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

On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, tune in to hear developers Angad, Jared, Jess and Jordan, as they share their thoughts on observability.  

Wollongong has a thriving and supportive tech community and in this episode we have brought together some of our locally based Developers from Siligong Valley for a round table chat on all things observability.

💥 What is observability?
💥 How can you improve observability?
💥 What's the end goal?

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"This was a great episode to be a part of! Jess and Jordan shared some really interesting points on the newest tech buzzword - observability""

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

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Transcript

Jared Kells:

Welcome everybody to the Easy Agile podcast. My name's Jared Kells, and I'm a developer here at Easy Agile. Before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging, and extend that same respect to any aboriginal people listening with us today.

Jared Kells:

So today's podcast is a bit of a technical one. It says on my run sheet here that we're here to talk about some hot topics for engineers in the IT sector. How exciting that we've got a couple of primarily front end engineers and Angad and I are going to share some front end technical stuff and Jess and Jordan are going to be talking a bit about observability. So we'll start by introductions. So I'll pass it over to Jess.

Jess Belliveau:

Cool. Thanks Jared. Thanks for having me one as well. So yeah, my name's Jess Belliveau. I work for Apptio as an infrastructure engineer. Yeah, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

I'm Jordan Simonovski. I work as a systems engineer in the observability team at Atlassian. I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, tech wise. But yeah, working on building out some pretty beefy systems to handle all of our data at Atlassian at the moment. So, that's fun.

Angad Sethi:

Hello everyone. I'm Angad. I'm working for Easy Agile as a software dev. Nothing fancy like you guys.

Jared Kells:

Nothing fancy!

Jess Belliveau:

Don't sell yourself short.

Jared Kells:

Yeah, I'll say. Yeah, so my name's Jared, and yeah, senior developer at Easy Agile, working on our apps. So mainly, I work on programs and road maps. And yeah, they're front end JavaScript heavy apps. So that's where our experience is. I've heard about this thing called observability, which I think is just logs and stuff, right?

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, yeah. That's it, we'll wrap up!

Jared Kells:

Podcast over! Tell us about observability.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah okay, I'll, yeah. Well, I thought first I'd do a little thing of why observability, why we talk about this and sort of for people listening, how we got here. We had a little chat before we started recording to try and feel out something that might interest a broader audience that maybe people don't know a lot about. And there's a lot of movements in the broad IT scope, I guess, that you could talk about. There's so many different things now that are just blowing up. Observability is something that's been a hot topic for a couple of years now. And it's something that's a core part of my job and Jordan's job as well. So it's something easy for us to talk about and it's something that you can give an introduction to without getting too technical. So we don't want to get down. This is something that you can go really deep into the weeds, so we picked it as something that hopefully we can explain to you both at a level that might interest the people at home listening as well.

Jess Belliveau:

Jordan and I figured out these four bullet points that we wanted to cover, and maybe I can do the little overview of that, and then I can make Jordan cover the first bullet point, just throw him straight under the bus.

Jordan Simonovski:

Okay!

Jess Belliveau:

So we thought we'd try and describe to you, first of all, what is observability. Because that's a pretty, the term doesn't give you much of what it is. It gives you a little hint, but it'll be good to base line set what are we talking about when we say what is observability. And then why would a development team want observability? Why would a company want observability? Sort of high level, what sort of benefits you get out of it and who may need it, which is a big thing. You can get caught up in these industry hot buzz words and commit to stuff that you might not need, or that sort of stuff.

Jared Kells:

Yep.

Jordan Simonovski:

Yep.

Jess Belliveau:

We thought we'd talk about some easy wins that you get with observability. So some of the real basic stuff you can try and get, and what advantages you get from it. And then we just thought because we're no going to try and get too deep, we could just give a few pointers to some websites and some YouTube talks for further reading that people want to do, and go from there. So yeah, Jordan you want to-

Jared Kells:

Sounds good.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. I hopefully, hopefully. We'll see how this goes! And I guess if you guys have questions as well, that's something we should, if there's stuff that you think we don't cover or that you want to know more, ask away.

Jordan Simonovski:

I guess to start with observability, it's a topic I get really excited about, because as someone that's been involved in the dev ops and SRE space for so long, observability's come along and promises to close the loop or close a feedback loop on software delivery. And it feels like it's something we don't really have at the moment. And I get that observability maybe sounds new and shiny, but I think the term itself exists to maybe differentiate itself from what's currently out there. A lot of us working in tech know about monitoring and the loading and things like that. And I think they serve their own purpose and they're not in any way obsolete either. Things like traditional monitoring tools. But observability's come along as a way to understand, I think, the overwhelmingly complex systems that we're building at the moment. A lot of companies are probably moving towards some kind of complicated distributed systems architecture, microservices, other buzz words.

Jordan Simonovski:

But even for things like a traditional kind of monolith. Observability really serves to help us ask new questions from our systems. So the way it tends to get explained is monitoring exits for our known unknowns. With seniority comes the ability to predict, almost, in what way your systems will fail. So you'll know. The longer you're in the industry, you know this, like a Java server fails in x, y, z amount of ways, so we should probably monitor our JVM heap, or whatever it is.

Jared Kells:

I was going to say that!

Jordan Simonovski:

I'll try not to get too much into-

Jared Kells:

Runs out of memory!

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. So that's something that you're expecting to fail at some point. And that's something that you can consider a known unknown. But then, the promise of observability is that we should be shipping enough data to be able to ask new questions. So the way it tends to get talked about, you see, it's an unknown unknown of our system, that we want to find out about and ask new questions from. And that's where I think observability gets introduced, to answer these questions. Is that a good enough answer? You want me to go any further into detail about this stuff? I can talk all day about this.

Jared Kells:

Is it like a [crosstalk 00:08:05]. So just to repeat it back to you, see if I've understood. Is it kind of like if I've got a, traditionally with a Java app, I might log memories. It's because I know JVM's run out of memory and that's a thing that I monitor, but observability is more broad, like going almost over the top with what you monitor and log so that you can-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. And I wouldn't necessarily say it's going over the top. I think it's maybe adding a bit more context to your data. So if any of you have worked with traces before, observability is very similar to the way traces work and just builds on top of the premise of traces, I guess. So you're creating these events, and these events are different transactions that could be happening in your applications, usually submitting some kind of request. And with that request, you can add a whole bunch of context to it. You can add which server this might be running on, which time zone. All of these additional and all the exciters. You can throw in user agency into there if you want to. The idea of observability is that you're not necessarily constrained by high cardinality data. High cardinality data being data sets that can change quite largely, in terms of the kinds of data they represent, or the combinations of data sets that you could have.

Jordan Simonovski:

So if you want shipping metrics on something, on a per user basis and you want to look at how different users are affected by things, that would be considered a high cardinality metric. And a lot of the time it's not something that traditional monitoring companies or metric providers can really give you as a service. That's where you'll start paying insanely huge bills on things like Datadog or whatever it is, because they're now being considered new metrics. Whereas observability, we try and store our data and query it in a way that we can store pretty vast data sets and say, "Cool. We have errors coming from these kinds of users." And you can start to build up correlations on certain things there. You can find out that users from a particular time zone or a particular device would only be experiencing that error. And from there, you can start building up, I think, better ways of understanding how a particular change might have broken things. Or some particular edge cases that you otherwise couldn't pick up on with something like CPU or memory monitoring.

Angad Sethi:

Would it be fair to say-

Jared Kells:

Yeah. It's [crosstalk 00:11:02].

Angad Sethi:

Oh, sorry Jared.

Jared Kells:

No you can-

Angad Sethi:

Would it be fair to say that, so, observability is basically a set of principles or a way to find the unknown unknowns?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Oh.

