybody on the same merits.

I think of it like a peer-to-peer thing. Imagine going to a doctor – ideally, I want to have both a human doctor and an AI doctor side by side, just because they both have biases, but now they can complement each other. It's like having a second opinion. If the AI says we should do this and the doctor says, "No, wait a second," or vice versa, having those two different opinions is super useful.

Parallels Between Agile and AI Transformations

Tenille: You're recognised as one of the leading voices in agile software development. I can see, and I'm interested if you do see, some parallels between the agile transformations that you led at Spotify and Lego with the AI transformations that many businesses are looking at now.

Henrik: I agree. I find that when we help companies transition towards becoming AI native, a lot of the thinking is similar to agile. But I think we can generalise that agile transformations are not really very special either – it's organisational change.

There are some patterns involved regardless of whether you're transitioning towards an agile way of working or towards AI. Some general patterns such as: you've got to get buy-in, it's useful to do the change in an incremental way, balance bottom-up with top-down. There are all these techniques that are useful regardless. But as an agilist, if you have some skills and competence in leading and supporting a change process, then that's going to be really useful also when helping companies understand how to use AI.

Tenille: Are you seeing more top-down or bottom-up when it comes to AI transformations?

Henrik: So far it's quite new still. The jury's not in yet. But so far it looks very familiar to me. I'm seeing both. I'm seeing situations where it's pure top-down where managers are like "we got to go full-out AI," and they push it out with mixed results. And sometimes just completely bottom-up, also with mixed results.

Sometimes something can start completely organically and then totally take hold, or it starts organically and then gets squashed because there was no buy-in higher up. I saw all of that with agile as well. My guess is in most cases the most successful will be when you have a bit of both – support and guidance from the top, but maybe driven from the bottom.

"I think the bottom-up is maybe more important than ever because this technology is so weird and so fast-moving. As a leader, you don't really have a chance if you try to control it – you're going to slow things down to an unacceptable level. People will be learning things that you can't keep up with yourself. So it's better to just enable people to experiment a lot, but then of course provide guidance."

AI for Product Owners: From Ideation to Pull Requests

Tenille: You're very well known for your guidance and for your ability to explain quite complex concepts very simply and clearly. I was looking at your video on YouTube today, the Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell video, which was uploaded about 12 years ago now. Thinking about product owners, there's a big opportunity now with AI for generating ideas, analysing data, and even suggesting new features. What's your advice for product owners and product managers in using AI most effectively?

Henrik: Use it for everything. Overuse it so you can find the limits. The second thing is: make sure you have access to a good AI model. Don't use the free ones. The difference is really large – like 10x, 100x difference – just in paying like $20 per month or something. At the moment, I can particularly strongly recommend Claude. It's in its own category of awesomeness right now. But that of course changes as they leapfrog each other. But mainly: pay up, use a paid model, and then experiment.

For product owners, typical things are what you already mentioned – ideation, creating good backlog items, splitting a story – but also writing code. I would say as a PO, there is this traditional view, for example in Scrum, that POs should not be coding. There's a reason for that: because coding takes time, and then as PO you get stuck in details and you lose the big picture.

Well, that's not true anymore. There are very many things that used to be time-consuming coding that is basically a five-minute job with a good prompt.

"Instead of wasting the team's time by trying to phrase that as a story, just phrase it as a pull request instead and go to the team and demonstrate your running feature."

That happened actually today. Just now, our CEO, who's not a coder, came to me with a pull request. In fact, quite often he just pushes directly to a branch because it's small changes. He wants to add some new visualisation for a graph or something in our platform – typically admin stuff that users won't see, so it's quite harmless if he gets it wrong.

He's vibe coding, just making little changes to the admin, which means he never goes to my team and says, "Hey, can you guys generate this report or this graph for how users use our product?" No, he just puts it in himself if it's simple.

Today we wanted to make a change with how we handle payments for enterprise customers. Getting that wrong is a little more serious, and the change wasn't that hard, but he just didn't feel completely comfortable pushing it himself. So he just made a PR instead, and then we spent 15 minutes reviewing it. I said it was fine, so we pushed it.

It's so refreshing that now anybody can code. You just need to learn the basic prompting and these tools. And then that saves time for the developers to do the more heavyweight coding.

Tenille: It's an interesting world where we can have things set up where anyone could just jump in and with the right guardrails create something. It makes Friday demos quite probably a lot more interesting than maybe they used to be in the past.

Henrik: I would like to challenge any development team to let their stakeholders push code, and then find out whatever's stopping you from doing that and fix that. Then you get to a very interesting space.

Closing the Gap Between Makers and Users

Tenille: A key insight from your work with agile teams in the past has been to really focus on minimising that gap between maker and user. Do you think that AI helps to close that gap, or do you think it potentially risks widening it if teams are focusing too much on AI predictions and stop talking to their customers effectively?

Henrik: I think that of course depends a lot on the team. But from what I've seen so far, it massively reduces the gap. Because if I don't have to spend a week getting a feature to work, I can spend an hour instead. Then I have so much more time to talk to my users and my customers.

If the time to make a clickable prototype or something is a few seconds, then I can do it live in real time with my customers, and we can co-create. There are all these opportunities.

I find that – myself, my teams, and the people I work with – we work a lot more closely with our users and customers because of this fast turnaround time.

