 If you're wondering if it's terrifying to be up on a big stage like this and a big room like this, I can tell you without hesitation or reservation, the answer is yes. My name is Mike Topa. I'm the director of web development for a small firm called Hobson and Company. I've been a web developer since the mid-1990s and I enjoy helping teams explore agile and lean practices with the goals of improving quality, communication and developer happiness. And if you've worked with agile and lean practices, you may be familiar with some concepts that come from Japan like Kanban or Kaizen. Both originate from the world of Japanese manufacturing and have since been applied around the world software work. Kaizen is about making constant small improvements and empowering individuals to discover and make those improvements. Kanban was originally a system used to monitor assembly lines and in the world of software it's grown into a system to help teams prioritize work, manage flow and uncover obstacles. The term I want to introduce you to today is omotenashi which describes Japanese customer service and hospitality. The application of Kaizen and Kanban to software work is something that has evolved over time. My goal in this presentation is to share some thoughts on how omotenashi might provide similar value for us to start exploring how we might adapt concerns, adapt concepts from it to our work and evolve beneficial practices. Kaizen and Kanban are concepts from management in Japanese manufacturing and so aren't really part of everyday life for most people in Japan. In contrast, omotenashi is very much part of everyday life in Japan is a significant aspect of Japanese culture. In Christelle Takigawa's presentation to the International Olympic Committee in 2013, she made omotenashi the key theme of Japan's successful bid to host the 2020 Olympics. She highlighted Japanese hospitality as something that set Japan apart from the other contenders. She began her speech by saying, we will offer you a unique welcome. In Japanese I can describe it in one unique word, omotenashi. Now before I go on I should probably answer the question that might be on your mind at this point. Why is an American white guy on stage talking about Japanese customer service at a Ruby on Rails conference? I'd like to answer that question by way of answering another question which is what do I think about when I think about Japan? First, I think about the time I've spent in Japan with my family. My wife Maria is a second generation Japanese American. She's an academic and studies Japanese politics and economics. She received research grants that brought us to Japan to live for six months in 2007 and again in 2014. My oldest son went to Yochien there which is Japanese kindergarten. She has relatives there and we've made almost a dozen other trips to Japan over the past 20 years. I've been incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to travel extensively within Japan and I've made several good friends in our time there. But having said all that, since I'm an American my knowledge of Japanese culture has inherent limitations and I have no relevant professional expertise so I'm not here to sort of mansplain it to you. Instead I'm here to share what I've learned in my time there from my own experiences, my wife Maria's experiences and from talking with friends I've made there. Having an outsider's perspective also has value as it's helped me gain a deeper awareness of my own culture and learn from its differences with Japanese culture. So what are some of the other things I think about when I think about Japan? I think about so many things. When I first worked on my draft of this talk I filled it with slides about Japan's high-tech modernity, its ancient history, its cultural heritage, its wonderful food, and even its amazing manhole covers. But for the sake of making sure there's actually some time left for our main topic I'll unfortunately have to skip all of that and limit myself to aspects of Japanese culture that relate to Omo Tenashi. So with that in mind something I think about when I think about Japan is orderliness and societal respect. I took this picture in 2004 back when pay phones were still a thing. This is my wife Maria using a pay phone on a subway platform in Tokyo. Sometimes the most mundane things can tell you a lot about a society. Notice that all the wiring is not secured at all. The power cord is exposed and plugged into an ordinary wall outlet. The handset cord is about the same as what you'd see on a home phone. This is because street crime and vandalism are rare in Japan. Compare that to an American pay phone where the only accessible wire is the handset cord and it's wrapped in steel. Tokyo is one of the biggest cities in the world. How long do you think a pay phone like this would last on a subway platform in a city like New York or LA? Also note how spotlessly clean everything is. In case you can't see the picture that well the subway platform floor is immaculate and the chrome railings and wall tiles are all shiny. Which brings me to the next thing I think about when I think about Japan. Cleanliness. For anyone who might not be able to read that it's a sign in a Japanese bathroom that says please urinate with precision and elegance. Things you may think of as inherently dirty like public restrooms or garbage trucks are just about always really really clean. I think about politeness, personal respect, and friendliness. Everywhere I have traveled in Japan I have always been made to feel welcome. This quote is from a friend of ours after she visited Japan for the first time and I can't think of a better way to describe the feeling. She said I just wanted to hug everyone. The Japanese are known for being polite but they're not generally known for being friendly but they actually are. Especially if you venture outside of Tokyo. If you make an effort to engage socially you may be surprised