Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Joe Ferris is thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps Support, Maintenance, and SRE (Site Reliability Engineering). The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling applications. They have an on-call team and do more complex cloud build-outs with the goal being to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. Follow Joe on Twitter or LinkedIn. thoughtbot's Mission Control team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Joe Ferris, thoughtbot's CTO and Managing Director of the thoughtbot DevOps and maintenance team known as Mission Control. Joe, welcome back to the show. JOE: Thanks, Chad. It's been a while. CHAD: It has been a while. I think you were the first-ever guest, if I'm not mistaken. JOE: I believe that's right. We talked about null, I think. [laughter] CHAD: Yeah. And it would have been with Ben back when I was just a listener and maybe producer. So welcome back to the show. It's been a long time, and a lot has changed at thoughtbot over the years. I've been talking to each of the managing directors of the new teams, and I wanted to be sure to have you on. Why don't we take a little bit of a step back and talk about Mission Control? When we say DevOps and maintenance, what do we mean? And what does Mission Control do? JOE: Sure. Mission Control is our newest team doing DevOps support, and maintenance, and SRE. It came out of our experiments with DevOps a while ago now, almost two years coming up. Historically, thoughtbot has shied away from getting too much into DevOps. I think a lot of us had some unpleasant experiences earlier in our career around sysadmin tasks and expectations there. Not a lot of people have wanted to be on call historically. So we've heavily leveraged services like Heroku that take a lot of that burden away from you and avoided doing things like direct to AWS deployments or getting too involved with CI/CD pipelines that were particularly complex. But we've had clients over the years that have requested more interesting or more difficult deployments. And finally, we had one a couple of years ago, where we said, "All alright, let's just handle this instead of saying no or trying to outsource it." We thought it made sense for them. And after going through it, we came to the conclusion that it was actually pretty good that the ecosystem had evolved a lot and that it was a service worth offering. That began our journey into DevOps, so to speak. So we did some smart DevOps work for a variety of clients over the next year or so before we decided to form an official team doing this new kind of work, which is how we ended up with Mission control. The goal of Mission Control, rather than building products or pairing with team members to improve their team like the rest of thoughtbot, the goal of Mission Control is to support those teams and support other client teams in deploying and scaling their applications. And we have an on-call team. We will do more complex cloud build-outs. And our goal is to empower and educate the teams that we work with so that they are more capable of working in those ecosystems on their own. CHAD: You used the acronym SRE earlier in that little spiel. I'm not sure that everyone knows what that is. [laughs] So it stands for Site Reliability Engineer, right? JOE: That's right. And that's been newer for us. So DevOps is supposed to be the fusion of development and operations. But the operations world is really big. So similar to how everybody has problems getting people to be full-stack enough given the complexity of front end and back end, we have similar problems in design. We also have that problem in DevOps where both development and operations are huge, rich ecosystems. And so, having developers that are fully experienced at both is hard. So the path of least resistance, when you say are doing DevOps, is definitely just to do operations. And it's been a struggle for us to actually break down those silos and have teams work more on the operation side on their own. So one of the things that caught our eye with SRE was some of the built-in mechanisms for engaging with the team. The one-sentence pitch for SRE is that it is operations if you approach it like a software problem. It has these concepts of SLOs, Service Level Objectives, and error budgets, which is the amount of time you spent violating your SLO. And part of the process is getting buy-in from the entire team, from the stakeholders down to the developers and the operations team. And so, it provides a natural interaction point between the operations folks and the rest of the team because nobody wants to break the error budget. Once the error budget is exhausted, everybody has to stop building new features and focus on stability until the error budget is cut up again. So rather than having this unpleasant give or take where we're more coming from the operations side, and we're always pushing for more stability, and everybody else is coming from the product side, and they're always pushing for more features, SRE gives you this useful metric to have that conversation around where we're not always just pushing for more. We're trying to hit a specific goal that we've agreed on. And when we hit the goal, we know that we can keep full throttle moving out new features. CHAD: Now, is the SRE a developer who is also working on resolving errors before the budget is hit? JOE: Yeah, a Site Reliability Engineer is a developer. But that's actually not too different from other forms of DevOps. DevOps is supposed to be developers in general. When I say we built an operations team, even if you look at the work that we're doing, a lot of it is development work. We build scripts, and automations, and so on. We don't manually set up EC2 instances, and not everything is toil, even outside of SRE. But the idea in SRE is that somebody will be more integrated with the development team and make changes to not just the operational stack but also the development stack in service of reliability. I've heard it said that SRE is a particular implementation of DevOps. That makes sense to me. CHAD: Let's start back in the beginning because you made reference to the fact that historically, a lot of what we deploy was deployed to Heroku. And we did that because, for a lot of the applications that we're building, it made sense. It minimized the operational overhead of deployments. There is a point in some systems that you cross a line. Where do we see that line typically being where you need to start looking at something else? JOE: I think there can be a few different instigating factors. One of the fastest ways for somebody to want to move to AWS is if they have significant security concerns, particularly for healthcare applications. The security model is more straightforward in AWS to have better isolation. There are options on Heroku, but it requires going to a different Heroku platform using Shield. And you just don't get the same power you get in terms of network isolation models you get on AWS with your own VPC. So if you're already at the point where you want to start out with a VPC out of the gate and do that kind of isolation, my opinion is you may as well own it and go to AWS. So that's one reason. Another is if you start hitting scaling issues, Heroku is easier for the developers because it's simple and it's very streamlined. But doing complex deployments is difficult, which eliminates some of the options available to somebody doing something like SRE. So to give one example, one mechanism people can use to make it safer to deploy without potentially introducing bugs or performance degradations is a canary release where when you release, you put the new version out as the canary build. And you route maybe 5% of traffic to that, and you actually collect metrics on performance and error rates on the canary traffic versus the regular traffic. And then you have some period where you're in experiment mode, which varies depending on the level of stability you're looking to achieve. Once you're confident that the canary release didn't introduce a regression, then it gets promoted to the stable build, and you do that every time you deploy. I have no idea how you would do that on Heroku. CHAD: I think you'd have to do it at the application level. You'd have to do it with a feature flag system. And it would only be possible to do some of the things that you would be able to do if you're able to do the whole system. JOE: Right. And I guess you could do weighted random numbers to try and decide whether to canary or not. But one of the benefits of doing it outside the application is there's no way to make a mistake. So, for example, if you introduced a bug in your canary mechanism in the application or you forget to put it behind a feature flag, then you've now deployed to production, and you have an error. Whereas if it's managed by the CI/CD pipeline, you're just deploying a new version of the application. In Heroku land, that would mean you deploy the new slug as a canary build. In most other areas, it means you're deploying a container image. That's one example of why if you get to the point that you have a lot of traffic in production and you need to manage that traffic while continuing to release features, it can be helpful to work on a platform like AWS where you have a lot more deployment options. Another one is that SRE is heavily built on observability and metrics, which can be difficult to collect on Heroku. Some of that is just a matter of lineage. Like, the SRE community was built up around tools like Prometheus that are scrape-based. That means you need to have a special metrics endpoint exposed on all of your containers. In Heroku, there isn't a way to access any of your dynos directly except through the web router, and you can't control which one you get. So using Prometheus on Heroku is not really practical, which means you need to re-implement what everybody else has built for SRE using a different observability tool. And observability out of the box on Heroku it's easy to get set up, but it's more limited. So doing something like complex SLOs and setting up error budget dashboards and alerting is going to be a significant task. Versus on a platform like Kubernetes where it doesn't sound like it'll be easier, but it is because there are open-source tools that you can just deploy. CHAD: You mentioned Kubernetes. It's probably worth calling out that that's pretty much what we are using across the board, right? JOE: For our AWS and other cloud deployments, we have standardized largely on Kubernetes. We started out using simpler containerization platforms like ECS on AWS. But what we found is that the developer tooling is generally not particularly good because there's not enough community momentum behind any of those. And the open-source is limited versus something like Kubernetes there's a massive open-source community. There is a ton of different tooling that people build that's available for developers and for DevOps. And for these things like SRE, you can use almost entirely open-source software to build out all of the interesting parts of that and deploy that. So what we've been building is basically an SRE Platform as a Service where we collect these open-source components. We deploy them to a managed Kubernetes cluster. And then, applications can immediately start exposing metrics to Prometheus and defining SLOs. CHAD: So much in the same way where we talked about some of the boundaries where it starts to make sense to not be on Heroku, what are some of the boundaries that teams hit where it makes sense to start thinking about SRE or even just having someone on the team that's focused on that kind of work? JOE: I think as soon as people start hitting their first scaling challenges. So for an MVP where you're validating a product where you don't actually have production traffic yet, I don't think it makes sense. And I also think I would avoid deploying to something like Kubernetes if you can help it for an MVP. But for anybody who has scaling concerns, SRE is a very useful mindset. And the sooner you start adopting it, the sooner you'll start to build an application that's made to scale. It can be very difficult to put out those fires while something is not on a platform where you have many options, and nobody has been thinking about observability. It means that you need to be guessing at how to put out the fire as well as simultaneously introducing metrics and potentially planning a cloud migration. So I think as soon as you start feeling nervous about deploying to production or as soon as you notice that you're spending a lot of time working on performance, it makes sense to bring in SRE. I also think anybody that needs to provide an SLA should for sure implement SRE. It can be used to measure whether or not you're on track to hit an SLA because you basically set SLOs that are stricter than your SLA, and you make sure that you meet it. CHAD: Is there a way that existing teams can layer on some of the SRE activities without having full-time SRE people? JOE: I think you can have a team member who does development that also acts as the SRE. If you have a small team, I could see the commitment to it being daunting. I think that could be one good reason to bring in outside specialists if you're not at the point where you can afford to have a full-time SRE in-house. Working with a team that can provide an SRE on-demand like Mission Control could be valuable. CHAD: I didn't realize that that was going to be a perfect segue into part of the value proposition of Mission Control [laughter] when I asked the question. But I guess that's a really good point. That is part of what we're helping people do is monthly contracts that provide this to them, even if their team can't do it 100% of the time. JOE: Right, except for pretty large teams. I don't think it makes sense for them to hire a full-time SRE. It's much easier to work with a team like ours that has the experience and has more than one person. Even if you do hire a full-time SRE, you will only have one. So if they go on vacation, or if they get sick, or if it's in the middle of the night, then do you still have an SRE? I think that's one of the benefits of working with a team. CHAD: And that's been interesting with Mission Control because we introduced Mission Control and made it a formal thing at the same time as going entirely remote. And it's interesting how doing that freed us up in terms of being able to commit to building a different kind of team. It doesn't necessarily need to be on call after hours if we're going to have an entirely remote team. We can have people on that team that span different time zones. And so, from a thoughtbot perspective, it's interesting how those things went hand in hand for us. JOE: Yes, it's been immensely helpful for Mission Control, in particular, to be fully remote. There are a lot of options that wouldn't have been available to us if we were a U.S.-centric team. It's been really interesting. I've built out development teams before that were focused on a location. And it's been really interesting to build out this team with a focus on availability and distribution. For example, one thing that has helped us is having somebody in South America because they don't celebrate U.S. holidays. So even discounting time zones, which are a challenge when you're trying to provide around-the-clock availability, just having that kind of diversity in holiday schedules really helps. So we've been able to build it totally differently than we would have if we were trying to put a bunch of people in an office. And I think it's made it possible for us to have much better coverage with a much smaller team. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So Mission Control I introduced it as maintenance and DevOps. So we're also helping people with different kinds of things beyond operations, right? JOE: Yeah, particularly with SRE, there's a focus on stability and scaling. And we're also helping people with CI/CD. One of the focuses for us this quarter has been helping people develop CI/CD pipelines that provide safer deploys and providing guidance and a system for developers to implement things like feature flags and beta flags. Because one of the challenges of making performance improvements is that you don't actually know if you've solved the problem until it's deployed, and deploying something that changes performance is inherently risky. And so, in addition to helping people actually make the performance improvements, we have to demonstrate the process for deploying and testing those improvements. CHAD: I've worked on fairly big systems in the past. But there have been a couple of different instances over the last maybe year where we've approached the problem in a different way than we have in the past, which has been really interesting to me from a development standpoint. It's the idea of…if you remember, for the food delivery application, we had that conversation about the different ways to build APIs rather than versioning APIs explicitly. And that has been a different approach than the way I would have done things in the past. And it's been a really powerful approach. So, can we talk a little bit more about that approach? JOE: Sure. CHAD: Well, specifically, so we have mobile applications that use a back-end API, and not everyone updates their mobile application at the same time instantly. You have bugs basically in the wild that you are fixing or that you're changing in your API, or if you're just introducing API changes. And so the idea of instead of explicitly versioning API on the server-side and having clients write to a specific API, instead building much more flexible APIs, in particular, having the client tell you what version of the API that they're expecting but through consolidated API endpoints so that the server is much more in control of the behavior than the client being in control of the behavior. JOE: Yeah, I think the two big changes that were helpful on that project were using GraphQL for some of the APIs, which provides more flexibility generally than a typical REST API and the minimum version requirement. So the application sends the version of the application. And the API will tell the client they have to upgrade if it's a version that isn't compatible with the newer APIs. So when we do have to break backwards compatibility, we force an app upgrade. CHAD: But in general, you're taking the approach not to break backward compatibility. And you're meeting the client where it's at whenever possible and maintaining backward compatibility in the APIs. JOE: That's something that we have been teaching developers about generally is backwards and forwards compatibility. We do that with deployments as well. For some of the larger deployments we have where there might be dozens of containers running for a service, it certainly doesn't make sense to stop them all and start new ones because the app would be down for a long time. And it would take too long to catch up to the backlog of requests. But even a typical blue-green deployment is problematic. So if we have 30 containers running and we spin up 30 new containers, and they all need 15 database connections, then during the deploy, you potentially overload your database or exhaust your connection limit. Plus, you will need to allocate the compute resources for double the normal workload. So what we've been doing instead is rolling deploys almost everywhere where we spin up a few new containers using the new version and wait until they're fully online, spin down a few old ones, and then repeat that process until everything is up to date. But to do a rolling deploy like that requires backwards compatibility with the services it uses, in particular, at the database. And so, writing Rails migrations that are backwards compatible for one version has been a challenge. CHAD: And there's not really good tooling in Rails to do multiple stages of things. So if you really want to do that, you have to manage that in your source control basically and say, "Here's a new migration. We're going to merge in and deploy after this one," and that's not so great. JOE: Right. The other way to do that in the CI/CD pipeline would be to release commits one at a time and wait for them to be rolled out. But depending on how you structure your commit log, that could be pretty tedious. [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. I've seen as I've worked on this other project we're really striving to do continuous deployment. It's a high traffic, very complex deployment with lots of individual configured tenants. Separating out the concept of a deploy from a release has been very valuable for the application and for the clients. It changes the way that you need to think about how development progresses. I never before really worked in a system where you're literally sometimes duplicating and preserving old code, putting new code in place, having them both deployed, and then being able to switch between them as part of the release, and then cleaning up the old code later. At the scale that this is at, at the complexity that this is at, it makes sense for that application. It obviously doesn't make sense for everybody to be working that way. JOE: Right. Breaking up applications to be a little smaller, having components that could be experimented with individually would make some of that easier. The experimentation there separating the release from the deploy some of that is necessary because it's monolithic in so many ways. Like, it's a very big Rails application with one database with ACID compliance, which is a very powerful model. And it provides simplicity in some ways. But then it requires you to take on the complexity of making sure that you release things correctly. I do think that it would be difficult in this particular situation but for applications that reach that level of traffic and where you need to manage the risk of deploying, having smaller components, having some services broken would make that easier because you could do, for example, a canary deploy with one release rather than duplicating the code and having the old and new version. CHAD: Right. The services create boundaries with contracts about behavior and reduces things that are tightly coupled together, and their behavior is tightly coupled together. So, for example, on this application, we do have that one service that is completely managed independently from the main monolith and has its own deploy schedule. And we can, for the most part, change them independently without needing to go through all of that process that we go through to manage change. I think you're absolutely right. JOE: Another experiment we've been trying for another client is it's another Rails monolith. There are different audiences for it. So this is the food delivery application again. And there are customers who are placing orders. There are drivers who are delivering orders. There are restaurants that are fulfilling orders. And then there are admins who are managing everything in the back end. And there's some overlap in the data they use. But the actual requests, and controllers, and pieces of the Rails application they use are almost entirely isolated. So one challenge we had was being able to provide different reliability contracts for those different audiences and also scaling them and configuring them differently. So, for example, if you've done tuning for a Rails application before, you've probably tweaked things like how many threads will I have for each of my Puma workers? How many Puma workers will I have per container? How many database connections do I need in the pool? And what we were able to do for this application using Kubernetes and Isto was running the same application, the same container, so like one monolithic Rails container but running it more than once in different configurations and routing traffic to different pools of containers based on the audience. And so, for example, if the customer is making requests, those all go to the customer pool of containers, which are scaled independently and have their own configuration tweaks for the kinds of requests that customers tend to make, which are generally small, high throughput requests with lots of little rights. And then, compared to the admin panel, they typically view dashboards and big lists of records. And so, the requests tend to be larger, but the number of users is much smaller. There are way more customers than there are admins. And so, for those, we have fewer connections. We have more memory allocated for the kind of bloat that results in those types of requests. And we also have a different performance objective for admins. It's more acceptable for those pages to respond a little bit slower. And admins understand it's their job. They have to use the software. So they'll reload the page if they have to versus a customer where if they're having trouble placing an order, they might just buy somewhere else. So that's been a pretty powerful mechanism we were able to leverage CHAD: Is that switching on URL-like endpoints? JOE: Yeah, it's based on the path. But the mechanisms available to us are actually pretty powerful. At that point, we have access to the full request. So we could really route based on anything we wanted right down to the user. CHAD: I guess that's a really good example. You don't have access to that routing on Heroku. JOE: No, I think any Platform as a Service where they manage the routing if they don't provide that feature, you don't get that feature. CHAD: This is the first we're talking about this. That is a really interesting example of how to scale a monolith solves some of the problems that services often get you without having to break everything up right off the bat in order to do that. JOE: Yeah. I also think it provides kind of an inside-out approach to doing that. One of the problems with breaking out services is you have to plan what the services are going to be to a certain degree. And so, I think the best way to do it is to extract services from a monolith the same way you extract classes to break them up. And this audience-based approach is almost like a dry run. You can see if the boundaries you're drawing make sense in terms of traffic. And if those make sense, it probably makes sense to break up the front end at those boundaries eventually into different applications. And then figure out what services you need to extract to provide the common infrastructure for those front-end services. The same way test-driven development makes it much easier to find the correct tests to write, I think this approach of audience boundary discovery is an interesting approach to finding service boundaries versus trying to guess at what the services are, which very frequently leads people to wrapping services around database tables which doesn't help at all. CHAD: Yeah, that's the wrong thing to be looking at when you're looking at how to do services. JOE: Right. It's almost like deciding what your database tables would be upfront before you've seen the UI for the application. CHAD: Cool. So heading into 2022, we're looking ahead at the upcoming year. And so what's on the docket for Mission Control? JOE: We didn't start experimenting fully with SRE until the third quarter of this year. And so far, we've loved it. So I think we'll make a pretty heavy investment into our SRE offering. The goal is for us to have an open-source set of Terraform modules that effectively deploy a platform ready to go for SRE. What we want to do is maintain and curate that platform and then deploy it and maintain it for our clients. I think another big thing we'll be doing is (This might be incredibly boring.) but restructuring the way our agreements work a little bit. One of the things we wanted to test out when we built Mission Control was how much we could have built into a monthly recurring contract versus billing for time and materials like we usually do. So we tried putting a lot into that contract and really pushing the boundaries of what would be reasonable. And there was definitely a lot of pain there for us and a lot of difficult conversations with clients. So I think for 2022, we will be shifting a lot of our work back towards time and materials. So I guess that's a lesson out there for anybody else that's providing [laughs] support contracts is to make sure that the responsibilities contained in the linear amount scale linearly. CHAD: I think when we originally conceived of Mission Control, we also saw it handling a lot more things that it turns out just were not doing as part of Mission Control like regular Rails upgrades. JOE: Yeah, a lot of the things that we included in contracts originally were not particularly important to clients or at least were not outside of what they were capable of doing already. So it wasn't that much of a value-add. There are a lot of people out there that will upgrade your Rails version. And having somebody who just does it in the background but isn't aware of some of the impacts that might have in the application turned out to be not much of a value prop. Whereas stability turns out to be a big pain point for a lot of people, people don't know how to do it. And then our maintenance offering, I think what ended up providing the most value is not the keeping the code fresh parts, but it was more for the teams that don't have a large continuous development team having access to somebody who can fix quick bugs and things like that without needing to first negotiate a contract with a provider. I think that provides a lot of value. Those are pretty separate and different offerings. But those are the pieces that we found have really been valuable to clients. CHAD: Well, great. If people want to find out more about Mission Control or get in touch with you, where are the best places for them to do that? JOE: Well, we have a website thoughtbot.com/mission-control with a dash between mission and control. There are a few ways to reach out there. You can also find us on Twitter. We are @thoughtbot, and I am @joeferris. CHAD: Cool. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Joe Ferris.Sponsored By:AgencyU: AgencyU is a membership-based program where Chad Pytel works one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. You'll do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. You'll start with goal setting, advice, and problem solving based on Chad's experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As you progress as a group, you all get to know each other more and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in his 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, Chad has seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and would be happy to work with you too. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyuSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Emily Bahna a Managing Director at thoughtbot who leads the Lift Off team, where they focus on really leaning into the core of the company. The team works with new founders to launch new products or they work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But, the thing that ties Lift Off together, is that they start at ground zero to build upon an idea and actually build the first version product to get it out live into the marketplace. Follow Emily on Twitter or LinkedIn. thoughtbot's Lift Off team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Emily Bahna, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Lift Off team. Emily, thanks for joining me. EMILY: Thank you. CHAD: So at this point, we've talked with a few of the different managing directors at thoughtbot about their teams. And Lift Off is one of the largest teams that we have. And so what is it that Lift Off actually does? EMILY: Lift Off is focused in on really leaning into the core of thoughtbot. We work with new founders launching new products or work with existing companies that want to build out a new service or open up a new area to generate revenue for their business. But I think the thing that ties Lift Off together is that we are starting at ground zero building upon an idea and actually building the first version product and getting it out into the marketplace. CHAD: And oftentimes, those are pretty significant endeavors. The last episode that came out was with Dawn at Ignite who is more on the validation, early stage, getting things that are fairly straightforward into market as quickly as possible usually in a matter of months. But Lift Off the endeavors are usually quite a bit more significant than that, right? EMILY: Yeah. I would say that the difference between validation...we're beyond the stage of validation. We're working with clients who are ready to build a foundation. They really need to put in the infrastructure that's going to take their product and get it ready to scale into the future. So they really need to make that investment into the longer-term strategy. They need to know what's realistic to build first. But they also have to keep an eye on the long road ahead of building something that can be something that can set out to grow down the road as well. CHAD: I guess another way of putting it is that Ignite often works with brand new teams, brand new companies creating something for the first time. And Lift Off typically works with existing companies who have existing significant revenue who want to do something new, either a new business or a new product, or maybe they have an existing web product and they're going into mobile for the first time. That's another way of putting it, right? EMILY: It could be. I think that when people are ready to move into the Lift Off space, it's about having the investment, the right kind of funding to move in that direction. Sometimes we do work with new founders that have a significant amount of funding, but a lot of times it is folks that are at the enterprise level that are building a new service line. They've got validation and market research already done. And they're building out a completely new line of business that they need to explore and set a new foundation in place. CHAD: Do you have some examples of clients that have been projects of Lift Off? EMILY: Yeah. We've been doing a lot of really interesting work in the health tech space, a lot of interest in improving patient experience. So we worked with a company called Relias in terms of moving them into a new service line that they'd never been in before, really focusing on improving patient care for therapists, physical therapy therapists. We've also worked with an organization called Groups Recover Together, building out a mobile application for an organization that helps people recover from substance abuse. And we also are working with an organization called Airrosti. That is also an organization that helps in the physical therapy space, so improving patient exercises or rehabilitation through an improved mobile experience, virtual experience to improve overall patient outcomes. CHAD: I think it's not a coincidence that a lot of the projects that we work on in Lift Off are in the health tech space because that combination of...like you were saying, a lot of what Lift Off does is really build products that are complex and that are going to scale and have a certain scale fairly quickly and need to really think about more of a platform that's going to be iterated upon into the future. And once you get into a highly regulated industry like health or finance or something, there are so many factors at play, especially if you're an existing business going into that. There's lots to consider. The projects are more complex. And so having a team of people that are focused on working in that kind of environment and know the challenges of doing that and an integrated design and development team who's comfortable operating in that space, I think that that's why it's not a coincidence. EMILY: Yeah. I think there's also a lot of great energy in that space right now to move it to the next level. And to be honest, the pandemic really accelerated the need for improvements in patient engagement and allowing therapists or physicians to be able to care for patients in a virtual setting. It also is true not just in health tech, but as you mentioned, we've been actively working with a lot of FinTech companies as well, building out mobile experiences for companies that are helping people get out of debt or working in even some of these new areas like cryptocurrency and things that are changing pretty rapidly in the marketplace and being able to respond to that. But kind of working in a really complex environment some particular industries that have specific compliance security needs in order to be able to serve their customers in a safe way. So working through a lot of those challenges is what's really important and having a team that can navigate through those levels of complexity. CHAD: I've talked with the other managing directors about the benefits of our new focus teams and how working on a similar project allows the team members to focus. The other aspect of it is there are parts of what we did under the studio model. And it may have been like there'd be one Lift Off project within...I think we should mention that you used to be the Managing Director of the Durham Studio. And it was a relatively small team working with local clients. And so you may only have one of these kinds of clients a year or maybe even less. And so building up an expertise but also meeting the needs of those particular clients there wasn't enough work there, for example, to hire someone with a specific skill set or knowledge if it's only going to be few and far between. And that's been true in Lift Off because we used to, at thoughtbot, not really have product managers. Everyone was designers and developers. And that was because only a subset of our projects really needed a product manager at the table. For the most part, a lot of those smaller projects or the boost-style projects are just developers or designers working directly with a stakeholder. And so, within Lift Off, we've built a product management practice because of that specialized need within these kinds of projects, right? EMILY: Yeah, I think just like you said, the ability to really focus in on the first version product is looking at ways that we could improve our process there and provide more support that's really needed for these kinds of engagements. So what we have seen with the more complex MVPs is a lot of these clients need reliability. They need to know that what they're building is the...They need to have more support in terms of the management of that, having someone who's dedicated to being able to straddle between the business objectives and working with the team navigating some of these more complex compliance issues, security issues, and keeping that on track. Also, we've been leaning into improving our practices around defining what first version product is. We've been using design sprints to really help align both business owners and the team to determine what are the biggest risk factors? How do we define what we're actually going to build and start building that roadmap? And we've been leaning into those best practices and actually improving upon it. And so we've looked at that and built out a discovery sprint that is not just a week-long but really extends that out to about three weeks to give us more time to do more user research, dive a little deeper through the design sprint exercises, but then bring in engineering, bringing an interdisciplinary team to look at the problem from both a product management point of view, a design point of view, and a development point of view to really determine the first version product roadmap and give more clarity to our clients and a clearer sense of what we can accomplish in the first. CHAD: I can speak to this firsthand because I was advising and working on a project that started before we reorganized into teams and effectively playing that role. But as the project went on, not that we did a terrible job, but it became overwhelming for me with my other responsibilities and spending a couple of days a week. A couple of days a week is sufficient on a smaller project, but on a much larger project, it's essentially a full-time job to do all of that work. [chuckles] And I just didn't have enough time to be able to do that, let alone then provide a real active management of the roadmap six-plus months out. So a very lightweight process with not a lot of definition works when that period is then over in 6 to 12 weeks, and you have something [chuckles] in the market. When you're trying to plan and trying to coordinate work and trying to give clarity around a product and everything that's six-plus months out, it's a whole nother ball game. And it requires a whole nother level of effort, and the clients want that. And so being able to give it to them not only makes them more successful and more confident and feeling like they have that reliability, but it also then puts our team in a better supported set up for success and that kind of thing because they have what they need, and the client has what they need. And everyone's able to really come together and collaborate on building and launching a great product. EMILY: Yeah. I think we're always looking at ways that we can improve our process, and as we are taking on more of the complex projects recognizing the need for this role. What's really exciting is the interest in the product management role. It’s been an opportunity for our team members. We've had two senior developers who've wanted to move into that role. And it's been an amazing transformation of with them, similar to you, having that background, the hands-on background of understanding what it means to be a developer on a project but then being able to transition to a different role on the project and get more involved on the business side of things. But that's been extraordinarily successful in making that transition and providing the support that the team needs in order to be successful. So in some ways, it's like we were trying to do that job without really defining it. But now that it's been defined, just recognizing the value that that role plays on these types of projects and seeing the opportunity to even improve it. CHAD: I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one on one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one on one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. So we have a bunch of positions open in Lift Off. But product management is one of those positions that we're looking for people, right? EMILY: Yeah. We are actually opening up a position for Director of Product Management because the role is so critical to the work that we're doing, just like...I feel like we're extending our design and development model but then adding this third tier of product management, which is just as important in terms of the team that works best for these types of projects. It's having that interdisciplinary core of product management, design, and development working together for new products. A lot of it is really having that high-level oversight, the business strategy integrated in with the folks that can specialize in the development