"Just yesterday I was teaching a course, and I was going home sitting on the subway. It was a 15-minute subway ride. I finally got a seat, so I had only 7 minutes left. There's this feature that I wanted to build that involved both front-end and back-end and a database schema change. Well, 5 minutes later it was done and I got off the subway and just pushed it. That's crazy."

Of course, our system is set up optimised to enable it to be that fast. And of course not everything will work that well. But every time it does, I've been coding for 30 years, and I feel like I wake up in some weird fantasy every day, wondering, "Can I really be this productive?" I never would have thought that was possible.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Agile Teams

Tenille: I'd like you to put your futurist hat on for a moment. How do you see the future of agile teamwork in, say, 10 to 15 years time? If we would have this conversation again in 2035, given the exponential growth of AI and improvements over the last two to three years, what do you think would be the biggest change for software development teams in how they operate?

Henrik: I can't even imagine 10 years. Even 5 years is just beyond imagination. That's like asking someone in the 1920s to imagine smartphones and the Internet. I think that's the level of change we're looking at.

I would shorten the time a little bit and say maybe 3 or 4 years. My guess there – and I'm already seeing this transfer happen – is that coding will just go away. It just won't be stuff that we humans do because we're too slow and we hallucinate way too much.

But I think engineering and the developer role will still be there, just that we don't type lines of code – in the same way that we no longer make punch cards or we no longer write machine code and poke values into registers using assembly language. That used to be a big part of it, but no longer.

"In the future, as developers, a lot of the work will still be the same. You're still designing stuff, you're thinking about architecture, you're interacting with customers, and you're doing all the other stuff. But typing lines of code is something that we're gonna be telling our kids about, and they're not gonna believe that we used to do that."

The other thing is smaller teams, which I'm already seeing now. I think the idea of a cross-functional team of 5 to 7 people – traditionally that was considered quite necessary in order to have all the different skills needed to deliver a feature in a product. But that's not the case anymore. If you skip ahead 2 or 3 years when this knowledge has spread, I think most teams will be 2 people and an AI, because then you have all the domain knowledge you need, probably.

As a consequence of that, we'll just have more teams. More and smaller teams. Of course, then you need to collaborate between the teams, so cross-team synchronisation is still going to be an issue.

Also, I'm already seeing this now, but this concept of sprints – the whole point is to give a team some peace of mind to build something complex, because typically you would need a week or two to build something complex. But now, when it takes a day and some good prompting to do the same thing that would have taken a whole sprint, then the sprint is a day instead. If the sprint is a day, is there any difference between a sprint planning meeting and a daily standup? Not really.

I think sprints will just kind of shrink into oblivion. What's going to be left instead is something a little bit similar – some kind of synchronisation point or follow-up point. Instead of a sprint where every 2 weeks we sit down and try to make a plan, I think it'll be very much continuous delivery on a day-to-day basis. But then maybe every week or two we take a step back and just reflect a little bit and say, "Okay, what have we been delivering the past couple of weeks? What have we been learning? What's our high-level focus for the next couple of weeks?" A very, very lightweight equivalent of a sprint.

I feel pretty confident about that guess because personally, we are already there with my team, and I think it'll become a bit of a norm.

Final Thoughts: Preparing for the Future

Henrik: No one knows what's gonna happen in the future, and those who say they do are kidding themselves. But there's one fairly safe bet though: no matter what happens in the future with AI, if you understand how to use it, you'll be in a better position to deal with whatever that is. That's why I encourage people to get comfortable with it, get used to using it.

Tenille: I have a teenage daughter who I'm actually trying to encourage to learn how to use AI, because I feel like when I was her age, the Internet was the thing that was sort of coming mainstream. It completely changed the way we live. Everything is online now. And I feel like AI is that piece for her.

Henrik: Isn't it weird that the generation of small children growing up now are going to consider this to be normal and obvious? They'll be the AI natives. They'll be like, "Of course I have my AI agent buddy. There's nothing weird about that at all."

Tenille: I'll still keep being nice to my coffee machine.

Henrik: Yeah, that's good. Just in case, you know.

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Thank you to Henrik Kniberg for joining us on this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. To learn more about Henrik's work, visit Abundly AI or check out his educational videos on AI and agile practices.

Subscribe to the Easy Agile Podcast on your favourite platform, and join us for more conversations about agile, product development, and the future of work.

In this episode, I was joined by Leandro Barreto - Lead Software Engineer at Miro.

Leandro is responsible for helping engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, Leandro worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil as Head of Technical Sales.

In this episode, we spoke about;

• Ikigai - what is it and how do you achieve it?
• The benefits of OKRs
• How can we combine agile, Ikigai and OKRs?
• How Ikigai can help agile teams achieve great results and stay motivated

I hope you enjoy today's episode as much as I did recording it.

Transcript

Robert O’Farrell:

Welcome, everyone, to the Easy Agile Podcast. We have an episode today with Leandro Barreto who is a lead software engineer at Miro. I'm your host for today, Robert O'Farrel. I'm the Growth tech lead at Easy Agile. Before we kick off this podcast, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Duruwa-speaking country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Islander, and First Nations people joining us today on the podcast.

Robert O’Farrell:

Leandro currently works as a lead software engineer at Miro where his responsibility is to help engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, he worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil and acted as a head of technical sales with the mission to increase the service offers in Latin America. Welcome, Leandro. It's great to have you here today.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Thanks also for the Easy Agile for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here today.