at the warmth of the interactions you'll have. I think about professionalism and decency. One of the things that struck me the most in Japan is that almost any full-time job will pay a living wage. People are treated with respect regardless of their job and you can pretty much always expect professional quality service. As an example the Shinkansen bullet trains these are the trains that go very fast go all over Japan and can get you anywhere about as fast as an airplane. These trains average 12 minutes between arriving at their last stop and then departing again. Five of those minutes are needed for passengers to get on and off which leaves seven minutes for cleaning the train. Now typically there's one person cleaning each train car. Those cars each have 100 seats so they have seven minutes to pick up the trash on the seats clean the floor wipe down the trays at every seat check for any lost items and since the seats rotate they also have to make sure to rotate them all to face the same direction for the new passengers. Doing a job like that well doing a job like that well in such a short amount of time requires having a standardized set of tasks that maximize efficiency and it requires executing those tasks with excellence day in and day out. Now here I am on stage at a software conference excited to tell you about how they clean trains in Japan. It's an ordinary job but when done so well it rises to the level of an art form one that Harvard business students want to study and this brings us to the idea of Omo Tenashi Japanese customer service and hospitality. A key motivator for why things like cleaning trains are taken so seriously in Japan is hospitality. In the U.S. we think of hospitality as something we experience when visiting someone's home or maybe a hotel but in Japan it's also a key aspect of almost every business. When you do something like get on a train it's very much considered similar to visiting someone's home in terms of how you should be made to feel welcome. Bridgett Brennan who's a columnist for Forbes magazine put it well and described in her customer service experiences in Japan. She said, wherever I ventured in stores large and small I experience what would be considered white glove service back home delivered with a kind of warmth enthusiasm and salesmanship typically found in black and white movies. Omo Tenashi is the combination of two words in Japanese. A mote which refers to the public face that we show the world and nashi means without. Omo Tenashi means your actions are wholehearted, sincere and without artifice. Whether people genuinely feel that way while say working as a cashier at a 7-11 day in and day out is another question but the main point is that customers experience the service you provide as if it was always true. Uniqlo is a clothing store chain that started in Japan and has since gone global. To give you a sense of the quality of their service Uniqlo's CEO Tadashi Yanai said this when they opened their first store in Australia. He said there is customer service and then there is Japanese customer service. They spent a full year training the Australian staff to get them to a Japanese level of quality service. Imagine going through 12 months of training before taking a job at a place like The Gap. Now if you've been to one of the Uniqlo stores that have opened in the US over the past few years your customer service experience may not have stood out as anything special. The quote in my slide here from 2014, this is just a guess on my part but I think Uniqlo must have found it cost prohibitive to do this level of training as they've rapidly expanded globally in recent years. But to give you a more personal example when I was living in Tokyo with my family in 2007 I was responsible for our boys each day while my wife was working. After dropping off my oldest son at kindergarten I would usually find a place to explore in Tokyo with my one and a half year old son. I found out about a department store that had a children's play area on its top floor so we headed there one day. We were the first to arrive when they opened the doors in the morning and there were no other customers. Now in an American department store you might see the staff milling around and still getting ready for the day you know this early in the morning but in Japan they are there and they are ready to serve you. Department stores in Japan also have more staff than in American stores as you would never want to risk keeping a customer waiting. Now I had to head across the main floor to the elevator on the other side to go up to the play area and as I walked with my son in the stroller lined up in front of me on each side every 15 or 15 feet or so was a staff person and they would bow deeply to me as I passed by. I had experiences before with individual staff people but never with so many like this and it made me feel like royalty. It also made me feel a little bit bad because I wasn't actually going to buy anything. We just wanted to go play with Legos and Ultraman action figures in the play area. Similarly if you visit a boutique retail store like a nice clothing shop and make a purchase when you leave the person who helped you will follow you out the door and bow deeply staying bowed until you've reached the end of the block. Westerners typically perceive this as a selfless devotion to the customer. You get the impression that Japanese workers will do anything to please you since you are made to feel so well taken care of. That's certainly how I perceived it at first. But this perception is the result of our own Western cultural assumptions where we presume a hierarchical relationship that it's the service provider's job to do what the customer wants. That's not how customer service works in Japan. As a customer you are expected to respect the professional judgment of your service provider and respect their expertise. If you are a customer service provider in