and the design piece. Having to look at the problem from those three different points of view just provides a level of reliability for clients that they just can't get with a single point of view. CHAD: What is the size of the product management team now? EMILY: Right now? Let's see. I think we've got about five. We have four or five active product managers right now. CHAD: So tell us more about the ideal Director of Product Management. What do you think that they would be? Able to lead a team that size while also evolving our product management process and doing product management themselves? EMILY: Yeah. I think I'm bringing in somebody who can help us improve our product management process specifically for first version products and really looking at it, and really shaping it, and pulling in the best practices, and really shaping it for the clients that we have I think is one thing I'm looking for the director to do. I'm also looking at the director to upskill our team. Like I said, there are a lot of folks like developers and designers that are actually interested in moving into that role and building up a potential career pathway for folks that may want to move into that area and to ensure that they are successful with that. And then growing the team, we are hoping to be able to...I think we've got five active projects right now, so being able to grow our projects and to grow the team so that we can support those kinds of projects on an ongoing basis. So really extending that out and then working collaboratively with our design and development directors to look at how we can collectively put together best practices around first version products. CHAD: Awesome. Well, what's on your radar now? What's next for Lift Off besides hiring a Director of Product Management? EMILY: [laughs] That's definitely number one. I think what is up next is really focusing in on teamwork. How do we work collectively as a team? Are there ways to improve our process to better serve our clients? We've done a lot of things in the past year. Like I'd mentioned before, we've improved our design sprints and extended them to become discovery sprints. Those are just names, but it's really the beginning stages of kicking off a project more successfully. Looking at ways that we can improve our customer experience and being able to serve clients in a better way, improving our product management across the board for all our projects, looking at ways that throughout the first version product for our clients what other ways can we better support our clients? Either through go-to-market strategies or helping them recruit permanent team members onto their team. But I think what's next for Lift Off is really examining how we service clients and looking at ways that we can actually make it even better. CHAD: Cool. Well, I want to change gears a little bit and ask you about you. EMILY: [laughs] CHAD: So your background, I think it's important to say is as a designer, right? EMILY: Yeah, that's one of my backgrounds. [laughter] CHAD: Okay, you have a varied background. But what were you doing when you joined thoughtbot and moved into the Managing Director role? And how has that evolved over time? EMILY: I think it's really interesting. You're always leaning into something. And as you look back at your past, even if it doesn't seem to make sense, you're always gravitating to something that is your North Star. Before I joined thoughtbot, I actually ran my own agency, which was called UX-Shop. And it was a team of one; it was me. As I was building up that agency, I recognized that I couldn't do it all. The types of projects that I wanted to work on were more complex. And so, when I started UX-Shop, I would be pulling in talent to create the type of team that would make that project more successful. It was hard to continually do that in a way where I had to recruit talent [laughs] and secure projects as well without having them as permanent employees. When I joined thoughtbot, it was an opportunity where I had access to amazing talent. And I could really focus in on building that, first off doing it in the Raleigh, Durham office where we went from a team of four to I think we grew the team to about nine. And starting to really grow that office to transitioning to this new model where we went from a team of nine to...I don't know the exact number, but I think it's like 25, 28. We're heading toward the 30 mark. So it's a significantly larger team with the ability to really focus in on the kind of projects that I actually really love, which is new product design and development but going after those more complex projects. And I think when I start looking back at my own career, I'm just starting to see patterns of the same focus but the opportunity to dive into it in a bigger way, in a more challenging way, and starting to tackle that. So thoughtbot's really given me the opportunity to take that ambition and actually apply it with the opportunity to have the talented team to be able to execute on those types of projects. CHAD: How has going from a team of one to a team of four to a team of nine to a team of pushing 30...are there things that you've needed to evolve in your own skillset or experiences? EMILY: Yeah. I think certainly building leadership skills, understanding how to work through a lot of challenges on what makes a team work really well together, making sure that we've got the guidelines and structures in place. There are a lot of things that I've grown just having the opportunity to work through some of those challenges. But also, in some ways, growing into a larger team has made some things a little easier. But it was nice having that progression from a smaller team to a larger team. I don't know if I would have been as successful with growing to a team of 30 right off the bat without being able to work in that smaller space, kind of learn my lessons, and then build upon those and grow that unit, get better at what I was doing. The reason why Lift Off is really starting to thrive is understanding that that foundation is built upon a lot of trial and error and just learning how to navigate and improve my own personal leadership skills. CHAD: Are there any particular resources that you called upon in order to do that? EMILY: So certainly reaching out to folks who are in similar positions. There's a strong community here where I live in Durham, talking to a lot of founders or folks in the leadership space who are growing teams. I've had some coaching with executive coaching that's helped quite a bit, especially when I've been in situations that I just wanted to make sure that I was handling them in the right way. And then, of course, having access to the folks at thoughtbot like you, Chad, and people that I can talk to and get advice on how to navigate tricky situations have all been contributing to my education and making me a better leader in this space. CHAD: Would you recommend coaching to other people? EMILY: I would. I think it's a real opportunity for you to...there's a lot of things that you don't really know that you don't know. And there's a lot of ways of approaching things in a different way on how you communicate. That is the difference between really getting through and solving a problem versus having a situation arise and escalate and become problematic. And it's a little bit of understanding how to frame things in a thoughtful way. It's also an opportunity to understand that sometimes you just need to have some space to think before responding and understanding how to navigate complexity, especially in today's world where leadership there's so much going on, transitioning to remote. There are different things that are pulling at us in different aspects and just really understanding the human element of your teams. So having someone who you can talk to in a way that you can share those ideas and get a different perspective, I think, is really helpful. CHAD: Yeah. Well, if folks want to get in touch with you or Lift Off, what's the best places for them to do that? EMILY: Well, there's always my email, emily@thoughtbot.com. I think just reaching out to me directly is the best place. I'm always happy to talk about Lift Off or have an intro coffee call with folks that are interested in what we do. So that's the best way to get in touch with me. CHAD: Excellent. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time.Special Guest: Emily Bahna.Sponsored By:AgencyU: AgencyU is a membership-based program where Chad Pytel works one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. You'll do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. You'll start with goal setting, advice, and problem solving based on Chad's experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As you progress as a group, you all get to know each other more and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in his 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, Chad has seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and would be happy to work with you too. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyuSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Dawn Delatte a Designer and Managing Director at thoughtbot who leads the Ignite team, where they focus primarily on validating and launching early-stage products through design-thinking, business and product strategy, and iterative design and development. Dawn works collaboratively with designers and developers to ensure they add value to the people and products thoughtbot works with every day. Follow Dawn on Twitter or LinkedIn. Visit her website at dawndelatte.com. thoughtbot's Ignite team Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Dawn Delatte, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Ignite team. Dawn, thanks for joining me. DAWN: Hi, thanks for having me. CHAD: Ignite is one of the examples I always use when I talk about why we split up into teams the way that we did and what the benefits are, Dawn. So why don't you tell people what Ignite actually does? DAWN: Cool. So the Ignite team we work with entrepreneurs, and non-technical startup founders, in some cases, experienced startup founders, as well as innovation teams within existing organizations. And we work with them to validate their product ideas and deliver very initial versions of their products to continue that validation process. We provide all kinds of services around that from a validation perspective. We use product sprint methodology to understand the opportunity, understand the market, the problem, come up with solutions, all those things to arrive at some ideas and some solutions that we can then quickly prototype and then test with target users depending on who we've decided their customer is or who they've decided their customer is. And that's very high level. I'm happy to get into more detail about what our discovery sprints are like. But after that, then we would go into, like I said, continued validation but through actual product launches. So sometimes that looks like proof of concepts, sometimes that's first MVPs. But either way, we focus on a set of goals, and that could be a certain number of users onboarded to the platform. It could be getting that next round of investment funding. But it's pretty straightforward, not a whole lot of complexity, and focused on getting a product and company to that next best stage. CHAD: One of the reasons why I use Ignite is that it's on one end of the spectrum. It's at the extreme end of the spectrum. Last week, I talked to Josh, who's on the other end of Boost, where we're working on existing products with existing teams. And Ignite is all the way on the other side, which is sometimes we are not even writing any code at all; we're just validating an idea. The work that Ignite does has always been a very important part of what thoughtbot does. But it's a big challenge to go from a product where maybe you have hundreds of thousands or millions of users and a large team, and you're doing development as a developer or designer, maybe it's healthcare or something super complex, and then to the next week where you're working on something that is going to get into market very quickly, maybe is totally unproven. The things you need to do in that environment and the way that you need to work can be a little bit different. And so allowing the thoughtbot designers and developers to focus on the particular needs of the Ignite-type clients I think we have seen, and I think we'll continue to see it as people even get more used to it, it has a direct benefit to our clients as well The best thing might not always be to write a Rails app. But if you take a developer who was on a Rails app on Friday or Thursday, and then they start on a new project on Monday, chances are they're expecting to write a Rails app. DAWN: That's a really important observation and distinction about what our developers do compared to other developers at thoughtbot. I've always said that selling any kind of project or working with new clients with any type of project, whether it's very early stage or that enterprise client that we all wear our product consulting hats, or we're product consultants first, and then we have our toolkit. But I think that is the most true, at least from my experience, in the Ignite team. And we've even talked about and, in some cases, have been able to blur the lines even more between designers and developers because first and foremost, you're coming to the problems thinking about it exactly how you're talking about. Like, what is it going to take to make this product launch successful? It might not involve writing very much code. And we might not discover that until after we've been working together for a couple of weeks and started to validate some of the ideas we have. And so, being able to have that adaptability and really focus on the consulting and strategy aspect of things is super important. CHAD: So if there is a typical or Ignite client that we're working with, what does it look like? DAWN: I would say a typical...so who we've engaged the most with are non-technical founders and entrepreneurs. And I say non-technical but what I really mean is they haven't had the experience of launching a product and going through that process. CHAD: A digital product. DAWN: Yeah, a digital product. So for lack of a better way to describe them, non-technical because there's a lot of work involved in helping them understand product strategy and technical architecting and everything that happens in between. So that's who we've been able to work with primarily while we've also worked with other types of clients. CHAD: What is typically the first step with clients? At what stage are they at, and what is the first step that we're taking them through? DAWN: The sales process is a little bit different. We're not talking about requirements. And we're not exactly talking about what the end product looks like. If the conversation is going that way, we're usually trying to bring it back a little bit and keep things more high level just to make sure that we have a really good sense of what it is that we should try to do. So the sales process is we're already starting to dig into validation processes and making sure that our clients are able to define their customers and define the problem, and have started to think about their value proposition from a business perspective, and have made other considerations that through all of our experience, all the years that we have experience with shipping products, make sure that the client understands at least at a very high level what the big components for success are going to be. And if they haven't started to make decisions about those things, that they know that we can help them do that. So that conversation is already starting in the sales process, which is great because we can get the team involved, and everybody starts wrapping their head around the problem. And by the time that we actually kick off the project, we're really excited because we all are ready, and we have ideas for what we can do together. But the first stage is usually always what we call a discovery sprint. So we've been doing Product Design Sprints for a long time at thoughtbot. And we've always been iterative with everything we do. But with Product Design Sprints, especially because every single one of them is unique, you have to figure out either what exercises you're going to do that make the most sense for this client in this project. We had, I guess a bigger iteration of the Product Design Sprint as a whole. And we've moved into this concept of a discovery sprint or a discovery phase. And it allows us to do a couple of things. So the Product Design Sprint was largely modeled after the Google Ventures Sprint, which is this intensive five-day process where you quickly understand the problem, come up with some solutions together, prototype, and test within five days. We've elongated that process a little bit. So we definitely do two weeks, sometimes four if there's a lot to uncover and make sure we understand about the market before we start writing code or before we start doing the next phase of work together. And we kick off with a lot of the same processes. So like I keep saying, making sure you understand the problem, making sure you've defined the customer, the opportunities. In some cases, at least with our clients, we're actually doing lean model canvas work because our clients haven't always thought through how they're going to make money off of this product and what their competitive landscape looks like and things like that. We incorporate a lot of that business strategy into the product strategy work that we're doing during this phase. But yeah, the first week of a discovery sprint is usually those kinds of exercises, working together through all this institutional knowledge that the client might have. Because usually, they're experiencing this problem or they've been in this industry,and they know what the problems of their customers have, and so they can talk a lot about it. And then, we move into some of the more traditional Product Design Sprint phases, so diverge exercises, converge exercises that help us to come up with a bunch of ideas for what the product should be or should do. And then decide as a group which ones are the strongest so that we can move into prototyping. We prototype. We test with either existing customers in this space, or we get anonymous users based on certain demographics that are important to validate the concept with, and then we test. And then, we do that iteratively throughout the process to make sure that we're capturing as much data as we can to feel confident about how validation is going. Or, in some cases, it might make sense for us to think about the next phase of validation actually being more like a proof of concept. And so we can jump into that really quickly depending on how validation is going. A lot of times, at the end of discovery spreads, we've incorporated some technical planning and architecting into the process. Sometimes we have to validate that the launch approach is going to work from a technical perspective. And so that's the kind of research that our developer would be doing in this process. And by the end of this phase, we have a presentation of our findings, an architectural diagram if that's where we're leaning or where we would recommend the next stage go. We would present all that information and make a decision. Sometimes we invalidate. We largely invalidate some of the ideas that we came up with, and we have to go back to the drawing board. CHAD: Have we worked with any clients recently that had a major invalidation where they really needed to go back to the drawing board based on what we learned with the whole concept? DAWN: We did have a client that we worked with this year that we didn't invalidate things during the sprint but not far into the product build, we realized that we were going to need some other infrastructure in place in order for that product to be successful. So we actually did a more traditional Product Design Sprint with this client. Part of the reasoning was…, and this product idea was in the real estate space. [chuckles] The idea was to open up the market a little bit by...I don't want to say eliminating, but I guess, in a way eliminating certain aspects of what a realtor might do in the process of buying and selling real estate. It is possible to knock on somebody's door and ask them if you can buy their house, and then the transaction is facilitated through a realtor. But this would open up the possibility of this happening digitally through a product. So there’s certain data that you can pull from real estate sites out there that let you know certain things about a property. And this is public information; anybody can find it. And the concept was to have homeowners who might potentially be interested in selling their properties be on the platform and have their homes be available to anybody that might be looking or vice versa. Like, someone who's buying could get on the platform and see what kind of homes are in their area; maybe they have a particular area that they want to buy in and essentially cut out the realtor in that they could go directly to the property owner and inquire about their home or see if they might be interested in selling it. So that was, at a high level, the product idea. We did a more traditional sprint with them because the client was obviously very familiar with this space and really understood the opportunity well. And there are not a lot of competitors in this space in the U.S., at least. Our goal was ultimately to get to a plan for MVP. And so we spent time validating the user experience and at a high level, making sure that we were confident and moving forward with everything. And we felt like we got validation for that. And we got started on the project, and we realized there's actually a lot to this space. It's very heavily...if not regulated, there are all sorts of processes in place that require very specific people and roles to accomplish different things and facilitate the process. It's also because of the role that a realtor has played for so long. People aren't very educated on what this process could be like, buying and selling homes, especially with a direct transaction. And so there was way more to uncover and to understand and to work through on the business side than we had initially anticipated. And so we decided to quickly bring in somebody to focus on product strategy while we were also iteratively working through an MVP launch. So we decided to test as often as we can and constantly be working through on a weekly basis what it was that we were building, making sure that that aligned with what we were learning in real-time, essentially. The product strategist came on and started to continue some of the competitor research that we had started in the Product Design Sprints really try to understand the market and try to work very directly with the clients who were both in real estate to quickly make decisions about the direction that we were going in while we were also iterating on this product idea. About halfway through, which is standard to Ignite a 12 to 16-week MVP launch, so about halfway through at about six weeks in, we decided that we needed to continue validating with a working prototype as opposed to continuing to chug along until we got to MVP launch and just see what happened. That was feeling too risky as we were learning more and more about the market. So I wouldn't say we invalidated anything, but as we continued to validate and as we started to build iteratively realized that we needed to spend a lot more time on validating the product idea and that it made sense to do that with a working product. And so, we pivoted in that way once we had started building. CHAD: Yeah, that's cool. I often say that it's fairly rare that we completely invalidate the core of someone's idea. But it's not at all rare that it changes based on what everyone is learning along the way, whether that be in a Product Design Sprint or discovery sprint. And I think that's one of the things that not only does it make products more successful because you're reducing risk and you're changing them based on the things that you'll learn, but I also think it leads to the working environment that I want to be a part of where it's very collaborative; everyone's building off of each other's ideas. We're changing based on what we learn rapidly. I really love doing that. DAWN: Yeah. AD: I wanted to tell you all about something I’ve been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that’s AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more, and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I’ve seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I’d be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyu DAWN: And it's funny what you just said about learning versus invalidating. I literally just got off of a call with somebody right before I joined this, and we touched on that exact same thing. They've been building a prototype and going through their own validation phases. And this person pointed out that they didn't want to call the work that they had been doing validation that they wanted to call it learning. And I just thought that was very poignant. I feel like I call it continued validation when I'm talking about delivering a proof of concept or initial MVP because, really, that's what it is. But I think a better way to say it is just learning. You're learning from the process and from your market, and it's all at the same time. It's very agile in that way. CHAD: One of the meta reasons why I like that from a thoughtbot perspective is that oftentimes, founders, in particular, can be very precious about their ideas or not want to give up. And so this idea of oh, it could potentially be invalidated is almost like a confrontational tension or something that even when they are shown something they might not be willing to adjust because it's not their original idea. And the word learning subtly de-escalates that a little bit. It's like, what have we learned? [laughs] Have we learned something that we can take into play? It's not invalidating the idea. DAWN: Yeah, I find that using the term like de-risking does a similar thing. Because whether or not you're an investor, that's a term that I think everybody can understand. Like, let's try to learn from and lower the risk of us not being successful with each step we take. The ultimate goal is product success and business success, and we want to get people there. But we want to make sure we do it the right way. And we want to make sure that all the decisions that we're making early on have positive, long-term effects. So yeah, de-risking and learning. I think I'm going to change the way I talk about validation now. [laughter] CHAD: So what else is Ignite working towards now? I know that you have...everywhere at thoughtbot, we've got a bunch of open positions open. So you're actively hiring, right? DAWN: Yeah. So going back to what you were saying and what we were talking about earlier, a lot of what we've been thinking through on the development side is what skills are really necessary and important for our developers to have for the types of projects and the type of work that we're doing. We made an assumption and have been working through learning [laughter] whether or not that assumption is true that we don't necessarily need a ton of back-end Rails expertise to be able to deliver products in the way that we're thinking. Rails has always been really good with MVPs, really good for MVPs and speed to market and things like that. But I think that we are thinking through how we can be even more agile and iterative with product delivery. So we're leaning towards skill sets that focus on the front end, so delivering that really great consumer or user experience on the front end because MVP and startup space is incredibly competitive nowadays. We have to be thinking through, I think, more than what we did maybe ten years ago when we were delivering MVPs for startups. So we're focusing more on the front end. We're focusing more on the user experience. And we're thinking through how we can utilize existing tooling on the back end to support the products that we're building, which we assume is going to require a lot less particular expertise and a back-end language like Rails and a lot more openness to making decisions that make the most sense for that product idea in particular so whether that's pulling together existing tools on the back end. CHAD: Well, I find it useful to think about...or one way to articulate this is mobile apps in particular because some people might not get the distinction with a web app the difference between the front end and the back end. I think it's maybe a little bit more obvious with things like React and that kind of thing. But if you take a mobile app, for example, in order to actually build and launch a mobile app, we typically need to build the mobile app, and then that mobile app needs to talk to servers on the backside. And put quite plainly, if we have a Rails developer on the project and a mobile developer on the project, that's two people. And if instead, we can have a mobile developer who is putting together some back-end services from companies like Google or Twilio or those kinds of things, to get to the next stage of the company, it's going to be a lot cheaper and potentially faster for the stage that that company is at if it makes sense then. That doesn't mean that they won't ever need a back end of their own, right? DAWN: Yeah. Well, and I'm learning more and more too that making those kinds of decisions now doesn't necessarily mean that I can't scale, even with the services that we pull together for the back end at that time when we do the initial launch. AWS, for instance, has a ton of capability for initial launches and for scaling. So there are a lot of options. That's what's become more important to us when we think through the development expertise on our team is not only experience with delivering early-stage products, because you're in that mindset, but openness to working with different technologies that would allow you to, like you're saying, plug into these different tools and servers and systems that already working for a particular industry, for instance. I mean, e-commerce is one that you think of where we definitely don't want to be reinventing any wheels there. [laughs] From a conceptual perspective, yes, and from a competitive perspective, yes. But from a back-end development and architectural perspective, there's so much that we can utilize that already exists. So yeah, we are hiring. [laughter] I think that was your original question. And we have open developer positions, which is why I was focused on that. Our development focuses less around what you've historically seen at thoughtbot, which is we need Rails developers. We need full-stack developers who can for sure stand up a custom back end. And we've shifted to...we definitely need to focus on the front end. We need that expertise. And we need some adaptability around back-end tooling and being able to pull stuff together that way. CHAD: So you were the Managing Director of the Austin studio. And now you're the Managing Director of the Ignite team. Before that, you were a designer. How has this transition compared to prior transitions that you've been a part of? DAWN: I think the biggest difference, and this has been just as challenging as it has been rewarding, and I think positive for our business, is the fact that I can focus on expanding our services and expanding our expertise in this one area. Before, we had the local studios, and we could work across the entire product lifecycle. And from a sales and business development perspective, that both gave me varied experience. And it gave me a lot of levers to pull, especially with the teams and making sure that we were all working on different things and able to cycle through different types of projects. But that's hard to do, and it's a lot of work. [laughs] And being able to focus on one stage of the product lifecycle and a set of clients, and expand our expertise in that area has been really challenging and really rewarding. We've been able to sink our teeth in and imagine what possibilities are here and explore markets that we haven't before and actually think through how we can build partnerships with people and really become experts in this space in a way that we haven't been able to in the past because there hasn't been dedicated time and dedicated effort in particular. So the transition has been really great in that way. I'm really excited about it. CHAD: Well, that's good. [laughter] You were out on parental leave for a fair amount of time. How long was it in total? DAWN: About four months. CHAD: Welcome back, by the way. DAWN: Thank you. CHAD: I'm curious on your perspective either with Ignite or maybe even more so thoughtbot overall. How was it being away, and what surprised you when you came back? DAWN: So a couple of things, we were a smaller team in the beginning of this year. We knew that we were going to have to be iterative with our approach to refining our positioning as a team and understanding all these things that we're talking about, like our clients and our customers, and who we're going to work with, how we're going to work with them, how we're going to deliver value. We knew that we were going to have to be iterative. So we went through some phases this year. We were experimental and applied our validation processes to Ignite as a business. And we learned a ton of stuff. And we're going in a great direction. And then I was out for four months [laughter], and so there was a gap. And I tried very hard not to check my email. I mostly did a good job of it. And so I was telling Diana, our CEO, earlier that I feel a little bit like we're going into 2022 with a fresh start even though we have this whole year behind us that we learned from. We got to a point where we're going in a particular direction now. And we validated enough and felt strongly enough about the direction that we're going in that we're hitting the ground running now going into next year. And I don't know what I assumed; maybe I assumed that we would have established a little bit more this year in the direction that we initially intended. And it's not like a far departure. It's just that it's certainly evolved beyond what I was imagining initially from the technical perspective, for instance. CHAD: Well, even in Ignite, which is pretty short client cycles, we're not so huge. [chuckles] Ignite might do 12 projects in a year, and that might be a lot. So we get a lot of opportunities to try new things. And the cycle time isn't that long, but it's not super-fast pace, and it's not super high volume. So it does take some time to refine things based on what we learn, even in Ignite, which is typically faster cycles. DAWN: Yeah, that's true. If you think of it that way, a lot of our projects if we're doing an MVP launch, for instance, it's about a quarter along. And if we only do a couple of those every quarter, it takes those whole cycles to be able to look at things in retrospect. I agree; it takes a little bit longer to learn overall. I like the way that you put it, too, like when you really look back and think of it, even though we do a lot of what you would consider rapid projects, it's still going to take some time to learn. And I think overall, and I think this is true for all of our teams and our whole company, the year has been so positive. And we've learned so much. And everyone is feeling really strong, I think, in their positioning in going forward into the next year. Again, it's been good. It's been certainly challenging [laughs] but good. CHAD: I think there have been certain things about this year that have been challenging, and we've talked about it on previous episodes, some of them. But just in general, I think I got the sense that we transitioned from being tired of the current pandemic situation and working situation to actually being upset and angry about it, which was a really weird transition. And I think it just made work in general challenging sometimes. We also had the challenges of fairly high turnover this year at the company like a lot of companies have had. The reasons why it happens at thoughtbot might be different than other companies, but it's something that people in general have. And sometimes that can make it hard to get ahead, but because we were having such a positive year overall, it was this weird dichotomy of general success and positive change and all that stuff. But at the same time, people were still leaving the company, and that can make it challenging. The silver lining is for a team like Ignite, even though that can be super challenging, you're in your early days, and now you're getting the opportunity to...the new people being added to the team are doing it with different expectations, and you're able to shape the team into what it needs to be today. DAWN: Yeah. There has been an interesting...it seems like there was an influx this year and excitement and readiness to get back into building products and working on their ideas from a client perspective, but our teams were just coming off of a very hard year. People were coming off of a very hard year. So a lot of exhausted people trying to show up and be positive and work through all this excitement and movement in the industry. So it's kind of like parental leave. [laughter] Totally exhausted, but you're showing up, so it's good. CHAD: Well, Dawn, thanks for stopping by the show, and joining me, and talking to me about Ignite and beyond. I really appreciate it. DAWN: Yeah, this has been really fun. CHAD: If folks want to get in touch with you or follow along with you, where are the different places that they can do that? DAWN: Let's see. Well, I have an email address that is dawn@thoughtbot.com. I have a Twitter. I'm pretty sure that my handle is @dawndig. [laughter] Why I don't know this off the top of my head. I haven't looked at my handle in a very long time. Yeah, @dawndig, so D-A-W-N-D-I-G. LinkedIn is just my name, and it's pronounced Delatte. CHAD: And you can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time.Special Guest: Dawn Delatte.Sponsored By:AgencyU: AgencyU is a membership-based program where Chad Pytel works one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. You'll do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. You'll start with goal setting, advice, and problem solving based on Chad's experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As you progress as a group, you all get to know each other more and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in his 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, Chad has seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and would be happy to work with you too. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyuSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad interviews Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. The Launchpad II team covers the EMEA area: that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. She talks about working remotely for almost the entire time she's worked with the company, her approach to talking with potential customers when she knows she's never going to meet them in person, and what she sees happening to the different geographies that thoughtbot is selling and expanding into. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Kirsten on LinkedIn Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Kirsten Hurley, Managing Director of thoughtbot's Launchpad II team. Kirsten, thanks for joining me. KIRSTEN: Thanks for having me on, Chad. CHAD: So I've now talked with a few managing directors at thoughtbot about the new team that they're leading. So I think listeners are probably expecting what's coming next which is, you know, why don't you give people a little bit of an overview of what the Launchpad II team, which has a slightly different name than the other teams we've talked to so far, do? KIRSTEN: Sure. So I guess maybe to remind some folks, so Launchpad I refers to the Americas. So you've already spoken to a few of the managing directors who head up different teams across the Americas. You have different propositions. Over in Launchpad II, which historically was the London studio when we were working in a physical office environment, we are a smaller team than everyone else who was based over in the Americas. So we didn't quite scale out to be able to have individual teams working on particular propositions. But I think what the team had been successfully doing anyway was working across everything. And we still do work on Ignite-style projects, Lift Off, and Boost engagements as well. So yeah, that's where we've got to. And I think maybe the changes for us is that since we've gone to fully remote working and officially called ourselves the EMEA Launchpad II team, we've started hiring folks from further afield, which is really exciting for me. CHAD: So not everyone may be familiar with the acronym, although it's fairly common, EMEA. So what regions does that actually cover? KIRSTEN: [laughs] Sorry. So that's Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. And I should say we were already working with clients pretty much fully across the region anyway. It was just never really official. But I think the more global terminology is Europe, the Middle East, and Africa or EMEA. But because we're thoughtbot and we like to do things a little bit...well, we like to own our things. So we've called it Launchpad II to go with the rocket theme that we had in our rebranding. What was that? The end of last year I think we came up with it all. CHAD: Yeah. So what has it been like to go from a team of people that were...