Robert O’Farrell:

Fantastic. You're here to talk about Ikigai, objectives and key results or OKRs in Agile, so let's kick it off. Ikigai, what is it? Can you give us a brief or a long explanation of what it is?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, of course, of course. So, Ikigai I use it to say is a philosophy of life that means like a reason for being or the meaning of life. So, the world Ikigai originates from a village in Southern Japan, where the average life expectancy of people is over 100 years old. So, Ikigai is basically divided in four components. The first, things you love. Second, something that you are good at, then something that pays you well. And finally, something that the worlds need. So, when you put it all together, then you have the Ikigai, but this is not easy. So, let me explain a little bit of each of these companies.

Leandro Barreto:

So, the first thing is something that you love, something that makes you be present, something that you must ask yourself what do you really enjoy in doing? What makes you happy? What holds your intention that makes you lose time and forget about time? So, for example, reading, dancing, singing, painting, learning, teaching, et cetera. So, maybe it's a little bit difficult to answer right now, but understanding and seeking what you love must is fundamental so that you can have a healthy balance between learning, putting it in practice, testing, failing, trying again, and keep the circle repeating itself.

Leandro Barreto:

So, an example that I can give you is, for example, I had a jujitsu teacher that no matter the day, he was always training. And one day, I remember I got my arm hurt. And in the next day, I had a message from him like 6:00 in the morning, he was asking if I was okay. And I was waking up and he was texting me like, "Hey, are you okay? Are you going to be able to train today?" And I was like, "Whoa, take it easy, man." This is very funny because our class is 6:00 p.m. And he was punctually at the tatami or dojo. I don't know the English word for that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, dojo. We have dojo. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Dojo. Awesome. Yeah. And he was always punctual. And after the classes, he always said that he wants to get home earlier after the classes because he has private classes. So, from morning to night, he always keeps training and you can see the passion in his eyes when he talks about jujitsu. "It's a passion for me". A little bit exaggerated.

Robert O’Farrell:

Something that definitely got him up in the morning and kept him going throughout the day to the late evening, by the sounds of it.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Yes. And then, you have the second component, which is something that you are good at. Something that you can always improve with yourself. So, for example, what you are really good at. It's quite hard to answer, but what the people say is that I'm do... something correct or what they say something positive that what I do. So, for example, I remember the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that says that usually, you have to spend 10,000 hours in something practicing to be good at.

Leandro Barreto:

So, don't take it as an obstacle but as a motivation to keep going, and understand this part of what you are good at. It's a good way to improve. And the third part is what pays you well? So, money is what... Some people say that "Hey, money don't bring... It's not... how can I say that?

Robert O’Farrell:

Money doesn't bring happiness?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, exactly. But it puts a roof in your head. It makes you provide a good life for your family. It makes you travel. It makes you have a hobby. So, according to Maslow, for example, one of the bases of human beings is to start thinking about security. So, we have to have this security in order we can improve as a person. So, money helps you to achieve it. Yeah. So, find something that makes your life as comfortable as you desire to, as you wish to. So, otherwise, you'll always be looking for something that you never had. So, for example, time.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you will spend so much time thinking how can you have more money? And here's the glitch, you will never be paid because you will be stuck on your daily basis thinking on how to get money instead of how to improve your skills to get money. Right? And then, you have the what the world needs. So, here, the idea is to find a proposal for what do you do and what is value to the society, your proposal. And sometimes it's quite difficult to find precisely because of the plurality of positions and responsibilities that we have nowadays. And even more today with the full expansion of technology that every month we have new positions to be filled by companies that needs different type of skills, soft skills and hard skills.

Leandro Barreto:

And here, the keyword is to serve. So, I will give a personal example. For example, one of the things that I missed most when I was a young teenager was having someone who could help me to explore the technology so I can get a job. So, it was in the early 2000 and it was quite hard.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes, very much so.

Leandro Barreto:

The internet is starting, everything is new.

Robert O’Farrell:

People on dial-up, internet was slow.

Leandro Barreto:

Do you remember that sound like prshh?

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, yeah. It comes to me in my dreams I think. I heard it so many times in that era.

Leandro Barreto:

My family and my friends, they wasn't in the IT field. So, there is no one to help me that. So, I had to learn it by myself. Seems impossible. But it took me time to learn it and enter in a company with a good position let's say that gives me money and the possibility to learn much more faster. So, since 2013, I dedicate part of my time to teach young people, acting as a mentor to help them enter in this market so they can learn new skills. I can open paths for them, put in contact with the right people, people which is going to be important for them, and all aiming to accelerate their dev development and giving them the opportunity.

Leandro Barreto:

And this for me is very meaningful because I'm helping those who don't have any references also, and sometimes don't have a chance. And the more I serve them, the more I earn and I grow with them. So, I came across like when I was introduced to Ikigai for example, another personal example.

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry. Before we get to that, just reiterating. So, the four components, so there's something that you really lose time in doing, something that you get into the flow of doing very easily. And then, the second component is the thing that you are very confident in doing, something that you do quite well. The third one, being something that pays you well, and the fourth one, being something where there's a need for it. So, just reiterating that. That's correct?

Leandro Barreto:

Correct. Correct.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, I guess getting to that, our second question that like for yourself, you can apply obviously in a business sense, but in a personal sense, what's been your journey there, and do you believe you've achieved Ikigai, I guess, would be my next question?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Well, actually personally, I have some things that's very clear in my life. I'm still not there, but let's say that I'm in the process.