Japan and you have a customer asking you for something that isn't supposed to be part of their experience that means things are starting to go wrong. It means the customer has overstepped the bounds of their role. It's your job as a service provider to steer them back onto the correct path. Not surprisingly this happens most frequently with foreign foreigners visiting Japan who naturally don't know anything about Omotanashi. Situations like this put a Japanese customer service provider in an awkward position and they need to get things back on track as gently as possible but also firmly. To illustrate this I'm going to show you a brief clip of a TED talk from Dr. Sheena Ayengar. She's a professor at the Columbia Business School and is an expert on choice. White people want choice, how they choose, and so forth. At first I wanted to just paraphrase what she says here but realize I really couldn't do it justice. So here she is describing one of her first experiences when visiting Japan for the first time. I knew even men that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings but they popped up when I least expected it. On my first day I went to a restaurant and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. After a pause the waiter said when does not put sugar in green tea? I know I said I'm aware of this custom but I really liked my tea sweet. In response he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. One does not put sugar in green tea. I understand I said that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea. Surprised by my insistence the waiter took up the issue with the manager pretty soon. A lengthy discussion ensued and finally the manager came over to me and said I am very sorry we do not have sugar. Well since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it I ordered a cup of coffee which the waiter brought over promptly. Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar. My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. From my American perspective when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences she has every right to have that request met. The American way to quote Burger King is to have it your way because as Starbucks says happiness is in your choices. But from the Japanese perspective it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better. It's the ignorant Gaijin for making the wrong choice. Let's face it the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards and they were doing their best to help me save face. So she says at the end there they wanted to help her save face. This is a common reason why you may not get what you want in certain situations. She didn't realize that from a Japanese perspective she's unwittingly embarrassing herself by asking for sugar with her tea. So they are trying to protect her from herself. There can be other reasons for these kinds of situations as well which we can explore with a couple more stories. Here's one from my own experience where Japanese customer service professionalism collides with American notions of choice. In 2014 we lived in a city in southern Japan called Fukuoka for six months. And near our apartment was a pastry shop called Anderson's. It was our favorite it was a favorite stop especially for my boys as you can see in the picture here. You would get a tray and pick out your own pastries and then go to the cashier to pay. The cashier would also individually bag each of your pastries. I'm very eco-conscious and this would bother me. It felt very wasteful to me to use so many bags. So one time using my limited Japanese skills I mustered the courage to politely ask the cashier to use just one bag. Her response was to simply ignore me. I felt confident she understood me as I've had many other kinds of simple customer service verbal exchanges without any trouble. My Japanese wasn't good enough for me to feel comfortable pressing the matter further but on future visits I tried a few more times and they would always just ignore me. So why were they doing this? It's because they knew what might happen if they actually did what I asked. I would go home and take my sugar donut out of the bag and give my wife her egg bread and it would have sugar all over it from the donut and she would think to herself boy what a lousy job those people at Anderson's did. So in this situation they are not just trying to protect me from myself they are trying to protect others from me as well and by extension maintain their own reputation. Here's a third and final example of a customer service situation going a bit off the rails. This is a story my wife Maria told me. She was in a small tableware shop in Tokyo and it was admiring a handmade tea caddy which is for storing tea leaves. Unlike me her Japanese is excellent and is actually good enough that native speakers often don't notice her American accent at first. She was chatting amiably with the store owner and said that she would like to show the tea caddy to her friends back home in America. At this point his demeanor completely changed he stiffened up and he said oh you're from America you're not going to put paper clips in it are you? This isn't just about protecting her from herself or protecting others from her it's about protecting the product from her. He would prefer to not make the sale rather than see it used incorrectly. This may seem a little extreme so what's what's really going on here? Before I answer that question I have to provide some context for the next short video I'm about to show you. My wife Maria has recently gotten into a very ridiculous very fun and very self-aware Japanese heavy metal band called Maximum the Hormone. Now when you watch videos on YouTube they automatically recommend other videos that their algorithms think you might like and so she came across a video by Marty Friedman. So who is Marty Friedman? He's the former lead guitarist for the American heavy metal band