[laughs] actually, as I ask this question I realized that you joined a week before the pandemic started, and we had to go remote. So I was going to ask you what it was like to go from a team of people that were going to a studio every day all based in London to a remote team. [laughs] But you never really experienced the alternative. KIRSTEN: [laughs] No. I think the most time I spent with the team as a whole was actually in my interview process [laughs] before I even started in person I should say. That was a pretty interesting week. You had flown over from Boston [chuckles] to spend some time getting me all set up and running. And I think it was the Wednesday where you and I had a bit of a chat, and we were concerned about this virus that was going around and the duty of care that we actually had to our teams across the world from a point of view of them commuting to work, and it didn't feel right. And so I think we made the decision that day that from the following week, everyone would start working from home. And I think we thought it would just be for a few weeks, and we'd see how it went. So yeah, it was interesting for sure. [laughs] CHAD: Right. And I remember what happened is I went to...I usually leave on a Friday when I visit, but a few of us, I think, went to a pub or something on...we were planning on doing that on Friday. So I was going to leave on Saturday morning, and I did. But I woke up on Saturday morning ready to catch my flight to the news that the U.S. had shut down all flights from the UK or from Europe, was what the headline said. And I was like, oh no, [laughter] I might be stuck here. And then when you actually read the article, it said actually the UK is exempt and also U.S. citizens were exempt, so they can get back. I remember waking up that morning and having a fright that I was going to be stuck there and made it back safely, thankfully. So the U.S. then went remote that following week if I remember the timeline right. It was an interesting time. And like you said, we thought it was going to be temporary, relatively short, but it wasn't. And then, at the end of last year, we decided that we would be going completely fully remote, and that was pretty exciting. I think for folks, it was obviously...unexpected is probably the wrong word because we couldn't be in person anyway. But it wasn't what people were necessarily expecting when they joined thoughtbot. People join because we often, or at least they have the expectation that we're in an office together. But it's been exciting for Launchpad II because it means that you can now and are hiring people much differently and further afield than you were in the past, right? KIRSTEN: Yeah, and even actually working with partners further afield as well. So we have some great partnerships still in the UK but actually working with some of your cohorts from AgencyU, your coaching program, Subvisual over in Portugal, and a couple of others as well. That's been really great to work with those teams as well. CHAD: Having come into a new team as in a leadership position and being, basically as we've said, entirely remote almost from day one, how has that been for you? KIRSTEN: Certainly, it wasn't the plan. [laughs] So I think my last few roles were very much working based in an office. And so my background is commercial and sales, account management. And I was very used to building rapport with teams and clients in person. So I had joined thoughtbot and joined the London studio as it was then but Launchpad II with a remit to grow the business. So I think you had been looking after the team for about a year, giving us a great foundation to then really grow. And coming in, this black swan event had happened in the world, so the priorities changed overnight. And it was okay; how do I keep this team safe? Is everyone set up to be successful in their role? And also our existing clients and our existing projects, are they supported in the right way? This is a shock to them as well. I think, at thoughtbot, we're very lucky that from a point of view of asynchronous communication and remote working practices, being a global company, it wasn't such a shock to the system, but for some of our clients, it was. So we had to make sure that they were supported. And in some cases, we showed them what good looks like. But rather than focusing on new business and growing straight away, it was really a period of stabilization, I would say, for about three to six months while everyone got used to what was an evolving situation, but we came through it. And I have to say a huge thank you to the team actually for their kindness and patience with me and learning remotely everything about thoughtbot that I was so excited to become a part of. But also, learning a leadership style over Zoom wasn't really what I thought I was going to be doing. CHAD: Well, you mentioned selling a lot of what you had done previously was relationship building with clients in person or potential clients in person. Is there anything that stands out to you in terms of how you've needed to adjust either your style or your approach when talking with potential customers when you know you're never going to meet them in person? KIRSTEN: I'm not sure you can really change your personality per se because I am always interested in building rapport through understanding an individual's motives and what they're passionate about. And quite often, those conversations can be things outside of work, so talking with clients about maybe going up for runs and things like that and personal bests and things just because that's a natural thing to talk to someone about. I still very much make room for those kinds of things in calls. Because I think in a consultancy relationship, people buy people, and people want to work with people who understand them. And while the majority of that is obviously people understanding your job and the product that you want to be building as well, I think you need to have that personal element. So while it felt a bit stilted over Zoom to make that time, I think that it's worth it in the long run. CHAD: That's a really good point. I think if you're not careful about it, it's very easy to just get right to business in a call as opposed to when you're meeting someone in person you need to walk to a conference room or something, and it naturally lends itself to some small talk. KIRSTEN: Exactly, that bit where you're riding in the lift together. CHAD: And I think that that probably applies to sales as much as it does our team members too. KIRSTEN: Absolutely. Funnily enough, I was talking with our Development Director here, Rob Whittaker, the other day about one-to-ones should not be really that much talking about your client project. It's obviously important to make sure that someone is happy and they're being successful in their work. But actually, what's going on behind the scenes and understanding that within your team is probably just as important, if not more so, like you say. CHAD: So tell us a little bit about some of the interesting work that's happening in Launchpad II. KIRSTEN: Well, we've got a couple of flagship clients that keep on growing for us, which is really great, actually. They're effectively partnerships, really at this point. And so, one of those clients is a large financial service institution where we were building APIs for all of the COVID loan schemes. And I think the last I checked, the amount of money that had flowed through that system and the loans approved was something over £75 billion. So for a pretty small development team, it's really impressive what they've achieved over that time. So that's a team of three developers in a Boost-style engagement, so like Josh's team over in the U.S. working on a Rails project and working alongside business analysts from the team and other stakeholders there as well. And so over in the Middle East, we have a food delivery client, so they're actually a huge brand over there. And we had started working with them nearly two years ago now on creating a mobile app for their customers. So we've been adding to features, getting that released. And obviously, with what's happened in the last 18 months, food delivery is a sector where you've seen huge growth. And that's even led to us recently looking at re-engineering the platform and making sure that we're still managing to delight their customers as well with their user experience. And we've even been working on some Ignite-style projects too. So there's a lot of startups, a lot of folks have been at home thinking about what is this new business? What's the impact I'm going to have on the world? And most recently, we've been running some product design sprints with a wellness brand who are looking at bringing a different type of wellness to the market. And again, that's a mobile app which we're really excited to be working on. CHAD: Have you seen the different geographies both from the U.S. and UK...what do you see happening to the different geographies that you're selling into and expanding into? Are there any notable differences you would call out? KIRSTEN: I think the biggest difference that I see between clients in the Americas and over here in Europe, the Middle East, Africa would be the funding levels for startups and the expectations around that. It seems like a more mature market from a point of view of being able to get a decent budget to really build a meaningful platform for first release over in the Americas, whereas over here, it's a bit leaner definitely [laughs] on the startup side of things. So I think that's probably the biggest challenge we have when talking with clients and making sure we can give them the bang for the buck, as it were. So making sure that the research that we did, that the designers do, for example, is focused on the right thing and really gives them the insight that they need to have the confidence to progress and invest in that build. Or whether they actually need to go back and do more before they actually start spending on the development side of things. CHAD: I would definitely second that. And one thing that I noticed not only were the amounts different in the U.S. and the UK, but it seems like in the U.S., when you're talking with a founder, there's more often than not other people they need to check in with in order to make a decision. And when I was talking to founders in the UK and beyond and in Europe, what I often felt was that there was actually someone that they needed to check in with and get permission from or that was holding the purse strings or something. And that might be a cultural thing as well, far less likely to just make a decision with you in the meeting saying, "Yeah, we're going to work together." There was always, for me, a lot more back and forth, and checking and permission getting around decisions that are being made. KIRSTEN: Yeah, I would agree with that. CHAD: Is that something that you've seen too? KIRSTEN: I think so. It's interesting because what we've started doing recently actually...sometimes through the product design sprints but even in the sales process, if a founder does know or does realize in those conversations that they're going to need to find an additional source of money to be able to fund it, conversations have gone more into how can we help them with their pitch deck as well? And I think I've seen this with the Ignite team over in the Americas as well, to be fair. The prototypes that we build, very early-stage prototypes, where we're testing and doing the user research those go into the pitch decks now to give potential investors greater confidence as well if that's the route that they go down. MIDROLL AD CHAD: I wanted to tell you all about something I’ve been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that’s AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions, and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot I’ve seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I’d be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyu CHAD: What do you think is next for Launchpad II? As you look ahead, what do you see, and what do you want to accomplish? KIRSTEN: Well, so it's budget season [chuckles] at thoughtbot at the moment. So we've just gone through our first iteration of what that might look like. And we are super keen to make the most of what we've built over, certainly in my time, the last 18 months. We've had great commercial success, and we've grown existing clients. We've brought on a couple of new ones. And we've really matured our team as well from the point of view of what we think works for our clients and what we get the greatest fulfillment in as well. So I think in that first card, we would like to grow the team by an additional ten folks, and that's working across design, development, and product management as well. So that's something new that we brought in this year. We had our first product manager join the team, and that's been a huge success as well. It's something that everyone at thoughtbot working on projects had assumed responsibility collectively for, but actually, some projects really need that nominated person. So I'm excited to grow that team as well as the other ones. And I think looking ahead for our hiring as well building a more geographically diverse team as well that better reflects our client base. So we currently have clients in the Middle East; as I mentioned, we've got France, Germany, and a few more UK-centric ones as well. So it would be great to build a more diverse team from a point of view of life experience. Because as we well know, the more diverse a team, the greater the empathy for a broader range of human experience, and that leads to great products as well. CHAD: Well, speaking of hiring, you do have a bunch of open positions in Launchpad II now. And we probably can't stress enough that those positions are open to anybody, anywhere in Europe, the Middle East, Africa. And we'd love for people to apply from across all of those places and including an apprenticeship opening, right? KIRSTEN: Oh, absolutely. I would also encourage people to reach out to me as well if they're not sure whether they would maybe qualify for the role. I think we do a lot of work on our job descriptions to make sure that they are as approachable as possible. But nonetheless, if someone isn't sure, then please do just reach out to me. And we can have an informal chat before the more formal process starts. I'm more than happy to have a 15-minute call with someone and just answer any questions too. CHAD: Well, on that note, I'm interested in your perspective, especially as someone relatively new to the team. Coming in externally, you have a perspective that maybe someone who's been here a long time doesn't have quite as fresh a perspective. But what do you think makes people a good fit for thoughtbot? KIRSTEN: From what I've learned from the team over the last 18 months or so, there's obviously a passion for creating great software. But I think what really seems to resonate with folks is feeling like they're a part of something bigger, so open source contributions, contributing to potentially clients who've got some social good agenda. Those kinds of things are pretty important to people. And working with even people who have empathy for each other and who envisage those values we have around earning, imparting, and summoning trust. I think we've all been through a pretty tough time over the last 18 months. And the level of compassion that everyone has shown each other has been incredible. And the patience, as I've mentioned before, is great. And I think everyone just wants to pull together for positive outcomes, whether it's within the team, whether it's for clients. What would be your old school view then, Chad, as a founder of what, 18 years ago? [laughs] CHAD: Yeah. I think the other thing that I would call out that maybe isn't explicitly in the values, which people can read about at thoughtbot.com/purpose, is designers, and especially developers at thoughtbot, are not what you might typically envision a developer to be in that developers at thoughtbot are expected to be able to talk directly to clients and work directly with clients. And that's not an expectation everywhere. So, people who like talking with people about problems and collaborating to solve problems, not everyone is a fit for that. And one of the things we look for in the hiring process is those communication skills, and the ability to have those conversations, and to weigh trade-offs, and be a consultant, and all of those things. So someone who enjoys doing that in the process of building a great product is something that I would call out. KIRSTEN: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Collaboration is huge for us, always has been. And obviously, the way that that works has changed slightly with the move to remote working. But I think thoughtbot is the least hierarchical consultancy that I've ever worked for in that everyone is encouraged to give their opinions and discuss challenges with clients very openly. Everyone is encouraged to contribute. It's not just the senior developers or the team leads who are making decisions. Everyone makes a decision together. And I think that's incredibly empowering for people maybe who haven't had that opportunity before. Sometimes it takes folks a little while to grow in their confidence and believe that it's true. But it's really nice to see when people who join us start coming out of their shells and really get a sense of satisfaction from genuinely being a part of a really constructive team. CHAD: And the other thing that I often say is really important, not necessarily to being hired at thoughtbot but being really successful here, is being able to lift your head up from the particular client project that you are on right now and to see and get excited by the bigger picture of what's going on. So that might be noticing patterns in the way that we're implementing something that will lead to the creation of an open-source project or a product to solve that need. It could be if you really love thinking about engineering or design best practices and getting the chance to experiment with them in your work, that's going to make you really successful at thoughtbot over the long term. Because we do great work on clients’ projects, but our actual product that we're selling goes far beyond the lines of code or the design that we produce. You said it yourself earlier, people buy our people, and our process, and our culture. That's what people are making decisions about whether to work with us or someone else over. And so we have an opportunity to be working on improving the company, and our processes, and our engineering practices, and all that stuff, and it makes us a better company. So the people who are able to do that tend to be very successful and grow into leadership positions and those kinds of things. KIRSTEN: Yeah, I would agree with that. So I was actually going to ask you, Chad, what are your hopes and dreams for the Launchpad II team? We obviously have a few conversations here and there. But it's good to know from your experience, having worked with the team before I came along, maybe it's interesting for people listening what you think the potential is. CHAD: I think that there is a lot of potential, and I think that it's probably no surprise that I think that, to be honest. [chuckles] I'm very excited by the ability to expand throughout a larger region and to bring new team members on as well as new clients on, and the way that that's working now is really great. It's not that the way that we were working before wasn't good. There are pros and cons to every way of working. And the pros now are being able to hire people no matter where they live and to have the expectation that we're able to work with these clients remotely everywhere. And we're getting the chance to be involved in a lot of really cool exciting things and with cool, exciting people because we're doing that. And I do this and have done it for so long because of the cool, exciting things that we do with the cool, exciting people that we do them with. So that is what I'm really excited by. And the thing from a business perspective and a team perspective that I keep on reminding people of and pushing people towards is the team structure that we have in the Americas was created at a certain point because the number of people in the Americas made sense to have a breakdown and have some focus. And that focus is proving very positive. It's not that in Launchpad II, we're not doing a good job on our client work. It's not that people aren't fulfilled in their work. But what we see is when people never know what kind of project they're going to be on next, or are tasked with going from a project where they're doing huge scaling and architecture, and the timelines on things are months, not days, and then you rotate on a project where it's the complete opposite. You're bringing your product to market super quickly. The timelines you're operating on...a ticket you're going to work on now is going to go to production a few minutes later. It's a different skill set. And not that the people at thoughtbot can't do all of those things, but there is a benefit to being able to excel in the moment of that kind of project that you're on and to be able to raise your hand and say, "You know, I really like this kind of work," and to be able to focus on that. So that's down the road for Launchpad II. That's something that we have to look forward to is the team will eventually get big enough where we're able to say, "Hey, what kind of work do you want to focus on?" It's a transition we've been through in the Americas. Hopefully, we've learned from that. And the other thing that will be the case for Launchpad II is that it won't necessarily all happen at once. In the Americas, we did it as a reorganization, and it all happened at once. But in Launchpad II, it can happen more organically where we say, "There is enough work in this area and enough people now," that we start to focus a little bit and we create a team of people that focuses on Boost-style projects or a team of people that focus on Lift Off-style projects and without worrying about also needing to create those other teams at the same time. So we should do it more organically. I'm excited. I'm looking forward to that process. I'm not exactly sure when it will happen. But I think it will be an indicator of the growth and success that we've had in Launchpad II. KIRSTEN: We're certainly watching all of the great experiments that are happening over in Launchpad I in the different teams, looking at the learnings that are coming out of all of the different things. And yeah, I think it's giving us a lot of food for thought right now as to how will that work for us and how will it work for the clients that we work with as well? Because that's the other thing we mentioned before about the maturity of the startup market, et cetera. So we may need to organize ourselves a little bit differently to be able to serve them. So it will be interesting, as you say when we get to the scale, that that's appropriate, which I hope is going to be sooner rather than later. [laughs] So yeah, it's going to be an interesting challenge. And I agree with you on the organic thing as well. I think it might be a case where some folks want to actually try out some different types of things. Maybe the newer folks who join us next year may not know what gives them the most fulfillment. But that's also another great thing about thoughtbot generally is that nothing is permanent. [laughs] And if we find a better way to do something, then we'll always twist rather than stick. CHAD: I like that saying. That's cool. You're right to call out that a lot of the improvements that I've talked about are from a team perspective and an individual perspective. But a big driver of that was from the client-side, and we see lots of benefits there too. And you called out that we have project managers now. And that's been successful in a way that project management at thoughtbot has never been successful before. And part of it is when everything was the same in all of the individual studios, not every project would benefit from a project manager. And if we only have one project and that happens to not be a full-time project for a project manager, it wasn't enough work. But when we can coalesce a team together and a client base together that needs a certain kind of thing consistently, then we're better able to support that which makes our work for the clients better as well. And so that's also been a really good area of improvement for us. KIRSTEN: Yeah, I think it's interesting to consider product management in the industry as well. I think it's matured quite significantly whether thoughtbot was doing that or not. I think product management generally is a far more important role than it ever used to be because clients themselves invest in those roles a lot more than they used to. CHAD: Yeah, and I think that I realized...I just caught myself in a mistake. Was I saying project management before? KIRSTEN: [laughs] I should have corrected you. I wasn't entirely sure if I'd misheard you across the pond here. CHAD: [laughs] Okay. That was a mistake. KIRSTEN: I think a few of us still make that mistake. CHAD: Yes. Actually, that's a really good thing. I caught myself doing it just because they're similar words. But I totally meant product management and not project management. And there are two different things, two distinct things that I think it's important to make that distinction clear. So what is the distinction between those two things, Kirsten? KIRSTEN: [laughs] And now it's my turn to tie myself in knots a little bit. It's because product management; I think the first thing you go to is thinking about someone who's responsible for maintaining a product roadmap. And I know that that's a spicy conversation to get into sometimes because you don't want them to be so resolutely set at the outset of a project. But you need someone who's got one eye on the end goal. And sometimes, when you've got a team of developers and designers working to some pretty aggressive timelines, and deep in technical problems and solving challenges, that person who helicopters out and looks across everything and retains the broader context of the overall program or the overall client objectives, and can hold the team true to that is really important strategically for the success of a project. But I think; actually, you also need to be flexible and listen to the designers and developers when something that was on the roadmap is disproved somehow or is not viable for whatever reason, whether that's because of end-user research or just technically [chuckles] it's too challenging for the budget available to the clients. So then being able to talk with the client as a whole team but lead that discussion and help them understand the recommendations that are being made. I think we've seen that work really well in our team here this year. CHAD: And I think an important distinction as well is that some of our clients look to us to make those decisions on their behalf, not all of them but some of them. And that's one of the things that distinguishes a product manager and someone who's making decisions about what the product even is versus a project manager who it's much more about the day-to-day tasks, making sure the backlog is organized, tickets are clear, things are moving along, meetings are scheduled, that kind of thing. And it's much less about the product actually being built. KIRSTEN: Absolutely. CHAD: Well, I think that brings us at about time. If folks want to get in touch with you, apply to those positions, where are the best places for them to do that? KIRSTEN: Well, my email is kirsten@thoughtbot.com. And I am on LinkedIn, Kirsten Hurley, pretty searchable,I think going Kirsten Hurley in thoughtbot. Those are the best ways to get ahold of me. CHAD: And I think people can check out all those jobs and apply at thoughtbot.com/jobs. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks, Mandy. And thank you for listening, listener. See you next time.Special Guest: Kirsten Hurley.Sponsored By:AgencyU: AgencyU is a membership-based program where Chad Pytel works one on one with a small group of Agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. You'll do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. You'll start with goal setting, advice, and problem solving based on Chad's experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As you progress as a group, you all get to know each other more and many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and referring work to each other. Whether you’re struggling to grow your agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in his 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, Chad has seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and would be happy to work with you too. Learn more and sign up at thoughtbot.com/agencyuSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad interviews Managing Director at thoughtbot, Joshua Clayton, about what a Managing Director at thoughtbot does, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than other teams, and the belief in integrated teams of designers and developers company-wide. Empathize with Your Customer by Josh Clayton thoughtbot Boost Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn Follow Josh on LinkedIn or Twitter Check out Josh's website Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Josh Clayton, Managing Director of the thoughtbot Boost team. Hey, I know that company. Welcome, Josh. JOSH: Hey, Chad. How are you? CHAD: All right. I'm back to the show I think. I didn't get a chance to look up the last episode you're in, but it was probably hundreds of episodes ago now. JOSH: Yeah, it's got to have been a while. CHAD: [laughs] Speaking of a while, you recently…now time is all messed up for me, but I know that you have been at thoughtbot for a long time. How long has it been? JOSH: It was 12 years in August. CHAD: It's been a wonderful 12 years, Josh. JOSH: I agree. I agree. CHAD: [laughs] JOSH: It's been fun. CHAD: So in that time, you have had a few different roles. But you've been a Managing Director for a while now. JOSH: Yeah, I think that's...let's see. It was seven and a half years for the Boston team. And then it's 10 and a half months with Boost. CHAD: So your background is as a developer. And you, like a lot of people who have a background as developers at thoughtbot, myself included, still do development on a fairly regular basis. What does the Managing Director job at thoughtbot actually do? JOSH: What don't we do [laughter] is maybe a better question. Effectively, we're running that team's business. So it involves some amount of software consulting. It involves software sales. It involves managing the profitability of the team. There are marketing functions, and, I don't know, anything and everything, hiring-related things. We opened up and recently filled our Development Director position, which was open for a couple of months over the summer. We've just opened up a Design Director position. So it's everything. [laughs] It's everything it feels like. CHAD: At the beginning of this year, we did an episode about the changes that we had made at thoughtbot to reorganize the teams around rather than geographic studios around the types of work that we would do on that team. And that's how the Boost team was created. So in that episode, we gave people an overview. But I'd love to hear in your own words, what makes Boost at thoughtbot different than the other teams, and what do you focus on? JOSH: So what makes Boost different? I think one of the drivers, one of the motivators, is to embed alongside existing product teams, engineering, and design teams, and help them get better, help them grow as well as ship features and fix bugs. So I think that the way that I position it is if there's an existing product that's deployed, people are using it day in and day out. Hopefully, it's been battle-tested. There are probably some funky areas of the code. Those are the codebases that we're operating in. It might be a team of two people; it might be a team of 200 people. But there is an existing product and an existing team. They're looking for our support to help make it better. CHAD: One of the things I love about Boost and the changes that we've made, especially relative to Boost, is that at thoughtbot, we really believe in integrated teams of designers and developers. And a big part of what we've always done has been to be a complete product design and development team that brings new products to market, big and small. And because we were one of the first consulting companies in the world to switch to Ruby on Rails and because of that deep experience with Rails, and scaling, and working on existing products, we had a significant number of customers who engaged us for development for that expertise, and to help them scale, and grow, and hire, and implement best practices or solve problems that they were having in their existing codebase or on their existing team. And even though that was a significant part of our business, it was always something that seemed that we maybe even didn't really want to be doing it, or it was on the periphery of our marketing and positioning. And I was super excited when we officially created this team because it allowed us to acknowledge that this was a significant part of what we do, a significant part of our revenue, and to have a team of people that opted into doing this kind of work who would not only love the kind of work but want to even grow it and do more of it. And we haven't really had that for this kind of work. We've had individuals wanting to do it but not at an organizational level in an organization that supports it. That was more of a statement than a question, but reaction? JOSH: [laughs] I think you're spot on. It's always been interesting to me to hear that it's...obviously, at thoughtbot, we have been building MVPs and working with a lot of different types of companies over the years and helping them launch products. But I think that the type of work that I and, ideally, obviously, other people on the Boost team enjoy working on is existing platforms and working alongside existing teams. We talk about legacy systems, and I think they get a bad rap. And it's like, no, it's battle-tested. CHAD: [chuckles] JOSH: The business has proven its viability. It is still around years later. Conway's law applies in all of the stuff. Again, there are gnarly aspects of the code. But I think that's what the folks on the Boost team enjoy being challenged by is problems where these things are larger systems. They've been around for a while, and they do get pretty gnarly. CHAD: I think one of the things that held us back in the past is that it is a skill set, and it's an experience. And you are going to be on an MVP project where you're doing design and development, going from concept to launching of a new idea, usually in a matter of weeks, working directly with a founder or a team of co-founders. And then you rotate on to this significantly larger project with maybe an engineering team of tens or dozens or hundreds of other developers on it. It's a very different skill set, and you have very different challenges in that environment. And when you're constantly switching between those different kinds of projects, you can't necessarily get better at it. And that's one of the other things that I think is helping us be more successful. JOSH: I remember one of the teammates had joined the kick-off call with me at the Boost inception that very first meeting. And it was Joël. And Joël had asked pretty straightforwardly, "What is the expectation in terms of project rotations?" Because I think historically across the company, we'd aimed to do two to four-month engagements before we'd rotate folks. And I told him point-blank it's going to be six months to a year probably. And I don't think it necessarily shocked him or other folks on the team. But I think when you're going into existing codebases and working alongside existing teams, there is inherently politics at play and complexities at play where it might take you being a new developer on a team six weeks, maybe longer before you actually feel comfortable and confident navigating the codebase and knowing where you can have and make an impact. And so, I think some of the shifts there have been particularly interesting to watch the types of consulting conversations that we have within the team just because it is a different beast, I think than building and launching products. CHAD: So let's get into a little bit of detail about the kinds of projects we're doing in Boost to the extent that we can give specific examples and maybe more importantly and relevant to the audience, what are the things that we see? What are the common challenges that we see as products grow and evolve, as teams grow and evolve? What do you think one of the most common challenges that people have is? JOSH: As teams grow and evolve, I think a lot of teams run into onboarding issues and general knowledge sharing. I think when you start a small team, and you're two, three, maybe five engineers, it's pretty easy for everyone to keep probably the entirety or the majority of that domain in their head at any one time. As you work to scale a team...there's a client of ours right now where they're effectively doubling every...I don't know what the time period is, but they're growing very, very rapidly. And the feedback that some of our team have provided to them is it's really hard, and there are very much knowledge silos. And they're working through, okay? How do we tease this out? How do we share this context so that you don't have a couple of folks that are effectively blocking every single other member of the team? And so that's one of the core areas that hangs up our team and other teams. [chuckles] Our clients bring us on, and a lot of times, it's like we're rip-roaring and ready to go. And it's like, I need information from a bunch of people, and the processes aren't in place such that we can be as effective as we would want to be given the nature of work that we're doing. CHAD: I think that's a straightforward problem, and it's a good example...I don't want to make this an hour-long thoughtbot commercial. But I'll just point blank say one of the reasons why sometimes working with us is positive for clients is it's really easy to have a certain pain around your onboarding process or company, even just simple things like how long it takes to get a new person a computer or to ramp them up on their existing team. If you're just hiring an employee, it's easy to ignore the cost of that. JOSH: Yes. CHAD: But when you're bringing on thoughtbot and we have a specific start date, and it's a certain cost, and those kinds of things, it can really expose the pain that is already happening but was just being ignored and provide the impetus to actually fix the problem. JOSH: One of the things that we try to set out to do on the first day for any project is to open up a pull request to the codebase, whether it's an improvement to the onboarding like the README for the repository or whatever it might be. Ideally, we are finding ways to contribute on day one. And sometimes, that's frankly not realistic for individual contributors doing it from their own machines. But oftentimes, we'll know that going in. And as we onboard new folks and things like that, we'll say, okay, well, day one is going to be your pair programming over Tuple or some other tool so that you are able to engage and interact with a team and work on the code, even if there's still a bit of a lag between GitHub access and everything else that's the base of onboarding steps. CHAD: So another common one that people bring us on to help with is scaling challenges in terms of the actual product itself, maybe that's performance or other scaling challenges. I'm working on a project now where that was how we first got involved. The service was failing, and it was only getting worse under the increasing scale. So, what are some tips that you have for how to effectively solve some of those problems while not bringing everything else that you need to accomplish to a screeching halt? JOSH: At the end of the day, you can't fix something that you don't know is broken. Or you might have a hunch in terms of, oh, I know this page or this set of pages are slow. I think so much of what we see is teams come in, and they're like, "We don't have New Relic setup." We don't have an instrumentation setup. So they can't measure anything. And so it's like, I know this page takes three or four seconds to paint, but I don't know why. And I don't know how to fix it. It's like, okay, well, the first thing that we need to do is set up some amount of performance monitoring and application tracking just to get a sense of what that's like. There is a potential customer who had reached out back in January of this year. So this was weeks into Boost's inception. And they said, "Listen, we've got some performance-related issues. We don't really know what to do, but we know the application is really, really slow on these couple of pages." It's like, "Are you using New Relic, or Scout, or anything like that?" They're like, "No." It's like, okay, that's the first thing that you need to do. And they came back about a month ago and were like, okay, "Here's the access to all of this data. Now we're ready to go," and it's like, "Yes!" They probably didn't need to wait for that long. But it really speaks to that in order to address some of the performance-related stuff; we need to have some sense of what is going on and where. I know Steph over on The Bike Shed Podcast had talked to Nate Berkopec. And she had floated one of the questions I had had. And he basically schooled me on that podcast and reiterated it really is ultimately about measuring so much of what we're doing. CHAD: Yeah. One of the things, especially for teams that are having a problem but feel like they don't know what to do it's tough when it's actually the case. But the reality is a lot of times; there’s actually very low-hanging fruit that it's just no one has the time or experience to actually identify that. And putting some monitoring in place combined with actually taking the time to look through it, especially if it's the first time you ever hit scaling problems...There's either a missing database in that index or some N+1 queries, and fortunately, once you identify that kind of problem, it's usually fairly quick to fix as well. It's a different thing when there's maybe fundamental architecture things that are causing your app to have scaling problems. But it's very unlikely that those are the first problems you're ever experiencing. The first problems you're ever going to experience if your app is running slow are going to be things happening at the database level or missing an index or something like that. And it's very unlikely that significant architecture changes need to be put in place in order to fix the first scaling problems that any product usually has. JOSH: That wasn't the type, or at least I think when we got brought on, and you were working on your most recent clients, we were well beyond...maybe we weren't, maybe I'm misrepresenting or misremembering, but it feels like we were well beyond some of the low hanging fruit. CHAD: Yeah, there was a batch of low-hanging fruit. One of the things if you're working on a product that is scaling super rapidly, what can happen is that the low-hanging fruit masks the other problems that are happening there because it all happened too quickly, all at the same time. And that was the case on this project. So it went from having hundreds of people using it to millions of people using it in the span of a month. And so there was low-hanging fruit. But removing the low-hanging fruit didn't make the app suddenly work again; it just made it so that we could look at the metrics and say, "Okay, those things are no longer the problem." The real problems are not being masked now. We now can identify the architectural changes that need to be put into place in order to operate at the scale. JOSH: Yeah, it's the low-hanging fruit when the orchard is on fire. [laughter] That is true. CHAD: Right. So you got to peel back like an onion. And this is the case with I think a lot of...whether it be a technical challenge or a team challenge. You can't always come in and very quickly solve the root problem. You might not even know what the root problem