Robert O’Farrell:

Work in progress

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Work in progress. So, I have clear goals and I have clear in my mind where I want to go in a few years, so I don't get disencouraged if the weather is cold or warm, if the stock market goes up or down. And the only thing that I focus is to be 1% better than I was yesterday. And this provides me a security that prevents me to wasting time and things that doesn't make any sense or simply doesn't matter for me in the future. So, I take my career very, and also my personal life very serious on that point. So, yeah, let's say that work in progress.

Robert O’Farrell:

I love that word security that you use there. It draws a parallel, I think, to a word that we also use when it comes to that plan that we have, which is that focus element, making sure that we do the things that matter. Do you think that it's also given you a sense of focus too on what you take on and what you say yes to and what you say no to with regards to your personal and professional development?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When you know where you want to go, it's more easy to say yes or no to something that came up to you. Another personal example that I remember was something like 12 years ago, 12 to 13 years ago, my focus was to learn Java, for example, Java programming. Because I know in the midterm, I would like to be a Java architect. So, I have to improve my skills on that programming language.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, the company that I was working was making some changes and then they asked me, "Hey, I know you are good at Java. You are learning, but we need you to start learning this another language, Ruby on Rails during that time. But you have to at least for the moment, forget Java." And then, I was like, "Mm-mm. No, no."

Robert O’Farrell:

It's not what I want to do.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. I totally understand that was a company's decision. But during that point, it begins to separate my focus on what I want to achieve from the company's purpose. So, it doesn't make any sense to continue on that company. I asked to leave. And again, best decision ever, because then I entered in another company that I learned so much. And then, in three years I became a Java architect.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. That's a fantastic example of that focus. I'm quite curious out of those four components that you mentioned before, what have you found quite easy, I guess, to achieve or to at least get clarity around personally? And what have you found more challenging?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. Yeah. So, learning something that you don't know, it's always a challenge but when you have a desire or a clear focus where you want to go in a few years, things start to be clarified for you. For example, in 2014, I did extension of my MBA in United States to learn about entrepreneurship and things that for me was really, really important. But totally new field, I have no idea what to expect but it provides me the vision to... I always had the idea to have my own company in other words. So, I know that in short term, not in short term, but in midterm at least five years to four years, during that period of time, I would like to have my company.

Leandro Barreto:

So, after I did this MBA, I came back to Brazil, and then I started to put myself in situations that makes me learn these new things. And in 2016, I open up our restaurant in Brazil. So, when you have an objective, things, and it's quite funny because the universe starts to help you.

Robert O’Farrell:

You make your own luck in a lot of regards too, I think.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, if you had somebody who was looking to learn about Ikigai and came to you for some, for your experience and your advice in how to apply it to their lives, what do you think your advice to someone would be who doesn't know much about it?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Great question. So, one tip that I, or advice that I can give is, and I think that this is fantastic and I apply it in my daily basis. Don't waste time in small decisions on a daily basis because every day we have thousands of decisions to make and our brain capacity is limited daily, at least daily. So, there are some times that we feel like mentally exhausted after, for example, you have six meetings in a row in a day. In the end of the day, you were totally tired. Right? And I once read that the greatest minds don't waste time thinking on small things, for example, Steve Jobs always wore the same jeans and t-shirt every day. And he didn't need to think to use it. He just took it and reuse it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, what I did in 2018, more or less when I was presented to Ikigai. So, what I did, I lived alone in an apartment in Brazil. So, I decided to change it, my life. What I did, I donated my entire wardrobe of clothes with things that I almost never used. And I was only wear eight t-shirts and two jeans.

Robert O’Farrell:

Quite a collection.

Leandro Barreto:

So, I avoid making those small decisions, especially in the morning, because in the morning, you have a clear mind and you don't have to spend those in small things, because if you think on small things, probably it'll grow during the day. So, for example, another thing that helped me a lot is plan the week. So, Google Calendar exists to be used, right?

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yes.

Leandro Barreto:

So, everything that is very important for you, events or plans that need to be done, put on the calendar. And also, talking about the clothes, separate your clothes a day earlier before you go into bed. So, you wake up more calmly, you drink your coffee calmly, and you focus your efforts on what really matters. And once you have freed your mind from thinking about these small things, you can focus your time and energy on learning new things or getting things done the way it should be. And whether it's learning a new language or a new skill, or you can also read a book in the morning because you have free time, let's say. You can focus on what matters to you exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I'm quite curious about this aspect of finding something that you really get consumed by. And I think in this digital age, we have so many things that distract us. Our phone has a lot of notifications where we have a lot of information at our beck and call and sometimes it can be overwhelming to know what we should focus on, and I guess what we can really get passionate about. I'm curious, do you have any insight into that as to how people can find that thing that they just lose themselves in and that they're super passionate about?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Another thing that worked very well for me is to turn off all the notifications.