Jess Belliveau:

And better equip you to find, one of the things I find is a lot of people think, you get caught up in thinking observability is a thing that you can deploy and have and tick a box, but I like your choice of word of it being a set of principles or best practices. It's sort of giving you some guidance around these, having good logging coming out of your application. So structured logs. So you're always getting the same log format that you can look at. Tracing, which Jordan talked a little bit about. So giving you that ability to follow how a user is interacting with all the different microservices and possibly seeing where things are going wrong, and metrics as well. So the good thing with metrics is we're turning things a bit around and trying to make an application, instead of doing, and I don't want to get too technical, black box monitoring, where we're on the outside, trying to peer in with probes and checks like that. But the idea with metrics is the application is actually emitting these metrics to inform us what state it is in, thereby making it more observable.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, I like your choice of words there, Angad, that it's like these practices, this sort of guide of where to go, which probably leads into this next point of why would a team want to implement it. If you want to start again, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, I can start. And I'll give you a bit more time to speak as well, Jess in this one. I won't rant as much.

Jess Belliveau:

Oh, I didn't sign up for that!

Jordan Simonovski:

I think why teams would want it is because, it really depends on your organization and, I guess, the size of the teams you're working in. Most of the time, I would probably say you don't want to build observability yourself in house. It is something that you can, observability capabilities themselves, you won't achieve it just by buying a thing, like you can't buy dev ops, you can't buy Agile, you can't buy observability either.

Jared Kells:

Hang on, hang on. It says on my run sheet to promote Easy Agile, so that sounds like a good segue-

Jess Belliveau:

Unless you want to buy it. If you do want to buy Agile, the [crosstalk 00:13:55] in the marketplace.

Jared Kells:

Yeah, sorry, sorry, yeah! Go on.

Jordan Simonovski:

You can buy tools that make your life a lot easier, and there are a lot of things out there already which do stuff for people and do surface really interesting data that people might want to look at. I think there are a couple of start ups like LightStep and Honeycomb, which give you a really intuitive way of understanding your data in production. But why you would need this kind of stuff is that you want to know the state of your systems at any given point in time, and to build, I guess, good operational hygiene and good production excellence, I guess as Liz Fong-Jones would put it, is you need to be able to close that feedback loop. We have a whole bunch of tools already. So we have CICD systems in place. We have feature flags now, which help us, I guess, decouple deployments from releases. You can deploy code without actually releasing code, and you can actually give that power to your PM's now if you want to, with feature flags, which is great.

Jordan Simonovski:

But what you can also do now is completely close this loop, and as you're deploying an application, you can say, "I want to canary this deployment. I want to deploy this to 10% of my users, maybe users who are opted in for Beta releases or something of our application, and you can actually look at how that's performing before you release it to a wider audience. So it does make deployments a lot safer. It does give you a better understanding of how you're affecting users as well. And there are a whole bunch of tools that you can use to determine this stuff as well. So if you're looking at how a lot of companies are doing SRE at the moment, or understanding what reliable looks like for their applications, you have things like SLO's in place as well. And SLO's-

Jared Kells:

What's an SLO?

Jordan Simonovski:

They're all tied to user experiences. So you're saying, "Can my user perform this particular interaction?" And if you can effectively measure that and know how users are being affected by the changes you're making, you can easily make decisions around whether or not you continue shipping features or if you drop everything and work on reliability to make sure your users aren't affected. So it's this very user centric approach to doing things. I think in terms of closing the loop, observability gives us that data to say, "Yes, this is how users are being affected. This is how, I guess the 99th percentile of our users are fine, but we have 1% who are having adverse issues with our application." And you can really pinpoint stuff from there and say, "Cool. Users with this particular browser or this particular, or where we've deployed this app to," let's say if you have a global deployment of some kind, you've deployed to an island first, because you don't really care what happens to them. You can say, "Oh, we've actually broken stuff for them." And you can roll it back before you impact 100% of your users.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. I liked what you said about the test. I forgot the acronym, but actually testing the end user behavior. That's kind of exciting to me, because we have all these metrics that are a bit useless. They're cool, "Oh, it's using 1% CPU like it always is, now I don't really care," but can a user open up the app and drag an issue around? It's like-

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, that's a really great example, right?

Jared Kells:

That's what I really care about.

Jess Belliveau:

The 1% CPU thing, you could look at a CPU usage graph and see a deployment, and the CPU usage doesn't change. Is everything healthy or not? You don't know, whereas if you're getting that deeper level info of the user interactions, you could be using 1% CPU to serve HTTP500 errors to the 80% of the customer base, sort of thing.

Angad Sethi:

How do you do that? The SLO's bit, how do you know a user can log in and drag an issue?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. I think that would come with good instrumenting-

Angad Sethi:

Good question?

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, it comes down to actually keeping observability in mind when you are developing new features, the same way you would think about logging a particular thing in your code as you're writing, or writing test for your code, as you're writing code as well. You want to think about how you can instrument something and how you can understand how this particular feature is working in production. Because I think as a lot of Agile and dev ops principles are telling us now is that we do want our applications in production. And as developers, our responsibilities don't end when we deploy something. Our responsibility as a developer ends when we've provided value to the business. And you need a way of understanding that you're actually doing that. And that's where, I guess, you do nee do think about observability with a lot of this stuff, and actually measuring your success metrics. So if you do know that your application is successful if your user can log in and drag stuff around, then that's exactly what you want to measure.

Jared Kells:

I think that we have to build-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah?

Jared Kells:

Oh, sorry Jordan.

Jordan Simonovski:

No, you go.

Jared Kells:

I was just going to say we have to build our apps with integration testing in mind already. So doing browser based tests around new features. So it would be about building features with that and the same thing in mind but for testing and production.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah and the actual how, the actual writing code part, there's this really great project, the open telemetry project, which provides all these sort of API's and SDK's that developers can consume, and it's vendor agnostic. So when you talk about the how, like, "How do I do this? How do I instrument things?" Or, "How do I emit metrics?" They provide all these helpful libraries and includes that you can have, because the last thing you want to do is have to roll this custom solution, because you're then just adding to your technical debt. You're trying to make things easier, but you're then relying on, "Well I need to keep Jared Kells employed, because he wrote our log in engine and no one else knows how it works.

Jess Belliveau:

And then the other thing that comes to mind with something like open telemetry as well, and we talked a bit about Datadog. So Datadog is a SaaS vendor that specializes in observability. And you would push your metrics and your logs and your traces to them and they give you a UI to display. If you choose something that's vendor agnostic, let's just use the example of Easy Agile. Let's say they start Datadog and then in six months time, we don't want to use Datadog anymore, we want to use SignalFx or whatever the Splunk one is now.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think NorthX.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. You can change your end point, push your same metrics and all that sort of stuff, maybe with a few little tweaks, but the idea is you don't want to tie in to a single thing.

Jordan Simonovski:

Your data structures remain the same.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. So that you could almost do it seamlessly without the developers knowing. There's even companies in the past that I think have pushed to multiple vendors. So you could be consuming vendor A and then you want to do a proof of concept with vendor B to see what the experience is like and you just push your data there as well.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. I think our coupling to Datadog will be I all the dashboards and stuff that we've made. It's not so much the data.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. That's sort of the big up sell, right. It's how you interact. That's where they want to get their hooks in, is making it easier for you to interpret that data and manipulate it to meet your needs and that sort of stuff.

Jordan Simonovski:

Observability suggests dashboards, right?

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, perhaps. You used this term as well, Jordan, "production excellence." And when we talk about who needs observability, I was thinking a bit about that while you were talking. And for me, production excellence, or in Apptio we call it production readiness, operational readiness and that sort of stuff is like we want to deploy something to production like what sort of best practices do we want to have in place before we do that? And I think observability is a real great idea, because it's helping you in the future. You don't know what problems you're going to have down the line, but you're equipping your teams to be able to respond to those problems easily. Whereas, we've all probably been there, we've deployed code of production and we have no observability, we have a huge outage. What went wrong? Well, no one knows, but we know this is the fix, and it's hard to learn from that, or you have to learn from that I guess, and protect the user against future stuff, yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

When I think easy wins for observability, the first thing that really comes to mind is this whole idea of structured logging, which is really this idea that your application is you're logging, first of all. Quite important as a baseline starting point, but then you have a structured log format which lets you programmatically pass the logs as well. If you go back in time, maybe logging just looked like plain text with a line, with a timestamp, an error message. Whatever the developer decided to write to the standard out, or to the error file or something like that. Now I think there's a general move to having JSON, an actual formatted blob with that known structure so you can look into it. Tracing's probably not an easy win. That's a little bit harder. You can implement it with open telemetry and libraries and stuff. Requires a bit more understanding of your code base, I guess, and where you want tracing to fire, and that sort of stuff, parsing context through, things like that.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think Atlassian, when you probably just want to know that everything is okay. At a fairly superficial level. Maybe you just want to do some kind of up time on a trend. And then as, I guess, your code might get more complex or your product gets a bit more complex, you can start adding things in there. But I think actually knowing or surfacing the things you know might break. Those would probably be your quickest wins.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, let's mention some things for further reading. If you want to go get the whole picture of the whole, real observability started to get a lot of movement out of the Google SRE book from a few years ago. The Google SRE stuff covers the whole gamut of their soak reliability engineering practice, and observability is a portion of that, there's some great chapters on that. O'Reilly has an observability book, I think, just dedicated to observability now.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think that's still in early release, if people want to google chapters.