is. You just have to start solving the problem that is obvious in front of you and learning more. And then you solve that one, and then you expose the next one, and you expose the next one. And even when you can identify the root problem, you'll be like, this is the problem, and everyone agrees it's the problem. It still might be too hard to actually fix that problem. It might be an organizational or a systemic problem. And instead, you say, "Okay, we have to iteratively solve that problem." And you start peeling back those layers to get to the point where you've positioned yourself to solve that core problem. And I think we face that a lot, particularly as external consultants. We're coming in, and we can't just be the bull in the china shop. Because we haven't built the trust with everyone necessary to make the changes, or we don't know enough to know what the changes need to be. JOSH: Right. And I think the people aspect of all of these things in my opinion...and I should caveat this with I've been writing software professionally for almost 20 years. The people, in my opinion, are always the harder aspects to any engagement. It's very rare that we go into a technical project where it's like we literally cannot figure out a technical solution to this thing. We can usually figure it out. And it might take weeks or months to implement, especially as it spans multiple systems. But more often than not, it's really navigating the people and the relationships and building that trust like you had mentioned that is really what will help dictate success within that project. CHAD: I have a line that I use fairly often, and it's that I really believe very few, if any, developers sit down and are like, I'm going to write a bad solution today, or I'm going to write bad code today. That's not what people are doing. I think the majority of people genuinely try within their entire capacity to do a good job. And so that means that when I'm coming into a situation where there are problems, or things are messy, or there were bad decisions or bad code written, it can't be chalked up to like, oh, that was a bad developer, or that was a bad choice that was made. There was usually some people or organizational problem that caused that to happen in the first place. And merely fixing the bad code is not going to be what we should focus our time on. We probably need to do that. But if we don't fix the reason for that problem in the first place, it's just going to happen again. A really popular example of this is when we get approached to do a Rails upgrade on a very significant product that is very behind with Rails. First of all, it's very expensive to do that on a very significant project if there's no test coverage. People could hire us to spend and spend a lot of money just getting to the next Rails version. But if they do that and don't solve the reason why they were so behind with Rails and have no test coverage and all that stuff, along the way, it will have been wasted effort because in a year or in two years, it will be back to the way that it was before. And that's one example that's very technical. But that kind of stuff happens all the time, even with squishy things [laughs] like the structure of a team or something like that. So if you could give advice to people that are struggling with a particular problem, what would you tell them? And let's maybe make it a little bit more concrete. Like, one thing that can happen is as teams grow, like you said, not everyone can know everything. And so it starts breaking down into pods; maybe is one way to organize the team. And then you've gone into a bunch of individual teams working on discrete features. And that's happening fairly quickly. What are some ways to manage that change and manage that growth while maintaining continuity and making it go well? JOSH: I think a lot of it depends on the goals from the technical leadership in terms of areas of ownership. That'd be the first part that I would dive into, I think. We work with clients where they segregate front-end from back-end development. And that allows the teams to focus on React and TypeScript versus Ruby or Go or whatever their back end is written in. But if the goal is to share that knowledge, I think you've got options in terms of lunch and learn and shared code review and team demos and things like that. There are other ways to spread that information across the team so that everybody still has maybe not intimate knowledge of the code that's being written on a day to day basis, but they're at least aware of those patterns and practices and what each of the individual pods is may be responsible for and is delivering. So you have that team cohesion across more of the functional space, on the engineering side or on the product design side. CHAD: One thing that I think I would also add is that a lot of times, people take for granted how better developers will do their job if they understand the reason or the business drivers behind what they're working on. And it's really easy for people to take that for granted because it's like, there's a ticket to the ticket. It says what to do on the ticket. [laughs] JOSH: I have a blog post about this, actually. CHAD: [laughs] Okay, great. We'll put that in the show notes. But if someone doesn't understand the reason behind that, it's not going to go the way that you're expecting frequently. It's not as straightforward. JOSH: Yeah. You're left guessing what the underlying customer need is. And if you're guessing about the motivations, I don't want to say not in absolutes, but you're likely not going to address all of those core needs and implement an effective solution. I think in the blog post that I had written, ultimately, it was advocating for getting engineers to participate in customer interviews and really understand, like, how are people using the product that I am implementing features for? Because without that exposure, without seeing those pain points, oftentimes, it's okay, you've got a product designer or a product manager who's putting together this list of things to do. And if it's treated as a checklist or oh, I need to go implement XYZ without understanding why that needs to be done in the first place, what is the pain point? What is the customer-facing? How are they feeling as they're going through the product? Without that context and without that empathy, the solution is going to be...it might functionally work. But will it be a good user experience? Will it be a good customer experience? It's a little bit more shaky, I think. CHAD: Yeah. And in a fast-moving, fast-growing startup where everyone has a lot to do, if you're experiencing this kind of problem, it might manifest to you as stories get caught up at the beginning stages of when a developer is supposed to be working on them. And you find yourself having calls about what something is even supposed to be or supposed to do. And as the person who originated that ticket or originated that idea, you might have the feeling like, I can't believe we're having this conversation. Like, we don't have time to educate you about all the reasons why this is important and just please just do what we've said on the ticket. That is a natural reaction to that thing. And so my advice would be if you're feeling that, if your team is feeling that or something similar, there's probably something small you can do. It might not even be having developers participate in discovery or interviews or anything. It might be as simple as just making sure that on the ticket you say why it's important. If your ticket is a checklist of things to change or do, making sure that the reason why is communicated there will go a long way to having the person pick up that ticket, get the context necessary to understand, and make good decisions as they work on it. JOSH: Yeah, I remember the switch to the jobs to be done format. And I remember just being like, oh, [laughs] this makes a lot more sense because we can understand the context and the why. What is driving it? What is the problem there rather than what is the solution? And I think that shift in mindset does go a long way, like you said. CHAD: I think one of the ideas behind a well-functioning team is we talk about this idea of collaboration which is you feel like you're doing your best work, that things are moving quickly, and you're enjoying the people you're working with, and you're building upon each other's ideas, and you're making things better as a team. And I was recently talking to someone else, a candidate for VP of Engineering at one of our clients, and they were talking about flow, the idea of flow. And it wasn't a way that I had articulated it previously, but it's certainly another way of thinking about and a good way of thinking about it, especially when it comes to what is the role of a VP of engineering? Or what is the role of a CTO at a small company? Or what is the role of a development team or a product team in general? And one way to think about that is to work to maintain a flow state. And when we think about the processes that we have in terms of retrospectives where every week we gather, and we identify things that could be better, and we come up with action items, a lot of the things that drive what could be better or what we want to try to do differently are all identifying the things that take us out of the flow state and trying to fix that problem so that items flow from beginning to end smoothly, that they go from concept to production smoothly as quickly as possible, and that individual people know where the next item to take is that it's ready so they're not blocked as they begin it. And they're able to get that to staging, and get a pull request out, and get that reviewed quickly, get it to staging, get that reviewed quickly, and then deploy it to production. And in theory, even do a continuous deployment so that that whole flow is automated as much as possible. So this idea of flow resonated with me. Has it resonated with you? JOSH: Yeah, I agree. I remember seeing the comparisons people saying, okay, you're not actually looking for an engineer's passion necessarily. What you're looking for...and I come back to the hiring side of things because I'm doing that right now. But rather than looking to assess passion, it's assessing capacity and ability to get into a flow state more quickly. And obviously, so much of that is dependent on the team, and the communication style, the management style, and things like that. But flow is very much...I think once you get into that and you know how to get into that like you said, every waking moment is spent trying to optimize how do I get into this space? Because when you're in that space, when you're flowing, be it from an IC level or above, there's nothing quite like it. It's just this calm state of just everything feels like it's firing all the time perfectly, and it's good. And I think trying to make those spaces available for the rest of the team to get into that state and maintain that state makes a lot of sense. I remember years and years and years ago, there was the focus on maker versus manager time. And we talk about anchoring manager time either at the start of the end day or around lunchtime or whatever is a logical time for a break. The idea is to maintain that flow state for as long as possible so that nothing else eats into that. Because you do an hour of writing software, and then you've got a 30-minute one-on-one with a teammate. And then you go, and you run for another hour, hour and a half, and then it's another half an hour meeting. It's like you're being sucked away. It is really hard to get into that zone and then stay there. So I think there's been a focus on it for a while. And I'm really glad that there's now a name and a thing that we can point to. CHAD: I don't want to lead people astray about what Boost is. There's a big important part of Boost, which may not be immediately obvious to people, and that is design. I may have insinuated that design wasn't part of Boost before when we were talking about it, but it is. And it's designed on existing products and existing teams which is a different need than going from concept to launch of a new idea. JOSH: So we had done some work with The New England Journal of Medicine. And their team, a very small team, internal team, had basically designed an application. And they ran into a number of accessibility and usability issues. They continued to hear feedback from a lot of folks saying, "This is not effective for what we're looking to do." And they'd engaged us in a couple of different times basically to rip apart and re-architect some of the application hierarchy and the usability side of things. It's been really interesting to see okay, well, within the design side of operating within existing products, it's often lended or leaned more towards doing some amount of a design audit and usability audit, talking to customers. And less around we're going to start from scratch and more what are some of these iterative improvements that we can make to make the product more accessible, easier to understand, easier to navigate, easier to use within what is, again, these very large platforms sometimes? CHAD: I know one common request we get is we're thinking about implementing a design system or introducing a design system with the first version of the product. And we're having this growing pain around introducing new features. Is a design system the right thing to do there? That's a request we sometimes get. JOSH: Yeah. And I think a lot of it at the end of the day, what we're looking to assess is what are the knowns? How much do we know about the application, about the interface? We talk about on the software development side of things avoiding premature abstraction, and I think the same thing is true about design systems. Like, if we're going through a product, maybe it's a wizard, and apart from forms, the pages are individualized, and there's not really any common patterns. It's like, okay, well, maybe now it doesn't make sense. But when you've got an application that spans hundreds of pages, there are going to be patterns across the different pages in terms of application hierarchy and componentization and things like that. And the work that we're oftentimes brought in to do is let's assess what's there, figure out what are the common patterns here. And it's almost like refactoring and teasing things apart to where we get slight...it's a reduction in code use or rather an increase in code reuse because we're removing some of the idiosyncrasies that maybe were not teased apart into some component-based system. And that's fun work. [chuckles] It's really interesting. You get things like React when you're doing client-side rendering. And within the Rails side of things, there's a big push for the GitHub ViewComponent. RubyGem is another example. It's both ways to introduce these layers of abstraction that allow more of the engineering team to take on more of the application development, not because design isn't necessary, but they're then empowered to reuse these logical set of components. And so it amplifies the dev work, but it also amplifies the design work because the entire team is now leaning on that pre-baked work. It enables designers to shift focus and priorities to okay; what are new components? What are different ways to position this or present this information? And also, for our designers, it frees up their time to talk even more to customers, to people using the system. CHAD: Well, I guess we'd be remiss if we didn't do a more blatant plug. You mentioned it earlier, but we do have an opening for Design Director on the Boost team. JOSH: We do. CHAD: So who would be a good fit for that role? JOSH: That's a great question. I think a couple of the things that we're really focusing on for this role is someone who has done the work, so to speak, at an IC level for a lot of the work that we're doing right now with customers. And so we ask point-blank on the application sheet, have you worked in HTML and CSS? Have you facilitated design exercises like design sprints? Have you facilitated user interviews? Because so much of what we're seeing from a vision and a strategy perspective is we need to take and leverage these tools in the skill sets that our teams are looking to hone in on, and we want to take it a lot further. I think there's a big opportunity there. So I think it's less around years of experience. I wouldn't say you need to have 15 years of management experience or having been a director in order to apply for the role. But it's someone that can empathize with the team and has some opinions and some thoughts in terms of okay, what is design? What is not only visual design but product design accessibility? What does that look like in the next 5 to 10 years? Those are the people that I would love to see apply. CHAD: If someone's interested, where's the best place for them to do that? JOSH: thoughtbot.com/jobs. And the listing is there. CHAD: So what's next for Boost, Josh? What do you have your sights set on as we wrap up 2021 and head into the next year? JOSH: Oh boy. A lot of where the focus has been on this year is continuing to double down on Rails as the technology stack and get our feet wet, not that our feet aren't wet, [chuckles] continue to invest on the front end with React. I think for 2022, I think the big focus...we've run in the past some pretty successful custom trainings workshops for engineering teams. I think one that we had done earlier was late last year into early this year. We ran about 120 or so of their engineers through a custom RSpec course. So we worked with their engineering managers and some of their teams and got a sense of okay; given this codebase and given the skill sets of this 100-plus person engineering team, where should we focus? And we put together a two-day RSpec workshop. We administered over; I think, five or six weeks. We did it virtually. And the reception from that was incredible. They ended up bringing us back on. We're getting ready to start another round of consulting work where we're embedding alongside their teams. So I see that as a huge opportunity for Boost coming into next year. And then I think one of the things that we've been pushing for is reducing some of the billing time from folks in leadership positions so that they're in a better position to support their designers and developers. And I'm really excited about the progress that we've made thus far. And I'm excited to continue carrying that into next year. CHAD: Awesome. Well, thanks for taking the time to talk to me. JOSH: Thank you. CHAD: Part of this new season, Season 11 of the podcast, for the next few episodes, I'm going to be talking to each of the managing directors at thoughtbot about their teams, about the different kinds of work we do on those teams, and the challenges, and what phases are clients in those different stages of the product lifecycle. So you can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode and all the other episodes at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. Josh, if folks want to get in touch with you or follow along with you, what are the best places for them to do that? JOSH: Definitely Twitter. My handle is @joshuaclayton, all one word. CHAD: Awesome. Thanks again. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time.Special Guest: Joshua Clayton.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad interviews Co-Founder and CEO, Victoria Ranson of Prisma. Prisma is a stealth-mode education startup on a mission to reimagine the way children are educated. Their mission is to create a generation capable of solving the world's biggest problems by creating and running a comprehensive virtual learning program for kids in grades 4-8 that is very unlike any other traditional homeschooling program you've ever heard of. Prisma's Website Follow Prisma on Twitter or Facebook Follow Victoria on LinkedIn Follow Co-Founder, President, and Victoria's husband Alan Chuard on Twitter For more info, email info@joinprisma.com Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Victoria Ransom, founder, and CEO of Prisma. Victoria, thanks for joining me on the show. VICTORIA: Hi, thanks for having me. CHAD: So, Victoria, before we jump into this great product that you have, why don't you tell people what Prisma really is. VICTORIA: Sure. Prisma is a very comprehensive educational program for kids who are learning from home or from anywhere in the world. It is not at all like traditional homeschooling because we provide kids with a very social experience. Kids are part of a cohort where they're meeting live with other kids every single day and collaborating with them on projects, and learning from each other, and discussing. And we provide coaches who are there every step of the way with the kids, providing them with rich feedback, helping to bring out the best in them, providing really engaging, live learning experiences. So it’s not traditional homeschooling, although it has a lot of the really great benefits of that with the flexibility and the ability to learn from wherever you are. But we're equally not like typical online schooling, which I would say has tended to be more of an approach of taking traditional school and bringing it online. So there's still a concept of lectures, and grades, and textbooks. They may be electronic in nature, but they still resemble textbooks. The Prisma curriculum is very different. It's rooted in learning through doing and project-based learning, and applying learning to the real world, and allowing kids a lot of choice. So they're ideally always learning through the lens of something that interests them and allowing them to go at their own pace. So a lot of the best practices from some of the most innovative bricks and mortar schools we're bringing to an online environment. And then, of course, we're very different from bricks and mortar schools because it is a virtual program where kids can learn from anywhere. So we think it's a new approach to education that is really uniquely flexible, really prepares kids. We're very focused on preparing kids for the kind of world they're going to live in. The world is always changing rapidly. But I think this generation of kids is going to experience a future that's unlike anything we've ever seen in terms of the level of shift and change, AI being one of the reasons. If you look at studies that look at the future of work, I think some studies we've read say 65% of today's elementary school kids will work in jobs that are yet to be invented. So, how do you prepare kids for that kind of future? And so, we're very focused on giving kids the holistic skills and the mindset that they will need to thrive in that kind of world. So yeah, that is Prisma in a very long nutshell. CHAD: [chuckles] Obviously, I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about the context of where we're in, which is kids just went through a year or more where a lot of kids were remote for school. And did Prisma exist before the pandemic? VICTORIA: It did in our minds very much so [chuckles] but not in reality. So Prisma arose out of our own personal needs. So my husband and I are the founders of Prisma. We've actually been entrepreneurs for most of our careers. After successfully selling a company to Google a few years ago, we said whatever we do next in our lives; we want it to be something that has the potential to have a large positive impact on society and on the world. And then struggled to figure out what that should look like because there are a lot of things that need solving in the world. But we have three children, and as they approached school age, it really caused us to do a deep dive into how do we want to educate our kids? What do we think is the best approach to education? And from that, we started to formulate a vision by looking at all kinds of different schooling models, from homeschooling to micro-schooling to innovative bricks and mortar schooling. We developed a picture for how we wanted to educate our kids. But that really inspired us to create something that could be accessible to many more kids than just our own kids. And so we had a good 18 months to 2 years of researching, ideating, thinking about the pros and cons of a virtual model. And then along came COVID, and at that point, we said, you know what? There's never been a better time to test out an innovative new approach to schooling, especially one that was always going to be home-based from the get-go. And so let's start ideating and dreaming about this, and let's just put it into action see how it goes. So it was born during COVID, but the roots of Prisma very much predate COVID. CHAD: So, what was the actual timing there from when you decided to do something? When was that to you had the first students? VICTORIA: Yeah, that was a whirlwind. [laughs] CHAD: I can imagine. VICTORIA: Yeah. So really, it was late March, I think of 2020, when we said, "We've just got to do this. The world is telling us to do this." To when we had our first kids in the door was early September. So between basically the beginning of April to the beginning of September, we incorporated, we refined our vision. The good news is we had a vision, and it was mapped out. We hired a curriculum team, hired coaches, created a website, found our first families, all of that. And we launched Prisma very clearly with the families saying, "This is a pilot. We're trying something new here. Let's see how this goes." And we actually told the families, "Look, we're going to definitely run this until the end of December, the end of the year. And if it's not going really, really well, then we will suggest you go and do something better." But it went great. It's not to say our model is perfect. And we believe very much in constant improvement and constant iteration. But in terms of kids loving school at a time, the national narrative was that kids were hating school, and they were falling behind, and parents were finding distance learning a disaster; we had kids that were loving school more than they ever had. And we surveyed kids, and that's why we know that. Parents were extremely happy. Everything was pointing to the fact that we really had found something unique that was really working. And so it turned from a pilot into something that we're now putting all the building blocks in place to be able to scale more broadly. CHAD: School is a big thing, a big concept, and a very important one. Working so quickly in the midst of a pandemic, you know, launching any product is as much an art and finding what those first features need to be. How did you identify what that is and make sure you had something that was viable but that you could get done on time? VICTORIA: I think that came down to...because obviously, our product is our curriculum and our model. We have a software development team and a product development team. And they are building the tools that we'll need to run our model. But when we first launched, we were piecing together different tools that already existed. So the initial product really was the curriculum and our model of education and the tools that we pieced together to make it work. And I think the reason we were able to be successful is that we did a lot of groundwork in saying, what really matters? What is our perspective on what is the goal of this educational model? We got clear on that. What do we think are the values or approaches that really are critical to achieving that goal? And then using that as our Northstar. So to be more concrete, we were really clear about two things in terms of why we were developing this model. One was we really wanted kids to love learning. We think they should love learning because learning is amazing, and it's exciting. And every kid is born with an innate desire to learn. And that if you want to bring the best out in kids, you want them to be excited about what they're learning. So kids loving learning was a very strong Northstar for us. And the second was what I already talked about before is developing an educational model that will really give kids the skills and mindsets they will need to really thrive in what is an exciting but uncertain future. And so that was the Northstar of why are we doing this. From that, we developed a clear perspective on okay; if we want kids to love learning, how do we do that? And so it was things like making sure that kids have choice so they can apply their learning to things that really excite them, making sure learning is applied to the real world, so kids are never saying, "Why the heck do I need this?" Making sure that learning is hands-on as possible because we think kids just get more out of it, and learn more, and enjoy it more if they can really be hands-on and project-based. Making sure...I won't go through them all, but we have our sort of core curriculum values, making sure learning is happening in a community-supportive community. And then the other thing we're really clear on is okay, what are these overarching skills or mindsets that we think are critical to succeeding in adulthood? And it was things like systems thinking and problem-solving, having a designer's mindset, which is this concept of being comfortable with iterating, and getting feedback, and putting yourself in someone else's shoes, being an excellent communicator and collaborator. Again, I won't go through them all. But we were just really clear. I think we had a really strong foundation of why do we exist and what is our approach here? And that enabled us to then be really clear about things like, okay, we're not going to throw the kitchen sink in terms of everything that kids need to learn, no. We're more focused on overarching skills than checking the box on 1,000 different science standards that kids might need to go through. So yeah, as you said, I think whenever you launch a product or a company, being able to narrow down because you can't offer everything you want to offer, being able to narrow down to what really matters is important. And I feel like we did a pretty good job with that. CHAD: Awesome. What was the makeup of the initial team? You mentioned you and your husband. How did you split the responsibilities between you two, and then who else was involved? VICTORIA: So my husband and I have been co-founders of several companies. And it's worked really well because we have very different skill sets. My husband has much more of a product mind. He's much more detail-oriented. And he has a real eye for design and user experiences and also a creative marketing mind. So that gives you a sense of where he tends to focus. And I've tended to focus more on people management and operationalizing businesses, being more that external spokesperson. And so that's how we have split. He's doing more of the software development and product marketing and marketing side of Prisma. And I'm more involved in the day-to-day running of the program. Our first two very, very critical hires were curriculum developers, and Prisma would not be what it is today if we hadn't hired the two people that we hired. And they really balanced each other well because we hired Kristen, who had really deep experience in education. She had at a pretty young age founded her own charter school very successfully and just had such super deep experience in education, teaching, teaching teachers, training teachers, managing her own school. And then we had Emily, who came from a really non-traditional background. She'd actually come up through the theater world, had done a degree at Harvard School of Education. And they actually had some good experience with working with professors at Harvard in innovative ways to assess, also, computer science education. And she's got a very out-of-the-box way of thinking. And between the two of those, it was a really great combination for us to turn what was a vision of a curriculum that Alain and I had created into something actually concrete. And then the other critical hires were our first coaches. Again, we got super lucky in hiring just really fantastic coaches. And we've now realized hiring great coaches is a very fundamental part of what we do. And in fact, it will be one of our scaling challenges, I think. But again, we got really lucky with our coaches. And then, over time, we've hired operations people and product people. But I think that initial magic of the curriculum team and the coaching team was really important. We wouldn't be where we are today if we hadn't have hired those people, I think. CHAD: Did you bring on the two curriculum team members full-time right away? VICTORIA: We intended to, I think, when we were still incorporating the business. And all of this was happening in such a rush that I think we technically had to bring them on as contractors. But it was intended as a full-time role. Having said that, our hiring process asked them to sketch out in a fairly in-depth way or at least to sketch out in-depth pieces of what the ultimate Prisma curriculum would look like. So we did have a chance, I think, to test them out fairly well before we committed. CHAD: So did you take investment to start Prisma, or did you self-fund it? VICTORIA: We have self-funded. We're super lucky to be in the position to be able to do that, and we are continuing to self-fund. We had a ton of interest from venture capitalists; I think partly because we're somewhat proven entrepreneurs with other successes. And then also, because there was just suddenly a big spotlight on education and the belief that education might really shift. But we have not taken funding because...it doesn't mean we won't ever. But we're very focused on being mission-first. And we're also very focused on growing carefully and thoughtfully. We think in the long run, we'll be far more successful if we really grow conservatively, at least initially, until we really feel like we've refined this and we know how to keep a really high level of quality and customer satisfaction while scaling. And I think our concern is that sometimes when you take outside capital that that capital might not be as patient. It might really push to grow faster than what we think might be the best approach. So thus far, we're just in the lucky position where we haven't had to take outside capital. CHAD: I assume that you're on a traditional school schedule based on what you said about starting in September. VICTORIA: We kind of are actually, which is funny because our initial vision for Prisma was to have it be year-round. And I think our families have been super open to so many innovative things. But the idea of having a summer break seems to be something that families don't want to give up on. CHAD: [laughs] VICTORIA: So I think our ultimate goal is that we'll be able to offer a summer program for those families that want to either go year-round or maybe they want to do the summer program and not do a winter program. And we do have kids already that are in the southern hemisphere, where that is desirable. But so far, we haven't tackled a summer program just because we're already tackling a lot. But we surveyed families, and they actually really wanted to mostly stick with the idea of having a summer, a more traditional summer break. CHAD: But does that mean that you can't add students outside of that cycle, so you really truly have cohorts? Or are you adding people along the way? VICTORIA: We're adding people along the way. We operate in five weeks cycles, actually. And each cycle has an overarching theme. And that's part of our goal of making things feel really-real world. And also, because kids have a lot of choice, we do want there to be some unifying factor to what they're doing. And so examples of themes that we've done are cities of the future, hidden histories, which looked at U.S. history but really from the perspective of lessons we can learn, inventor studio where kids learned all about design thinking through being real inventors. We have a super cool theme right now called uncharted territories, which has got some really strong STEM learning but through the lens of space exploration and deep-sea exploration. And kids are working on an interdisciplinary project during that time. We have live workshops that are aligned around the theme. And then they're also working on what we call missions. So math missions and writing missions, which again, are really honoring that idea of giving kids choice and allowing them to go at their own pace but just to make sure they're really getting the foundations they need in math and writing. But really, a kid could join at the beginning of any cycle. CHAD: Okay, that's great. Is that a happy accident of the model, or was it intentional in terms of from a product perspective making sure that you could continue to add people and weren't locked in to a small set of initial users? VICTORIA: No, that was intentional, although our original model that we launched with did not have five weeks cycles. It actually didn't have themes either. It was more trimester-based. We call them sessions, not trimesters. And so that was more of a model where we could have kids come in every trimester. And that's evolved to do these five-week cycles and themes. And from the feedback we got in that first trimester, we evolved the model. And so, I guess we've now evolved in a way we could have even more frequent intakes. But yeah, I think it was very...for us not coming from the education world, the idea that you could only bring customers on board once a year that felt very foreign. So we've always had the idea of let's make sure we can onboard kids throughout the year. CHAD: So what did the first families, I guess, the early adopters, what did they look like? VICTORIA: They were a real mix, so some long-time public school families and private school families, some long-time homeschool families. It was a real mix. I think it was a mix. Now, the Prisma families, I would say, are very much bought into precisely what our model and our vision is. But that first set of pilot families, I think some of them, if you ask them honestly, would say, "School was a disaster because of COVID. We're willing to give anything a shot. We'll give this a shot." And I think what's been really surprising to some of those families is, wow, we actually really only thought we would do this for a year, and now we're continuing because it worked. But it was a mix of families I'd say who had always really believed in a more alternative innovative approach to education but, for one reason or another, hadn't had the ability to test it perhaps because there were no schools like that in their neighborhood or because they just hadn't perhaps had the courage to try it out. So there was that set of families. There were families that had kids that would be probably said to be gifted and were just not being challenged in school and were a bit bored and not really living up to their potential that I think were attracted to give Prisma a shot. There were homeschool families who really loved the idea of home-based learning but were looking for more community, a bit more support by having some structure and some coaches. And in some families where kids had not thrived in school because they had special learning needs. We even have kids at Prisma that have physical disabilities where physically showing up in school each day is really tough. And online learning just makes their life so much easier. So I guess the ultimate theme here is it was families for whom the more traditional bricks and mortar approach was maybe okay, but it wasn't wildly successful for their kids. CHAD: You focus on particular grade levels or age range, right? VICTORIA: Yes, four through eight right now, yeah. CHAD: And you said, "Right now." [laughs] So why did you choose that age to focus on, and do you plan on expanding? VICTORIA: Yes, we do plan on expanding. I think the first expansion will be to go up into high school grades. The reason we focused on fourth through eighth was twofold. One was that we just think parents are more open to experimenting with a new model at the elementary-middle school level than they are at the high school level, so there was that. Just because once you get to high school, parents and kids alike start to get more anxious about things like college admissions and perhaps become more risk-averse. But the other really big reason came from all the conversations we had with teachers. I didn't mention that when we hired for our first coaching roles, we got 1,400 applicants applying. [chuckles] CHAD: Wow. VICTORIA: And so we narrowed it down. I did not talk to 1,400 people, but I talked to a lot of teachers. And actually, we first started those conversations saying we were going to focus on high school. And we shifted our thinking in part because so many of those teachers said that they felt like fourth, fifth, sixth grade is a real turning point for kids in terms of their enjoyment of school and their confidence in their own abilities and part of the reason for that, not the only reason, is that testing starts to ramp up at that stage in schooling. But we just really felt like if we could catch kids at that point, before they'd sort of lost their enjoyment for learning and before they had started to internalize ideas like I'm not good at school, or I'm not good at math, or whatever it may be, that we could have the greatest impact. The other thing is there is quite an unlearning process that kids have to go through when they join Prisma because we give them a lot of autonomy, and independence, and ability to make choices and have control over their schedule. And we ask them to write self-reviews. And when it's time for a Parent Coach Learner Conference, the learner leads that conference. And the earlier you can get kids, I think the easier it is to get them to adapt to that approach than when you get them later in their schooling where it's been drummed into them that you paint within the lines. You do what you're told. You do this in order to get good grades. And so that was another piece that attracted us to that age range. CHAD: How old are your kids? VICTORIA: Good question. So they are seven, four, and two. So they're not quite old enough for Prisma yet, so we're doing our own version of Prisma right now until our oldest is old enough for Prisma. And the reason we didn't go below fourth grade, at least for now, is we do think there is a limit to how young you can go and be successful with a largely virtual model, and so that's why we haven't gone below fourth. And so, our seven-year-old is being homeschooled. But we've also put together a community of other homeschool kids that she learns with several times a week and gets that socialization piece, so that's the cohort piece that we offer through Prisma. But yeah, she's definitely...she's in training to be a Prisma kid. CHAD: How do you balance with both you and your husband working on Prisma, homeschooling a seven-year-old, the other kids? How are you balancing all of that? VICTORIA: And just parenthood in general because this is our first time starting a company while having kids. CHAD: Yes. VICTORIA: We had a pretty long gap in between our last company and this. So the honest answer is we have hired a teacher for the homeschooling piece, so that helps a