Robert O’Farrell:

Get a dumb phone just so you don't have that level of notifications coming through. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Because I read... I don't remember where exactly, but your brain took something like 15 minutes to focus on something. So, if you don't spend 15 minutes of your time, focus on what needs to be done. You cannot focus at all. So, what I usually do, I turn off all of the notifications from my phone. So, the principal one, I just took it off and I don't care about notifications. Also, one thing that I noticed is that when I, for example, when I had Apple Watch. In the Apple Watch, even if you turn the notifications on or off, the iPhone, it keeps doing on the phone. Oh, my God. So, this is one simple device that I can say, because otherwise, you will enter in a black hole in a community and social media and news, and then you'll lose yourself.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I found that personally with the Apple Watch, having something on your wrist that vibrates is incredibly distracting. And I was always very big champion of technology, but that was one area where I just moved away from it, went back to a mechanical watch, just didn't want that level of interruption when I was trying to focus on things. So, I think it's a really key insight to focus.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. In addition to that, when you, for example, when you are in a meeting with someone and you are actually expecting a message for, I don't know, maybe your family, and then it pops up on your phone and you are in a meeting, and then you take a look into the watch and the people notice that you are not paying attention because you are looking into watch. No matter why you are looking, if it's a message or et cetera, you do provide a psychology... How can I say that in English? Oh, my God. Psychology interference. Let's say it.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yep. Psychological interference.

Leandro Barreto:

Interference. Yeah. Thank you. That will provide a negative influence to other people. So, yeah, that's why you made the right choice to move into the-

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I've heard some people that will actually ask people to leave their phones outside when they go into meetings or leave their laptop outside so that you're present and that you are engaged in the conversation. Because I think even the mere fact that you have your phone near you is a distraction. Even if there's no notifications, its presence is enough to ensure that you're not 100% present in the conversation, which I think is quite interesting from how we focus and our dependency on that rush that we get or that endorphin rush of getting that ping on the phone or that notification.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I thought we could move on to talk about objective and key results. Or for those people that may not have come across this term before, OKRs are collaborative goal-setting methodology and used by teams and individuals to set challenging and ambitious goals with measurable results. So, to break that down further, the objective part of the OKR is simply what is to be achieved and the KR part of it, which is key results, benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. So, getting to the heart of setting successful OKR is establishing it clear and compelling why. Is there a secret formula to creating a powerful why to get everyone on board?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Great question. So, OKRs, it's all about action and execution. And I think the secret formula, let's say it's having a well-defined proposal and also everyone engaged in seeking the result as the main objective. So, companies in my opinion are made of living ecosystem called human beings. And every human being has its own desires, proposals, goals. And en suite, unite all of the objectives of both the companies and all the people together. That's when we can achieve best results. And that's why some companies are focused on the cultural fit.

Leandro Barreto:

And this is one thing that I see growing a lot in the HR area, companies and persons that must, which the cultural fit must match. It basically means that the person has the same values and desires to achieve results as most of the people in the company or what the company understand as their force that they need to keep growing as a company. And I have seen many technically good people failing in selection, in process selection, simply because they don't adhere to cultural fit. And this is much more than a psychological issue because you don't know how to say like people that cannot work as a group.

Leandro Barreto:

So, it's better for the company to hire someone who can play as a team instead of someone who is like the lonely wolf that keeps working alone. And the results is for only him and not for the entire company. So, yeah, this is the classic example that I can see. And also, one thing that is good for that is nowadays, our fault tolerance is quite good because today at least serious companies don't punish failures. So, they even encourage you to learn.

Leandro Barreto:

And the Spotify models, I remember they say like, "Fail fast and learn fast." So, that was the fail wall was born. So, where everyone shared their failures and they can learn as a team, as a clan, guild. And this is quite beautiful because you can create such an environment where everyone can learn and grow together because humans can fail. And this is normal.

Robert O’Farrell:

Do you think that-

Leandro Barreto:

And-

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry, I'm just curious. Do you think that companies are more focused around the why these days, or that why has become more important in their measure of success? And you mentioned cultural fit and I love this idea that more companies are much more sensitive to what is their company culture and how does this person work within, or are they going to fit into this company culture? Because the existing people in that company are aligned around their why. And if someone is coming in and doesn't align with that, they understand the impact on their success. So, do you think that company's becoming more and more aware of this and more sensitive to this?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. I think they are. So, as far as they have the right people in the right environment with the right proposal, no matter the why they will find it blindly, let's say. I think it's like a sense of behavior for the people. Because if you see someone from, as your peer, let's say, that's running to an objective that was defined by the company. And you are aligned with your values and goals. You will follow it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, this is good for both persons as human beings and also for the company because they show the proposal, they show what is the why we must be, for example, the first selling company for our product in the market, why, and then people who is working on it, they will take it as a personal objective. And this is when you make the connection between the company's objective and the people's objective because when the company grows with this why, with this north star, the people will grow together with you.

Robert O’Farrell:

I completely agree. I'm quite curious too from the opposite point of view. Do you think that employees are becoming more aware of understanding the company's why before they join the company? Because we've seen with the pandemic that a lot of companies are now moving to this remote recruitment. And so, the possibilities for employees to work for a much broader range of companies now have increased. And do you think that employees are now finding better wire alignment when they're looking for new jobs because they do have a broader pool to play in per se?

Leandro Barreto:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's why Glassdoor is so popular. So, when you are invited for a meeting or for an interview, you can see everything from the company. Like from salary to feedbacks from the people who works there or is not working anymore. And then, you can see if there's a match. And this is quite funny because like 10 years ago, which is not so popular, we are blindly thinking to work, let's say, in a position like software development. So, I have to be a software developer. I have to be a...