Jess Belliveau:

The open telemetry stuff, we'll drop a link to that I think that's really handy to know.

Angad Sethi:

From [inaudible 00:26:12], which is my perspective, as a developer, say I wanted to introduce cornflake use Datadog at Easy Agile. Not very familiar, I'm not very comfortable with it. I know how to navigate, but what's a quick way for me to get started on introducing observability? Sorry to lock my direct job or at my workplace.

Jordan Simonovski:

I would lean, I could be biased here. Jess correct me or give your opinion on this, I would lean heavily towards SLO's for this. And you can have a quick read in the SRE-

Jess Belliveau:

What does SLO stand for, Jordan?

Jordan Simonovski:

Okay, sorry. Buzz words! SLO is a service level objective, not to be confused with service level agreement. An agreement itself is contractual and you can pay people money if you do breach those. An SLO is something you set in your team and you have a target of reliability, because we are getting to the point where we understand that all systems at any point in time are in some kind of degraded state. And yeah, reliability isn't necessarily binary, it's not unreliable or reliable. Most of the time, it's mostly reliable and this gives us a better shared language, I guess. And you can have a read in the SRE handbook by Google, which is free online, which gives you a pretty good understanding of Datadog.

Jordan Simonovski:

I think the last time I used it had a SLO offering. But I think like I was mentioning earlier, you set an SLO on particular functionalities or features of your application. You're saying, "My user can do this 99% of the time," or whatever other reliability target you might want to set. I wouldn't recommend five nines of reliability. You'll probably burn yourself out trying to get there. And you have this target set for yourself. And you know exactly what you're measuring, you're measuring particular types of functionality. And you know when you do breach these, users are being affected. And that's where you can actually start thinking about observability. You can think about, "What other features are we implementing that we can start to measure?" Or, "What user facing things are we implementing that we can start to measure?"

Jordan Simonovski:

Other things you could probably look at are, I think they're all covered in the book anyway, data freshness in a way. You want to make sure the data users are being displayed is relatively fresh. You don't want them looking at stale data, so you can look at measuring things like that as well. But you can pretty much break it down into most functionalities of a website. It's no longer like a ping check, that you're just saying, "Yes, HTTP, okay. My application is fine." You're saying, "My users are actually being affected by things not working." And you can start measuring things from there. And that should give you a better understanding, or a better idea, at least, of where to start with what you want to measure and ow you want to measure it. That would be my opinion on where to get started with this if you do want to introduce it.

Jared Kells:

We're going to talk a little bit about state and how with some of these, like our very front end heavy applications that we're building, so the applications we build just basically run inside the browser and the traditional state as you would think about it, is just pulling a very simple API that writes some things into the database with some authentication, and that sort of stuff. So in terms of reliability of the services, it's really reliable. Those tiny API's just never have problems, because it's just so simple. And well, they've got plenty of monitoring around it. But all our state is actually, when you say, "Observe the state of the system," for the most part, that's state in a browser. And how do we get observability into that?

Jess Belliveau:

A big thing is really, there's not one thing fits all as well. When we talk about the SLO stuff as well, it's understanding what is important to not so much maybe your company but your team as well. If you're delivering this product, what's important to you specifically? So one SLO that might work for me at Apptio probably isn't going to work for Easy Agile. This is really pushing my knowledge, as well, of front end stuff, but when we say we want to observe the state as well, we don't necessarily mean specifically just the state. You could want to understand with each one of those API's when it's firing, what the request response time is for that API firing. So that might be an important metric. So you can start to see if one of those APIs is introducing latency, and so your user experience is degraded. Like, "Hey when we were on release three, when users were interacting with our service here, it would respond in this percentile latency. We've done a release and since then, now we're seeing it's now in this percentile. Have we degraded performance performance?" Users might not be complaining, but that could be something that the team then can look into, add to a sprint. Hey, I'm using Agile terms now. Watch out!

Jared Kells:

That's a really good example, Jess. Performance issues for us are typically not an API that's performing poorly. It's something in this very complicated front end application is not running in the same order as it used to, or there's some complex interaction we didn't think of, so it's requesting more data than expected. The APIs are returning. They're never slow, for the most part, but we have performance regressions that we may not know about without seeing them or investigating them. The observability is really at the individual user's browser level. That makes sense? I want to know how long did it take for this particular interaction to happen.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah. I've never done that sort of side of things. As well, the other thing I guess, you could potentially be impacted in as well as then, you're dealing with end user manifestations as well. You could perceive-

Jared Kells:

Yeah sure.

Jess Belliveau:

... Greater performance on their laptop or something, or their ISP or that sort of stuff. It'd be really hard to make sure you're not getting noise from that sort of thing as well.

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah. There are tools like Sentry, I guess, which do exist to give you a bit more of an understanding what's happening on your front end. The way Sentry tends to work with JavaScript, is you'll upload a minified map of your JS to Sentry, deploy your code and then if something does break or work in a fairly unexpected way, that tends to get surfaced with Sentry will tell you exactly which line this kind of stuff is happening on, and it's a really cool tool for that company stuff. I don't know if it'd give you the right type of insights, I think, in terms of performance or-

Jared Kells:

Yeah, we use a similar tool and it does work for crashes and that sort of thing. And on the observability front, we log actions like state mutations in side the front end, not the actual state change, but just labels that represent that you updated an issue summary or you clicked this button, that sort of thing, and we send those with our crash reports. And it's super helpful having that sort of observability. So I think I know what you guys are talking about. But I'm just [crosstalk 00:35:25], yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, that's almost like, I guess, a form of tracing. For me and Jordan, when we talk about tracing, we might be thinking about 12 different microservices sitting in AWS that are all interacting, whereas you're more shifting that. That's sort of all stuff in the browser interacting and just having that history of this is what the user did and how they've ended up-

Jared Kells:

In that state.

Jess Belliveau:

In that state, yeah.

Jordan Simonovski:

I guess even if you don't have a lot of microservices, if you're talking about particular, like you're saying for the most part your API requests are fine but sometimes you have particularly large payloads-

Jared Kells:

We actually have to monitor, I don't know, maybe you can help with this, we actually should be monitoring maybe who we're integrating with. It's actually much more likely that we'll have a performance issue on a Xero API rather than... We don't see it, the browser sees it as well, which is-

Jordan Simonovski:

Yeah, and tracing does solve all of those regressions for you. Most tracing libraries, like if you're running Node apps or whatever on your backend. I can just tell you about Node, because I probably have the most experience writing Node stuff. You pretty much just drop in Didi trace, which is a Datadog library for tracing into your backend and your hook itself into all of, I think, the common libraries that you'll tend to work with, I think. Like if you're working for express or for a lot of just HADP libraries, as well as a few AWS services, it will kind of hook itself into that. And you can actually pinpoint. It will kind of show you on this pretty cool service map exactly which services you're interacting with and where you might be experiencing a regression. And I think traces do serve to surface that information, which is cool. So that could be something worth investigating.

Jess Belliveau:

It's funny. This is a little bit unrelated to observability, but you've just made me think a bit more about how you're saying you're reliant on third party providers as well. And something I think that's really important that sometimes gets missed is so many of us today are relying on third party providers, like AWS is a huge thing. A lot of people writing apps that require AWS services. And I think a lot of the time, people just assume AWS or Jira or whatever, is 100% up time, always available. And they don't write their code in such a way that deals with failures. And I think it's super important. So many times now I've seen people using the AWS API and they don't implement exponential back off. And so they're basically trying to hit the AWS API, it fails or they might get throttled, for example, and then they just go into a fail state and throw an error to the user. But you could potentially improve that user experience, have a retry mechanism automatically built in and that sort of stuff. It doesn't really tie into the observability thing, but it's something.