Megadeth and it turns out he has lived in Japan for the last 16 years and has his own TV show there. So I give you Marty Friedman providing some advice for first-time visitors to Japan in an interview he did with the online magazine Metal Injection and it turns out it's perfect for what I wanted to say about this experience Maria had while shopping for a tea caddy. That's one of my favorite things about Japan customer service is off the charts just wherever you go whatever you try to buy what even from a convenience store fast food chain high-end department store the customer service is second to none they will really make your experience great but one thing I want you to know is unlike America and sort of like Europe special orders are not really going to happen this on the side or this with extra sauce or this with no sauce pretty much take that out of your mind and you're going to have a much more enjoyable experience the food is so incredible just go with it I mean how many times do you go to Japan in your life you know what I mean it's their way and if they try to do it your way it's not going to come out right and they're not going to have the same pride that they would have in doing it their way and so if you get refused please do not mistake that for unfriendliness please understand that what they're doing is that's their way and they want to give it to you the best way they can and a lot of restaurants don't allow you to take food away like doggie bag type of things that's mainly because they don't know exactly how you're going to deal with it afterwards and they want you to have it in the best possible form so tying this back to dr angar's tea and sugar story my pastry bag story and Maria's tea caddy story you can start to see the common threads there's a very strong focus on providing service according to strict standards of excellence the salesman Maria was dealing with definitely went a bit too far with his comment but it's an expression of his worry about a customer not having the right experience with the product so there's a reason I'm focusing on these stories about customers desires coming into conflict with the professional standards of Japanese customer service providers because that's where I think the most interesting lessons are for us and there are three lessons I've thought of the first lesson is about how we as developers do our work and how we work together as teams omelettanashi entails a rigorous approach to achieving consistent excellence for everything from cleaning trains to hosting the olympics and with developing software we have standards and practices that allow us to achieve excellence as well and you have them right and most of the places I've worked over the years when I started on the job my team didn't have things like a definition of done or mutually agreed upon ways to do things like testing or pair programming or if we did have them they weren't followed with any real consistency I just mentioned a definition of done if you're not familiar with this it's essentially a checklist of tasks you should complete before saying that your work on a feature is done the checklist is something your team works together to create and it should evolve over time as your team's practices grow and evolve its purpose is to help provide your team with a shared understanding of what it means to do quality work when you don't have a mutually agreed upon way of working in your team disagreements typically end up being resolved by someone asserting authority or by whoever decided to push their position more aggressively or a situation may end up unresolved lingering to plague the team again the next time it comes up over the years I've worked at major universities medium-sized tech firms small venture funded startups consulting shops and nonprofits and at all of these places I've experienced team environments like this where there are always some areas of significant dysfunction maybe I've just been unlucky but I've heard many stories like this from friends over the years as well so my impression is that these situations are more common than we might think this has led me to believe that just like every family every organization is dysfunctional it's just a question of in what way and to what degree and just like with families what you experience on a daily basis naturally comes to define your perception of what's normal making it easy to become blind to the dysfunction and the cost over time of that blindness can be high in terms of its effect on quality efficiency and team morale this happens because people are unwilling to have hard conversations or they don't know how to have them or they don't have the organizational support to have them in addition to that challenge there's a whole other challenge as an industry we're still figuring out the best ways to do things so even when you can bring your team together it's not always obvious what the right way forward is on any given day you can go online and find people arguing about whether scum is great or should just die in a fire or whether application monoliths are bad design and we should all just switch to microservices or whether test driven development is dead the world of software development is like this because our industry is fairly young compared to others this is both a blessing and a curse it's a curse because it makes it hard to figure out how to proceed when you're hearing really smart and experienced people tell you really different things about how to do your work but it's also a blessing because it means we have the opportunity to participate in the conversation about where we're all headed to learn different ways of working and decide for ourselves what works best for us so I encourage you to have conversations with your team that might be hard to work towards being on the same page for things like testing strategies having a definition of done code reviews pair program pair programming