Leandro Barreto:

So, it was more focused on the position instead of the purpose. And now we are seeing the opposite. Now, the people are looking for the purpose, what the company can help me achieve. And it's more like a win-win-

Robert O’Farrell:

Situation.

Leandro Barreto:

... situation let's say, situation. Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think also a lot of people are really focused on how the company takes care of them as a person. They're very sensitive to the fact that they are committing their time to that company. So, there has to be that alignment around professional goals and personal goals. And I think that it's a great shift to see, to come back to the OKR side of things. I'm curious about what benefits do setting OKRs within an organization give or provide?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think OKRs, they are very, very simple. They do not require a specific knowledge to implement it. So, when you have the people committed and engaged to the goal and the why they want to achieve, then the implementation and using of OKRs became naturally. So, company can benefit because he's straight to the point. He's like, "Objective, it's the direction. And the key results are yes or no." So, keep it simple. That's the main benefit of the companies.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I love that. The fact that there's no gray area. You either succeed or you don't, and there's a lot of clarity around that as well.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that with that aspect of OKRs, in your experience, have you seen OKRs set that tend to stretch the team further than they normally would be stretched in terms of what they attempt to achieve than companies that don't set OKRs from your experience?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, but I think it matters on what the company, what's the culture of the company, because I have seen companies that is setting OKRS in the good way, but I have seen companies that is setting OKRS because it's fancy. When it's fancy, you don't have a clear objective. You don't have a clear vision. You don't have the right people. And then, it's very tricky and you will never achieve what you are proposing.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm curious to dig into that a bit more to get your insight on that. Because as somebody who would come into a company that might be setting OKRs, how would you determine that the OKRs are probably not as clearly defined or that they're implementing a process that don't necessarily have the depth or the belief in doing? So, how would somebody come in and determine that?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. So, the idea to have a objective is like to have something that can be... How can I say that, can provide you like a, not a fear, but it's going to be like, provides you a direction for, but the people who sees it, they think like, "Hey, this is quite hard to achieve I think." So, one example for Google, for example. So, Google in 2008, they tend to launch the Google Chrome. And as I remember, the first year was like, "Hey, this is the objective." Like, "Hey, we want to launch the best browser in the world." And the key result is the number of users because the users will tell you if the browser is good or not.

Leandro Barreto:

In the first year, they didn't achieve the key result. But the second year, they rise at the bar again, like, "Hey, now we are much than double the objective." And the second year, they still didn't achieve it. But it was very, very close to it. And the third year, they pass it. So, keep in mind that the objectives must be something that seems like a challenge, a huge challenge, but at the same time, it's very inspirational.

Robert O’Farrell:

Inspirational.

Leandro Barreto:

Inspirational. Thank you so much. For those who are working on it. So, I think this is most of the point.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. And what do you see as some of the pitfalls when setting OKRs for an organization?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. Awesome. So, the pitfalls from my perspective, there are some common mistakes when implementing OKR. So, for example, as I said, not having a clear vision of the goal, so people cannot engage. And especially when you have senior engineers because they don't want to work in something that don't bring purpose for them. Right? So, this is the first one, for example. The second one could be like a system that supports the monitoring of the results. So, you cannot follow up, which is quite important to keep following it if you are, we are close to achieve it. Yes or no? So, a good point.

Leandro Barreto:

And one thing that seems quite strange, but it's very, very common in the market is that your product is not finished yet. One personal example that I faced not quite recently, but do you play video games?

Robert O’Farrell:

When I get the time. I have two young boys, so I get very little time to do that these days. But yeah, I do.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I love doing, I don't have also time, but when I have a litle bit of time, I can spend. So, this little time I try to spend in the best game that I found in the market. And here is the point because some years ago, there was a game that was released and before released, there was several gaming platforms, new sites, and et cetera, that was telling us that, "Here is the game challen... no, the game changing for the gaming market, because it's going to be very good. The marketing for this game was really, really good. And the game was like highest expectations for that. It was always in the top. "Hey, you have to play this because it's going to be very great. You are going to be having a great experience on that."

Leandro Barreto:

And the funny thing is that after they launch it, a few hours later, I notice some YouTubers who start testing the game. They began to post videos about so much bugs that they are facing. And within a week, the game had to stop selling because that was a disaster.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

And... Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I was just going to say, I can think of a few games that come to mind that fit that criteria.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Probably we are thinking the same, but I can say it, so.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yeah. Do you find that people get OKRs and KPIs confused within an organization? Or have you ever come across any examples of that, where people misunderstand the purpose of between the two of them?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. One thing that came up to my mind is the key result is a simple measure to understand if you are going in the right direction to your objective or not, but KPIs is it's more a performance index for performing for your team. For example, if they are performing in a good way, if we have the right resources for delivering something. And so, I think this is mainly the difference is the KPI, it's a measure for you to, maybe to bonus, to create a bonus for your team or et cetera. And the KR must be not linked to bonus or salary, et cetera. Must be like a direction. Something that, yes, we are achieving it or not. Or if not, what we have to do to correct the direction.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Fantastic. So, coming around to Agile, I'm curious about this marrying of the two, of OKRs and Agile together. How can we combine Agile and OKRs in your experience and your understanding to achieve results that drive high performance?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. So, as the Agile manifesto says, "People over process," so I believe whenever you maintain a fail-safe environment along with a good leadership, you can get the most of your team. So, connecting what I said earlier regarding the Ikigai and when you have a good leader, for example, in a safe environment and colleagues or peers who shares the same values and goals as you, then you can extract maximum efficiency because high-efficiency teams are teams that are focused and committed with the company results, and that will achieve great business results. Sorry.