Jared Kells:

And the users don't care, right? No one cares if it's an AWS problem. It's your problem, right, your app is too slow.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, they're using your app. Exactly right. It reflects on you sort of thing, so it's in your interest to guard against an upstream failure, or at least inform the user when it's that case. Yeah.

Jared Kells:

Well, I think we're going to have to call it, this podcast, because it was an hour ago. We had instructed max 45 minutes.

Jess Belliveau:

We could just keep going. We might need a part two! Maybe we can request [cross talk 00:39:21].

Jared Kells:

Maybe! Yeah.

Jess Belliveau:

Or we'll just start our own podcast! Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

So what were your biggest learnings today, given it's been Angad and I are just learning about observability, Angad what was your biggest learning today about observability? My biggest learning was that observability does not equal Datadog. No, sorry! It was just very fascinating to learn about quantifying the known unknowns. I don't know if that's a good takeaway, but...

Jess Belliveau:

Any takeaway is a good takeaway! What about you, Jared?

Jared Kells:

I think, because I we were going to talk about state management, and part of it was how we have this ability, at the moment to, the way our front ends are architected, we can capture the state of the app and get a customer to send us their state, basically. And we can load it into our app and just see exactly how it was, just the way our state's designed. But what might be even cooler is to build maybe some observability into that front end for support. I'm thinking instead of just having, we have this button to send us out your support information that sends us a bunch of the state, but instead of console logging to the browser log, we could be console logging, logging in our front end somewhere that when they click, "send support information," our customers should be sending us the actions that they performed.

Jared Kells:

Like, "Hey there's a bug, send us your support information." It doesn't have to be a third party service collecting this observability stuff. We could just build into our... So that's what I'm thinking about.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah, for sure. It'll probably be a lot less intrusive, as well, as some of the third party stuff that I've seen around.

Jared Kells:

Yeah. It's pretty hard with some of these integrations, especially if you're developing apps that get run behind a firewall.

Jess Belliveau:

Yeah

Jared Kells:

You can't just talk to some of these third parties. So yeah, it's cool though. It's really interesting.

Jess Belliveau:

Well, I hope someone out there listening has learned something, and Jordan and I will send some links through, and we can add them, hopefully, to the show notes or something so people can do some more reading and...

Jared Kells:

All thanks!

Jess Belliveau:

Thanks for having us, yeah.

Jared Kells:

Thanks all for your time, and thanks everybody for listening.

Jordan Simonovski:

Thanks everyone.

Angad Sethi:

That was [inaudible 00:41:55].

Jess Belliveau:

Tune in next week!

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

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

In this episode, we spoke about;

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

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

Transcript

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, dojo. We have dojo. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Money doesn't bring happiness?

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes, very much so.

Leandro Barreto:

The internet is starting, everything is new.

Robert O’Farrell:

People on dial-up, internet was slow.

Leandro Barreto:

Do you remember that sound like prshh?

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

Correct. Correct.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Work in progress

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

It's not what I want to do.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Quite a collection.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yes.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yep. Psychological interference.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Do you think that-

Leandro Barreto:

And-

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Situation.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Inspirational.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

And... Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

In Agile. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, that's the Chaos Monkey.

Leandro Barreto:

The Chaos Monkey.

Robert O’Farrell:

That was Netflix. Yeah. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Netflix, yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. Yes. Right.

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

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

Leandro Barreto:

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

Robert O’Farrell:

You too. Cheers.

Leandro Barreto:

Cheers.

‍

‍

"I loved having the space to talk about common interests - all things technical documentation & information architecture" - Henri Seymour

On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, tune in to hear Henri Seymour - Developer at Easy Agile speak with Matt Reiner - Customer Advocate at K15t.

Henri & Matt are talking all things technical documentation (we promise this episode is way more interesting than it sounds! 😉)

✏️ Considering technical documentation as a product
✏️ The value of well written documentation
✏️ Why you should be digitally decluttering often
✏️ Information architecture

So many golden nuggets in this episode!

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

Transcript

Henri Seymour:

Hi, everyone. This is the Easy Agile Podcast. We've got an episode today with Matt Reiner. I'm your host for today, Henri Seymour, developer at Easy Agile. And just before we start the podcast, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional Australians of the land on which I'm recording today, the Watiwati people of the Dharawal nation. Pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people listening to this episode.

Matt is an experienced content strategist with a history of working in the computer software industry, skilled in agile scrum framework, related tools, communication, technical writing, video production, customer interaction, strategic planning. And he's here today to talk with us about writing and specifically technical writing and documentation. Hi, Matt.

Matt Reiner:

Hi. It's great to be here. Yeah, I'm Matt. I'm into all sorts of content things. And one of those is technical writing, which is, I think more interesting than it sounds. I guess you'll have to decide by the end of the podcast, if you think so.

Henri Seymour:

Technical documentation experts. So when you talk about technical documentation specifically, what do you mean by that?

Matt Reiner:

Well, I feel like that term is actually in the middle of a big change right now. In the past, technical documentation was very strictly like, "Okay, we're a team, we're making a thing, a product." Maybe it's an app, maybe it's, I don't know, a go-kart and we need to have a user manual for that. Technical documentation was someone sitting down and writing down, "Okay, here are all the knobs and switches and here's what they do. Here are all the features. Here's maybe why you would use them."

So putting together that user guide, which traditionally was printed material that you would get with the product. But it's become a lot more over time, partially with the internet, because we can just constantly iterate on content like many of us do with the products that our teams make. And then also we are seeing it in new forms. Maybe it's not a printed piece, in fact, most people do not want printed technical documentation anymore, they want it online. Or even better, they want it right in context in your app when they're using it, they can just get the info they need, and then get on with it.

That's what technical documentation is. It's supposed to be there to help you do the thing that you really care about and then get out of the way so that you can do it.

Henri Seymour:

Do you have a description of why good technical documentation? Not just having it, but having it at a good quality in a way that really helps your users, is so important to product users.

Matt Reiner:

Well, I suppose we all find those points in our day or in our journey that we find ourselves in where we want to accomplish something, but we don't know how to do it. So a lot of us have really gotten very used to jumping on Google and saying, "Okay, here's this thing I want to do, how do I do it?" And good technical documentation is there with the answer you need, the explanation you need. Because really ultimately all of us are smart people who should be empowered to do the thing we're passionate about.

And technical writers and communicators who are really all members of our team. People who sit down to create good technical documentation uses few words as possible to get a person on the way they're going. And that's like, when it happens its just like, "Glorious," not to the user. They don't even know that it happened, they didn't even know that they read your writing. But to the writer, it's like, "Yeah, I did it, I did it. They don't even care what I did, but I did it." And now they're doing the thing that really matters.

Henri Seymour:

That's great understanding one of the major differences of like, I've written something and I don't want my user to be spending time on it. I want as little time spent reading this as possible.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can have great pride in your work, but one of those metrics that a lot of people look at for websites is time spent on page. So sometimes you can fool yourself into thinking, "Oh wow, they spent 10 minutes on my page. That means my documentation's really good." But also that might mean that it's not very good and they're having to reread it over and over again. So the true metric is, did they get to the thing they really cared about? And unfortunately, it's hard to measure.

Henri Seymour:

You mentioned now that with the advent of the internet and giving you the opportunity to iterate on those docs in a way that you wouldn't be able to with printed documentation. That iterative thing brings the agile process of iterate on something that you already put out and improve it in the same way that as a developer I do for products. Can you tell us more about that iterative agile sort of process?

Matt Reiner:

Oh yeah. Yeah, it's so true. Documentation used to be back in the waterfall standard, more typical product project management days, documentation was a major part of it. You'd start this project by writing these massive documents of, "Here's what we're going to set out to do. And here's all the considerations, and here's how everything's going to connect up." And that did work really well for a lot of hardware. Which was the thing that we made for a long time. Just everything that humankind made was hardware often, as groups anyway.

And then all of a sudden this whole software thing comes along and we're trying to build that like it's a physical thing. And we get to the end of this two-year software project and people are like, "Yeah, that's not the thing that I wanted." But we're like, "Oh, but we go back to the beginning and look at that documentation, and that's what you said you wanted." But now with the internet and with just agile development, we really need to move away from this place where we start with a pile of documents. And then we develop another pile of documents as our, I don't know, development guidelines.

And then our test plans, and then finally we end up with user documentation. Instead, these days, documentation should really just grow from a very small piece of content throughout that whole agile development cycle into that final user documentation. Because it doesn't matter what we set out to make, it matters what we make. Nobody he wants to read about what we thought we would make, that's straight up fiction. And it's probably not an interesting read. It's really that final user guide that comes out of the agile process, but that's a big change, but it's a good one.

Henri Seymour:

I love that idea of just like, this is gradually growing. There is no specific start block and end block. It's a process. And you mentioned the opportunity to iterate on those documents. Do you have any advice for after you've published digitally your technical documentation from iterating on what you've already got there, improving that over time?

Matt Reiner:

Oh yeah. I know every agile framework is different, but they all have that feedback phase, where... And really that's throughout the whole process, but we do need to dedicate some time. So, there's a lot of different things we can look at. For example, I don't want to say basic, a standard one that we should be looking at is, you should have a help center, where you can implement something like Google Analytics so you can see just, what are people looking at? How long are they looking at it?

Another really good one is, you have to set it up separately in Google Analytics. What are people searching for on your site? You can also use Google... used to be Webmaster Tools. I think it's called Site Tools now, but you can see what were people searching for on Google before they came to your pages. That's all really, really valuable stuff. Then you can get more advanced. You can look at pointer tracking, apps that you can embed on there, which you get some pretty wild stuff.

But then you also, you want to consider having a forum at the bottom of each page like, "Was this helpful? Was it not helpful? Oh, it wasn't helpful? Tell me why. Oh, it was helpful? Tell me why." Just like a YouTube creator, they look for that feedback. That feedback is essential, the thumbs up. In fact, it's very controversial, YouTube just announced that they're going to hide the thumbs down numbers, but a lot of creators are like, "No, no, no don't do that because that communicates the value of this video that is out there."

So there's a lot of those signals. And then there's just really soft signals that, it's hard to know if people are using the content or not. Because you may never hear. Especially, if it is one of those things that they just get in and get out, you're not going to hear anything about that. But the feedback phase, it's really great to... Anytime you're getting feedback on your product that you're making, try to get your documentation out there as well. Because that's the time where people are open to exploring your product and giving feedback.

So why not explore that same documentation, the related documentation to see, "Okay, is this actually helping these people do the thing that they want to do? Or should we improve it just like we do with the product?"

Henri Seymour:

No, that's a really good, comparing the, we've just released a product. Give us feedback with doing the same thing with the documentation. Because that's when it's going to reach its peak use before everyone's got the hang of it. We've just done this feature release, let us know how you go using it, and the documentation is in a sense part of it, especially for more complex products.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

Do you have any background in the customer support side of things? We do customer support in-house as well as their documentation. So we're trying to improve the documentation to lower the support load on our team. Do you have any background in that... Can you solve it?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Well, yes and no. It's interesting. I work at K15t now, I used to be a customer of K15t's, so that's actually how I met the team. And that was also how I met documentation in the first place. At my last job, they brought me in to administrate this system called Jira. And I was like, "I don't know what that is." I told them, "I thought I could do it." And I figured it out, it was this little thing called Jira On-Demand, which is now Jira Cloud. And I introduced Confluence On-Demand to the company as well. And wow, I broke Jira a lot of times.

Luckily it wasn't like mission critical at the time, we were still really figuring it out. But it was through Atlassian's documentation on Jira that I really learned like, "Wow, there is tremendous value to this content here." And then I discovered, "Okay, how is Atlassian creating their documentation? Oh, they're doing it in Confluence. They're writing it in Confluence. They're using these apps from K15t." And so I started using those apps, and then I talked a lot to K15t customer support, just questions and how do I get this started?

And we also do our support in-house, so it's really great. So maybe as a customer, I overused it, I don't know. I should ask some of my colleagues if they got sick of me. But the benefit was very clear because they would send me, "Oh, here's documentation on this. And here's the answer to this question or here are the considerations you should keep in mind." And actually several of our teams now, we're really looking at, especially, for those features that are very robust, people have questions.

So it's like, how can we enable them to help them help themselves? And putting those resources out there is one thing, making sure that Google can find them, well, is another. But that is a really important thing, especially, since as a product team, when your user base grows, so does your need for support. It's just... I don't want to say it's exponential, but it's in line with each other. And so, one of the ways you can mitigate that is, making sure you have good design so that your product is easy to use. And then another is you need to have good content all around that entire experience so that you don't have to keep hiring more and more support people.

Or your support people can specialize and really focus on those deep entrenched issues, and then the documentation should help with the rest. But the secret sauce there is tricky. It's hard to write the perfect content to deflect the cases. That's everybody's dream.

Henri Seymour:

Even if it is just not all of them, but some of the common use cases start to get deflected away from support because people can self service. It does make a difference. And I really understand the idea of Jira documentation as well. Easy Agile works on Jira and it's... Jira is an incredibly complicated product at this point, and I imagine it probably was also complicated when it was Jira On-Demand. Because it's so complicated and so detailed, there's no way to make that easy to understand for a user without that documentation. There's no getting around that one.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. I think there should be a club for the people who have broken workflows too many times in Jira. But yeah, I mean the documentation saved me many times and I would have to put out a... Well, it was a HipChat message at the time. May it rest in peace and I'd have to say, "I broke Jira, give me a minute. I got to go read something." Not the way you want to learn Jira, but it's an option.

Henri Seymour:

It is. Sometimes you learn things by breaking things. That's-

Matt Reiner:

That's right.

Henri Seymour:

Really seems like my experience in software so far. You try to break the things that people aren't currently using and that's about all you can do.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

So K15t has recently published Rock the Docs. Can you tell us a bit more about this project?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Rock the Docs, actually, it came out of a lot of that information that I got from K15t. Customer support, I got from K15t documentation, I got from Atlassian documentation. And then some of the stuff I figured out on my own, or some of my colleagues at K15t did. Essentially like, what are the best practices for creating really good content in Confluence? And it really started with a collection of guides on how to create technical documentation content. It's geared toward like making a public help center, but really it's for any kind of content that you want to be like evergreen, longstanding content to be able to help people.

So we initially talked about all sorts of things like structuring your content, content reuse, managing multiple languages, which can be tricky in Confluence. Collaboration, publishing your content outside of Confluence in one way or another, managing versions of that content. So, that's the start of it. And then we saw a lot of positive response with that and we had more general questions like, "Okay, but what are the best ways to get feedback in Confluence?" Or, "How do I make a template or a good template or how do I make a good diagram in Confluence?"

And so we've grown that content to focus on just all sorts of general Confluence things. Because we found that there's a lot of information out there on how to do something. Atlassian documentation really helpful, but there wasn't as much, I'm like, "Why would you do it? And why would you do it this specific way?" And we've been working with Confluence for over 10 years now. Like I said, I've been with Confluence since the crashy early cloud days. It's grown up so fast, it's beautiful.

But we just know we've done a lot of stuff with Confluence, so it's been a real privilege to share that both in like these written guides. And then actually recently we've started publishing a series to our YouTube channel as well, all about Confluence best practices.

Henri Seymour:

That's great. It's real interesting to hear how that started as a smaller project than it turned out to be, because you could see the value in it and the use in it. We've discussed Confluence a few times now and K15t builds apps that use Confluence as a documentation source. Can you tell us more about what makes Confluence useful for building technical documentation? What sort of tools and approaches that make it useful in this context?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Confluence is by nature open, which is not the way technical writing tools are built. In fact, I remember the first time I went to a technical writing conference and someone asked me, "Oh, what tool do you use?" Which is like, what technical communications people talk about, because we're all nerds in that way. And I was like, "Oh, I'm doing it in Confluence." And they didn't really want to talk to me after that because they didn't think I was a serious tech writer. And I was like, "Oh no, no, no, no, this is all happening."

At that point, Rock the Docs didn't exist. So I couldn't be like, "Go over there and see how it works." But the biggest difference is most tech writing tools are just totally locked down. You have two licenses for your two people who are trained professional tech graders, and then everybody else, there's no access. You don't touch it. Maybe your tech writers will send you a PDF and you have to go through the God awful process of marking up a PDF to tell them like what to correct. Or, I've heard of teams printing out the content and people penciling in what needs to be changed.

The review processes are just out of this world insane. And those tools don't fit terribly well with agile processes because it's like, you build the thing over here, and then here's the two tech writers over here in their separate tool. And at some point we'll be like, "Okay, this thing's done. Would you write about it?" So with Confluence, the benefit of using Confluence is, it's accessible to everyone on the team and even people outside the team. And that's incredibly by an official because we've seen with agile, but we're also seeing in this technical communication and in information design field, that teams are less and less looking for those specialized individuals who are trained tech writers.

Which that's an oxymoron because half of us, we don't have degrees in tech writing, we fell into it for one reason or another. But now teams are starting to see, "Hey, I can be a code developer and an information developer. I might not write the final piece of written content that is seen by our customers, but I might write the first draft." Confluence really opens that up for everyone. And especially with like at mentioning and inline comments, review processes are just so fast.

Actually, the reason that I switched to Confluence at my last job, was my product manager threatened me and said, "I will not mark up another PDF. Go and find a good tool that we all want to work in." And that's where we landed on Confluence. It's about bringing the whole team into the writing process instead of having it be this separate thing. Because when it's a separate thing, we lose track of it. And content, we forget how important it is to our product, to the customer life cycle, to... God bless customer support, who really, really need that content to be good and accurate.

And it needs to be seen by the real experts who validate, "Yeah, okay, this is correct. This will actually show people how our product works." And Confluence is like the heart of that.

Henri Seymour:

No, it's great to hear how that all comes together to build the documentation as a team. Can you speak more to the different roles in, specifically in software development and the different roles you're looking to get involved in your documentation process? We are working on building our specific app teams here at Easy Agile as we're growing at the moment.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. That's such a good question. Well, what-

Henri Seymour:

And how do you incorporate... Sorry, this is more specific to my question. How do you incorporate that technical writing process as part of the work of an agile software development team?

Matt Reiner:

Well, first, it starts by rethinking priorities because most teams are like, "Documentation down here, testing and then everything else above." So generally, those two things should be moved up. And actually, the content around our product is... I don't want to sound over traumatic, but if we don't have information, we don't have a product. I don't care how much code you write. If we're not explaining it to people, if we don't have good UI text, if we don't have good in-app help, it doesn't exist. It's not a useful tool, it's just a set of mathematics that humans can't interact with.

So content is essential, so it's really important that we elevate it to the position where everyone on the team recognizes that the content experience that our users have is the product experience they have. So it needs to be part of the product development process. So then the next step, which I know you're talking about team structure, but the next step is really everyone on the team needs to know they're a writer, and they're a good writer. And that's important because a lot of people have never heard that. They've never heard that they're a good writer, and they probably have never heard that they're a writer.

I remember going through university, my writing classes were the things that I didn't pay attention to. I was doing mathematics, and Java programming, and statistics. Even that seemed more important to me, not the writing classes. And then sure enough, it turns out everyone has to write. We all write. So knowing that that is a role that everyone fills is really important. And then when it comes to actually team structure, you need to have individuals who are willing to cross the streams, so to speak. If you're bringing in someone who's focusing on test engineering, they need to realize that the test plans they're writing are very similar to a lot of user documentation that needs to be written.

They're writing task topics, or task instructions, do this, do this, do this over and over again. That's documentation. They could be contributing in that way. Engineers, as I mentioned, they could be drafting the first copy of a lot of what are called concept topics. So areas of documentation where you explain concepts, because they already know what those concepts are. In fact, if you look at the root of a lot of agile development teams, they're using epics and user stories and acceptance criteria. And all those map perfectly into the documentation you needed to create for that new feature you're working on or feature you're improving.

So really, it's essential to have everybody recognize, we are all already creating documentation, so we can contribute. And then of course, you really do want to have at least one probably native English speaker. Maybe not native, but someone who feels confident in their English or whatever language you're authoring in. English is typically the cheapest one to translate to other languages, so that's what people go for often. But that person's the person who takes everything everybody's written, gets it to the right style and tone. And then gets it out there. That's what we are seeing be successful.

Like our teams right now, we don't have any legit tech writers. We have product managers writing. We have product marketers writing. We have engineers writing. Some of the best documentation I've ever read was from one of our German-speaking engineers. I was like, "Peter, this is an amazing guide. You got to get out of this Java and get into English, man. It's great. It's great." So he's done a few, which I really love. But yeah, it's about jumping out of your typical roles and realizing, we're all documenting this stuff, anyway.

Henri Seymour:

I love the focus, especially with your German-speaking colleague. The focus on, it's not just that you must write the documentation because you know how the product works and we need that written down. It's, you are capable of writing the documentation, you can do this. You have that added barrier of safety with somebody who's got the language proficiency that they're going to massage it and edit it at the end.

So, before it gets anywhere, anything that you do is going to get filtered out if it's not working. But you don't need a specific tech-writing background to write the docs.

Matt Reiner:

No, absolutely not. In fact, there's an entire community of what... They call themselves documentarians called Write the Docs. And that whole community, that whole group is focused on, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters that you care about writing the docs, contributing to the content. And that's been a big shift, I think in the industry, where people thought we're separate. But now it's like, "No, no, no, we are all able to do this." And once we can respect the contributions that each of us can make.

And then also, I have that protection of somebody else is going to have their eyes on this, which even my writing, I'm like, "I don't like to send it out until someone else has seen it." Because I make spelling mistakes and typos all the time. I really want to have another colleague look at it. Even if they're not native English speakers, because they catch my typos pretty often. That feeling of togetherness, it's the same way that we feel when we ship out a project or a product.

Whether you did the testing for it, or you wrote the code for it, or you did the product marketing for it. It's like, "It's our baby. Let's send it out and see what happens." Content's the same way.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, part of my daily role and [inaudible 00:28:03]... We don't have QA team separate from developers. Our developers also review our code and it's that sense of, "I wrote this thing, but I have one or two other people who've refined it, who've made sure that it's good enough quality. They've got that fresh eye, so they'll see the spelling mistakes, they'll see the minor little errors that I've just been looking at it too long to notice anymore."

I found the documentation writing process has some parallels in there like, "Here's my thing. I'd like some feedback on it before it goes out into the real world."

Matt Reiner:

Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

That's great.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

All right. Can you talk a bit about the difference between the customer-facing documentation that we've mostly discussed so far and internal documentation?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. There are some differences and there are some major similarities. So this very... It sounds very technical and ugly. The term information architecture, it's really important with any kind of content, internally and externally. And really that's like, if you're a developer you're familiar with XML, you're familiar with structuring things in that way. Our content needs to work the same way. And that goes for internal and external documentation. So, many of the things that they use, writers, when they write a page or an article in the newspaper, they'll use that Pyramid approach, where they put the broad bits of information at the top. And then they slowly focus in on the topic and give more and more information about it.

But you want to make sure that if somebody only reads the first paragraph, they're getting a rough idea of what the information is. And that's really important for successful Confluence pages and spaces. People should be able to start at the top level of the space, understand what the space is about, and then be able to navigate down into the thing that they really want to learn about into the page itself. Which should then be using headings and subheadings and bullet points to get, again, just disseminate that information and break it down. Because everybody skims.

We need our content to be skimmable, our spaces need to be skimmable. And that kind of content also makes Confluence search happy, especially the new Confluence Cloud search, which has been greatly improved. There's a whole new elastic search base to that that's being optimized. But it's happy, it's just like with Google when we structure our content like that. So when you have a page that is just a wall of text, no headings, you're not breaking it up into pages or even spaces, nobody's going to be happy with that.

The bots aren't going to be happy with it, the people reading aren't going to be happy with it. So it takes a bit of work to structure, break up the structure of our content. It's probably all good as long as it's up-to-date, but it's really essential that we think about, how do we structure that in Confluence so that people can find it and people can skim it? And that is what seems to plague a lot of internal Confluence instances, because a lot of... Maybe the team isn't so focused on that.

It's like, "Oh, our external help center that's come coming from this space over here, that's fine. Our team space, hot mess, total tire fire." And nobody cares because they think they know where everything is. But then you start to think about, "Okay, but what about the new team member? How do they find something?" Or, "What about the team member who's been away for Paternity leave for six weeks? Are they going to remember where everything is or know where all the new stuff is?

What about folks with disabilities? Is it going to be much harder for them to navigate to the information they need? Because they're working with a screen reader and they're trying to go through a wall of text. They need headings, a screen reader relies on those headings and titles." So there's just so many considerations that really leadership of companies needs to understand, just because you have a process to do something or the information is somewhere, doesn't mean you don't have a major information problem. And maintaining all of your content in Confluence and then maintaining it well.

That is what enables people to avoid the frustrations of searching for information, losing information, having to relearn or rewrite information. I have worked at too many companies that just information sieves everywhere. I don't even want to call them silos because nobody knows where stuff is anymore either. That's what Confluence brings to things, and that's what matters with internal content pretty much as well as external.

Henri Seymour:

That's a great perspective on it. And I can see the silos, it's a really more... Just a one big pile, you can't find anything. I've been-

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

... at Easy Agile for more than half of its life now and I've got that sense of like, "Oh, I know I wrote this down somewhere. I know I've seen this written down somewhere." And we are making a habit, especially as we're hiring more and more people. Every time somebody's going through onboarding, they're going to be looking at all of this documentation with no previous background on it. And we want to hear their feedback on it specifically. Because if it works for them, then that's the documentation that we need for them and for everyone after them, and for everyone who's already here.

Especially, I've been at Easy Agile for almost three years now, and I've seen it grow from eight people to now we're up to high 20s, I think. We're going to cross over into the 30s by the end of the year.

Matt Reiner:

Wow.

Henri Seymour:

The growth of information that we have in our internal documentation, and I'm sure it would parallel the growth of the product documentation for a product that's been expanding for three to five years. How do you manage the documentation and the Confluence spaces as the team and the company grow and you just develop more and more pages out of it?

Matt Reiner:

That is the question since the dawn of the universe or at least the dawn of Confluence, which, what's the difference? The biggest thing is team responsibility, so knowing this is our space, this is our content. And not like in a territorial way, but this is our responsibility. Much the way we should think about our planet, we should also think about our content, keeping it groomed and taken care of, and up-to-date and accurate. And then as things change.

For example, we have a product called Scroll Viewport, which is actually what enables you to publish content from Confluence to a public health center, which is really, really cool. So with that, we had a server and data center version. We've had that for quite some time. That's what I was a user of. And then we set off to develop a cloud version, and cloud requires a whole bunch of new infrastructure, which is a lot of fun and very challenging, but it's a totally different beast.

It's not like you can just lift the server code and just drop it into cloud, which is what as a user I asked them to do for years, "why isn't this on cloud?" Now I know why. So we created a new team that started off this Scroll Viewport on cloud effort. And it was just a very scrappy project at first. And I remember the first page we got up there, it's like, "Whoa, look at this page we published." And then it progressed from there. But then at some point, we needed to bring the two teams back together. And what we could have just said, "Oh, this old Viewport space, whatever. We're just going to leave it there and then just go on with the new one."

But instead the team took time and brought the two spaces together and really went through the old content in the Viewport Server and data center space to say, "Is this all still relevant? Do we still need this?" So it's been reordered in such an amazing way. Several of our teams have gotten really good at making these spaces so that I can come in. Because I work with all of our teams, just get in and find what I need, even though I'm not working their day-to-day. I'm just so glad, I'm so proud of the team for not just letting that space languish somewhere or being afraid to delete or archive content, which a lot of people are.

It's like, "No, what if we lose something?" It's like, "No, no, no, we've moved past this. We really do need to delete it." So that's the kind of attitude it takes is, our teams to split and expand and grow, and we need conscious of that content. Because again, think of the new person, think of the person who's learning something new. Think of the person who maybe does have disabilities and is trying to get the content they need. They just don't have the background that you do. Having been with the company for half its life, you know how to dig through the thought pile to pull out just the thing you want, but they don't.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, and I don't want to be the person that they have to ask every time they need information, "Hey, can you find this for me?" No, no. I want to build a system that means that I don't have to answer the same questions all the time. That's one of the reasons I've been doing internal documentation so much since [inaudible 00:37:36]. I've answered this question once, that will do.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. That's a really good way to motivate any contributors to documentation. "Hey, you know how you wrote that piece of our app that one time and then everybody's asked you about how it works ever since? Just document it once and I promise you can never answer it again." That's good motivation right there.

Henri Seymour:

It is. As well, we've got a team on support models, so I'm working on the store maps and personas, product development team. And that's the same team that gets all of the support requests about story maps and personas. So yeah, the better we make the product, the better we make the documentation, the less of our time every morning we spend doing that. And the more we can get back to our regular jobs.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

It's been great for helping us keep in contact with the customers and what they're doing and what information they need when they're using our product. You mentioned that like it's necessary, it's valuable to be deleting an archive-based stuff, pages in Confluence from time to time. When you're looking at a page and wondering whether or not it's time to go, what sort of questions are you asking yourself?

Matt Reiner:

Well, a great one is like, look at the last modified date on that page. That's general a pretty good sign of like, "Are people even looking at it?" In fact, if you're on cloud premium and above, you can look at some great metrics on every page to see like who's looking at this thing? Is this valuable? What are the views like? Just the same way that you would look at your external website to see if your content is valuable or effective. But typically, we have a lot of debris left over from product development or team activities.

Like if you're in marketing and you have a campaign from three years ago, do you really need all of those detailed pages? Maybe keep the overall campaign page, maybe that's useful, but do you really need everything? If you're into testing, do you really need every test plan you ever created? If you're in the legal team, do you really want your legal terms from 10 years ago? Maybe, maybe, I'm not in legal. But often we have this fear of, it's like fear of missing content.

It's like, "Oh no, if I get rid of that, then I won't have it." But information, just like language, just like the way we think, just like the way our teams grow, it changes. And so we need to be aware of that. As we are changing as a team, you should expect our content to change. And part of that is shedding that old stuff. So it's always worth it, like if you're questioning it, ask another subject matter expert and be like, "Hey, I'm pretty sure we don't need this anymore, or we should revise this. What do you think?" But if nobody has any qualms, you should probably delete it.

Henri Seymour:

No, that's great. I am a big fan of decluttering, even digital decluttering. It's, I want people to find stuff and the less pile there is, the easier it's going to be.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. Because somehow bad information is less helpful than no information.

Henri Seymour:

Yes. It's like coming across a question and they're like, "Oh, I tried doing it this way." I'm like, "Oh, that way doesn't work anymore. You're going to have to do... Where did you find that written down? I'll go update out." It's-

Matt Reiner:

Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

... new people doing stuff. The best way to understand where your documentation is falling over. It's the same as you're never going to understand how your product documentation and that your product itself is failing your users until they come to you and tell you, "Why can't I do this thing?"

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Yeah. In fact that that power of bringing in someone new on your team is so amazing. And it's almost hard to impart like first day of onboarding like, "You have fresh eyes, please use them. This is called an inline comment, please put it everywhere." I remember going through our human resources employee handbook, which we had just created not too long before I joined. And I remember them telling me, "If there's any questions, at mentioned us." And I was really afraid to do that. But we corrected a lot of things.

For example, we mentioned do these things on... What was it called after HipChat? The product that lived and died so quickly.

Henri Seymour:

I think I missed that one.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, the one that Atlassian made and then they sold it to Slack.

Henri Seymour:

Now, where do I even start on that?