and so forth having those conversations first requires having an environment of trust and mutual respect sometimes you have to build up that trust first but when you do I have found that having a mutually agreed upon way of working is really empowering and promotes team harmony quality and job satisfaction so everything I just said is about teams the challenges are even greater when dealing with clients whether it's an internal client in your organization or your consultant working with external clients the Japanese customer service stories I've shared have all been one-time retail or food service interactions in our world we have ongoing relationships this is a huge difference doing things like ignoring a customer's request as a way to solve a problem like the cashier at the Anderson's pastry shop did with me that's really not an option for us and all the mistakes you can make working with clients over the years I've made them the most common mistake is over promising and under delivery unless you're lucky enough to have an especially enlightened management you will always face pressure to do more in less time and I've done things like meekly saying yes to impossible deadlines and that I exhaust myself and cut corners to try to make it happen and the end result is almost always damage damage to the code quality stress and damage to your health and damage to the client relationship or even after all that they still end up with some combination of missed deadlines and buggy code to give you a sense of what I mean this is a chart I made after I started as the director of the web team at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine it's an effort allocation chart showing the number of people we would need to do the work expected of us for the upcoming six months compared to how many people we actually had the blue bars represent the staff we had which were assigned to meet the needs of specific departments and small teams of mostly one or two people which meant the team sizes were too small but that was a separate issue and the red bars represent the number of people we would need to do the work that was actually expected of us until I got everyone together to make the estimates that informed this chart we didn't really see the big picture of the situation we were in the team had never done estimating like this before we use what's known as the swag estimating technique to generate this chart if you're not familiar with the term stands for sophisticated wild ass guess so it's by no means perfect but it's very valuable for providing a general sense of scope and scale when you're looking at a long time horizon and many many projects almost all the demand in that tallest red bar was coming from one department they had had a history of always getting what they wanted if we ever pushed back they would escalate their demands politically through the school's administration to apply pressure prior to this we had no means to really respond to this pressure other than to just give in and these demands for projects also came of course with deadline pressure which meant we would rush and not always do our best work leading to more suffering for us in the long run with bugs unhappy clients and poor experiences for users this marked the start of a very challenging but very worthwhile agile transition for the team we discussed and implemented good engineering standards and practices and stuck with them and over time this allowed us to deliver more maintainable and less buggy code giving our customers and users better experiences we also adopted agile workflow and project management practices that allowed us to articulate and visualize the bigger picture of what was going on with our projects together these changes gave us the ability to do something analogous to what Japanese service providers do when faced with difficult situations we were both protecting the client from themselves and protecting the product from the client importantly these changes also helped us develop the ability to have productive conversations with the client about how we had been working together over the years and how to find a better way forward and we even learned how to protect other clients from this client by developing skills for estimating and making data and charts available about our work to all departments we were able to provide transparency on where our time and effort was going which enabled other departments to to participate on a more equal footing and the higher level political conversations that would determine our team's overall effort allocation so having standards and practices is good but a huge part of what we do is creative problem solving every project we work on is a unique creation not quite the same as any other on a regular basis we are called upon to be insightful and ingenuitive to solve new problems this is very different from the Japanese customer service stories I've been telling you which are all about consistent adherence to standards and providing service in the same way every time an American friend of mine who lived in Japan for many years said this he said in Japan I consistently get very good service in the US I've had the worst service but I've also had the best so what is he getting at here at this point we know about the high quality of Japanese service and if you're from the US or have spent any time here you know about the terrible service that can happen but the best service he's talking about is when you're provided with creative problem solving when Marty Friedman was saying to try not to customize your order at a restaurant in Japan that's not such a big deal if we're just in the realm of preferences but what if you have a food allergy when we were living in Japan in 2014 we became friends with my Japanese tutor and her daughter had a food allergy he told me that going out to eat in Japan was often a frustrating experience for them while staff were always very willing to provide information about items on the menu to avoid trying to customize an order was difficult when they visited the US and when we went to good restaurants with good staff she was thrilled that the service they provided waiters would usually say something like oh it's no problem I'll talk to the chef we'll see what we can do we'll come up with something that's just for you there are parallels here for the kind of work we do with software creative problem solving is essential to the work we do and we need to incorporate it into our standards of what it means to do quality work to give you an example creative problem solving can sometimes even call for pushing back on a client's request and educating them on possibilities they hadn't thought of when I was working in a consulting shop we had a client whose business was to make buildings more energy efficient they would retrofit buildings with new windows doors installation and so forth they wanted us to build an online calculator for them for prospective customers to provide information about their buildings and then receive cost savings estimates they already knew how they wanted us to do the calculations but as we became familiar with everything we had an idea for what we thought might be a better way to do it we asked if they had actual cost savings data from previous customers and they said yes so we said great if you're willing to share that data with us we can do some statistical analysis and use that to have the calculator provide more accurate estimates they seemed intrigued but also a little apprehensive they said well you know we've we've always done it this way and they hadn't worked with us before and so they weren't sure how much to trust us so they said no now at that point we could have just said fine and just gone ahead with their approach and they probably would have been perfectly happy but instead we came back and offered to develop and run an initial analysis and share the results with them and show it how it compared to their old way we said that if that point they still wanted to do it their old way they wouldn't have to pay us for the time we spent on the analysis so they said yes and once they saw what we did and we stepped them through it they really liked it and adopted our approach now there's a whole talk I could give on interviewing clients and eliciting business requirements but my point with this example is to illustrate the value of asking questions and creative problem solving a key question is when does a situation call for adherence to professional standards in order to avoid giving into unrealistic demands and when does it call for client education and creative problem solving I believe the answer is that many situations call for both you want to adhere to engineering standards to maintain quality and morale and you want to offer alternative creative solutions to problems when necessary this is the key point of my talk there's a lot we can learn from Omotanashi for ways to think about having high standards and achieving consistent professional excellence but given that the nature of our work is also about creative problem solving we also need to always be open to new ideas and new ways of doing things for example if a deadline must be met and we don't have enough time to do the work well can we defer certain features until later or can we start with simplified versions of certain features or are there other creative ideas we can explore that don't require compromising quality or putting the team on a death march these are the kinds of questions we need to be asking but how exactly do we go about having these kind kinds of conversations with clients conversations that can often be difficult in the world of Japanese customer service customers are expected to respect the professional judgment of their service provider in the world of software development we're educated on programming languages frameworks tools workflows but we're not taught how to behave we're not taught how to clearly articulate and diplomatically present and defend our professional judgment a key part of the education of doctors and lawyers is how to behave with their clients and coworkers doctors know how to handle themselves and the pressures of an emergency room or how to persuade a patient to make more healthy choices by cultivating a perception of knowledge and expertise for their professions doctors and lawyers are typically treated with great respect even when they have things to say that their clients don't want to hear now I'm not suggesting we all have to go to school for a million years like doctors and lawyers do and spend a million dollars in the process but what I am suggesting is that if you want to be seen as a professional and treated like one that means pursuing technical excellence providing creative problem solving standing up for the quality of your work and always being courteous and diplomatic awari that means the end my slides are available at the link here you can find me on twitter at amtopa I'm going to leave you with another short little video this is a moment of zen this is an example of creative problem solving and teamwork these are my two boys when we were in japan in 2007 and we were living in a small apartment in japan they call it a one ldk one means it has one bedroom l means it has a living room d means it has a dining room which is also the living room and k means it has a kitchen which is also the dining room which is also the living room so this is a small place we had set the boys up in the bedroom my wife and I put a bed in the living dining kitchen room so this is the morning my boys are having breakfast and my younger son decides he wants to have access to my older son's drink but he doesn't want to have to bother moving that drink so together they construct an extended straw and you can see my wife in the in bed they're still furtively trying to get some sleep