Robert O’Farrell:

I also love that aspect with the OKRs, with that clear definition, too, that Agile, that processes is that sprint by sprint activity where you're going back and you're looping around and looking at the results of that sprint and going back to the customer and getting customer feedback and that real alignment around what you're trying to achieve as well, to give you that clarity of focus that when you are going through that sprint process, you're coming back and saying, "Okay, are we acting on the initiatives that have come out of these key results that contribute to that OKR?"

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. And also, adding to that, that's why we have the goal for the sprint, right? So, we have the direction for the sprint. So, every sprint you can measure if you are achieving this goal or not.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I love it as a mechanism, too, to link back to that, that why piece to really give a clarity around why, which I think a lot of software development sometimes doesn't focus as much as they can on. So, I'm curious, so how can Ikigai mix into this? So, we've talked about that at the start and we talked about the components of it and it was a great framework about understanding a purpose, but how can we use that to achieve better results and stay motivated as a team?

Leandro Barreto:

Great question and also quite difficult. But yeah, I believe there are two thin lines that eventually met in the future. For example, the first one is like the individual as a person. So, how he seems himself in, within the organization and how can benefit, how this relationship can benefit from this win-win relationship. And also, the second one is like the individual as a professional. So, based on the skills that he already has. How can he help the company achieve the results more efficiently?

Leandro Barreto:

So, in a given timeline, these two lines will cross and then you will be able to extract excellent results because you will have a person with excellent internal knowledge, internal as a person, and also engaged with the companies is seeking as a greater objective, as a north star, and also helping your peers to grow all together.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think this is quite like a smile. When you smile at someone unconsciously, you make the other people smile too. So, when you have someone who is genuinely working with a proposal, that person will contaminate other in a good way. And then, you have a continuous string of people delivering consistent results. And I think this is the most important.

Robert O’Farrell:

Have you experienced that yourself where you see someone working with purpose and contaminate or infect how you... infect is again, not a great word, but inspired is probably the best word there, inspired the people around them to work in a similar fashion. Has that something that you've witnessed yourself?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, yes. I remember back in the company that I was working in Brazil, that was my first day. I was like, "Hmm, there's something strange here," because everyone is so passionate on delivering their best results for their customer, that this thought influenced me in a positive way to start being like hungry for good results, not only for the company but for me as an individual, as someone who have to learn and teach others. And nowadays, I see these companies, it's achieving a great results with a great leader because even if we have a good team, we have to get someone who is a servant leader, who you can follow and maybe follow blindly in a good way. But yeah, I experience it.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. But I'm interested, is there anything that you wanted to talk about personally with regards to either of those three topics or even outside of that, that has been inspirational, I think, in your professional development, in your personal life?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think Leandro five years ago was totally different person. And when I started looking, not only by myself inside me, but also outside and the opportunities that the world can give me and how can I serve back this, or how can I provide this back to the world? This is very funny because good things start to happen. For example, I never imagined to be working here in Amsterdam. And now, I'm here in Amsterdam, working in a great company with great people, delivering such great results, which is giving me a lot of knowledge to keep learning and keep the wheel turning on, keep the cycle.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think today, like performing the best Leandro's version ever, maybe tomorrow, a little bit more, and I can provide this knowledge to other person and I can also learn from other persons, from other people. And that's very exciting. I think that's what motivates me to wake up in the morning, do my sport things like running and jujitsu, and then let's do the work.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love that, that reflection on the past five years, how far you've come. It sounds like you've had a lot of inspiration from a number of different sources, but is there something in there that you think was key to that? Or was it just a general progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I tried to focus on people who have positive influence on others. So, I try to be more not equal because if you are equal, so you are the same person, so it doesn't provide value to the others, but try to be quite different in your own way. So, yeah, basically, that's what motivates me to get different sources of references and trying to be the best version of myself.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love this mix of the philosophical, which is for me, the Ikigai, and the concrete, well, not concrete, but the workflow aspect of the Agile side of things coming together. Have you traditionally worked in Agile methodologies or did you transition between that may be starting, because if you're from the 2000s, so you probably touched on Waterfall at some point in the past and then came into Agile. Was that your professional progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I worked a lot with the Waterfall methodology in 2008, when I was introduced to the Agile methodology with Scrum... no, actually 2009, then I saw. "Hey, this is very, very interesting." Let's learn more about it. And then, during this time, I keep working both with the Waterfall methodology and the Agile methodology. And the more I work it with the Waterfall, the more value I saw in the [inaudible 00:54:24]-

Robert O’Farrell:

In Agile. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. And that was quite fantastic because then I also learn about SAFe and how to scale it, and yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm quite curious, like because we had a similar path in that regard and I reflect on where we are with OKRs and Agile, and it's interesting that Agile brought us closer to our customer and we speak to our customer on a more regular basis, which I thought was a massive win over Waterfall where you might have months and months of development, and you've got a requirement that you're trying to put into code, and then suddenly, you have this big delivery and that's when you talk to the customer. And usually, the customer comes back and says, "We want all these things changed." And it's a real pain.

Robert O’Farrell:

Agile was instrumental in that, but then going up from there and putting that layer of why on top of that, which I think is, again, one of those big fundamental shifts on how we focus on what we are doing. Do you see anything emerging from your experience, your professional experience that is tackling another key challenge with regards to, I guess, how we work and how we deliver value?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. And for example, the customer, they want to see value on what is going to be delivered. They don't want to spend six months to wait something to be delivered. So, I think that's why cloud start being so popular, like SaaS companies, because when you are working on something that is on cloud, for example, you always have the last version. And no matter the day or the hour of the day, there will come new features. And usually, it's transparent for you. And internally from the engineering perspective, the more you deliver, the more quickly you can correct and the more you can understand the market.

Leandro Barreto:

And also, that's why some strategies, some release strategies came up so popular like Canary release. So, you deliver a few things to a particular person, and then you can test it. And if they provides you good or bad feedback, you have time to correct it. So, that's why it became so popular. So, I think during this time from now on, we must see a lot of SaaS companies starting to growing because things are in real life now, real time now, so I think it's natural.

Leandro Barreto:

By the way, there's a good strategy that was implemented by Spot 5 if I'm not mistaken that was like, but this is more for engineering perspective. They have some robots that keeps doing bad things to the servers.

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, that's the Chaos Monkey.

Leandro Barreto:

The Chaos Monkey.

Robert O’Farrell:

That was Netflix. Yeah. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Netflix, yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

Netflix. And it would take down bits of their infrastructure and break things. Yeah, yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. It's quite hard to see in some companies, but I think this has become to be more popular during the next couple of months or years, because it will teach the engineers how to deal with that because no one wants to stay working in the weekend. You stay with your family.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I completely agree. I remember when I first heard about the idea of the Chaos Monkey, that it shocked me that someone would inflict that upon their business and upon, I guess, their systems, but then it only takes a production incident to realize that if you had something like that, that you would've built in some provision should that eventuate. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom to it. And so, I absolutely love the idea. I love this, what you were saying about real-time delivery of value to customers.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I think back to how Agile has really been fundamental in pioneering that, well, not pioneering it per se, but with the release cadence that you get from one to two-week sprints, you're putting yourself in a position where you are delivering more often. And you mentioned Canary deploys, I think within that. Is there any other deployment strategies that you've come across that also support, I guess, that immediate delivery of value to customers?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. There is another strategy which is called the Blue-Green release, but the difference between it is like the Canary release, you deliver something in the small portions, but the Blue-Green, you, like a switch that you turn on and off.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. Yes. Right.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, you can test it. You can deliver new version of your environment or your tool, and then everyone can use it. And if something goes failed, then you have the plan B, where you can just turn on and off, and then you can rearrange the traffic to your tool. But this is very technical.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Very interesting to me, but we might lose a few of our podcast listeners. One last question from me, just within your current professional engagement, were they implementing OKRs before you joined the company? Or was that something that you've seen introduced over that period of time?

Leandro Barreto:

From my current company, they are currently working with OKRs, so I didn't participate and implemented it. So, I'm just more focused on helping the teams in implementing the KRs. There were some companies that I worked in the PEs that I helped to build it, and also to build not only the objective but also the KRs. And the objective, it's you spend so much time because you have to understand where the company wants to be in the future.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you have to know inside what we have, what we can improve, where we can improve, and then we can base it on that, base it on the objective. We can build up to four key results to be more precise in achieving this. Yeah. But it's quite challenging, but at the same time, very exciting.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that was going to be my question in your experience in seeing a company go from not doing that to then implementing it, what were the real challenges in doing that? And how long did you see that process take before they really got good at doing that? Because it is not only setting the meaningful objectives and obviously measurable key results but also then getting the alignment from the teams around that. What were the big challenges there and how long did you see that process take?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think it depends from company to company. I remember back in Brazil, I had to work with companies that spent months on deciding, but at the same time, I remember my own company took three months to start implementing it. So, I think it depends on the commitment of the people who is responsible for this objective. So, yeah, depends on the maturity also of the company, the people who is working, and yeah. Because the OKRs are quite old, but at the same time are quite new for people, for the companies. Right? So, this is like very challenging. And how do you balance it?

Leandro Barreto:

There are some people who doesn't know how to set the correct objective. And then, we came up with the same thing that we are discussing earlier. Like if you don't know where you're going to go, if the objective is not clear enough, no matter if you have good people or bad people, the people will not see value on that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. And you won't get your alignment because people don't either understand or don't believe in the objective.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic insight, Leandro. And I really appreciate your time today. Again, is there anything that you'd like to chat about before we wrap it up? I'm just conscious that we have been chatting for about an hour now and gone off script a little bit too.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, actually I'd like to thank you, Rob. Thank you, Agile team, everyone. I don't want to spend much time talking also. It was a pleasure and thanks for invite again. And I hope we can think good things in the future. Like, "Hey, I hope I can provide good insights on this."

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. You certainly have. I've learned a fair bit today as well. So, I'll be going back to revisit some of the talking points from this chat. So, thank you very much again for your time, Leandro. I really appreciate it. And, yes, have a great day. It's kicking off for you and it's ending for us. So, yeah, really appreciate it, mate.

Leandro Barreto:

Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it too. Thanks again. See you. Have a great day.

Robert O’Farrell:

You too. Cheers.

Leandro Barreto:

Cheers.

‍

‍

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.

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