lot. And she's super capable, and she's really the frontline person for managing the community that we've developed. So the harder piece is not that so much; it's managing parenthood with entrepreneurship. [chuckles] I would say it's a work in progress. And ask me some days, and I'll say, "That's going great." And ask me other days, I would say, "It's not going so great." We are really, really lucky that we can hire good childcare, so that helps a lot. But even if you have great childcare, I want to be involved with my kids. I love my time with my kids. There's also just so many decisions and things you need to be involved in with kids that you truly don't want to and should not outsource, whether it's as simple as like on my to-do list right now, is that the two-year-old's birthday is coming up, and I'm not going to outsource buying birthday presents or organizing a party. So that's on my to-do list. So I would say relative to when we had our previous company which was really successful, and stressful, and busy but that was the only thing we had to worry about. Trying to manage a company and kids it's a lot of context shifting. But for me, at least, I'm very, very rigid about my time. So I will organize my schedule so that I finish at least at the latest by 4:00 p.m. each day, and that is my time with the kids. And I'm with them until they're in bed, and then I'll jump back online. But there's almost nothing that will interfere with it. And that's just how I've prioritized, and it's just really important to me. So it's setting priorities, I guess. CHAD: Yeah, when we were setting up for the show, you said that you were in the office. So you separate home and work, and school places, I guess. VICTORIA: Kind of. The office is a little built-out area of our garage, [chuckles] so I walk from the front door three paces into the garage. But it is separated to the extent that the kids are not running in at any moment. They don't really come here. But it's really nice. And I think a lot of parents have discovered that during this whole COVID work from home experience and with kids home too, it's really nice. Because not every day, but some days I can go in and have lunch with the kids because they're all around. And some days, I can pop over to Elle's classroom and see what she's doing and be involved and do a bit of reading with her and that sort of thing. So I personally really love the efficiency of working from home, wasting no time with commutes, and also just the ability to be really flexible with my time. Maybe I will take an hour out in the middle of the day to do something with the kids, and then I'll make it up later in the evening because that's fine. I don't have that much going on in the evening anyway once the kids are in bed. So I personally really like that flexibility. CHAD: So, turning our attention back to the product, you said that you got started piecing together existing tools on the tech side. And so, what were the first things that you started to replace in that stack? And when did you start hiring a tech team to do that? VICTORIA: Yeah. So Alain, my husband, his background is product management. So we had product expertise already. We spun up a team of engineers, I think already by October or late October of 2020. So shortly after, we had officially begun the school year. And fortunately, these were engineers we'd worked with before in previous companies. And the first thing we started to tackle actually was the live learning experience, so basically a replacement for Zoom. And that was partly because we felt like there was nothing available that really designed a live learning experience through the eyes of fourth through eighth graders, through that sort of demographic. And also, because the other product needs that we have that we're now tackling is everything we need to just manage the whole curriculum like a learning management system. But our whole model was still too much in flux for us to want to focus on that right away. We needed some clarity about what the model would look like. Whereas the idea that we would always have a live learning component where kids would be online, there'd be a coach, but it would be very collaborative and interactive was very clear. We knew that wouldn't shift, and so that was the first piece we tackled. And we've really tried to tackle a few different areas there. One is to make coaches really efficient so that they're not trying to focus on creating this really engaging learning experience while also having 15 different tabs open and trying to play this YouTube video. So we've basically created what we call Prisma LIVE, where our curriculum team can create these semi-scripted because we certainly let coaches deviate, of course, but experiences with chapters. And there's a lot of shifting of the way the room looks, and the way the kids are organized, and the visuals. Because a lot of the research we looked at is that fatigue, Zoom fatigue, actually comes from staring for a long time at the same scene of this person you're talking to or these people you're talking to. So to make it visually stimulating and appealing for kids and seamless for coaches so they don't need to worry about managing all these different aspects of the workshop. They're just clicking through and focusing on making sure kids are participating. And participation was another thing we really focused on. We do a lot of breakout rooms because we want kids to be collaborating in small groups. So we wanted coaches to be able to instead of having to jump into breakout rooms and interrupt the flow and not know who needs help, the ability for them to stay in the main room and be able to listen in and get an oversight for how things are going in the various breakout rooms and jump into those rooms where it's clear that they're needed perhaps because there's not much going on in there. There's not much discussion, or maybe there's a lot of very animated discussion. So that was an area we focused on and then just making it more kid-friendly and more fun. And every cycle at Prisma ends with Expo Day, where kids present the project they've been working on to the whole Prisma community, parents, and grandparents. And one of the real downsides of virtual in that experience is that these kids are presenting these amazing things, but there's limited ability for people to express how amazing they think it is. And so just visual ways of people being able to express their emotions and their reactions during live workshops is another thing. We've focused on fun avatars that would appeal to kids and that sort of thing. So that has been our first focus. Now we're heads down on the learning management piece. Like, what are the building blocks we need to put in place in order to be able to keep the customer experience really high whilst making our coaches more and more effective and more and more scalable? CHAD: So as you got started or when you were thinking about getting started, what were you most afraid of? VICTORIA: Well, aside from the fact that we're trying to pull this off really quickly and being afraid that this would be a complete failure, aside from that, honestly -- CHAD: Just that small thing. [chuckles] VICTORIA: Yeah. I think the thing that we were most nervous about, and I think it's the thing we probably get the biggest question about, and yet it has proven to be the thing we really didn't need to worry about, is socialization. And to what extent can kids build friendships virtually? To what extent can they build community virtually? To what extent can they meaningfully collaborate and learn together virtually? And I think we went in hoping that all of that was fully achievable but not being quite sure about it. And honestly, the signs were so quick that that wasn't going to be an issue for us. Already in orientation...we organized this really fun orientation mostly oriented around making sure kids were excited and got to know each other. And so quickly, we started hearing from parents, like, "Oh, my kid can't stop talking about Prisma. They're jumping out of bed every morning. They've never done that before. They've never jumped out of bed to go to school. And my kid has already made their first friend." And what I think we've discovered is absolutely kids can make friends virtually, and probably kids would have never questioned that actually. That probably felt natural to them. I think it's maybe adults that might question that. Now, does that mean that kids shouldn't have in-person friends? Of course, they should. And we would strongly encourage Prisma families to make sure their kids are enrolled in extracurriculars in their community and that sort of thing. We've surveyed the kids. Every single Prisma learner has said that they've made strong friendships at Prisma. For some of them, it's many friendships. For some of them, it's a smaller number of friendships. And the other thing that's just going really well, I think, better than in-person school or bricks and mortar school is the community we've created. It's a really, really supportive community of kids. There hasn't been this sorting that I think happens in schools, particularly at the middle school and high school level of like, you're part of that clique, and you're part of that clique. And we're a little cooler than you are. Maybe just the nature of virtual makes it harder to sort kids like that. And there's not the natural time of in the cafeteria where you have to decide where you're going to sit and that kind of awkwardness. Plus, we did a lot of legwork upfront of working with the kids to say: What kind of community do we want to build here? What are the values of our cohort? What are the expectations of our cohort? And I think that really helped to create a community that's just really kind and supportive, pretty uniquely kind and supportive, I think. CHAD: Cool. That's great. And now that you're up and running and continuing to grow, looking ahead, what are you most worried about now as your next challenge? VICTORIA: I think the biggest, hardest thing for us to figure out is how to keep the level of quality, great results. I haven't even mentioned it yet, but we are making sure that kids are progressing both academically in terms of these holistic skills. And on the academic front, we've seen really amazing growth. So the kids did a nationally recognized assessment at the end of last year and at the beginning when they joined. And they grew in math at 153% of expected growth and 174% of expected growth in reading. So we've set a really high bar for ourselves. Kids are loving Prisma; 100% of kids said they're happier at Prisma than at their previous school. We have a really great Net Promoter Score, which means parents are really willing to recommend Prisma. We're seeing great growth in the kids. So how do we keep that super high bar whilst opening Prisma up to more and more and more kids? Because part of the attraction for us to offer a virtual model was the desire to be able to reach large numbers of kids if we came up with a model that really worked. And I think through all of our research, one of the things we noticed is there are amazingly innovative schools out there. There are a lot of really innovative brick-and-mortar schools, actually, but they really haven't scaled. They tend to be...a few have scaled a bit, but they're still very limited in the number of kids that they can reach. And part of our thesis was that if you could do this online, just online is inherently more scalable. You're not dealing with buildings and everything that goes along with that. But nevertheless, we still are a model where coaches are really important. So our ability to continue to find, train, and develop coaches that are really awesome I think will be a challenge, something we're going to have to get really, really good at. And then just making sure that we can strike the right balance because we also want to be a model that's as affordable as possible and that requires us to make sure that our costs are reasonable. So striking that balance and trying to use technology to be as efficient as possible, I think that is the next set of challenges that we need to deal with. CHAD: Are you comfortable sharing how many students you have now? VICTORIA: Yeah, I'm comfortable with that because the number we have was very much set by our own desire to grow carefully. So we have almost 90 kids. And we have a very long waitlist, basically. CHAD: Well, that's bigger than my high school graduating class. [laughs] VICTORIA: Oh, there you go. [laughs] It's funny because people react differently to that. Some people are like, "Wow, that's pretty big." It's not nearly as big as we intend to get. But we decided to cap. We wanted to be disciplined. We had way more demand than that. But further to what I said of quality first and delighting customers first, we said, "No, we'll cut it off at that point." And families have gone on to a waitlist, which is growing by the day. And then we'll be able to let more families in throughout the year. We're small, but we're a lot bigger than we were in our first pilot year. And I think what's been really exciting is we're still somewhat early into the school year. But that level of delight, and excitement, and families just writing to us and saying, "I've never seen my kids so excited." And that's happening again. So it's really exciting to see that we're getting that again even though we have actually grown quite a bit relative to where we were. CHAD: Well, congratulations on everything that you've achieved so far and in tackling these upcoming challenges. VICTORIA: Thank you. CHAD: If people want to find out more about Prisma and join or if they're interested in becoming a great coach, where can they do that? VICTORIA: So the best place to go is our website which is joinprisma.com, so not prisma.com, joinprisma.com. We have a super detailed website, which I think is really informative. So that's a great place to start. You can also sign up for an info session there if you want to talk to someone live about Prisma. And then yes, we have job postings on there as well. And we're always super excited to hear from talented candidates. So that's the best place to go. CHAD: And if people want to follow along with you personally or get in touch, where are the best places for them to do that? VICTORIA: So we do have Prisma social media accounts, so Twitter is @joinprisma. And I'm not the most active person on social media. My husband is much more active, so they may want to follow him. He's Alain Chuard. I presume his Twitter handle is @AlainChuard, C-H-U-A-R-D. [laughs] And you can reach me if you email info@joinprisma.com, but you address it to Victoria. It will reach me, and I will reply. CHAD: Awesome. And people can find all these links and everything in the show notes, which are at giantrobots.fm. You can also subscribe to the show there as well. And if you have questions or comments for us, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Everybody, thanks for listening and see you next time. Thanks, Victoria. VICTORIA: Thank you. Thanks so much. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Victoria Ransom.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

At harbour.today, Natalie Nzeyimana and her team are helping people build holistic resilience. On this episode, she and Chad talk about building the app at the beginning of the pandemic when she witnessed herself and others feeling like they were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. Harbour is a space for people to anchor themselves, find clarity, and set sail. The community offers one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. harbour.today Instagram Twitter Lunchclub Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And today, I'm joined by the founder of Harbour, Natalie Nzeyimana. So, Natalie, thanks for joining me. NATALIE: Thanks for having me on. CHAD: So tell me a little bit about what Harbour is. NATALIE: Sure. Harbour is a space for people to anchor self, find clarity, and set sail. We offer one-to-one coaching, workshops, a course, and a daily check-in tool. Harbour was built at the beginning of the pandemic when I witnessed within myself, and the people I knew who I'd worked with, friends, family, just a lot of us felt like we were close to drowning and feeling really unmoored. And so, it began as a course to think about the ways we could use holistic strategies to anchor ourselves and set sail. And from then, from November 2020 to now, it's become a product. CHAD: You started in November. And I know we first met in London a while ago. You were teaching yourself to code working on an education product if I remember right. And we got together at Google Space there and paired for a little bit. Did you code Harbour yourself? NATALIE: It feels like another lifetime. CHAD: [laughs] NATALIE: I think life before the pandemic and life after the pandemic; there’s a real line there. I've done quite a bit of the coding myself. However, I've also used a lot of no-code solutions to create MVPs. They've been amazing at helping me scale, helping me test out ideas incredibly quickly. And so one of the interesting things about juggling doing client work, and then also building the back end, and building the module, and then building the design work, and thinking about content juggling all of these different pieces, is that equation of do I invest time in HTML, or do I invest time in machine learning that's going to help me scale? And making all of those intricate decisions has been really, really interesting because, of course, I want to make everything myself. But these no-code solutions have enabled me to test hypotheses so much faster so that I can save time in the long run. CHAD: Well, tell us a little bit more about what the product is today and what you went through to get to this point. NATALIE: Sure. So initially, I just posted on LinkedIn to see who would want to join the course. I had a really simple Squarespace page, and then that evolved into a Typeform which I would use with clients to help them track progress and checking in with their chakras every day. And so, the way that Harbour works is that we do an energy review based on the seven in-body chakras. And so, for anyone who might be unfamiliar with this terminology, the chakras are...well, there are different schools of thought on this. They are a system for either focusing during meditation depending on where you sit in terms of your feelings towards energy bodies. They are a subtle body energy system of themselves. And what I find incredibly helpful for those chakras is that they help people map their energy in a way that I haven't found anything else does effectively. So starting from the root chakra, which is the base of your spine, you can ask yourself, am I feeling safe? Am I feeling grounded? Am I feeling as though my material needs are met? Traveling up towards your reproductive area, you've got the sacral chakra which governs your sense of feeling as though you can desire the things that you desire in the world, feeling as though you are sensual. You're able to experience pleasure. You're able to be creative and playful. And then up to the solar plexus, which is around your navel area, governs the sense of personal power, empowerment, will, feeling as though you're able to go after your goals with chutzpah and energy. And then moving into the heart chakra, which governs this idea of do I feel as though I'm open to receiving and giving love freely? And the throat, do I feel as though I'm an open conduit for the truth of who I am? Do I feel as though I'm able to express myself fully in the world? And then into the third eye, which governs your intuition. Do I feel as though I'm able to trust my intuitive leads and to move with grace and ease, trusting and able to go with the flow? And then finally, we have the crown chakra, which governs do I feel open to receiving divine wisdom? Do I feel as though I'm in this world on my own and there's nothing but pure materiality? Or do I feel open to receiving what some people might call God or Allah or the Tao? Whatever your orientation is, do I feel open towards receiving that kind of wisdom? What's really beautiful about the chakras is that they've been used by ancient Chinese, ancient Egyptians, Tibetans, Sikhs, multiple traditions, and indigenous systems. And so there's kind of this lovely thread of people around the world thinking about how energy moves through our minds, bodies, and spirits. But that's quite a lot. So we just ask seven questions every day. CHAD: So I have to admit I was not...and my first exposure to this is this conversation. So is this something that you have been aware of and practicing prior to working on Harbour, or is it something that you found which then led you to the creation? NATALIE: Definitely the latter, the latter. So I went through a pretty gnarly, dark night of the soul and just had this huge existential crisis of wondering what am I here to do? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? I don't know if other people might resonate with this, but kind of feeling that you make these huge or not so huge career goals, and then you reach them, and you still feel like something's missing. And in my quest to understand what that missing piece might be, I came across chakras, and I found it incredibly helpful. I think people who do yoga might be aware of this because they often come up to yoga. Physical movement is often a way of realigning and balancing the chakras. So there are specific movements or specific asanas that you can do to balance out your root chakra or balance out your Sacral Chakra, which is great because it's kind of like all of these different hacks you can do to bring your mind, body, and spirit back in line. And that's why I think I loved it because when I encountered a lot of other systems or other approaches, it just all felt a bit ephemeral and like I couldn't grasp it. But there was something about chakras that really spoke to the budding engineer within me because I was like, wait, you can just hack yourself into alignment? This is great. [chuckles] CHAD: So this is something you do daily. NATALIE: Well, something I try to do daily. [chuckles] CHAD: Okay. I meant, is this something one does daily? [chuckles] NATALIE: Yeah. Ideally, yes. Because it's like anything else that we do, if you want to maintain a certain level of well-being or perhaps a certain level of fluency, let's say, for example, in a language whether that's a programming language or the spoken language, you need to practice it every day. And so, with chakras and aligning one's mind, body, and spirit, it feels as though the stakes are slightly higher when we're in the middle of a pandemic, and there's so much uncertainty, and all of our lives have kind of been exposed to so much change. But yes, daily is optimal. Daily is, at least at Harbour, the bare minimum. What are some things that you do every day to balance your mind, body, and spirit? You may be aligning your chakras without quite realizing that you are. CHAD: Yeah. So I run every day. And I've often described that as that's my meditation. So I find that that really does wonders for reducing my overall stress. I do it in the morning before starting my day. And so, I think it really sets the foundation on which the rest of the day is built for me. And it wasn't until I made the commitment to do it every day. And now I run long distance enough where I need to take a rest day once a week. But when I made the commitment to do it every day, it really did change my relationship with running. NATALIE: That's so interesting. I was thinking about Kazuo Ishiguro's what I think about when I'm running or something along those lines. He's written this great book. And I know several people who run and have spoken of its incredible meditative qualities. And I think that's a wonderful way of connecting with yourself or creating space to connect with yourself. I also wanted to touch upon something that I know that we tend to move towards or perhaps even a dichotomy: do we meditate to relieve stress, or do we meditate to get closer to our divinity? And so one of the things at Harbour that we try to do is we try to help folks shift from meditating to relieve stress to meditating to connect with one's divinity, and that way, the stress doesn't become as prominent a factor for which meditation is there to alleviate. CHAD: What do you mean by divinity in this case? NATALIE: Yeah, great question. Very controversial. [laughs] I mean, it's 2021, and the least cool thing you could possibly do in an engineering environment is talk about God and the divine. I think there is a really interesting choice point we're at as a collective where there is an increased awareness of consciousness. So there's a lot of language in at least the tech community, from my experience, whether you've got things like Burning Man or just a lot of products and offerings out there, which are there to raise your consciousness. One of the really tricky things about raising your consciousness...and in the chakra system, we do that through something that's called a kundalini awakening, which is where your consciousness does raise from the root chakra all the way to the crown. As your consciousness raises through the chakras, coming from the Indian tradition, what happens is your life force, your consciousness moves through your chakras, and each chakra it touches upon triggers a mini awakening. So, for example, as your life force is moving through your root chakra, anything that may have happened in your childhood, anytime that you may have experienced any aspect of material instability, let's say you lost your job or you had a partnership fall apart, or any time where you felt like your world completely crumbled, that will likely be triggered when you're going through that mini awakening in that root chakra. I mentioned divinity because it feels as though there are two paths we can go down. We can either go down the path of I am raising my consciousness. I am the master of my own destiny. I know what I am here to do in life, and I'm in control of my own awakening. Or we can go down another path which is far trickier, which is sort of saying, "At every point in every day, I choose to surrender to the wisdom that is far beyond me. And I'm going to trust the signals and the science that I receive that they are aligned with my highest good." One of these paths is more egoic, and the other one is more surrendered. That's not to say that we don't need an ego. But the ego can get into really tricky territory when you're doing this kind of alignment and awakening work, and it can really do a lot of harm. And I don't say that through judgment. I say that because I've been through the wringer with a lot of ego deaths. And so, one of the safest ways to mitigate that risk of the ego taking over is to surrender to something that is far more wise than you. Perhaps you don't resonate with the idea that there is only one creator, and that's fine. But perhaps just from a logical point of view, it does seem to make more sense to surrender to the fact that there's something that knows more than I do at any moment. CHAD: So this is some really big stuff. NATALIE: Oh yeah. CHAD: Before we get much further into it, I think for listeners who want to learn more or are interested in what they're hearing and want to give it a try, where do they do that? Where do they find Harbour? And what is it going to look like? NATALIE: Sure. So you can follow us at harbour.today online on our website also on Instagram. And I'd love to invite your listeners to try out our 30-day trial, where if you complete 30 days of your chakra daily check-in, you'll receive access to our platform with activities, reading prompts, and also different course materials for free for a whole year. And I know I'm probably giving this away to a lot of people because all the engineers I know are very disciplined, [laughs] and they'll do this 30-day streak like it's a GitHub streak. CHAD: [laughs] NATALIE: So I'm shooting myself in the foot a little bit. But I'm really keen to offer folks who are asking these questions who are thinking about what am I here to do? Is there more? How do I engage with literature that could help me ask these questions more deeply within myself? And the daily check-in and the learning platform is a really simple way to do that. CHAD: Great. That's great. I hope folks check it out. So, in addition to the daily check-in, you just gave some hints on what is actually on the platform. There are reading prompts and those sorts of things. Is there more than that as well available? NATALIE: Definitely. So we are launching a monthly course on October 6th, and then the next one will be in January when we come back from the break called Organic Cycles. And the purpose of this course is to help people who are thinking about launching something. So you may have a side project that you're thinking about launching or perhaps a hobby that you feel like you want to take up, or maybe you even want to become an entrepreneur full time. But you're a little bit overwhelmed by what might be involved by that. And so at Harbour, we're real big believers in cyclic, iterative, sustainable growth. And so, we use the moon cycle for our sprints. We use it for measuring our tasks. And in Organic Cycles, you will learn about the moon. You'll follow the Moon Phases. And let's say, for example, you want to start a new business selling socks. [laughs] On the new moon on October the sixth, you will join us, and you will tell us all about your sock business. And we'll listen, and we'll make a plan as other people in the cosmic plan. In the first quarter, we'll start thinking a little bit about why do you love socks so much? Where does that come from? And what are the small steps we can make together to help you grow your sock business within this moon cycle? Which is, of course, 28 days. On the full moon, we'll celebrate all the progress that you've made with your sock business. And together, we'll figure out the next steps. In the last quarter, we'll think about hmm, what were the experiments making the sock business so far that worked really well? What are the ones that didn't? Which ones would you like to take into the next cycle? And on the next new moon, we'll start all over again. And so it's very similar to an agile workflow, except you're learning about the moon. And the reason why I believe that's important is because a lot of our day-to-day lives are just so focused on abstract entities and not necessarily the natural world. And so a lot of the prompts in the daily review for Harbour are getting outside, all sorts of different things that reconnect you to nature as a way of rewilding you. So yeah, I'd really love for folks to come on board. If you have any experience with agile, even if you don't and you're just curious about the moon, and want to find out a little bit more about the stars and anything natural, and meet other people who are curious about energy and ideation and how to create cycles which feel more organic, we'd love to have you along. CHAD: I really like the sound of this in that it's a structure to anything. A group environment where you're helping each other is great. Layering on the information about the moon and everything adds an additional element of interest to it. I'm just a big believer in being intentional about what we do in our businesses and in our lives. So any structure that can help people be intentional about what they do, I think is going to help people and help them be more successful than if they just don't have a plan and aren't intentional, aren't consciously thinking about what they want to achieve, and what they want for themselves. And helping people do that, I think, is great. NATALIE: Definitely. And I definitely have been on both sides of that coin, either having too much structure or no structure at all. And I think there's something really beautiful about naming things in ways that feel soft and ways that feel different to people so that they can access that idea and be playful with it and be creative. Because I know that for a lot of people who we work with, post-burnout, folks who are incredibly structured. The Harbour client is a recovering Type A like me who has probably been an overachiever at school and has probably been incredibly structured in their lives but didn't really know how to let go and didn't really know how to create fluidity and flow in their life. And so one of our tag lines is between discipline and surrender and a devotion to flow. And flow is made possible through that playfulness, and through that structure, and through those rituals, and through that surrender, which is really fun. And it's always really, really fun to see people connect the dots and see, oh, it's quite interesting. Like on full moons, I do have a lot more energy. Or on the new moons, I do feel a little bit more restful, and giving people prompts to add self-care and add meditation to their existing structures. CHAD: So this might be an overly practical question, but I'm curious how you manage time zones. NATALIE: [laughs] With naps. [laughter] CHAD: Okay. Fair enough. NATALIE: No, really, I do. I have naps. And I really love work...as you know, I've been working with folks in the U.S. for the last ten years. And I really enjoy it because I think it feels like transporting to a different environment. So, yeah, just a nap, and then I wake up, and I'm in a different country. It's great. CHAD: [laughs] So it's almost like you've actually traveled then. NATALIE: Exactly. Exactly. CHAD: Hopefully, a little less jetlag. NATALIE: Yeah, it's really great. What about in your work? I know that you're one of the most organized and structured people I've ever met. But sometimes, when I'm in Notion, I'm like, what would Chad do? [chuckles] But how do you find the balance between order and structure and allowing yourself the space to find flow and surrender even as a leader, even when you're building a product? CHAD: Well, thank you for the compliment. I appreciate it. Let me preface by saying I think that nothing ever stays the same. And so what I do today and what's working for me today is probably pretty different than three years ago because our teams are in different places, and the people I work with are different, and I'm in a different place. So the thing that's working for me now is putting times blocked off on my calendar where I want to either...it's a regularly scheduled time. And I have one on Thursday; it's from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m. It's just blocked off, and it just says, "Focus time." And each week, then I decide in advance what I'm going to be doing during that focus time. And it might be exploring something new. It might be working on something specific. And then, when I need to accomplish something else, making sure that I block off the time on the calendar. And so that's working for me now. And it's not what I used to do. I used to be much more freeform. Nowadays, if I don't block off the time, I lose it. Previously, I could maintain a lot of free time on my calendar and use that as the time I was doing things. And as we grew and as I was working with people more across all of thoughtbot, across many different time zones, I needed to be much more conscious about what my scheduled time actually looked like and make sure that I'm scheduling time to work on things more freeform. NATALIE: Yeah, definitely. That's so helpful. And I like the idea of time blocking. I've been trying to do a little bit more of that. What's interesting, too, is as Harbour grows and the product grows, and thinking about scaling and trying to anticipate things before they happen, even though you can't anticipate everything, one of the exercises I've been thinking about is what would it feel like to have a team of this many people and meditate on that idea and see if it feels right? And do I necessarily need to have a team that looks like X or a team that looks like Y? And trying to meditate into what that experience would be before making the decision. And I'm wondering if, through your experience having run this global company and having scaled it over more than a decade, what are some of the things that you've done to pre-pave and to support the sustainable scaling of the business? CHAD: I think thinking things through in advance is very important. And I don't say the next thing I'm about to say because it's not important because I think that it is very important, and I certainly do it. But I've also come to grips over the years with the idea that no matter how much we plan, it's not going to go like we plan. And so there's this interesting balance between planning too much and reacting to what's happening. And I'll come back to intentionality. And the way that I talked about it at thoughtbot is letting fulfillment be our North Star. So we shouldn't be doing things just because we think they'll be good business decisions or because we think they're the right thing to do for some arbitrary reason. We should be driven by what we want to be doing in our work and what kind of company we want to be, and being fulfilled in our work. And when we're faced with a decision to make about who we are, or what we do, or how we're going to approach this, letting it be driven by fulfillment is very powerful. Because it means that likely what everyone wants from their work is not so different from one another, especially when we curate a team of people that want to work together for our working lives what might be. It's probably not so different from each other. So that's also very powerful because it means that I don't need to be the one to make all of the decisions. Other people can make those decisions around who we are and what we'll do, and which direction will head in. And they'll very likely be what will be fulfilling to the rest of the team as well. And so it sort of democratizes that decision-making in a way which is more resilient and then can be more flexible. As our best-laid plans start to go awry, we're making decisions based on fulfillment. And I think that allows us to be resilient. NATALIE: Yeah, that's so helpful. CHAD: Because so much of what we've tried, particularly when we intentionally try to grow, so many of the decisions that have made thoughtbot successful we weren't making them for business reasons, we were making them because -- NATALIE: They felt right. CHAD: They felt right. We were the first consulting company in the world to switch to Ruby on Rails. We didn't make that decision because we thought Rails was going to be popular. We made it because, as developers and designers, we were more fulfilled using this new thing, Rails, than using PHP or Java. And, in fact, if we had been focused on what we thought would be the successful business thing, we might never have chosen that because it can feel very risky because you're choosing something entirely unknown. So the opposite example is we've tried very hard to grow over the years non-organically geographically. So someone is moving to this area, or we are going to hire someone in this area. And we're going to grow into this area. And it's not driven necessarily by fulfillment. And in a lot of those cases, it's been very difficult, or it's outright not been successful. And so, being able to react to those situations and adjust has been critical for our long-term success. Another word I use often is grit. And grit, for me, means we fail a bunch but we stay at it because we are driven by...what's driving that is fulfillment. So even if we really believe in it, even if we've failed in execution for business reasons or something like that, we tend to stick with it over the long term and just try a different way. NATALIE: Yeah, I hear that. There is so much grit that's required to sustain something over a long period of time. And it feels like quite an incremental grit as opposed to huge pushes of energy that we might witness in different business models, for example, venture capital. And having been in the whirlwind of the VC world a little bit and now building what I hope is a more sustainable model, the grit is very moment to moment. It's continuous. Each task, each decision, it's a soft resilience that kind of grows over time as opposed to having to wield huge amounts of chutzpah to get through this investment cycle. Do you know what I mean? CHAD: I do, and I think that has a flip side as well, which I try to be conscious of but don't always do a good job with. I tend not to project too far; that’s one side. And then the reverse is also true, which I tend not to celebrate successes enough. I tend not to reflect on the past too much because I'm on to the next incremental improvement pretty quickly. That has benefits because when you have a down day, tomorrow is a new day. It's a brand new day. But that has downsides too, which is when you have a great day, [laughs] you're on to the next thing the next day as well, at least for me. I move on very quickly. And like I said, I think that has its benefits, and it has its downsides. NATALIE: What are your rituals for celebrating both personally and professionally? How do you celebrate yourself and the ways that you've grown? And how do you celebrate the business that you've grown with others? CHAD: Just being honest, I probably have not...I do not have rituals. And I think this is where having good partners, or other members of my team has been helpful because knowing that this will be my tendency, having other people backing me up to recognize the successes or to call me on when I’m moving on too quickly or something like that has been helpful. NATALIE: Yeah, definitely. CHAD: Are you working on Harbour solo right now, or are you working with others? NATALIE: Sure. Sometimes I work with a really wonderful ayurvedic practitioner called Sriram, who was an engineer for 15 years before he became an ayurvedic practitioner. So completely similar to you in that thought about going about and finding a co-founder or partnering with someone. And then I just had this really lovely chat with someone on Lunchclub. And we ended up talking about chakras for an hour and also coding. And I was like, this is my dream. [laughs] I get to talk about chakras, and I get to talk about product. This is great. And so, I work with Sriram sometimes on client work. Normally, the split is that he takes approximately a third of the client sessions, but we work on the one-to-one coaching. And so, I'm your accountability coach. And we're hiring more now, which is really exciting. And I'll do the weekly reviews with clients, and then Sriram will put together the ayurvedic program for the client. So that's always really great fun. And I'm also working with a wonderful designer based in San Francisco called Christina. And yeah, so the three of us...Sriram has his own practice, and Christina has her own agency. But there's a lot of collaborative work that's happening there. And I'm currently onboarding more coaches, which is exciting and very necessary because I came to a choice point, and I said, do I want to study chakras and become qualified? And I realized I didn't. I wanted to talk to all the people who knew about chakras and who were qualified, and so that's been a lovely experience onboarding them, and onboarding therapists, and onboarding other personal development coaches who are going to be able to serve clients as we scale. CHAD: Nice. You mentioned Lunchclub many times in the story of Harbour on the website. I have never used Lunchclub. But I heard of it before. And if folks haven't heard of it, what's the pitch for Lunchclub? [chuckles] NATALIE: It's LinkedIn as you'd want it to be. [laughter] CHAD: Oh, that's great. That's great. NATALIE: I think Lunchclub gets rid of all of the bravado and all of the stuff on LinkedIn because I think a lot of us do really struggle with self-promotion online. But at the same time, we want to connect with people. And we want to have real conversations that hopefully lead to more conversations or more opportunities for both parties. And when I started on Lunchclub about a year and a half ago, it was just an incredible way to connect with people around the world. I'd just moved into a flat. I was living on my own in the middle of the pandemic and in the middle of the lockdown building product. And I thought, I really need to chat to people because I really enjoy doing that. And through 45-minute conversations, you get matched by their little magical AI, and you connect with people who might be related to the interests that you have. And you can build streaks. And the more streaks you build, the more points you get. And the more points you get, the more you can choose who you connect with based on geography and business development goals, et cetera. Well, even if you do choose I want to meet an investor or I want to meet a Biz Dev specialist, this isn't really a sales call or an investment pitch. It's just I want to increase the likelihood that the person I meet will be aligned with where I'm trying to get on my journey. CHAD: Well, the pandemic has been a really difficult time for everybody, parents, and of which I count myself in that. In particular, seeing it across thoughtbot, obviously, a trend is the people who live alone had an especially challenging time during the strictest of the lockdowns that were happening. And it was challenging. We saw a lot of people struggling. And because we were all remote, you're remote all day working. You don't necessarily want to be reaching out to people remotely, just that energy there. And I think that's maybe where Harbour comes in is solving that energy problem that I think many of us are feeling now. NATALIE: Definitely. I think what happened over the last year and a half, two years, has created a tectonic shift, but I think also a portal because it's forced us to reckon with ourselves in ways that perhaps we had been ignoring, in ways that we didn't know we needed to, in ways that we've been forced to. And it can be really scary. And even as an adult, that's weird. It's weird to feel that scared as an adult. It's weird to feel that displaced as an adult. It's weird to feel so unmoored. It's weird to feel like you're starting from scratch again, not necessarily in terms of your career or what you post on LinkedIn about who you are, but inside that, you really are starting from scratch: Who am I without access to my friends? Who am I without access to family members? Who am I without X? Who am I without Y? And so, the pandemic kind of energetically takes everything away, and so we can see ourselves more clearly. And that can be really strange because we haven't had the opportunity to do that in the past. And for many folks, often, we don't engage with mental health or well-being until something goes wrong. And we don't really engage with these ideas until we feel we're at a breaking point. And so the pandemic being the biggest breaking point we've had as a collective, at least in the Western world, we are forced to do that reckoning. And so, of course, it's not just a loneliness pandemic; it's not just a burnout pandemic. I really do think it's an existential pandemic because people are wondering, or at least I am, and I know others who are, and I think others who are listening might be: Who am I? What am I here to do? What's my destiny? Why am I here? What's next? How do I make sense of all of the things that have happened in my life so far? And because there's no noise and no distraction or no busyness much as there was before the pandemic, you really are just there with yourself reckoning with those questions. CHAD: Well, Natalie, I'm happy to see that someone emerged on the other side of this with a new product. NATALIE: [laughs] CHAD: And I wish you the best. NATALIE: Thank you. Thank you very much. CHAD: Again, if folks want to sign up or check it out more or just follow along with you, where are all the places that they can do that? NATALIE: Sure. I would love for folks to connect on Instagram, harbour.today. You can also sign up to our newsletter. We have a daily email that comes out with questions from our community. So folks might ask things along the lines of what I've been describing, and we'll respond with some chakra guidance, some ancient philosophy that might be helpful, and also some practical tools, things that you can do like walking barefoot in your local park. Or some breathing exercises that might help you find balance within, or some yoga can really help you hack your chakras back into alignment, or some scripture that may help you reconnect with your divinity. CHAD: Wonderful. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. And we are emerging into this new season with full transcripts of every show as well. So you can find those on the website. And it will be included in the show notes, so they appear in your podcast player as well. I'm excited. It's something that we have been talking about doing for a while, but the time and expense of it traditionally was prohibitive. But we've made it happen for this new season in no small thanks to our new editor and producer, Mandy Moore. So if you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and edited by Mandy Moore. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Natalie Nzeyimana.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Lindsey and Chad talk about product roadmaps. Are they dead? Lindsey and Chad think they just smell. We also say an emotional goodbye to Lindsey as she moves on to new adventures. We miss you! Buffer Transparent Product Roadmap Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: LINDSEY: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Lindsey Christensen. CHAD: And I'm your other host, Chad Pytel. LINDSEY: And today we're going to talk about product roadmaps. CHAD: Product roadmaps. [laughs] LINDSEY: Whoa. This is the topic. I feel like recently I've seen some thought pieces that product roadmaps are dead. So I'm curious if you think product roadmaps are dead. CHAD: No, I don't think that they're dead, but I want to make the distinction too. I've never believed in a public product roadmap because I think that sets you up for just disappointing everyone involved, your customer, yourselves. And I think that there's a balance to be struck there. Saying that product roadmaps don't have a place, to me, in my mind, is like saying planning, having plans doesn't have a place and that just doesn't ring true to me. I think you should plan out what you're going to be working on. But I'm sure we'll get more into it. I also believe things about not having big backlogs and not doing too much planning and that kind of thing. So it depends on what you mean by a product roadmap. LINDSEY: Well, yeah. I think that therein lies the issue. You can do it well, and you can also [laughs] run it into the ground. But you mentioned having it public and that being a bad idea. And I think at the core of product roadmaps is communication and alignment and getting all of your stakeholders on the same page about what you're building and why. So to me, I would think those stakeholders are the leadership team of the company, if this is a product company and product is the main business driver, the leadership of the company, the product team, of course, and engineering, sales, and marketing as well. Am I missing others? Clients, customers. CHAD: Right. Customers. LINDSEY: How do you feel about it? Does that count as the externally facing do not reveal? CHAD: Oh yeah, it does for me. So we've all seen the companies that say that they're going to do something and then in a best-case scenario, that becomes a deadline which was arbitrarily made in the first place that everyone is stressing out over, that sales is potentially making promises that are either going to need to be broken or are going to need to be super stressed over. And then in a worst-case scenario, you end up not delivering on that roadmap as you essentially promised. And you actually end up with disappointed customers. LINDSEY: So you would recommend not telling the customers about future features. CHAD: Yeah. I think there's a balance to be struck there. So certainly, if you know that you're working on something now like actively working on something and a customer were to ask you about that thing directly, I might say, "Yeah, we're working on that now, and we're excited about getting it out to you." But I have only [chuckles] ever been a part of when a team is saying, "Q3 of next year, six months, nine months down the road, this specific feature is going to make it to customers." That's a real recipe, in my experience, a real recipe for lots of people being either really disappointed in that not happening or really working unsustainably in order to hit that in the first place. It's really hard to plan software that far in advance. We just had the CEO of Dragon Innovation on the podcast. And I think that even then, you have to be careful with hardware, but at least with hardware or other kinds of businesses, it's a little bit easier to say, "Our goal is to have this incorporated in the product, or whatever, in the next revision of the hardware. And we expect to do that two years from now," or something like that. That's a little bit easier to put a bow around, I think. LINDSEY: Yeah. I was a part of a software company that got acquired by a hardware company. And all of a sudden, we were wrapped into these 5 to 10-year product roadmaps that were blowing all of our minds [laughs] and a very different fit than how we were used to working. CHAD: Yeah. It's worth noting that there are some companies that essentially go so far as to publish a Trello board of their roadmap. I don't know which ones they are. [chuckles] I have to find them. But even then, they're not necessarily making hard promises. And if you're committed to being transparent and publishing some roadmap to the public, the ways that I've seen it done best are working in themes. So you say, "Two quarters from now, our focus is going to be on reporting," or something like that. That is a little bit...because you're not making specific promises. You're just establishing a theme of what your focus is going to be on for that time. You can imagine you can still get yourself into a position where customers are putting all their hopes and dreams on what that's going to look like, and maybe your support staff or salespeople or whatever start to make promises about what's going to be delivered in that time. And then again, a bunch of people end up disappointed. LINDSEY: Yeah. I've also seen what I think to be the most successful roadmaps be based around themes. And I think it’s also…again, going back to that, the fact that it's, in addition, to actually delivering product and delivering good product, it's helping align your internal team around what you're doing. So to rally your whole team or your whole company around reporting is the next big thing that we're working on, and this is why. This is what we've heard from users, from our research. And this is the direction we're going in and then actually getting everyone working towards reporting in their own ways. Marketing can be working on content around reporting. Hopefully, sales is seeding the idea of maybe not promising around reporting as well. And that also really appeals to me as a marketer and as someone who's thinking often about how do we get folks moving in the same direction, speaking the same language and creating some momentum around something that can differentiate us, get people excited about what we're doing? Then hopefully, it's also strategically valuable to the company adding a new feature or entirely a new product. You're expanding your offering and maybe even your market reach. Who do you think are the most important folks within the company to be driving the product roadmap? Who owns the product roadmap? CHAD: Well, [laughs] so if you have a company that has a roadmap...I'm getting distracted by the premise here. Let's just come back to that a bit. Momentum is key. You used the word momentum. And if you're feeling the need to plan things out or to gain a sense of clarity on your team about what's going to be done, and what's important, and you need to do a long-term roadmap in order to do that, that to me does point to it's sort of a smell. That's what we do when there's a code problem. We say it's a code smell. It points to if you had a team that was continually delivering value to your customers, to your users, and that you had a team where when sales, or marketing, or someone learned something about what will be valuable to customers and it's validated that it's valuable, and it gets put into the design and development process, and it comes out relatively soon, there's no need for a product roadmap. Or I should say people don't feel the need for a product roadmap as much because they have high confidence that user needs are going to be met in a tight feedback cycle and that there's not a loss of momentum. And things going into the system are coming out in a week, two weeks, three weeks. Even four weeks, you can maintain that sense of momentum of we understood that this was important. We validated that it was. It went into the system, and it came out the other side, and it's in the hands of users. It's only when that starts to break down that stakeholders start to say, "We need to plan. We need a roadmap," because they lack the confidence that putting things into the system they're going to see them come out the other side in a way that maintains momentum. LINDSEY: Does that depend on the size of the company? CHAD: Well, ideally, even companies of large size are able to do that, but we all know that that's difficult. It may be that most companies just can't do that. And when that's the case, you have that breakdown. You have that lack of confidence. You have a system where you aren't putting things in and quickly seeing them come out the other side. And so that's where something like a product roadmap you start to say we need that in place. And I think that that's why it often happens as teams get bigger and as companies get more complex. LINDSEY: Interesting. So product roadmaps are not dead, but roadmap can be a smell. CHAD: Yes. [chuckles] Yeah, that's what I would say. That's my opinion. LINDSEY: Who owns that smell? CHAD: So now to get back to who owns the product roadmap, if your customers aren't the ones driving what's on the roadmap, then something is fundamentally broken. At the end of the day, the real owners of the product roadmap, even though they probably shouldn't see it, are the users, the customers. But I don't think that's the question you were asking. Who decides what's on the roadmap? It's got to be the people who are closest to hearing customers and who have the vision for what the product is supposed to be. So that will often be the company leadership, the CEO, the chief product officer, something like that combined with people who are talking with customers. LINDSEY: So on the opposite end of the spectrum, if it's a big company, maybe it's a little bit harder to operate without the roadmap. If you're a really small and young company, let's say, and you already have a roadmap, is that too much? CHAD: Well, this is a podcast, so we can have opinions. I would say [laughs] growth opinion, high-level position, yeah, you should probably not have that roadmap. Now the devil is in the details. What is the roadmap? Is it high-level themes? Is it I'm building this idea, and I'm a visionary about what this product is going to be, and I've laid out in broad strokes...we've done an initial version, a minimum viable product, and we have a vision for where we're going over the next year or two? There's a way to do that which doesn't then convert into this rigid product roadmap. And I think that that's what people who say product roadmaps are dead and you shouldn't be doing them; that’s what they're pushing against is that really rigid expectation setting system where promises get made and then broken. LINDSEY: Right and promising especially deadlines far out into the future. CHAD: And they also understand or believe that if you have a product roadmap, it potentially puts you in a position where you stop listening to customers because you say, "In six months, this is the thing that we're going to be working on." And then you get there, and you just work on it, and you deliver it without having learned along the way that the next most important thing might be something completely different. And so that's another risk with product roadmaps is you start working to the roadmap instead of working to what your users are telling you. So at that company, I'm not surprised to hear that it was a 5-year, 10-year thing, and then it's based off of a thing, Was it really concrete, or was it more sort of vision stuff? LINDSEY: It was very concrete, I would say. CHAD: Yeah. [laughs] LINDSEY: And it's interesting because a lot of it was around trying to be first to market with cutting edge technologies. And on the hardware side, there was also R&D and multiple scientific teams working on specific things. And actually, to get more concrete, I think I can share without giving specifics. So it was 3D printing, and there's like an arms race in 3D printing to be able to print with new materials. So there are multiple teams working on trying to figure out how to print with new materials. And then we had these really long-term product roadmaps that were like by this year; we’re going to have gone to market with it and using that as a way to stay ahead of the competition basically. CHAD: I can imagine that from a business perspective, you're looking at that situation, and you say...and this is true both in science and in software. But from a business perspective, it's saying, "If we don't have this deadline in place, then we have a research project that's just going to go on. We need this timeline, this deadline to hold everyone accountable to what a goal is and to make sure that we're bringing new products to market in that timeframe." And then the scientists are probably saying, "We have no idea. It's completely arbitrary. We think that we could do this, but what happens when we don't? What happens when we don't have something?" A lot of times, I make an analogy between science and even software development and art because it is a creative process. It's all in our heads, and we're just coming up with it. You can say, "I need to have the book," or "I need to have this painting finished by this time." But it's very difficult to then ensure that that is actually going to happen at the creative level of saying, "I'm proud of this work, or it's good." It's hard to do that. LINDSEY: Yeah, and I think there was an element too of either we will figure it out, or we will acquire whoever figures it out. And then there's a separate team that's off trying to suss out who's figuring it out and what are they willing to be bought for? [laughs] CHAD: Right. And maybe from a business perspective, a lot of that makes sense. And you have to balance all of those things in order to try to be successful from a business perspective. LINDSEY: Yeah. It's interesting on the hardware side, too, especially as you do get closer to actually launching. It can be very waterfall-esque working towards launch because there are so many dependencies in order to get the thing built and shipped and launched on time. CHAD: I found a Quora thread about companies that have made their roadmap public. LINDSEY: Did any do it successfully? CHAD: [laughs] LINDSEY: I've only seen nightmare stories. Like, let this be a lesson. Here's a company that made their roadmap public, and within weeks they were disappointing people. [laughs] CHAD: I think that it's tempting, you know, and I think we should just do it. Part of the benefit of not having a roadmap that people say is that it allows not only the flexibility for what you're going to do to change based on what you learn. But the other is it offers you the opportunity to surprise and delight customers. And it allows you not to say, "This thing is six months away," but to say, "Here it is now." And one of the best examples of that that I think we're all familiar with is Apple. Apple doesn't typically pre-announce products that far in advance. And they're even a hardware company. They're clearly working on things years in the making. But they don't talk about them publicly until it's like, you can order this today, or you can order this on Wednesday. And the excitement and momentum that Apple builds around that is like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka kind of secretive thing. It's super exciting to customers, and they're super successful doing it. And last year, we had a really public thing where...actually, it was I guess two years ago that the saga started when Apple unusually announced AirPower, which is a charging mat that could charge both of your phone and your watch and everything all at the same time. They announced that far in advance. And then it actually ended up never shipping, and they eventually canceled the product. And they had to do all of that publicly, which is very, very different from Apple. I imagine that there are tons of products that Apple thinks that they're going to eventually release, and they don't work out, and they have to kill the projects. And all of that happens behind closed doors. LINDSEY: So we don't know of anyone who does it successfully. What does Quora say? CHAD: Quora doesn't know. A lot of the companies are not even in business anymore. [laughter] LINDSEY: There you go. CHAD: Buffer has apparently...Buffer has a transparent product roadmap. And I guess if there's any company that does transparency pretty well that I could point to, it would be Buffer. So we can link to that in the show notes. How does this board work? We've made this to give you a clear view into what we're working on, what we're about to work on, and what we're thinking about working on. We hope you enjoy the peek behind the scenes. They have four lanes: potential, next up, in progress, and done. They have voting enabled on their Trello board so their customers can vote on the different things that they have going on. LINDSEY: Are you in the actual board? CHAD: I am on the actual board, yeah. LINDSEY: How many votes? What kind of numbers are we talking? CHAD: So the in-progress thing that they are currently working on is a better way to manage campaigns in Buffer, and it has four votes. LINDSEY: Oh. CHAD: [laughs] So it doesn't seem like there's tons of engagement. There's another one, the best time to post to maximize your reach. It has seven votes. LINDSEY: Okay, so a pretty low number. CHAD: Pretty low. Oh, here's one, flexible pricing for Buffer has 67 votes. So I think you can get a little sense of the engagement that's on there. But I like that there's no description on these cards. It's just a better way to manage campaigns in Buffer. So they're not saying what they're going to be doing. There are no timelines on any of these cards. It was only moved to in progress. And they're not saying anything on these cards from what I can see about when it's going to be done or what is actually going to be entailed in it. I encourage people to look at this. It's pretty good in terms of potentially ways to make a public roadmap work for you and your customers. LINDSEY: And what about thoughtbot? We also heavily gravitate towards the Trello management. CHAD: Yeah. This is clearly not their actual Trello board. It's a specific board created for a transparent roadmap. LINDSEY: It’s a distraction. CHAD: [laughs] Yeah. If we were going to do something like this… LINDSEY: I guess I meant as far as tools; what are the things that you have seen work with…? My guess would be Trello because we use that a lot for managing projects. CHAD: Yeah, we use it for managing pretty much every project. And longtime followers of thoughtbot will know that we used to use a tool called Pivotal Tracker. And then, we created our own tool called Trajectory, which doesn't exist anymore. But the big thing about that was it was really meant to address the flow between coming up with ideas and the design thinking that goes into evolving a product idea and then breaking it down into stories and doing the stories from there. And we switched to Trello in part because of the flexibility of Trello. Trello is not specific to any one product or any one workflow. And so, the nature of software development is again a reason why product roadmaps can be troublesome because things change constantly. You're constantly learning. You should be meeting on a regular feedback cycle of not only how is our product working for people and what should we do differently, but how is our process of developing that product working, and what should we be doing differently? That's one of the great things about Trello is that because it's so flexible, you can say, "Yeah, we're having this problem with our process. Let's change it." And you can usually find a way to embrace that flexibility in Trello. LINDSEY: And how do you know that your product roadmap is on the right track? Or what are some smells that you're going in the wrong direction? We talk about customers being happy. What does that actually mean, and what does that look like? CHAD: If the things that are going into what you're doing on your product are coming from users, and then they're going back to them, and they're receiving usage, that's a really good sign. And a lot of teams look at and measure cycle time, so the total time for something that goes into the process to come out the other side and get in the hands of users. And a lot of teams really high functioning teams will be working to make that as short as possible. And one of the reasons why is because that gives a sense to your customers that your product is continually moving forward in a way that comes from their needs. And that's a really good place to be in. You know what I mean? LINDSEY: Yeah, that makes sense. CHAD: Do you use any products where you feel like they've got that flow working really well? LINDSEY: As far as asking for feedback and then incorporating it into the product? CHAD: Yeah, or even just that you use the product and you're maybe not even giving them feedback directly, but you have a vague sense of how your need might not be met. And they're releasing features and that kind of thing on a semi-regular basis where you say, "I didn't even realize I needed that, but now that I have it, it makes me happy." Or "Boy, that really solved this problem that I was facing." LINDSEY: I think the one that comes to mind immediately is Slack, actually. I feel like their product releases often speak to something I was feeling. Like, I think especially they seem attuned to the fact that it can create a lot of noise. And so providing or increasing the different ways that you can personalize your own experience so that you can mute things or have certain kinds of notifications or be able to set hours that you're away and unavailable. Those releases, I think, feel especially personal when I see those come through. CHAD: I think you're right. Slack is one where that would be the case. And it's worth noting that Slack does publish a roadmap, and they've been doing it for a couple of years. Particularly, it seems like, from the outside, a big part of what drove that and what's in their marketing around it is better setting expectations with their enterprise customers and that sort of thing rather than necessarily not meeting the needs of actual users. LINDSEY: They also seem especially responsive and helpful out in the world too. I've seen multiple instances of folks I know tweeting about a bug or something in Slack, and very quickly, the Slack account is responding with how to fix it or notifying that it's been logged in, and they'll be following up, that kind of thing. CHAD: So I'm looking at the Slack one a little bit more, and it seems like the roadmap is centered primarily around what they call the platform roadmap. So it's more like APIs and system-level things that they're going to be focusing on or adding rather than user-facing features. So it's more serving the needs of people who are building on top of the Slack platform versus saying that their product is going to have a specific feature at this time that's user-facing. LINDSEY: That's interesting. CHAD: Which makes sense because people building on top of the Slack platform who are really dependent for their business needs on the Slack platform are going to have high expectations for knowing what's coming and knowing that their needs are being addressed at some point in the future. LINDSEY: Right. And on the enterprise side, as they're getting more enterprise customers, I imagine that could come into play as well where enterprise companies are going to have some dependencies or requirements that maybe the Slack team hasn't had to deal with before, which could be integrations. It could be certain kinds of security measures, which if they're definitely working on those or creating the necessary partnerships, it can also make sense to say, "We have in our sites this integration or the security measure coming by the end of the year," kind of thing. CHAD: Yeah. So one that I have...and it's interesting because I think they've been doing a good job lately, but they went through a real period of time where I felt like they weren't doing as good a job with it, and it’s GitHub. So GitHub lately has done a much better job of, for me as a developer, as a user of GitHub every day, delivering features where it's like, yeah, this is awesome, and it fills a need or a pain that I was really having. Or I didn't even realize that I was going to need this feature, and now that it's here, I can't imagine it being any different. And they do that, as far as I know, there's not a public roadmap for GitHub. And GitHub, I could be completely wrong on this; they do a conference. They do shows. And what they're doing at that is they're announcing things. So they're more on the sliding scale towards Apple, where they're announcing general availability or beta availability of new features at their events as opposed to saying, "Here's what the roadmap for the next year looks like." LINDSEY: Which does create a forcing function of having things ready enough, maybe not launchable but ready enough that you can at least talk about it and talk about the timeline. CHAD: Yeah. And we had the product manager of the payments that GitHub announced on a previous episode. Her name's Devon. And that's one of the things she talked about was working towards that deadline of that presentation and how stressful it was and making sure that they manage scope within that. LINDSEY: So, do you think GitHub has been doing a better job since they were acquired? CHAD: It doesn't so much match since when they've been acquired, but there was a period of time where...and maybe it could be that there's nothing GitHub-specific about this, but there's probably a period in every product's time where you go from this is a new thing, and so there are so many new features that are low hanging fruit. And you can quickly roll them out, bang, bang, bang for a long period of time. Your roadmap is just sitting there in front of you, waiting for you to do it. You don't need to worry too much about it. That's, depending on the product, probably six months, a year, two years, maybe even five years. But then you're going to work your way through that list and the things that you do next, particularly if you reach a growth stage, which means that your core customers may be different than your original core customers…where you can enter a lull. And you need to take some time to figure out what the next phase of your product looks like. It's possible that it happened with GitHub. I tend to think that it's more that internally GitHub had real challenges. And we know it had some issues with sexual harassment and workplace issues like that. I think that really got in the way of GitHub functioning well. That's my theory. But again, I'm totally on the outside. But I do know that they went through some significant restructuring and addressing a lot of those issues and creating what is hopefully a more inclusive workplace where people can do their best work. And then good work started to come out again. LINDSEY: As far as launching products or new features, it's always interesting and challenging I think with SaaS products where you're continuously releasing improvements and how you think about…again, from the marketing fun of it too a little bit, is like how you think about when is something like a new launch? When is something a significant enough new feature? Is this actually a separate product from what we've been offering? And sometimes, that can be really obvious. Going back to the reporting example, that's a nice kind of shiny new toy in your platform that you're going to have, like a dashboard. The difficult ones are performance improvements. But I was curious if you have any takes on that too. CHAD: Yeah. What I've always done on the products that I've worked on...and thoughtbot has created several products that have been fairly successful not only for our clients but for ourselves as well. I've always favored not underestimating people's ability to absorb significant product changes as long as they're coming from a place of you know that they are needed. And that if you're shipping regular new things on a basis, not all of your customers know about that right away, and so you can take a marketing touchpoint for those changes. And even though you have a sense of urgency about communicating them right away, you do have some time to do that. I think I said earlier when I was starting out, "Underestimate people." What I think I meant was overestimate. We, as people who are very close to the product, assume that the minute we deploy a new feature or a change that everyone in the world is going to know about it. And that's just not the reality of what it's going to be. So when rolling out new features, you have to communicate them to the people who are touching them and are who are hitting them. But there are almost multiple layers of marketing and communication for any new feature that's going out, communicating with immediate customers that are touching a new feature, and then making sure that everything that's going out is flowing through marketing and is coordinated with marketing around what those touchpoints are going to be. And the general guideline that I've always used is at least once a month; there should be a major round-up or communication about a significant change that has been made. And I've always felt really good about the products that I was working on if we were in that cycle like we're continually delivering new things. But then, on a monthly basis, there's at least one new either individually significant thing that we can talk about. Or absent of that, doing a roundup of a theme of changes or just here are three major improvements we've made in the last month. LINDSEY: Yeah, I totally agree. It's great to have those opportunities to engage with customers and keep them invested in the product, and looking forward to those regular updates as well. CHAD: Right. So when we think back to Trello boards or roadmaps and that kind of thing, I don't think marketing should be…after that fact, marketing shouldn't be saying like, "What was just released? Can we know?" and then responding to it. Marketing should have insight into what's in the backlog, what's the next things that are going into production. What are the things we're planning now? And they should be contributing to that process because, in a lot of companies, marketing is going to be on the front lines of interacting with customers. So you're going to hear things, and you're going to see things and that should contribute to the process. LINDSEY: Right. Ideally, the marketing team is also customer-facing and providing those insights as well and tapped into what folks are having challenges with or looking forward to as well as what else they have their eye on that others are offering or trying out that are your competition. CHAD: So that's the cadence that when I'm in charge of a product, I've tried to achieve. It's easier to do in the early days of a product when, like I was saying, you don't even need the roadmap. There's so much low-hanging fruit, and everything is valuable, and the priorities are relatively clear. It's harder to maintain that pace far into your product's future not only because what you're doing is less clear and maybe less valuable to all of your customers but also that daily, weekly, monthly pace can be difficult to keep up indefinitely just from a sustainability standpoint. LINDSEY: Yeah. I feel like sometimes I even see products incorporating content in those later stages as ways to keep folks engaged and updated and have that be a feature of the product, whether it's community-based or the company itself actually producing new content and incorporating that into the product. CHAD: Yeah. So a really good example of that is (Boy, we've had a lot of good people on the podcast.) the folks at Wistia, which is a local company to Boston. And they're continually evolving what their product is offering. And they're launching new features. They're doing new things. But a big part of what you see publicly from them is also new content that helps people be better creators. So they are a good example that comes to mind of a company that does that pretty well. LINDSEY: So, we're going to be talking to three other startups of different stages in different industries about how they approach their product roadmap. Any sense for what might be consistent versus what is different? I imagine you also have insight from seeing a ton of client projects. Are certain areas of product roadmap more consistent than others? CHAD: I suspect what we're going to hear from the early-stage companies is that they actually have what...They're probably either going to say, "We have no idea. We're just flying by the seat of our pants." But actually, I think it wouldn't be surprising to me if there's just so much low-hanging fruit in front of us that that gives them a sense of a clear product roadmap. And they say, "Yeah, we do know. We do have a sense of what we're going to be doing next week and the week after." But they're going to not be so worried about what six months from now looks like. And I think a common trend of later-stage companies is I wouldn't be surprised to hear that they're very focused on partnerships and external relationships in a way that early companies aren't. And that is one of the factors which we haven't really touched on is, anytime you start involving external people the same way with Slack; it’s like people who are depending on you for their own business needs outside of your users creates more pressure for you to set expectations with them and to introduce roadmaps. So companies that are really focused on that who have channels and partnerships and that kind of thing are going to have more desire or pressure to introduce some form of roadmap. LINDSEY: Yeah. And in a way, that's the later stage companies' low-hanging fruit. When you bring in a partner, or you make an acquisition and immediately fill in a need that you've identified or an opportunity that you've identified, instead of taking your existing team to build it, or hire a team, or work with someone like thoughtbot. CHAD: Yeah. And it could be that that is actually totally the right thing. Because if you give everybody the benefit of the doubt and you say, "This product has been well-managed and user-centric to meet the needs of the users, then you're going to get that cycle." In the early days, we know what we should be doing, and our users are telling us. And we've got a lot of things to introduce into the product to fully meet the needs of those customers. And you're going to do that, and it's going to serve you for a really long time for delivering new things to them. But at some point, again, giving the benefit of the doubt, assuming you've done that and things have gone well, there is a point at which you say, "We've delivered all of that. And we have a product which is meeting the needs of our users. It's fulfilling the job to be done of those users." You say, "Okay, great." So we're either bringing new people in who might have different needs and different jobs to be done. Or we are exploring other business opportunities like bringing on partners and opening up new channels which have their own needs that are driving your product roadmap, or they're bringing in customers who have a different job to be done. LINDSEY: And honestly, it's an easy way for early-stage companies too to add a partner and gain access to their audience. But it's not likely that they're going to want to partner with you [laughs] because you're not bringing anything to the table, so you got to do that building first. CHAD: Yeah. So we'll see what they say. I'm looking forward to the conversations. So, Linsdey, you have some personal news. LINDSEY: Yes. With mixed emotions, I'll be moving on from thoughtbot and the podcast. CHAD: This comes as a complete surprise to me. You're just springing this to me on the podcast. LINDSEY: I know. I know I told you I wanted you to join five minutes earlier. And it's inappropriate. CHAD: [chuckles] LINDSEY: No, that's not true. I used all the proper channels. I read the handbook. But yeah, end of an era, moving on. But dang, it's been a lot of fun, hasn't it? CHAD: It has been fun. It's been great working with you. The impact that you've had on thoughtbot will be long-lasting. It was significant and long-lasting. I think that you joined at a really interesting time. Pandemic and all that stuff aside, completely separate from that, we were going through important transitions, and I think you're an important part of this. I remember commenting to you not long after you joined when you gave the first company-wide presentation that you were the first person I think who had ever done a full company-wide presentation like that, besides me. LINDSEY: Yeah. Wow. This feels like so long ago. CHAD: And you're just so fun to work with and collaborate with and just be a team member with that you're definitely going to be missed. So thank you for everything. LINDSEY: Thank you. I am definitely not tearing up. So no one has to worry about that. It's hard to look back without getting choked up. It's been a really great experience. [laughter] CHAD: I'm glad to hear that. You brought so much to the table. We learned a lot along the way, and it wasn't always easy. We had a marketing team working in a certain way, which went through a big change. I think we learned a lot about how the next phase of thoughtbot needs to work, and I think you're an important part of getting there. So thanks again. LINDSEY: Thanks for having me. Thanks to all of you for listening. And I'm now available as a guest, which is the great news. CHAD: [laughs] LINDSEY: And I almost know how to set up all my recording settings, so that's half the battle. But it's been real, and thank you for the opportunity from the experience. CHAD: So we will be back in a little while with new episodes of the show. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. And for all you listeners out there, I'll talk to you next time. Bye. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad talks to Leadership Coach and Founder of Plucky, Jen Dary, about working with individuals and companies to create healthy dynamics at work. In fact, Plucky just released a new product that aids in doing just that! Manager Weeklies are notebooks designed to help leaders intentionally set up their weeks and track progress. It includes tips and tricks, including useful 1:1 tools. Each notebook is designed to last one quarter. Follow Jen Dary on Twitter or LinkedIn Plucky Manager Weeklies info & order link Newsletter: beplucky.com/newsletter Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Jen Dary, founder of Plucky. Jen, welcome back to the podcast. JEN: Thank you. My third time. Three time's a charm. I feel very lucky. CHAD: There aren't many people who have been on the podcast as guests three or more times. So you're in an ever-increasing select group of returning guests. JEN: Thank you. I feel like it's maybe because the Tokyo Olympics have just started, but I feel competitive and ready to take on this third session. CHAD: [laughs] So the last time you were on was October 28th, 2019 is when the episode came out. JEN: Millennia ago. CHAD: Not quite two years ago, but yeah, also a millennia ago. And that was Episode 342 so if people want to go back and take a listen to that. And then before that, you were on Episode 270, which I actually don't even know the date of. It was even longer. So welcome back. You are celebrating the eighth anniversary of Plucky. JEN: I know. I don't really think of it in these ways because I don't have an MBA, or I didn't come from a business background or anything. But definitely when I hit five years, I feel like my husband said something about that. He was like, "Honey, you should be really proud. Not a lot of businesses make it five years." And that was not really on my mind. But now that Plucky is eight, I feel like oh man, I'm just so happy to talk about how businesses evolve and how what you thought it was going to be in year one was different than year three, was different than year five, and of course, it's different than year eight. So we're eight years in, but nothing's the same, and everything's the same. I'm sure you've experienced that too. CHAD: It was actually the eighth year going into the ninth year mark that we at thoughtbot started to make big changes. And it was that idea of coming up on a decade. It started to feel like, wow, there's real momentum here. And instead of thinking about what the next year looks like, what does the next decade look like? And are we the kind of company that is going to last 20 years? And that put us in a different mindset. And I started to think about the impact we were having and the legacy that we would have. And was it big enough for the size of the company that we had? JEN: How old is thoughtbot right now? CHAD: We just celebrated our 18th anniversary. JEN: Oh my gosh. All right. Well, maybe at the very end, you can give me your best wisdom for the ninth year. [laughter] CHAD: Oh jeez. Okay. [chuckles] JEN: No presh, but tuck that in the back of your brain. CHAD: Yeah, get some sleep. That's my best advice. JEN: [laughs] Great. CHAD: That would be great. We can come back to that. JEN: Cool. CHAD: So obviously, it's been a big two years since we last talked. I'm sure a lot has progressed in Plucky. How have things changed? JEN: Well, what's funny is that the two years spread that we're talking about or 18 months or whatever it is, for the most part, overlaps with COVID so far. So by the end of 2019, things were cooking, and everything is good. And even, personally speaking, my youngest son would be entering kindergarten in the fall of 2020. Again, as a business owner, a mom, all those things I was sort of at the end of 2019 hot, so good. And then I was anticipating 2020 to be continued pretty much the same as is. Like, we would keep training managers. I would keep traveling. All that would get easier because the kids are getting bigger, then my kid would go to kindergarten. And I was also finishing a book about...I can't remember if we talked about this before, but I was really sick in 2016. I had a brain tumor diagnosis, and I'm okay now. It was benign. I had this memoir that was eh, I don't know, maybe two-thirds done. All that was the plan for 2020, Chad. And I'm sure this is shocking news to you, but none of it happened, including freaking kindergarten, obviously in person. So on the business side of things, I kept everything stable as best as I could. So coaching kept going because coaching has always been remote. We have some products, and we kept shipping those out as best we could. At the very beginning of COVID, when everybody thought it was this three, four-week hiatus from real life, I recorded a story every day. Because I was like, what can I do for all the world that's working? So I recorded a storytime for Plucky with my kids. And I put it out on social media so that working parents could have another 15 minutes of distraction for their kids. That's how cute I was back then. [laughter] After one month of that, I was like, I need somebody to read stories to my kids. Yikes. CHAD: Yeah. [laughs] JEN: So the big thing that changed was that our manager trainings in person obviously I had to cancel those. So I transitioned from in-person to virtual events, and that has continued. And as of this recording, end of July, I was thinking that our November event this year…it's the 20th cohort of So Now You're a Manager. I was going to have it in person. And just last week, I pulled the plug on that. And I was like, no, we're going to stay virtual a little bit longer because I don't know how to predict what the hell is coming. So again, that sort of stabilizing, right? Like, okay, well, now I know how to do the virtual. That will be the stable choice this year, which is weird to say, but true. CHAD: Yeah. So you just gave a great organic listing of the things that Plucky does, and a big part of that was that in-person So Now You're a Manager training, which, if people remember from the previous episodes, new managers at thoughtbot have attended over the years. It's a really great training for people who become managers. So what was transitioning that to remote like? Because you'd only ever done it in person before, right? JEN: Yeah, totally. The first 11 cohorts were in person, and then we got to 12, and that was supposed to happen in March in Atlanta. We canceled that, and it wasn't until June that we had the 12th, and that was the first virtual one. And to say that I needed to go through stages of grief is probably pretty accurate. [chuckles] My energy in person is so a thing, like a tool of mine and just pulling people together, and making safe space for conversations and all that jazz. So I was like, what the hell is that going to be like on Zoom? And meanwhile, remember I'm watching my first grader go through the shenanigans of Zoom for the end of that year. And I'm like, oh my God, how am I possibly going to get grown-ups on this and paying attention and not being distracted? So a couple of things, I will say number one is I definitely interviewed four or five people in the industry who are good at virtual events, and I tried to get their deepest wisdom about it. The second thing is that I made the cohorts smaller. So in person, we have around 20 to 22 max, and in virtual, we do 10 to 12 max. And so that got a lot smaller. Also, instead of being two days back to back, I broke it into three half days which is just a different ask. And I wasn't sure if people would bite at that. I tried to mimic it after how some people do an MBA on the side. So then they go to work, and they practice the stuff they're learning at the MBA. And so that has been my thought like, okay, you'll be with me basically for a month. We'll have three half days together, usually on a Friday. And then you're practicing in the meantime. So between the times I see you, you're improving your listening skills. You're coming back with anecdotes about hires or tough conversations or whatever. So I won't say that's like a silver lining, but it's just a different beast. And the first day I did it, I mean, I'm telling you, I was on the bathroom floor on my knees like, don't let the internet go out. CHAD: [laughs] JEN: I was so scared. I don't know why looking back. I'm in tech, but I'm not technical. It's my husband who helps me set up a monitor and whatnot. Oh God, I was so nervous. And I just thought, shit, this is the thing I can't problem-solve. If the internet goes out, I don't know what to do, but if someone's upset, I can help them. So it just brought all of my skills in a different environment. And now I feel pretty good about it. I don't know if you found this with your distributed company overall, but I have worked very hard to make sure that it's a blend, of course, this digital experience, but also I use the mail. I use snail mail a lot. So attendees get a packet before we begin. They get a gift at the end, a graduation gift. And yeah, I feel like I've learned a lot about how to have a hand-in-hand experience of digital as well as a physical object that they can touch to make that experience more than just a screen. CHAD: Yeah, I think that's important. How did changing the format, reducing the class size, what business ramifications were there for that? JEN: Well, it's way less money. [chuckles] CHAD: Right. Okay, sorry. JEN: No. Oh my God. I want to be very real about these things, especially for people starting their businesses. It's way less money. And also if you think about it, everybody had already bought tickets to Atlanta, and then they had already started buying tickets to...I can't remember what the next one was going to be, New York, I think. So for a lot of the year, everything was, I'll say, comped, but that's not really what's going on. All of a sudden, the amount of seats that I thought I was selling for the year got reduced in about half, and much of that were already pre-bought tickets. So, as a line item, that was way lower. I also think I got...man, I haven't really said this transparently to anybody before, but I'll say it here. I got really scared about what to charge. Do you charge the same thing virtually than you do in person? And so I lowered it, I would say for a year. I lowered it by a couple of hundred dollars for each ticket because I didn't know what the market wanted. And also, I didn't know, oh God, were businesses closing? Were people getting prof dev budgets? Everybody was frozen for a good while. So I'm lucky that now today I'm back up to the same price that it had been before, but it's not as much income per event. And the other thing I'll say which affects money…but again, I want to be transparent for other folks who think about or currently run businesses. One great thing to come out of some of the social unrest of last year is that we now have an equity scholarship for So Now You're a Manager. So in every cohort, be that virtually or in person, I always reserve a seat for someone who's coming from an underrepresented group, so people apply. And that is something that I very happily said I will eat the cost of that ticket because it's important to me to have different voices in the room. And that has been a total awesome thing this year. That just started in January of 2021, but that's something really great that came out of last year. CHAD: Yeah. What did you find that customers wanted, and did it change over time? Was there an appetite for it to be remote, or was there resistance to it? JEN: I think at first people were overwhelmed and didn't want it. That's why I held it from March until June until I thought people were ready. I can tell you categorically that I've had the lowest percentage of parents attend of all time because, let's be real, who wants another kind of obligation? Or also, parents during this time, especially with young children, were not in that growth space necessarily for work because there was so much to keep afloat. So other than the three half days, I also have this optional hour that I throw in just if people can come; there’s this extra exercise that didn't fit in from the original curriculum. And I don't think I've had one parent, maybe one, come across all those cohorts that have been virtual to that. So the optional stuff I see parents opting out of. That said, I saw more folks who maybe either live alone or maybe have a roommate but who are pre-family or some people won't have families but someone who was socially like, "It was so hard and tiring last year." And that sort of swung back around towards the summer and end of summer. I saw much more interest there because I think people were really lonely. CHAD: Yeah. And I also think, at least for me personally and for thoughtbot, that was when the thinking definitely shifted that this wasn't going to be going away anytime soon. And so we came to terms with that and started to then make much more long-term plans and permanent changes. JEN: I think it was also in the...I want to say like early fall when Twitter announced they'd be remote. Like, they have an office, but they wouldn't oblige anyone to ever come back again. And whenever that decision was made, there were a couple of other companies...At that point, I was still living in the Bay Area, and there were a couple of other companies that made similar suggestions. And so again, to your point, there was a revisioning of what the next phase was like or at least what to expect. And so, I think people weren't holding out to go back to normal. It was like, what's the new normal? CHAD: Yeah. So when we first shut down offices and went remote, we were giving updates every two weeks, and then it changed to every month. And then it would be like, "There's really no change. We're going to give another update in April." And then April was, "We'll give another update in May." And when it came to June, we just said, "We're planning on being in this mode for at least the end of the year. Let's start all acting and make this sustainable." So that is when our thinking changed too. JEN: Did you feel like with your CEOness and business responsibility over there...what kept you grounded for all that thing? Because obviously every time you make that announcement or regardless of whether that's in person or just...I don't even know– retention or whatever it is. It feels like you're just building strategy on freaking quicksand. CHAD: It wasn't easy. You feel responsible for everybody's well-being, both financially and everything else. And so the lack of stability…you want to provide it in an unstable world. You want to say, "Well, at least you shouldn't have to worry about this. Let’s provide…" but it was impossible to do. And I'm much more comfortable with uncertainty. I think there's a spectrum of comfortableness with uncertainty, and I'm pretty far on one end of it, and even I was struggling. Same thing with like I'm very much on the spectrum of not having to worry about anxiety or anything like that, and even I was feeling it. And so I was just like...at one point I said to I think it was Diana or whatever "If I'm feeling this, if I'm getting chest palpitations, [laughs] something's really wrong, and we really need to pay attention to how everybody else is feeling." JEN: Oh, yeah. I even saw that anxiety obviously with coaching clients. There are some clients that when budgets dried up, there was like an initial drop-off, I would say March, April. But then I feel very lucky that the pipeline was still very strong, and I had clients stay with me or join or whatever. You remember as well as anybody not only did we have this health crisis going on, which again we still do but my last class...So third of three of the cohort in May last year was a couple of days after George Floyd's murder. And the responsibility I felt too...like, when all these things were going on last summer, it was like, who freaking cares about anything? It's like these huge things. And you start to say nothing matters. There are only three things that matter in life. And then you kept sort of recycling the drain on that. So here I am going into teaching the third of three classes. And during the third class, I always teach concepts on how to hire, concepts on how to lay someone off and fire someone, which everyone's always very barfy and nervous about. And I try to bring us together and graduate us in what feels like a victorious moment. But that's three days after George Floyd's murder, and everyone is reeling and needing to process. And I remember thinking that morning, I don't know how this is going to go because I was fully willing to rip up the plan and do something different. But at the same time, there's also sometimes they want some structure. Folks want to just show up and take this class and be distracted from what's going on in the world. So we sort of talked about this a few minutes before we started recording but really, what has been fascinating and challenging about continuing to train managers over the last two years is that these very large things are going on in the background: George Floyd's murder, a lot of social unrest in Minneapolis, the election, COVID, all these things. And you can't just put that away and show up to manager training. It is freaking relevant because it is relevant for them. Of course, it's very meta, but all of my students are then going to go back and be responsible for 3, 5, 7 other people in their day-to-day work. So it was really wild, but again, stretching and a challenge that I met with a lot of intention. I don't know if I was always super successful at it, but I thought a lot about it. CHAD: Yeah, I think that was the shift that we saw on our team. And what I've heard from people is that enough is enough in several different categories of things. And like, we just can't keep on doing what we were doing before. It's not working, and it is unacceptable. People are angry too. So it's not just processing. It's anger and wanting to see action, wanting to take action. And yet, doing it in a world where we can't actually be together, I think, made it particularly challenging for some people and for managers to know how to meet their team members where they were. And people process things in different ways too, and people need different things. And at that point, we had hired people who had only ever been remote. So I think the connections that you have with people that you might've worked with in person you can lean on a lot in the beginning. But then you're working with someone or managing someone who you've never met in person. JEN: Yeah. It's a whole new ball game. And I think that the notion of community has gone through the wringer, not only in the worst, it's a rebirth almost. I think the notion of locally what's going on for you and then who can you see? Who can you have a barbecue with? All of those questions of like, who can I be with? Of course, the internet's great, but the internet has some major, major boundaries to it. And people see that at work, and they see that in training. CHAD: One of the things we're struggling with in that category now is there are people who live next to each other because we were historically in offices. And as it becomes more possible to get together with each other, and this is something that, as managers, we're trying to navigate, it actually has a huge potential for exclusion now that we have hired a bunch of people who are anywhere. If the teams that were in-person together but are now working remotely start getting in person again, even if it's just an outing at a park, who's not able to attend that, and how will they feel? And what expectations have we set with them? And then you have just sort of equity and inclusion issues around people we've hired in Brazil since we've gone remote. There's no way for them to come. JEN: Sure. CHAD: It's not fair. And navigating that as a team, I think we've been able to do that, but it hasn't been easy. JEN: I think sometimes the only way to see it is none of it will work. So if none of it will work, then cool. The bar's low. [laughter] Yeah, it's not going to be perfect. And all in person had its issues too. So then, if you just sort of bottom it out and say, cool, cool, cool, there's no one silver bullet answer here. So what that means is yes, as human beings, folks who are possibly able to meet up for coffee will resonate and glow and be psyched to be around some other people. So, how do we say "No," less often to that? Because that's great. That's really something to celebrate. And I'm sure if everybody was in that situation, they would try to take advantage of that too. But then to say, if you're not in that situation, here's another option. And then, every once in a while, we'll mix those options together and have like a rolling menu with it so that nothing gets too static and paralyzed and presumed. And it's in that flow state, which of course, is more fatiguing because you have decision fatigue, and you got to keep making decisions about it. But if you can just say, "Oh, well, we're going to decide that on a week to week basis or on a quarter to quarter." I probably have said this to you before in one of these other podcast conversations, but I just really think that life is a giant science experiment. So if that's true, then you can just say, "Hey, y'all, for Q3, we're going to try this. And at the end of Q3, we'll ask you how that went, and we'll either keep doing it, or we'll totally change it, or we'll increment it." Software people are really good at this because they know that not everything has to go from 2.0 to 3.0. You could go 2.1, 2.2, 2.3. There are incremental builders. So if you can leverage that metaphor even culturally or socially with the makeup of the team and the way you run things, I don't know; I kind of think that's the best you got. CHAD: Yeah. And I think we generally have the idea that we trust people and that we can provide the information. And people will generally use that information to make good decisions that are oriented towards fulfillment. So a really good example when it comes to managers is in an environment where if you're meeting in person with someone, one team member and you're their manager, and you're not meeting in person with another, that could influence negatively the other person's path to promotion or the relationship they have with you and just subtly bias you towards the person that you might be able to meet in person with. And so as a manager, making sure people know that, that that is a thing that can happen is a good way to manage that bias because I think generally, people don't want to let that happen, but they might not even realize it, so they can actively manage it. JEN: Well, it sounds like even in that thought, you are gently nudging people back towards intention and back towards just not sleepwalking through their work, that this is important for us, not only in the distance conversation here but also obviously for race, and for gender and for all kinds of different ways that humans are. We will never get it 100% right and yet intention, and taking a beat, and taking a breath before you move into conversations about promotions or whatever will help remind you hang on a second, remember there's invisible stuff inevitably going on based on who I am and where I came from. How do I make sure things are fair today? Or whatever the reminder needs to be. It sounds like that's...I don't know. It's good that you have that front of mind. CHAD: So that's one example of remote management. How much of before the pandemic were people who were coming and attending the workshops? Were they managing people remotely? And how much of your curriculum was specific to that, if any? JEN: My gut says maybe about a third were remote managers. They are definitely with bigger companies that I was seeing that. The small agencies based in Pittsburgh, you know, Austin, those places were pretty localized. But so what you get with a bigger company is also a bit more infrastructure that supports some of these cultural conversations. And we had it as part of the curriculum, but it wasn't very big, and maybe I would sort of be intentional. There are breakout groups and stuff like that. And I might think I'm going to pair these two together for their practice one-on-one because I know they're both remote managers. I am very intentional about a lot of the pairings and all that stuff, and so I would be thoughtful in that way. But now, on some level, in all these virtual workshops, everybody has an equal footing now. So everybody's kind of screwed, and everybody's also making it work. So that has been a very interesting thing to see. And I always laugh at this example, a woman who came early on, maybe like the eighth or ninth cohort, and she's a remote manager. And she would say, "Well, I don't have a water cooler. I don't have, like, I'm walking down the hall sensing somebody’s upset or anything." But she would say, "This is going to sound weird, but I keep an eye on how fast they emoji something." So if you have a person who...You know this person in Slack. They're always on Slack, always so supportive, funny, have something to say, a little thumbs-up emoji, or whatever. But if one day they're at work for sure and they haven't said anything about something, she would learn to read the tea leaves like that and check-in. And I just thought that was so clever and very creative. And what she's alluding to is this level three listening that I teach, which is gut or instinct or intuition. And what she was tracking was basically a change in behavior. And that's pretty much what we're tracking when we're in the office too. There could be many reasons why somebody doesn't emoji something right away. Maybe your daughter just ran into the room. Maybe there's a doorbell. There are a million things. But at the same time, not to be too precious about it but to casually track that at least instinctively. She was doing a good job of meeting the moment as best she could. CHAD: Are there other ways in which what you've been doing has changed over the last year? What are managers concerned about or challenged by? JEN: Yeah. First of all, I always had name tags that allowed for pronouns. But this is now certainly part of the curriculum. When we start, I give some social norms and then some tech norms. And so I make the suggestion that in Zoom, after your name, you put your pronouns. And it's not a huge chunk because I really don't feel like I am the best to teach this, but I've added in a DEI component, diversity, equity, inclusion component. And we have some folks in the alumni community who are DEI consultants, so that's great. I always give them shout-outs and refer over if people are looking for that. I've noticed that people are...I'll say careful, but what I mean by careful is that they are aware of all of the stuff we're talking about, like race and social stuff. Depending on where your office was in the country, the election was sometimes really hard. I think about companies in Ohio or Pennsylvania or swing states where it was not obvious that everybody in the office was on the same page about that. And the way that that stuff comes up and is like this piece of baggage in the room that prevents literally like a website being made. We want to think no, that shouldn't enter. That's not relevant here. And yet people are careful about both trying to say, "Listen, bring who you are. You're accepted here." And also like, well, sometimes what you're suggesting you believe about the world is harmful. The whole Basecamp thing is a good example of that. And so I found the managers who come to my training to just be open to not only sharing their experiences with that but looking very much for some guidance on that from their peers and then from me. CHAD: That's sort of what I was saying about people felt like you needed to be changing the way that you were approaching things. It wasn't okay anymore for most people to say, "We shouldn't be having this conversation. It's not a work-related conversation." It affects people's work and their ability to work. It is a work issue. And you can't simply put everything aside. That's one angle of it, but we're not all equipped. We're not all educated. We're not all ready to be able to do that as managers. JEN: Totally. But with the amount of shit that we have had to handle for the last two years, short of somebody who's a social worker/priest, I don't know who was ready. I feel like a lot of what we're talking about is so resonant for me because all of this is so hard. And if you are alone doing hard things, it's impossible. But the reason that I run the manager trainings the way I do and the reason that I hold onto them after and I put them in a Slack community, they're now alumni of the program. And it's active; it depends on the day. But people have hard questions that they're wrestling with. People have jobs that they're promoting, that they're trying to get people to apply to. It's this active community that goes on afterwards. Because, honestly, Chad, I feel like a big input into me creating So You're Now a Manager and the community around it was my experience becoming a parent. I was one of the first ones of all my friends. I was the first one of my siblings, and my son was the first grandchild on both sides. And I was like, this is so lonely. All my friends are going out in Brooklyn for dinner. And I was 31. It's not like I was very young or anything, but that's New York. And so I had a moms’ group. And man, that moms’ group got me through those early days because we could all laugh at how hard it was. We could cry together. And when I looked at the transition that people go through from IC, individual contributor, to manager or some level of leadership, you get responsibility. You have to play the messenger sometimes, something you're not totally down with. You have sometimes competition with peers. You have to manage up sometimes. And then you have these people who come to you with requests: I want a new career path. I want more money. I want a different title. And the slog of that is very reminiscent, on some level, of parenting to me. So I thought, well, this is not going to be like, here's your book. Good luck being a manager, although books could be helpful. For me, it seemed like there was at least a certain template of a person in the world who could use community too. So I always say you'll be with me for two days or a month if it's virtual. But I can't possibly teach you everything you'll encounter. That said, we can get some critical skills under your belt. And then you can just continue to riff with this peer network. And that has been a very, I would say, unique thing about the manager training I run and something that is so fulfilling to me. I have a very tiny business. Those are, in weird ways, kind of my colleagues, the funny jokes they tell or those personalities. That was another thing that we had to let go of. In 2020, I was going to have the first reunion. CHAD: Oh yeah. We actually talked about that in the previous episode as an idea. JEN: Heartbreaking. Yeah, it was called Encore. Basically, it was a follow-up and open to anybody that has already taken SNYAM, So Now You're a Manager. I had people who pitched talks, and we had selected them. And yeah, we had to pull the plug on that. So my hope is that next year we can do that. And now we've got almost...actually; I think we just hit 300 people, so maybe 50 will come, I don't know. We'll see. But I like the idea of providing a space for these folks who were new managers when I knew them and when they came through me but have gained some skills themselves and could become thought leaders in this management space. And whenever the world is ready for it, I'm excited to put that together. CHAD: Yeah, that's awesome. That sense of community is one thing I've struggled with, to be honest. Because having done this for 18 years, there aren't many people who worked at the company that work there now anymore. [chuckles] We've grown too. So I no longer have the close personal relationship that I had with most people at the company before or close work relationships. And combined with as we've grown, it's harder...you have to be more of a leader. You have to put yourself aside. It's harder to always be a servant to others. And then I found that especially difficult last year. And it's part of why I needed to not be CEO anymore and to transition to the COO role. Because I couldn't be in a position where everyone was always looking to me continually to make...and as distributed as we are, one of our values is self-management. But continually always looking to me to be the one who always has an answer, who is the stable one, I needed a break from that. So it's been nice, the transition. JEN: I was going to say is it better? CHAD: [chuckles] So it's a little bit different than I expected. So what happened was we made that change. We made other changes, and that was all going well. And then, in February, the largest vaccine scheduling provider in the United States came to us and needed help scaling the infrastructure and all that stuff. JEN: Oh my God. That's exciting. CHAD: And so I, along with a crack team of other experienced thoughtboters, went and spent all of our time focused on that. It has pros and cons, which is right as I was transitioning into a new role; I completely got pulled away and started working full-time with that client for a very important cause, which is the reason why we did it and decided it was worth it. The silver lining is it put everyone else in a position where we went very quickly from Chad's no longer the CEO to Chad's not here right now. [chuckles] And that was unexpected. But I think that it had downsides, but it had upsides too in terms of really being in a position where people could come into their own, into their new roles and sort of a forcing function for some of the changes that we needed to make. JEN: You know, I'll give you major props on that, Chad. Because 18 years and especially, I think this about a lot of things, but especially business here, people get stuck. They really do. They get stuck, especially founders, CEOs. They don't know how to get out of something if they're tired. And there are not a lot of models for what that could look like. The biggest disservice someone could make to leading a company would be to not really be feeling it because that shit trickles down. And if you're tired or if it's not your thing anymore, really, the biggest gift you can give is to go get aligned somewhere else and then hand over the reins to what I keep thinking of as the next generation. I coach a lot of people, or I work with a lot of people who are in the middle, let's say, so they're not C-suite, and they're not newest managers, but they're sort of senior there. They're totally ready to go. I can't overstate that. [chuckles] Will they mess stuff up? Sure. So did you. Will they have questions? Absolutely. But the next generation of every company it's the most strategic thing that a CEO could do is to think, what happens if I'm not here? That allows you to take a freaking vacation, like take a month off. Or that allows you to meet such a huge civic call, which you're describing here, and step away. Or again, God forbid something happened, and you get very sick; it allows the company to be bigger than yourself. So I just commend you on even having the courage to step towards COO and then obviously also kind of redirect as needed this year. But I hope that if there are other CEOs listening or folks in the C-suite who are wiped, this is my gentle nudge to them to hand over the reins at some point. Because you'll get a paycheck, I’m sure you can figure that. CHAD: [chuckles] Being wiped was one small part of it. And I had Diana on who's the new CEO, and we talked about this. We had grown to a certain point. Also, to toot my own horn, I had done a really good job of building a team of managing directors who were really good at what they were doing. And I was no longer the best manager for them. I was no longer what they needed in order to continue to grow. I could do it, but I wasn't the best person for it. So that was the overriding reason to make the change, and being tired and needing to not always be the one that everyone was looking to was certainly a part of it. But yeah, it's been good. JEN: Yeah. I figured we would get there at some point, but we talked a little bit earlier about how I have this new product coming out in September. So the product is called Manager Weeklies, and it's basically...I got to figure out the exact noun for this. I guess this is the marketing moment. [chuckles] But it's basically a small notebook. The way I think of it is it helps you take a deep breath before your week starts. And so I'm not messing with your to-do lists. Everybody has different versions of that, Trello or wherever the heck you keep it. But before you start the week, it is so important to wonder where's my energy at? What's my perspective? What are the couple of priorities? What am I blocking? Just a couple of invitation questions there. And then the idea is that you then can do this on whatever, a Sunday night or Monday morning. And then the rest of the week has, I feel like I've said intention 50 times in this conversation but has intention in it. You can decline those three meetings because they're not the highest priority. You can make some space to actually do the work that comes out of the meetings that you're in. And what I have watched over the last maybe three years are my coaching clients who get themselves together at the beginning of the week who have some sort of practice about setting things up in a good way are the most successful. They get the promotions because they look like they know what they're doing because they do. So anyway, it's called Manager Weeklies. So it's a small notebook. Each notebook is for a quarter. And then, because I'm a coach, I also filled it with other good stuff. Like at the end, there are all kinds of prompts for ways to give praise to people on your team, ways to give feedback, ways to handle conflict, ways to say, "Yes, no, maybe." And then there's a Work Wheel tool at the very end. And so my hope is that people who just feel like they show up on a Monday already behind that they would find some help with that intention. And I feel like what you're saying is that self-awareness component that came through for you, Chad, to say, I'm not the best at this, and also, I'm a little fatigued and so, therefore, deep breath. Here's the strategy going forward. It wasn't reactive, but there was some thought behind it. And so we'll see this fall people get a chance to try that out. CHAD: That's awesome. I feel like it's getting back to your roots but also building on it. So for people who don't know, the Plucky Cards were actually the first way that I was introduced to you was someone showing me a pack of those cards. So, where can people find out more about that? JEN: The best way for people to find any information is just to subscribe to the newsletter. I send it once a month. It's usually a reflection on work, life, something going on there. So if you go to beplucky.com/newsletter, then you'll be first in the know. What's very funny, Chad, is I have a former coaching client who holds the record now. He was the first one to buy the first pack of cards. He was the first one to buy the second pack of cards. [laughs] And he was also the first one to do this Small Group ticket that I recently did as a little offshoot of Plucky. So anyway, in my mind, I always laugh, and I wonder, I wonder if he's going to grab the first pack of Manager Weeklies this fall. But you're right. They certainly plug and play with the cards very well where there's even space in the weekly template to say, what's the one-on-one topic for the week? So it could be a card that you pull, and you use, or it could just be something else going on in the world that you want to bring to all the one-on-ones. But I feel like there are a lot of things I'm not great at in the world, but the things I am good at are people. And then I listen to people over and over again through all of these experiences. And I try to hear what else do they need? What weird little thing can I invent that could help them with some of these things that they struggle with? And I'm also just really mindful of the fact that not everybody has the budget for coaching or for manager training. And I would love for Plucky to be a brand that even if you work for a nonprofit or if you don't have the money to pay for some of those more expensive things that you would have 35 bucks for a pack of cards or 20 bucks or whatever the pricing will be for the notebooks and that you can engage with my brand, even if you're not very wealthy. And I feel like as a person who works and serves an industry like tech, that is always really a priority for me to not only coach or work with the people with the most money. CHAD: Yeah. If I remember right, you designed the cards, right? JEN: Oh my God, I wish. No. CHAD: Oh, okay. JEN: For the first pack of cards I worked with, I don't know if you know him, Greg Storey. CHAD: Yeah. JEN: He's great. Greg Storey did my first deck of cards, and then he moved on, and he's doing other interesting things with his career. So I have a designer who helped me with the second deck of cards called the Manager Pack. So that's questions for managers of managers to bring to one-on-ones, and then the Manager Weeklies are coming out. I've been collaborating with a woman who runs a design little shop called YupGup in Delaware. So her name is Joni. So it is so wild, Chad. I wish that I had any design sense. But it's like, I make these things which look like a terrible PowerPoint. I'm like, here, then there will be a bullet. And then I give it to a designer like Joni at YupGup, and all of a sudden, she has a logo. And then she has some emojis and colors. And I'm like, this is how I felt when I was pregnant, and someone showed me a sonogram, and I was like, (gasps) there's a baby in there. CHAD: [laughs] JEN: This is how I felt when she showed me them, and it was so exciting. And I will never be good enough to even be talented at all to make these things myself. But I hold the idea, and then I find someone who wants to help me make that in the world. It's just magical. That is so fun for me. And so I just ordered them. Actually, I ordered 1,000 of them about three hours ago. And so they'll come in August, and I just know it will be very surreal when I open the box and look at them and think about how many people in the world and pens in the world will be used to set intention, to set up people's weeks and hopefully, make a softer and more fair and thoughtful place to work. CHAD: And one of the things I love about your business and products is that you know you're having an impact beyond that 1,000 notebooks that you put out in the world because each of those people manages 3, 4, 6, 7 people. And if you can make work better for those people, then you have a 7,000-person impact. JEN: Yeah. And it's funny you say that because I think that recently...I keep saying I'm about to go away for a month or just be out of work for a month as a break after this whole COVID time. Since starting Plucky eight years ago, I didn't really have a model. I am not a traditional business. And even though many people kept saying, "When are you going to hire? When are you going to build the team? When are you going to do all of that?" That is not the shape of Plucky medium-term or long-term. I'm not going to be a coach factory. I certainly could, but then I'd end up super burned out and not liking my job. And then I'd have a sad company, and it would be bad. So I don't want to do that. CHAD: And that's literally the opposite of Plucky. JEN: Right. I mean, in the name, right? So, where I have landed as a model is to look at what artists do. And you would never take an artist...I really like Lisa Congdon in Portland. She's a cool, cool artist. And I've heard her speak, and I like her a lot. And what would Lisa Congdon's team look like? She sure isn't hiring other artists to do the work that she's over-signed up for. You get Lisa. And so she has a shop, and then she has partnerships where she teaches at different universities. And as I move into the ninth year here, I'm thinking a lot about what's standing between me and Plucky's shape and what an artist like Lisa Congdon has going on? And honestly, fully transparently, I think it's that I need to own that Plucky is me. And it's so messy in marketing. Do you use the royal 'we'? We at Plucky? Who is we? And I think that there's some good growth in front of me this fall and next year to say, yeah, I'm Jen, and I run a company called Plucky. And I'm putting this stuff out in the world, and I hope to have ripple effects. And it won't be by hiring 100 people. It'll be just like you described, selling things to X people, and then those people's reports, those ripples will follow down. And I'm really grateful to have found myself in this place because I love coming to work every day. CHAD: Awesome. Well, even though you love coming to work every day, also enjoy your vacation. JEN: Oh my God. Thank you. CHAD: And your time off and your time to reflect. JEN: Yes, thank you so much. CHAD: You already mentioned the website, but again, mention that, and then are there other places that people can follow along or get in touch with you? JEN: Yes, sure. So the newsletter, like I said, is beplucky.com/newsletter. On Twitter, you can look at @BePlucky. I'm on LinkedIn, too, obviously for Plucky. And then I have basically a behind-the-scenes account on Instagram because it was too annoying...Like, what do you take pictures of, Chad, when you're a coach? You can't take pictures of confidential conversations. CHAD: [laughs] JEN: So Instagram, I was like, I don't know what to do with this anymore. So anyway, I just have a behind-the-scenes one over there, which is called bepluckster because somebody else had it. So yeah, so all those ways. And also, I just generally say that if you're a person listening to this podcast and you just wanted to say something to me or ask a question, you should always just email me. It's just hello@beplucky.com. I love just hearing from people. And I might not be able to send you a three-page essay back, but I really love just interacting. And if something moved you or made you think about something, whether that was something I said or Chad, you can always just shoot me a note and tell me what you're thinking. I am not precious about that. CHAD: Awesome. Likewise. So you can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. Thanks for joining us, Jen. JEN: Thank you. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.Special Guest: Jen Dary.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Chad and Lindsey talk about how the pandemic has changed "normal" remote work and how thoughtbot has dealt with the transition from being majoritively in-person to fully remote, plus the impact it's had on both employees and clients. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. LINDSEY: And I’m your other host, Lindsey Christensen. We’re back. Chad, I've only seen you pixelated for over a year now. CHAD: I know. LINDSEY: Can you believe it? CHAD: It's hard to believe. I haven't seen anybody that I work with [laughs] not pixelated for over a year now. LINDSEY: It seems normal now. CHAD: Yeah, it seems normal, except when you think about it, and you realize how long it's been. We're going to talk about remote work today, and I think that that's something to keep in mind, which is what we're doing now isn't normal remote work. We can make the best of it and that kind of thing, but it's obviously different than normal remote work when you can actually have a social life outside of work and meet people and get together in person to kick off new projects or to be like, “Let's have a retreat or whatever.” So right off the top, we should acknowledge that we're not in this normal period, and this isn't necessarily normal remote work. LINDSEY: Right. Which is a good thing, I guess, or the optimist in me says remote work can be way better than it is right now because this is quarantining work. [chuckles] CHAD: Right. So for those who don't know, thoughtbot made the decision to go remote-first work from anywhere. And we touched on it in the previous two episodes a little bit, and that's what we're going to be talking about today. And I think that that's one of the things that made us confident in the direction was that things aren't great now, but they're certainly not bad. And the majority of the team felt good about what was happening now, even given all of the downsides. It gave us the confidence to look ahead and say, “Can this be even better, and will it be okay?” And I think that's part of what gave us the confidence to move forward. LINDSEY: I saw this interesting stat, and this was actually from a while ago, last July 2020. Gartner did a survey of company leaders, and 80% plan to allow employees to work remotely, at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow people to work full-time from home, which is even a bigger percentage than I anticipated. But I think it speaks to the major change that everyone's seeing. We've all learned that remote work can work. I saw another stat that was, I think, no companies are reporting a reduction in productivity because of remote work, and in 27% of cases, companies feel like they're being even more productive. CHAD: We didn't not do this before because we didn't think it would be productive on a day-to-day basis or that we didn't believe in the ability to work remotely working. There were a couple of important points that caused us to choose the direction we did; the first one being we went through a period of time where we were a hybrid remote or about half the team was remote, and the other half was working in an office in Boston. And it felt hard and mediocre and something we couldn't -- It wasn't worth the amount of effort we would need to invest in making that work well. It just didn't seem worth it. And so we made the decision to -- And I think this is the way thoughtbot works like we've got to make intentional decisions in a lot of things that we do and half measures don't really satisfy us over the long-term. And so there was this feeling back then of we either need to decide to go completely remote, or we need to all be in person. And because we work locally with clients, that pushed us in the direction of well, we really like working with local clients face-to-face. We like how that feels, and it feels like something that's going to be enjoyable and fulfilling, and sustainable over the long term. So let's commit to that. And I think that that's one of the reasons why we've been successful in this transition is because, at the same time, we no longer had the client constraints of clients asking us to be in person with them or wanting to work with them in person, that was just completely off the table. LINDSEY: That's interesting. I think I hadn't really fully thought about that element which was need or perceived need from the client to be side-by-side with us. CHAD: Yeah. Once that was off the table, it allowed us to be freed up to make an independent decision, probably more confident in that decision because going through a period where we could show clients that it could work, I'm more confident now that when clients can be in person again, that they will be more open to working with us remotely. And I'm sure some portion of them won't be, but we'll find other clients in that time period. [laughter] LINDSEY: I think another thing that helped us in that transition was we weren't fully remote, but we were remote in a lot of regards. So we had six different studios around the world who collaborated together, worked on the same projects and the same teams. And we had a really good starting point for how we collaborated online, whether that's in actual video meetings or doing asynchronous work or project management all the way through to client work. Not everyone was in the city of the client that they were collaborating with. CHAD: Yeah. And all of the corporate team, the operations, marketing, all that stuff was already really a distributed team. It was primarily the design and development that fell back on being in person the most often. LINDSEY: And I would say we also had a pretty flexible work from home policy too. So if folks felt like they were going to be more productive from home a certain day or were having a delivery or whatever those life things are, we trust that they know what's best for them and best for the client and allow folks to make decisions about where they're working. CHAD: The way that we worded it before was that temporary remote working was always okay. And that could be I'm going somewhere for two months; even that was okay. And the opposite of that is what we said wasn't okay, which wasn’t permanently remote. And the big difference now is that we said permanently remote is okay. And walking back through the transition, this was something that has been an ongoing conversation at thoughtbot for a while. It was pretty early on in the pandemic that we said that people needed to start to move out of the places that we had studios. And I think that that was the first important step that we took as a company to make sure that we were supporting everybody in what they needed to do for life reasons saying, “If you need to move outside of a place where you would normally be based, do it. We'll continue to support that.” And then about 20 people, [laughs] a little less than 100 moved over the course of the next six months or so. And once that happened, that's a pretty significant portion of the team no longer being based where we have offices, and that sort of sealed the deal. LINDSEY: I didn't know that number. CHAD: I think it's less than 20. I think it's like 17 or something like that. LINDSEY: So it probably works out to about 20% moved to where there weren't offices. And do you have an idea how far spread out everyone is now? CHAD: I think most people who moved significantly moved to be closer to family or back where they were originally from. I think that was the driving factor. So it's places like Texas, different parts of Texas, Arizona, that kind of thing. And then people bought houses to get out of the city and that kind of thing as well, particularly New York City was -- I think a lot of the people in New York City are the ones who moved as well. LINDSEY: So, how would you describe our remote structure now? CHAD: I think there are a couple of important things like, we're specifically calling it work from anywhere, not work from home. Obviously, we all need to be in our homes now, but long-term, there's no reason why if the home isn't comfortable for somebody that they will work somewhere else, and anywhere also means geography. And we're not even completely shutting the door on eventually having small co-working spaces or small offices where people can get together and work in person. It's just not what we have right now and not what we're specifically planning on in the short term. So I think that's the base level when I think about the important parts of the structure is what are we actually saying, or what are we actually doing? And then the next important aspect we took into account was okay; one of the things that influenced the way that we were working before, which was a local team working with primarily other people in your office was it's pretty annoying, and it does affect productivity to be waiting significantly across time zones for people that you're supposed to be collaborating with. And so we ended up splitting the company by time zone into what we’re calling Launch Pad 1 and Launch Pad 2. And Launch Pad 1 is all of the Americas, and Launch Pad 2 two is Europe, Middle East, and Africa. It's interesting because that's actually only about three maybe four times zones different at the extremes. All of the Americas, when you do it out, it's a lot of time zones. It's ten timezones, but the reality is we don't have anybody in Hawaii or Alaska yet, so we're okay with that.[chuckles] But it's something that may need to be revisited in the future if we really start to hire people remotely in those extremes of the time zone. LINDSEY: So the geographies are really time zone-based, which is an interesting note. And then I'm sure some folks are also interested in logistics, especially now that you're heading up operations. What does that mean, or what are the big hurdles when you do have people spread across countries, let alone states? CHAD: So let's break it down in terms of employment stuff, and then we'll talk about operations like how we run things. We're not leading the charge in this. Other companies have done it before. And so we're taking a lot of cues from companies like GitLab and Buffer about how they do things. We've had international employees for a little while off, and on or international team members, I should say. And what we've historically leaned on for that is having them as independent contractors. And it's pretty common for them to create their own company that they're then using, and they're working within, and they're paying local taxes, and they're invoicing us for the time. And in a lot of countries, their laws are conducive to that. But strictly speaking, it's not okay to do that in every country. And if you were to get audited and someone were to look at the relationship you have with that person and their laws are similar to the U.S., they might declare that person an employee, and you're responsible for the taxes and everything, not them. Operating at the size we are, to be perfectly honest, at the size, we are with a handful of people, it’s a gray area. Like, some places it's okay, some places it's not quite okay, but it's only a handful of people and everything. You can get away with that without doing a lot of research into each specific country, whether it's okay or not, particularly if you make it the responsibility of the people, and you set up contractor agreements, and you set things up that way. So that's a pretty common way of operating. But as you start to grow and formalize it more and the numbers of people that you're working with as international contractors increases, the pressure is going to mount to say, “We have to get out of this gray area; otherwise, some country or someone could get in trouble,” not even us, but potentially the team member. If they were to get audited and it's not quite up to snuff, they could be held for some employment taxes or something like that. So we want to avoid that. We don't want to create a burden on people. And so there's really two ways of going about it; one is to create local entities in each of the countries where you want to hire somebody. So you create your own local company. That company employs them and pays the local taxes and employment taxes, and all that stuff and everything is fully set up and official, and we've done that before. We did that in Sweden when we had the studio in Stockholm, and that's how we work in the UK. The overhead of doing that is really high, especially --It’s okay when we were in Sweden and the UK and the U.S. But as we look ahead and we say, “We're going to have ten then maybe 20 in different countries,” the overhead of that is really high. So the alternative is to work with a company that does that for you. So there are companies they're called PEOs professional employment organizations or international PEOs. And what they do is they create companies in all of the countries that they want to operate in, and then they employ the people as real full employees there. And they do all the books, and they pay all the taxes and everything. And they make sure that everything is done correctly for each individual country. And then they invoice you for the employee's salary, the taxes, and then an administration fee. And it's typically on the order of $250 to $600 a month per person. And so that's the direction we're going to go in as we expand this and we do it. That's the direction we'll go in because we've been through what it's like to create that overhead of the individual entities in each country. And it might make sense if we were saying we're going to open an office or hire significantly in this one country and build a whole team of 20 people in one country, but that's not what we were planning on doing. We may only have one or two people in each of the countries that we end up hiring someone in. So it doesn't make sense to have that overhead. And there are a few different companies out there, and not to plug them, we're not using them yet, but the interesting one that's on my radar is remote.com which was started by the person at GitLab that did this all for them and learned a ton about it and then left GitLab and started remote.com as a way to make that more accessible and modern for other companies. A lot of the other companies that do this tend to be very large, and they've been around for a long time, which typically means things aren't really done online so much; it's a lot of paper. And remote.com it's a website you sign up for. You could just enter the people in, and things happen automatically. And so that's why that's on my radar. LINDSEY: They're probably getting a lot of business these days. CHAD: Yes. And they have a lot of countries that they're expanding to over the next year or so. LINDSEY: How many countries do we have people in now? CHAD: That's a good question. I don't know [laughs] United States, UK, and Uruguay right now. I think those are the only ones. But we have two people who are moving, one to Canada, one to Austria. So those are the next two that are on the horizon. And we're actively hiring, so we just opened a bunch of positions. And I know that a lot of people applying to those positions are from places like Brazil, other places in South and Latin America, and potentially Canada as well. LINDSEY: Cool. Oh, we also got some great audience questions for this episode, so thanks to everyone who submitted. One of the questions was, when will you start hiring Canadians? CHAD: We're doing it now. [chuckles] All the positions on thoughtbot are at thoughtbot.com/jobs. They're all listed as remotely. They're segmented by Americas versus Launch Pad 2, which is Europe, Middle East, and Africa. LINDSEY: So, continuing on the hiring conversation, obviously, the hiring process itself has to be modified for the remote life. I'm not personally currently hiring, but I see the activity. And I think it seems like right now we've got a good handle on it but are also in the process of figuring out what works best and how to optimize it. Because we were on a hiring freeze for a while, and now it's opening back up, and we're trying to figure out how -- Honestly, it seems like the biggest question is how do we replicate that in-office cultural experience, social experience in the online format? CHAD: Yeah. Up until the office visit portion, the majority of our hiring process was already remote. So the non-technical interview was primarily done remotely. The technical interview was primarily done remotely. But at the final stage of that process, we would bring people into the office for the full day to pair with one person in the morning for developers, pair with another person in the afternoon, have lunch with the team. For designers, it was getting a design challenge and working with the team throughout the course of the day in a conference room. And so replicating both the working together aspects and the social aspects of that office visit day is important to us, and that's where the tricky part has been. The working together part is the easier part of it, I think we found because we're all working remotely anyway. So we just replicate that; it’s pairing remotely, and it's doing the design challenge in collaboration remotely. It's the social aspects that are harder. And part of it is is we're not necessarily getting everybody together on a regular basis every day and so creating a time for everybody to come together just because we have a candidate visiting and do something that's not artificial, together, was a little bit tricky to find. LINDSEY: Everyone act natural and social at 2:00 p.m. [chuckles] CHAD: Right. Go. [chuckles] And then to insert someone into that mix who doesn't know anybody on the call and is interviewing, it's a high level of awkwardness for the candidate as well. So what we've found has worked best is to find something that we are doing already and piggyback on top of that. So in the case of the UK, they were already getting together where everyone shares something that they're working on. They were already doing that on a regular basis. Or someone would say, “Let's have a discussion about this,” we were already doing that. So just making sure that that gets scheduled for when there is going to be a candidate and then prepping them and asking them to prepare something to share as well. And then, when it came time to do a different team, I encouraged them, “Don't just do what they're doing because they were already doing this. If you try to do it, and it’s something you're not doing already, it might turn out to be even more awkward. Try to find something that you're doing already and piggyback off of that.” And some teams were brand new, and they didn't have anything that they were doing already. And so that's the one thing we talked about in the last episode. But at the same time as going remote, we also, instead of being small teams based on geography, we reorganized to be based on the kinds of projects that we work on. And so Boost, for example, was an entirely new team of people that didn't necessarily have those norms and those regular events happening. And so they needed to create something that they could use not only to bring the team together but that that hiring process could piggyback on for that final stage. I think mostly it's gone well. I think everyone knows that it's a little awkward, so I think everybody gives it the benefit of the doubt. I couldn't imagine...well, I guess I can imagine it. But I wouldn't necessarily want to arrive at a standpoint where we start hiring people without the opportunity for the whole team that they're going to be working with to get to know them a little bit but also to provide their feedback but also for the candidate. When you join a new company, you want to know what it's like to work there. You want to know that you want to work with the people. You want to flush out any red flags. And I don't think we have any red flags. And so I'd rather that be out there and that kind of thing so that people can experience as much as possible what it's really going to be like to work at thoughtbot and who you're going to be working with. LINDSEY: So we have another audience question, and you can let me know if you actually want to answer this or not. How will you handle compensation? Will it be the same for everyone across the globe or country-specific, et cetera? CHAD: I can totally answer this. LINDSEY: You want to get into it? Let's do it. CHAD: I realize I'm answering in long-winded ways, but I think the context is important in these things. So the way things worked historically at thoughtbot was based on your geography, but that made sense because the clients were based on geography, and each of the locations was working with local clients. And so, the economy of the different studios was entirely different from one another. So the studio in Raleigh-Durham worked with clients there primarily, and that is very different than Manhattan, New York, and what people understand a local team costs and what they're willing to pay and that kind of thing. And so there was a natural one-to-one correlation between the studio you worked in and the economics of how the business of that studio worked. And so the salaries and the economics of the whole expenses of the studio were based on that local thing. And so that's the way it worked previously. And then we would always do reviews within that group of people to make sure that there was fairness in pay from an equity perspective between people with the same level of experience and not for other factors like gender or anything like that, so equity in pay is really important to us. And so every compensation thing goes through that review process. And then we do an annual salary review every year where we re-review everything for equity, and we review an increase for economics and performance, and that happens in April. So when we went remote, we didn't change anything. And historically, what would have happened if you lived in one place and you moved to another studio with different economics? Your salary might change because you needed to be sustainable within that studio. And you would find that out in advance, and it would factor into whether you want to do it or not. So when we went remote, and people started moving, what we did was we reminded people that traditionally, that might have an impact, but you're not moving to where a new studio is. We don't know how things are going to be in the future, just that we'll do the salary review in April. So coming up to the salary review, we started looking at the way that we were going to do it. We went through a little bit of a change when we originally started the process; like I said, we're taking cues from other people, and one of those companies is GitLab. And what GitLab talks about is cost of market. And so that's what we had planned on doing so rather than paying people cost of living, cost of market is the idea of what would your competitive salary be based on where you live? And that includes both remote and local employers, what you can command, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the same everywhere based on where you live. And so that was the direction we started to go down. It's not where we ultimately ended up. Ultimately, we ended up creating within the United States, based on the position you have, a salary range, and that is the same salary range across the whole United States with a couple of exceptions, and I’ll mention what that is. So if you're a developer, or if you're a senior developer, or you're a team lead across the whole United States, you'll fall within this range based on your performance, and I'm happy with that. We were never philosophically opposed to doing that. And I'm pretty cool with the fact that we got there in the course of doing the review. So the exception to that is we financially couldn't set the level of that salary at a city like San Francisco or New York. If we were bringing everybody up to that level at the company, it would be very difficult for us to be profitable. And so we set the tiers based on the next tier down of cities in the U.S., so it's cities like Boston and Austin are where we took the bands from. We have team members who live in San Francisco and New York, and that, strictly speaking, would have meant a salary reduction for the people who live there. And we didn't want to create hardship on people that didn't know that we were going to do that. When they decided where to live, it would create hardship on people. And so, we took a look at New York and San Francisco, and we created another tier that is based on those markets. And then, between those two tiers, what we're looking at is, are these salaries based on the cost of living equitable? So does someone who was working at thoughtbot in New York effectively earn the same amount of money as someone on the other tier who's living anywhere else? And if you actually look at that, the interesting thing is there are more people at thoughtbot now who are at the main tier who live in even lower cost of living places. And so they're actually coming out sort of it's more favorable, which is I'd rather be in that position because I think over time, more and more people will become more and more distributed, and people will live in different places with different cost structures. Any follow-up questions or thoughts on all that? LINDSEY: For me, I'm glad I didn't have to decide it. [laughter] It's really complicated because I see there's logic to different approaches. Nothing is an obviously bad decision. The reality is we do live in a world where economics of location vary greatly. But at the same time, what does the future of work and equity look like? CHAD: Everything I just said was U.S.-centric. So we actually don't have a set thing that we're doing for countries outside of the U.S. We're going to evolve that based on what we learn over the next few months as we hire people. There are really two tracks or two options in front of us: the first one is to establish country rates, and the second one is to establish an outside of the U.S. tier like that is maybe the same or slightly below that other tier that we're already talking about, the main tier that everybody in the U.S. is on. And so we'll see what we learn over the course of that. The reason why we probably won't end up there is because Canada is very different than Uruguay, for example. And so establishing one rate that works everywhere -- There are two important things that are our guiding principles here; the first is people should be paid equitably and fairly for the work that they do. At thoughtbot, there's not really an ulterior motive. We don't have outside investors. We're just people who work at the company trying to create the company that works on our behalf as people who work here. That's the primary motivating factor is to be fair and to pay people as much as we can, and then the second thing is while being sustainable. So we also don't have outside investors. We don't have a huge bank role, and we have to operate profitably. We’re not a VC-backed company that doesn't need to operate profitably. And so that's the second guiding philosophy is we've got to make sure that we operate profitably. And if we create a tier, creating a tier that works to meet both of those things, pay people fairly and be sustainable, we've got to set those numbers right because it's pretty easy to hire a bunch of people in an expensive place and set the tier too high and then not be sustainable. So we'll learn over the next six months. LINDSEY: So switching gears a little bit, we got a few questions from folks who are curious how we are actually doing the remote collaboration with clients because that's obviously something core to what we do that we're really passionate about and I think especially on the design side too. So someone's like, “How, are you doing things you used to do on whiteboards or on the walls?” The sprint comes to mind with the sticky notes all over the different walls. CHAD: Well, I've been talking a lot. Do you want to start this one? [chuckles] LINDSEY: Yeah. It's funny; I’ve said this before on the show, but I feel like going remote has also almost made our meetings more equitable. We had a lot of especially corporate folks in the Boston team who would sit in a room, and then we'd have a few folks from our different studios calling in remotely. And there is a disadvantage to that, not being in the room and not being able to hear every comment or the conversation after the call has ended. And I feel like this spills over to client work as well, where remote meetings can actually be even more productive and collaborative in a lot of ways. So that's one component. But as far as the actual tools that we're using, I would say right now we're using online whiteboarding, sprint-mimicking tools a lot. So Miro is definitely getting a lot of use. CHAD: I think that's the one we're using the most. New things come along, and people experiment with them and everything, but the default at this point is Miro. LINDSEY: They even have the sticky note feature, which for some reason, just works. It's the same thing as having a little box and writing in it, but it feels like a sticky note. So it evokes the feeling of the sprint. So we do use that a ton for brainstorming and collaboration internally and with clients. CHAD: And there are actually some things that are obviously being in person in the room with people is really nice, especially in those early days of a product where it's a really critical portion of the time. But there are some things about being remote equitable inclusive is one. Another is when you're in person, you have limited space. And Miro whiteboard is an infinite canvas, and so you don't run out of space. And when you flex to fill your whole tool and take advantage of that, it makes it easier. And the other I would say is -- and Jaclyn and Kyle just talked about this on the last episode of Tentative, our design podcast, which if people don't know about, they should check out. And talking about how when we're in person and one person is at the whiteboard, they have a marker, and they're working on a sketch, bringing together the wireframe and the storyboard. They’re the one with the marker, and they're the one who's doing everything, and not only is that not necessarily -- They're the funnel of all the ideas, but it's a lot of work for them as well, and it's not as collaborative as it otherwise could be. But when everyone is remote, and everyone's on the live whiteboard, people can share the work in a way that is better and more efficient when it comes to those wireframes. And you can give people a task because everyone can have their own portion of the board. And you can say, “Can you do this for me?” And then two people can go off and do that on one portion of the board, and then you can drag it over when they're done, that kind of thing. And it makes the sprints more efficient. LINDSEY: Yeah, like organizing the Post-it notes. I've seen that done a lot, asking for help. Grouping common themes together can make things move really quickly. CHAD: We were already using Figma on the majority of our products. And for those who don't know, Figma is a collaborative design tool so think Photoshop or Sketch, a totally online version of that that's more like working on a Google Doc with people together. And now Figma has prototyping tools built in. So it's pretty powerful in a very online collaborative way to be able to create the designs and then turn them immediately into prototypes and to do that directly with clients and with other team members all in the same document. This is one of those things that is actually a little bit harder to do. If you're all in the same room with someone, you're inclined to -- I guess you could all open your computers and work in the same document together, but I feel like that doesn't happen as much instead one person's driving, so it actually makes things more productive to work that way. LINDSEY: Yeah. Miro and Figma both have that kind of Google-ish feature of you see everyone who's in the doc, and you can actually see their cursor moving around in real-time as you're both working on it. And you can leave comments on all the kinds of collaboration features that you'd want with those kinds of things. And then on the development side, we also obviously put a lot of value on pairing on work. So I know even before Covid, we were experimenting a lot with different ways to do development pairing, whether it was in Hangouts or Slack video. And I believe we're currently using Tuple a lot for that. CHAD: Yeah. Tuple was created by a previous host of this podcast, Ben Orenstein, thoughtbot alum. LINDSEY: It’s how all the greats get started. CHAD: Yeah. But unfortunately, it's Mac only. And so we do have some team members who are not on Macs; they're on Linux. So we can't totally rely 100% on Tuple. And so there are some other things we use like USE Together, and people who use Team Macs will share that way. LINDSEY: And then I think one of the last things about remote work that is worth chatting about today is the team culture. We did have a very in-office culture, especially because folks are working on different client projects. And one of the things they love most about thoughtbot is the other thoughtboters and getting to see each other and maybe do investment projects together or going to the summit. So we had another question about this too, which is how do you foster that culture? How do you keep it going when no one's in-person anymore? CHAD: I think this is one of the areas where we have the most iteration and learning to do because the work stuff we were already doing a lot of it. And the project stuff is easier to judge, too. So did the project work? Did we ship on time? Was the design great? It's a lot easier to get immediate feedback on whether what we're doing is working or not. And with the culture things, the ramifications of doing it badly might not manifest for months. LINDSEY: We also need the client work to get money. CHAD: Right. [chuckles] LINDSEY: We need the money in order to work on the culture. [laughs] CHAD: Right. And the fact that we've been doing this in the pandemic it's a double-edged sword. I think it gives us a little bit of leeway to say, “Things are not normal now. And so we can't do this or we can't do that, and that is just what it is. And so we're just going to have to make the best of it.” The other side of that, though, is that it's been a very difficult time for a lot of people, not only just because of the pandemic. This last year has been a really difficult year for a lot of people. And so, yes, we get a little bit of runway to figure things out because it's such a unique situation. At the same time, it's important more than ever to figure out how to support people and have things be good and fulfilling and sustainable for people and to have a culture that thrives, not necessarily just gets by. I think that is what has made this last year challenging is figuring that out. So some specifics, we traditionally get together as an entire company once a year. So we brought that all online last year, and we combined it with our end-of-the-year parties that we usually do, which are also a hackathon where we take time off of client work, and we work on projects together. So we combined those two things in December and had a two-day all-remote event with murder mysteries hosted by professional companies to trivia and then underlying with the hackathon. And I think people really enjoyed it. It was one of those things where I think people were -- there was a pocket of people who were really skeptical about it. “I'm tired of being on video calls all day,” and all that stuff. “I'm not feeling up for it,” like all these sorts of things. And it was like, “Trust me, just show up, just do it.” And I think what we heard was pretty universal that people were surprised at how enjoyable it was. And so this year we're doing three of those, two one-day ones and one two-day one. And that'll be in May and then the summer, and then the winter. Implicit in that is we're not expecting to be able to get back in person together in any large group for all of this year. LINDSEY: But you do anticipate in-person summit return. CHAD: Yeah, definitely. I think it's more important than ever. And I think what we'll also see and encourage is team in-person get-togethers where it's not just the whole company, but you're on a project team or the marketing team or rocket fuel, as it likes to be called now, and get together. Yes, it's fine. Get together in this place. And that's one of the things that -- We spend a lot of money on very expensive offices in Boston and New York, and in the past, San Francisco, and Austin, London. It’s over $500,000 a year in office expenses between all those places that we still have the expense now. But once we're able to eliminate that expense, it's going to free up a lot of money to be put towards getting those teams together in person and do other things. LINDSEY: That was the other thing I was going to say, and you noted this about the UK team is that there's also a lot of team-specific activities where team leadership for Boost, Ignite, Lift Off, Mission control or with the geography-based ones too are figuring out what kind of social stuff or testing out different ideas like the show and tells or doing quiz time. I know there's a pocket of folks who jump in the lounge, which came out of the remote summit, the lounge during lunchtime or after work on Friday, and just trying out different things. CHAD: And Stephanie, who was the office manager in New York, has moved into an operations manager role, so company-wide. And a big part of what she is doing is figuring out things to try. And I think some things will succeed and some things won't, whether it's organizing games or the thing that just happened on Friday was people opting in to be paired for a 15-minute conversation with somebody else in the company, things like that. We're trying a lot of different things and seeing what works, what doesn't online. She created an online art gallery where people who are doing art can post it, that kind of thing. So we'll learn. LINDSEY: We'll learn, and then we'll most likely share it with you, so stay tuned for that. You can subscribe to the show and find notes for this episode at giantrobots.fm. CHAD: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @cpytel. LINDSEY: And me on Twitter @Lindsey3D. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot. CHAD: Thanks for listening, and see you next time. LINDSEY: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. Thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success. Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots