 So let's get started I'm gonna do this in English, which is kind of unusual to have an Italian speaker that also helps the organization but gives this sort of Constraint I told them I'm gonna come I'm gonna speak I'm gonna speak about what I do, but I'm not gonna do in Italian because First of all for me it's easier so being a super lazy person This was the only way to do it, but also because the little struggle that may you have in following me on this It's something that I had in the past when I was trying to When I was working and living in Italy trying to get through to the international community It was a struggle to follow them in another language But every single piece of effort that I put into that Was able to bloom later on and give me and gave me a lot of opportunities So to encourage you to get those opportunities. I want you to struggle a little bit today our journey today starts in 1986 which is not my Year of birth because I was born six years before that but with this picture So this is my mom and this is me six years old and this is a place that many of you might know because if you are into Bicycle racing or if you're just passionate about mountains, you know that in Italy we have Stelvio and Paso de los Stelvio, which is passed through to mountains in the albs And it's very popular because for people who ride bikes. It's one of the one of the place to go It's one of the biggest challenge being able to climb up This road with your bike It's a challenge that an experienced biker wants to do at least once. Yeah, it's true There are also motorbikers that they do that but that is easy do that with a bike and my mom did that in 1986 she trained for more than 10 months. She was very passionate about bikes She trained for more than 10 months and then she was able to go uphill here I took her four and a half hours. I was with my dad in the car very comfortable even at that time and And she made it and then we took that picture So after that coming from a family of passionate bikers my mom was a biker My grandfather was a biker. My uncle still is a biker today very passionate about it I had this idea that maybe there was a chance that I could make it too and and start riding a bike And I was six so it was like that age where you you start learning Running a bike and I had my little bike with side wheels, you know the side wheels and I decided to take them off So I asked my grandfather. He took unscrew the wheels and There I went with the bike without wheels for the first time and of course what happened. I fell Many times to the point that I said, you know what not that sure This is my thing and it's true Even if I learned how to run a bike at some point for me bikes are very very interesting objects that they can decorate your apartment Really well, they're really nice to see at they're really nice to ride But for sure they are not my job and my job Developed over the years started in Italy then I went I crossed the border I started joining international companies and At the beginning of 2014 I joined automatic which is the company behind many of behind all of them, but also more Products that you may know or you may use We are behind wordpress.com. We're behind the kismet. We're behind jetpack. We're behind woo WooCommerce and We do our best to make the web a better place and One of the things that is well known about automatic is that we don't have meetings Why we don't have meetings? Well because we don't have offices because we live everywhere So all of my colleagues including me We don't have a place where we go every morning except the online Facilities that we have which is slack wordpress and other tools that we used to keep connection Keep us connected, but we don't go to the office because our life is fully distributed. So everybody works from home wherever home is So this is a map of us if you go on automatic.com you can see this map It's interactive and you can see where everybody lives Of course, we have higher density in Europe and North America, but we are we can call ourselves a global company And we love to work asynchronously So it doesn't we don't need others to be awake at the same time and to be in contact with us with video calls or Real-time chats all the time because most of our work happens to be asynchronous So I do my work. I just submit my work and others will take over Later on when they wake up because we have many many different time zones We also have an open vacation policy It means that all of us can just go on holiday whenever we like and how long we want to we don't have we don't count how many days of vacation we take every year and also we don't Have a check-in and check-out time every day So I don't have to start at 8 or 9 I start when I want and I stop when I want So what happens that sometimes you do something and then you just wait for someone else to be online because it's not online At the same time sometimes takes a few days because that person is on holiday And of course his schedule is on the calendar. You know about it, but you know in a traditional office You're more into I need you come by let's see each other Let's work on something together at the same desk and we expect the kind of Interactive waste of time which happens most of the time in an office. We don't have that We just keep on working and rely on the fact that someone else will show up and the first day that you join the company This is the message that you get is the very first message that is on top of the field guide The field guide is a super large document made of course on a WordPress blog that Tries to answer all the questions that a newcomer has from how do I take vacations or how do I communicate with my teammates or how do we do things or where do I find the cool t-shirts that all my colleagues have all that stuff is in a Big giant blog with all the answers and if an answer is not there and you find out And you find it out somewhere else You are encouraged to contribute to that blog to provide more documentation for for the people that are coming next But the first thing you have on that blog is this welcome to the chaos Because it is it is what it is you join a company that has so many differences from the traditional work That at the very beginning feels really complicated to melt with I Was coming from a complete different experience my boss actually my business partner before Wanted all of us to be in the office no matter the type of work we were doing and I was used to that Even if I was a free spirit for a long time the last couple of years before automatic. I was working in an office Where I because was a startup I developed my career in a direction. There was this growth methodologies So today I'm gonna disclose a little bit what I'm doing So Georgia will be happy Karim will be happy my mother hopefully will be happy because that happens I mean you say a year ago my mom is asking since that day What do you do because she's not clearly aware of what I'm doing? She just knows that I'm happy with it and it's enough for a mother So today I'm gonna show you actually what I do And I want to talk about this struggle that I had when I joined automatic was a positive struggle don't get me wrong But I was coming from a very structured type of work And I had to implement a very structured type of work in a carding environment Where there are no timelines when there are no deadlines and Everything happens just because the people are really cool and they really cooperate together so What is growth? Because we hear this word a lot However, like many of the words that we use they tend to be very broad in their meaning So for everybody is a different thing and sometimes they're not very precise in the description What is the real work behind that helps me for instance to be? To apply to many different conferences with different talks, but I just put growth in the title and everybody's set right Not exactly but growth for me is this and for my team and for my company is optimizing the product market fit What does it mean having a company with so many products and Dealing with so many clients because everybody that has a blog on workers comm is potentially our client Not a customer because most of the time is for free Not a user because I deeply reject the idea of calling the people and workers comm users It's wrong. We should never use the term user outside of specific Part of the design because otherwise we tend to feel that they we produce they use The reality is they have a life and they want to improve their life and our job is to make their life better This is my job making our people Better like making their life better it happens internally So I help other people within the company to have better processes But most of my work is to make sure that our people that are using our services They have today a better service than they had yesterday and tomorrow will be better than today So a continuous improvement of their experience It happens through business analytics What many of us know as Google analytics? How many of you know Google analytics? What do you use Google analytics for? What is the main purpose? Just brag with other people about the visits, right? Google analytics is one of the many tools that you can use force for business analytics Knowing that it's offering a very very narrow amount of information on a specific set of Keymetrics of your business Google analytics is not telling you a lot of things But the few things that is telling you if you are able to read them, right? They can really really improve the quality of your outcome Of course, it's not the final goal as many of the tools that we use It's one of the things that contribute to the success of your business Then another thing that I do daily is this split testing and usability testing I submit our design to real people that they use it They show me their struggle in using it and I feed back to the designers in order to get them better I also do a split testing this happens really every day where I send different groups of people through different type of Experiences measuring the key matrix to decide which new feature is better which design works better not necessarily gets More visits or gets more sales, but according to the business analytics To the metrics that we measure through business analytics and the goal that we have We use these tools to make sure we are going in the right direction and then The entire thing that happens before is focused on one and one thing only Making data informed decisions Most of the time most of the decision we make as a human beings are wrong Deeply wrong. It happens at personal level when we choose the people we want to spend our life with many of us know when we choose The food we're gonna eat tonight when we choose the restaurant when we choose the in the next car and In business when we choose the next partner the next feature on our on our Website the next design on our website when we say, oh, you know what? I really feel that this is gonna work when you hear this sentence for sure. It's wrong My job is to tell you how much big is that for sure? Because I know that it's wrong. I just don't know the extent and my job is to find it out and tell you look This gives us 95% of chances to be right This one gives us 10% the potential outcome of this is this amount The potential outcome of the other is this amount. Am I making the decision? Sometimes sometimes it happens that I am supposed to decide what to do Most of the time I just present the thing to the decision makers and the decision makers Try they can make a decision that is based on the goal on the vision on the strategy and on my data-informed Matrix actually on on the metrics that I provide in order to be informed because the point is not about making the right one The point is is to limit the amount of risk Compared to the outcome that you want to get How do we do that? Well, of course, this is science Totally science right and we know that science Requires to be strict. You cannot just make Science if you are not strict on the process. Otherwise, it's not science. It's just voodoo or very very similar to magic or sometimes just Stuff that doesn't work you need to be strict So the struggle was how do I take strict methodologies and apply on a chaotic company? not an efficient Not slow company really fast really efficient, but very chaotic There was to be applied with methodologies. There are sometimes very slow Sometimes it takes me two months to get an answer and I have people that they work on that and they need an answer today Sometimes the answer requires that something doesn't change for those two months and Things are changing every five minutes. We have more than a hundred deployment per day on workers.com My colleagues submit code on a continuous pace. They don't stop for two months because I need to measure something I need to figure out a way to measure it even if things are changing in the meanwhile That was my that was my thing to do And this is my team You see five people here. This is our recent meet-up in Vienna a few weeks ago. So This is Brie. She lives in San Diego. This is Mike. He lives in Richmond, Virginia This is Dan lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This is Ron. He lives in Tel Aviv Israel And this is me. I live in Vienna, Austria as you can see we go from Tel Aviv time to San Diego time and We never we're never awake at the same time all together We have a window that covers 20 hours per day because Ron wakes up then I wake up Six five six eight hours later. They wake up and then Brie wakes up Last in a day and we cover the entire clock So I know that if I have activities to do that require just me so they're like solo work I do them in the morning because the others are sleeping except Ron but if I need to do something that requires to Work with my lead which is Brie. I need to wait. I need to wait for Pacific time So I tend to push that later in the day after four or five p.m. To make sure that we are efficient with that And we have these three Things that I'm gonna talk to you today. These are three things that we do We don't talk about it. We just do it First one is a weekly sprint the second one is a weekly growth hangout and the other one is our meetup projects So let's start with the first one a weekly sprint. How many of you are familiar with a sprint methodology? Okay, what what happens in our case every week? We just talk so we take one hour sometimes even less the fastest the fastest to hangout about a sprint We had was like 12 minutes. We tried to keep it as short as possible remember if you want to make sure if you want to measure the efficiency of a meeting The shorter the better because it means that you did homework before If you sit in a meeting and the meeting goes long It's a waste of time not because it's just long But because it means that a lot of things that had to be sorted out before it never happened And so you didn't do your homework So we have this weekly hangout where we just sit we talk and we plan next week We just report about the previous week. It lasts for half an hour usually and This is the main tool that we use to keep track of what we do. It's a Trello board I'm sure that many of you are familiar with Trello, right? How many of you good so These are the things that we do and this of course Well, this is a screenshot of yesterday's Trello So if you're squinting your eyes trying to read ha ha I change every single title But I changed it with full with cool stuff like Design a beautiful flower these two are designers or design a logo another designer in my case Solve a Rubik's Cube or revision revisions make sure to be sure So, you know, I cannot really disclose what we do in detail But this is how it looked like but what I want you to look at is this This is our size chart the same way we measure shirts Right, you have extra small small medium large extra large for us Tasks that end up in a card on our Trello. They need to be extra small. So tasks that we Estimate they're gonna last less than two hours to be completed Small less than one day Medium less than two days There is no large There is no extra large. There is no special. There is no Task that is allowed to be bigger than two days Because with a weekly sprint if you have something that lasts longer than that It's a liability as soon as you put that on your on your task list It's a threat for the entire team because if someone is stuck on something that is supposed to last three days It's gonna take five days and you have one resource completely locked for a week and we cannot afford that So everything that is bigger needs to be breaking down in pieces that are smaller than that So everything needs to be smaller than two days It's our job to figure out how to break things down in order to be smaller chunks So we can consume those chunks and make sure that the entire in progress and current spring is completely done by The end of Friday, of course sometimes is the end of is mid Saturday because of the time zone But it doesn't matter. The idea is this Current spring that starts on a Sunday evening or Monday morning for us Is completely done by the end of the week if it's not what happens The next time we have a hangout we discuss why it didn't happen Then we have a weekly growth hangout that works roughly the same It's not the same people there are other people from other teams because we support growth on other teams as well and What happens on a growth hangout which I am responsible for are three things and they happen in a very strict time frame So ten minutes to discuss recent test results Why ten minutes because a discussion if it's longer needs to happen on a written form on a blog Where we discuss things and things can be compounded and documented We don't want to waste as Karim said before our time talking about something that then when the call is over everybody forgets We discuss future test proposals Discuss and we have general discussion during the general discussion, which is a 10 minute sharp We actually iterate on the process itself. So we just change this process itself Because the company changes really fast we hire really fast we grow really fast We cannot afford to have this growth hangout to get stuck for more than two months in the same format Because in those two months we learned that there are things that are that needs to be done better And so everything keeps on evolving with the company and with the business along the way and This is our testing board every single test ends up on this board where people contribute with ideas that can be tested Then we have a list of the tests that are almost ready or ready to be deployed the tests that are running like less typos in our copywriting or More CTAs are why is there are pews, but less acronyms And then I'm gonna rush through this because I don't want to go to too long But as speakers I'll be available if you want to talk about it. I'm here all day Projects we have in different time zones. We live in different countries Sometimes a little less sometimes a little more we get together and we spend an entire week together and during that week We pick a project and we just work on that project together and the last one is this so this is a book that I highly encourage you to buy and to read it's called Sprint and it is recently recently was featured by Google Ventures actually comes out of Google Ventures and it's a guide that in five days takes you from takes a design team from zero to a prototype Tested so how to develop new products or services or businesses in five days. It's really really interesting You should try it. The first thing you need to the book Is to have a lot of post-its a lot of stickers a lot of paper and a lot of pens And you know you give designers this thing and they can just cover the entire place with that it's just amazing by itself, but Truth is that if you follow that book you have very precise time slots where you are supposed to design for ten minutes design Discuss for five and it gives you like on five days. It gives you like ten sessions half a day each You just follow that the first time it's awkward from the second time You start to get momentum and get speed and it's amazing. You should really try it So during this thing you create a blueprint of your next product or your next service in our case Of course, we were not designing this but this is a pretty cool Thing because at the end you actually make it to create an MVP So a prototype of the product that of course you're supposed to try and like every single time it happens It's gonna fail miserably and that is the entire point because that is the right time to fail Not when you go to market Fail as soon as possible and this design sprint helps you to fail on the right things those things that you can fix and get better so This for instance, it's me Mike Dan and run and Bree was taking the picture. You can see a designer So here tells why I'm needed why this team needs me for doing this kind of stuff Because a designer is good at designing this like the product that I was testing with this guy But he's so embarrassed and I know that Mike is gonna watch this video some point and Mike I'm talking about you look how embarrassed was this guy was like, I don't know these people It was just but I I am good at that So I went to this guy and I said this guy was selling tickets outside of the outside of the opera house Which is not that legal but they do that and if you go to Vienna You have a lot of people that they try to sell you tickets So my my we were looking for real people to test our prototype There was a mobile a part of a mobile interface and I was like, oh tickets for the opera Let's do this and and the guy was like, oh, they're gonna buy so I need to be cooperative and so it was like, oh, oh, you know We're designers. We're here designing stuff Can you try our app and he was trying the interface and we were looking at his usage So taking notes like struggle on this. It was fine on that. Thank you and we were leaving and Mike was very embarrassed by our Behavior, but we got very useful insights on how real people were interacting with our interface So in this case, I was the face. I don't know if you know the a team the the TV series from the 80s I am the face In Italian was bearla. Okay in English is the face So three takeaways from my presentation and then if you have questions, I would be super happy to answer The first thing is make do not talk I leave the New Zealand for a while and I started martial arts for more than 20 years and when I was in New Zealand I had an awesome sensei for aikido and Every time that people were like stopping their practice and talking about it We're like, you know, my elbow is not going right or my stance The guy was showing I was like do not talk about your problems Solve them and this is the thing every time you have people that they tell you, you know We should do this we should just do it do it because the first time you do it Is not gonna work out No matter what you can talk about it You can talk for months the first time you do it is not gonna work out. So just do it and then learn Take notes on what is not working Do not talk about what you what you don't think is working just Reflect on what is really not working because of the experience you did you made doing something and then even if it feels really awkward you should Get it wrong and then learn about it and then keep on doing it Keep on doing it iterate change little things a lot of times Not let's do this for three months then in three months We're gonna talk about it and then in another three months. Maybe we change it No, we talk about this every week and if we learn something this week next week is gonna be already different Every single thing including the iteration process itself needs to be put into an iteration process So when we talk about growth, we have this saying Up and right Because when things go well on your chart, they go up and right. We actually have an internal blog where we discuss growth That is called up and right however It's not right. It's not up and right. It's a lot of stuff happens before you can go up and right And if you look at the real path that success and growth take It reminds me something doesn't it? Oh Yes Reminds me something My mom didn't spend 10 months talking with friends about you know what it's really needed to get on top She trained every single day for 10 months With a six years old pain in the ass that was me at home to get to the top and That is the only way to do it and When you think that growth methodologies that you see on books or people like me that talk about it blah blah blah Yeah, but they apply only to automatic they only apply only to Google they only applied only to crowd favorite or big companies That is not true They apply all the time they apply in personal life on a small shop on a one-person Consultancy business on a large corporation. They just work, but you need to remember something. It's like bikes There are people that are in their life They make a career becoming professional bikers and they do Jude, Italy through the France and they make a living out of it Then there are other people that they just go to work with their bike And they just don't buy a car because they have their bike and the bike is more than fine to go to work and come back There are people that they use their bike on Sunday Just to take a stroll outside of the of the city or to go on holiday and they just go by bike Or they use it for other purposes or they run in a circle. So the purpose of the bike is different for everybody But learning how to ride the bike is the same for everybody So don't worry about looking at what other people do with the bike Just make sure that you understand the best the basics Fail enough to learn how to ride the bike and that is well that will accompany Your life for the entirety for the entire life You will know how to learn your bike even if for a while you take another job when you go back You know how to run the bike and the bike is to have an iterative process that allows failures The lowers the cost of failure and makes things to change every day. Do not wait for change. Just drive it So thank you very much. I really appreciate and I would really appreciate your questions I'm sure you have unless we are super late. No, we're not late, right? We are in time. We have one question there Yeah What's the MC doing? It's just like Okay, how you can ask sorry if I interrupt you you can ask me in Italian English I will repeat the question in English in any way and I will answer in English If you want to do Italian to Italian, we do it afterwards just for a video I want to keep the answers in English. Okay, so Thanks for everything this kind of Moving around the job is it's huge. I like it Just a small consideration. Yeah This looks great for long-term projects or always evolving projects, but how about web agencies with small terms Projects and so always Starting again a new project a new project and not thinking about that's that's a great question because that allows me to Help you understand the scope of this Do not see your business as the bite or your next customer Your business is not the current customer and it's not the next customer. Your business is the entire life of your Agency your shop of your company And that is the scope that you need to take a Client it's a little window in a very long time But that little window compounded with all the others. They make your living over time So it's not about growing or iterating a lot on a single client But every client itself is a new iteration on negotiation sales support There was a problem one client will teach you For the next one and this is the thing I really encourage you to do take every single bit of failure as Learning for the next one, but not with with an attitude that is like I know they do this I know this happens. Oh, yeah, and the one that I really hate And I hope I'm not offending anyone if I do I apologize. No, I don't even apologize if I offend you You are wrong on this Never promise me never use ever again the sentence. Well, but this is Italy Cut that shit It's your business. It's your responsibility to change this If a client is not behaving the way it's supposed to it's your job to change that The country is not gonna change by itself and we are responsible for it So the first thing to do is never say that sentence again Never justify yourself or someone else saying. Yeah, but this is the way it is. No, this is the way you keep it Is that clear good? I'm happy about myself. I Told I told him yesterday So I told him yesterday that I should start a political party, which is not gonna happen I know that other people with microphones said that a lot of times and that it happened I have no plans for that. So you find my thing out. You can sign. No, I'm kidding more questions, please just another one Yeah, okay, I Have two questions. I'll just make one. Okay. One is about you. So what's the best? Grow I mean success in terms of growth in an automatic that you did just to contextualize your Okay, so last year we went for an extraordinary journey of automatic We started one thing called Calypso that many of you may have heard about It's a new way of Interacting with WordPress and in our case in it's very deep deeply connected with wordpress.com Calypso gave us a new framework in terms of technological framework so there were new ways to write the user interface new ways to interact with the back end and At some point we realized at the very beginning of the year actually a little before last year that One of the goal that the company had for the year was to improve the new user experience. So the sign-up process I Didn't work Directly on new user experience for the entire year wasn't I was not in charge of it I