Matt Reiner:

How am I... It was a great app, I really liked it. But we mentioned in the employee handbook to use that. And I'm like, "Oh, I think we're using Slack now, we should update this content." That's stuff that HR is never going to go through and catch, but your new employees can do that. New people are the best way to tell you if your processes are bad, if your content is better. Maybe not bad, but they're bringing in something new. That's why we added them to the team. And they should not be afraid from day one to ask questions, or poke holes in our already messed up or failing process.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. And I can really see the benefit of the tools in Confluence, like that inline comment. Even if you don't know how you need that page updated or what the new version's supposed to be. It's just coming in fresh, you can go, "Oh, this is weird, or incomplete, or it might be wrong." It's just a little comment. You don't have to change it yourself, just say something. Here's a way to speak up without changing it yourself. And somebody who does know is going to be able to change it for you.

I was excited to hear you talk about information architecture. That's something I only got introduced to last year also. Do you have a general explanation of what information architecture is and why it's relevant to documentation?

Matt Reiner:

Oh, information architecture is, there are whole, people, professionals whose entire career is coming in and helping you. So I'm not one of those professionals, I just play one on TV. Really in essence, information architecture is breaking down what would be a wall of text into a pattern of information that anyone's mind can connect to. That's the real and ultimate goal, and that starts by just breaking up logical chunks. In fact, in a lot of pure technical writing, you break the content into tiny, tiny pieces, chunks or some technical communicators talk about atoms of information, really tiny pieces.

And then once you've broken that down and said, "These are separate pieces," then you assemble them together in an order that makes sense. In fact, you can also do really cool stuff with content reuse in Confluence, using include macros and the new Excerpt Include Macro is very cool in cloud, because you can do new stuff with that. But it's really about breaking apart all your content, figuring out what's the order of all of this? What's most important? What's more specific? What is important for everyone? What's important for just a few people?

And then just going down like you would with an XML structure or any other sort of hierarchy and tier that information using your spaces, your pages, your headings. And then finally bullets and paragraphs and that kind of thing.

Henri Seymour:

Thanks for getting that generally explained. Is there anything you want to mention in your work at the moment that you would be interested in getting readers onto?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, totally. A major new effort for me, because I'm just this content explorer, I guess. I've done like technical content, I've written some marketing content. I started speaking, which I enjoy speaking. I got to speak in front of one live audience before... No, I guess a few, and then, the world's shut down for good reason. Because when you're breathing out on a bunch of people, you want to make sure that you're not potentially putting them at risk. So been doing a lot of virtual speaking.

But recently, I mentioned, we've worked on all these best practices on Rock the Docs. And so we've started this video series about Confluence best practices and it's been very exciting to figure out, "Okay, so I know how to create fairly good in Confluence, how to structure that content. Now, can we make a good video?" And it turns out, no, not at first. Made some pretty poor ones or ones that just took way too much time to make. And finally, as you do with any kind of content, we finally got a good structure, a good rhythm. And we also found what are those things people really want to hear about?

And so we've developed 16 of these now on our YouTube channel that are just out there for administrators to share with your users who are asking these questions. Or maybe these are for users directly who just want to subscribe and get these things. But it's like eight minutes of just as much information as we can pack and still speak fairly legible English. And then show just like how do you do this in Confluence? Why would you do this in Confluence? What are the things you should consider in Confluence? What are the best ways to do things in Confluence?

We've actually just started a series of live streams as well, where we're trying to look at those more in depth and then have people live listening in, asking questions and directing the whole thing. So far those have been really great and we're looking to do more of that. So the more people who pile into those, the more direction y'all get to give that content. But it's been new types of content that it's exciting to see, okay, our good written content in Confluence is coming to the real world in a new format. Which has been cool and challenging and fun and scary all at the same time.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. That's sounds like a really exciting project. Rock the Docs is going audio-visual. And I can-

Matt Reiner:

That's right.

Henri Seymour:

... figure what... Get users on there to give you that iterative feedback that we talked about at the beginning. And so is this worth the thumbs up? Do you have comments? What else can we do? And especially in that sort of live stream webinar format, you get that direct contact with your users so you can find out what they're needing. That's that's fantastic. Probably see if I can come along with those. Easy Agile started using Scroll Viewport for cloud specifically earlier this year.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, cool. Oh, cool.

Henri Seymour:

So that's been a major improvement for us actually.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, good. Yeah. I'm just loving what the cloud team is putting out. It's so exciting and so polished and it's just like every team has that documentation space, and Viewport, it lets you put it out there and you're like, "Ah, looks so great. We're so proud of it." You can read it on any device. It's just like it's the magic that everybody wants, but no team has time. Our very few teams have time to make it look that good, so it's nice to have Viewport just do the heavy lifting.

Henri Seymour:

We've got the Confluence space, we've got the documentation. We don't have to make a website about it. It's just, "Go ahead, please make this website happen. Here's what we need on it. Here's the structure." And golly, it looks a lot better now, even just aesthetically, it looks a lot nice in the house.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. And it's nice to know that like some designer peered over the spacing between navigation items to decide how spaced out they should be. And as a writer, I can just like, I don't have to care. I don't have to care. I can throw in Confluence macros and stuff, and they just look really great when they're published. And I don't know how or why, but I'm happy. I can just keep writing. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah.

Matt Reiner:

It would be great to have someone from Easy Agile join us for one of those live streams. Because what we're really focusing on is just like great way to do things in Confluence. We haven't jumped into Jira yet. I'm not as much of an expert in Jira, but I have thought about it because that content doesn't really exist yet. But it's not necessarily app-focused or K15t app-focused. It's just like one of the best ways you've found to do certain things in Confluence, and we're just sharing those with people alive, and it's a lot of fun.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, that sounds great. I've got the parallel of get really into Jira and making Jira apps and Confluence is, "Yeah, we've got a Wiki. This is where we write stuff down." And it is great to have stuff like "There's the visuals on our docs page." But I don't do those. I'm busy making visuals in a Jira app. I don't want to think about that spacing. I've got my own spacing to do.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

And it really is that, I can just do the writing, I can just do product. I can do my job more because this other stuff taken care of because the experts at K15t have made that happen. And I hope that our apps can do a similar thing for their users of, this is the thing we need, we don't have to think about this. Bring in this app and it will solve a problem for us. It'll help us see what we need to and organize our information in Jira. Which is a different type of information again, but.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I've talked with some people who have actually described that whole app part of Confluence in Jira as App Hell. That's a term that I've seen and I can't help but love the community because we all come up with this stuff. But app hell is, it really comes out of not understanding what a platform is partially. For example, if you're using the Salesforce platform, yeah, that's going to be app hell if you really want Salesforce to be a marketing platform. Because Salesforce is a sales platform. But then there's apps, and Salesforce happens to a sell big one. And then all of a sudden it's a marketing platform.

So that is a really interesting perspective shift for people who are used to a tool that just does one thing. Everybody thinks Excel does everything. It doesn't, we really should just use it for spreadsheets, everybody. It's not a platform for other things. Confluence is really good at these core things, Jira is really good at these core things. And then these apps, they come in to answer the questions that don't have answers and do the things that can't be done. And that's why. So is it App Hell or is it App Heaven? That's the real question. Or maybe it's maybe it's App Purgatory, I don't know. I guess the listeners gets to decide.

Henri Seymour:

The constant stream of, and yet another app needs to update. Which to be fair, I think is not a problem on cloud at this point. That's an exclusively an on-premise problem, the constant app update cycle. But we are hopefully moving towards the end of the purgatory perhaps.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. Yes. I think we're all ascending together. We're just reaching new heights all at the same time.

Henri Seymour:

Is there anything else you'd like to bring up while we talking tech docs?

Matt Reiner:

I guess, I typically go back to when I was in university, I had a manager there who told us in this on campus job that I had, "Our job is to connect people with the resources that are already around them. You're not a teacher, you're just here to connect people." And that has really stuck with me. And that is essentially what we all do. Whether we're building a product that connects people with resources or that is the resource or we're contributing to documentation or some kind of content.

We're really trying to enable people to do that greater thing, that higher level thing that is above our content, it's above our product. It's that thing that they truly care about and any part we get to play and that greater thing, that better thing. That's what it's all about.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, that's really great perspective. That's probably also a really great thing to round off the end of the podcast with.

Matt Reiner:

I guess so.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. Thank you very much for joining us, Matt, and for talking all things technical documentation with us on the Easy Agile Podcast.

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