was involved sometimes Marginally sometimes I was asked questions sometimes I was consulting other teams sometimes I was just passing by and I was saying if I may I would do this and that So it's not my personal success because in automatic there are no look at successes There will never be look at successes because it's not about me It's about the company and whatever I do I do it to support others in reaching the goals of the company in that case Being able even in a little in a little contribution to push a culture of data-informed decisions testing iterating and Getting data as one of the main components for decisions helped the company to go from a Let's say conversion rating sign up there was a little above 30% 250% on a specific flow in the calm and that was big because was in use experience So everybody that was starting a new account went through was was involved with this So of course, I'm not going into details on which flow in particular or the size of it But that to me was a big Was I was really proud of that not just because it was involved because as I told you I was not directly involved But I know that I contributed to the attitude towards that in order to get that done And that is enough for me to be extremely proud of what the company does At every level because that happens not just on new use experience, but also engagement and reduction of churn there are many business challenges that companies of that size have and I'm really happy to be there and contribute Was that okay cool? I would take the very last one and then we move into private Q&A outside if you may if you want I Annoy if you can talk about this, but I'm curious about an example of a work day for you since you have this Oh, I don't work That is that is a decision. I made a long time ago now. I'm 36 and it's too late to start so, you know But it's true. I don't I don't feel myself. I'm working. I am just I'm just happy enough and I was very very Skilled and smart smart enough to get someone to pay me for having a hobby And it's real. I don't feel I go to work because I don't go to work, but my my usual day goes like this I When I'm in Vienna when I'm traveling every day is different But when I'm in Vienna, I structured the day to make sense for my team and for myself And I wake up around 7 30 or 8 I go to the gym to 2 hours in at the gym So around 10 30 11 I open my computer And then I go through everything that happened during the night because all the American shift happens when here is night So I just go through Internal blogs emails everything that requires me to be informed about what happened the day before around 11 in the morning and then from 11 to I would say 1 or 12 30 I just process that in chunk of information that some days are really big Some days is a little smaller and I do all the activities that requires my solo attention. So Preparing tasks or doing analytics doing things that doesn't require me to talk to others And that happens before lunch and after lunch around until 3 3 30 when the three Americans tend to show up When the three Americans show up It's time to interact and to do that work that requires interaction So let's say that I have a piece of code that requires design So I can interact with designers and get it done because we are up at the same time If I need something to go through my team lead the team lead comes around three or four usually sometimes before And that is the right time to interact with them. So I prepare a B tests. I prepare usability test I review the test I keep all the key metrics in line because when you test you test something new But don't forget that this is a big company with a lot of key metrics and a lot of them are called health metrics It means that if everything goes well like you have but you have revenue that they fall that there is a problem So everything every single health metric needs to be on my dashboard and my desktop every every moment of my Workday, so as I said 11 to 2 p.m. 3 p.m. Solo time 3 p.m. To 6 interaction then I take time off until 8 or 9 Depending on the plans for the evening usually before after dinner I just check in again to make sure that everything is on the launchpad for the night what what I mean Sometimes let's say a designer needs to work on something I cannot afford that that designer cannot work during my night Because I forgot to prepare enough for him to do it So after dinner I just make sure that everything is ready to be taken over by someone else that comes in when I'm sleeping And that keeps the wheel spinning when I'm traveling. I try to adapt So I try to keep this even if you know different time zone but the thing is I work with extremely capable people and That means that even if I forgot something They ping me on slack. I just two words They know already where to go what to get and my job is to make sure that I'm never a bottleneck for anything So my day can be extremely flexible and then there are days where I am All in for the entire day and there are days that I say sorry It's contributors day tomorrow. I need to take it off and there is no problem because there is a Saturday a Sunday and then a Monday And I will catch up on things the most important thing is to keep this wheel spinning all the time and Making sure that when when you have other things to do those things do not stop this wheel that spins but most of all Being able to rely on others and this is not easy It took me a while to get used to do not rely just on myself Because that is the most difficult part and to do that you really need to completely delete your ego There's never I do this. There's always we do this. There is never personal success There's always team success company success even before so that requires requires quite some time But I got there. Oh, yes, I'm getting there. I'm not here yet there yet completely But I'm happy about it and I'm super happy that you have been here for such a long time I don't want to keep you any longer. There's lunch