 You see I know why you're attending a conference like this. I know why you would be drawn to the book. I wrote It's because you were hoping somewhat beyond hope To bring joy into your own workplace Deep down you know that there is a better way to run a business a team a company a department. You've always known it Those thoughts come to you just before falling asleep or just after waking and then your day begins and the idea of Transformational change evaporates like a maddening dream. You can't seem to reassemble after waking from it Although you may be silently or perhaps not so silently tortured by that monster boss in your own Broken company culture. You haven't given up completely change is still possible. I was in the same place once deeply unsatisfied with my work and my own ability to do anything about it But things can be better And that's what I'm going to walk through in my talk with you today So great to be here. It's my first time to India. You guys have already taken great care of me Can you get the slides up on the screen now doesn't look promising? Figure a guy runs a software company is probably gonna have technical difficulties. Let's try replugging it in here See if that helps Voila excellent So the first thing I'm going to do is I want to give you a peek inside of my company And I think the best way to do that is with a video the video is a trailer for the book It's not the point of me showing you this It's really to just give you a 90-second view into what I'm about to describe Hit a trough of disillusionment and by 1997 I wanted out. I wanted to get as far away from this industry as I could and then in that moment Decided to change the industry and that's the story that I've captured in this book People are coming from all over the planet to come visit this space It's in the basement of a parking structure in downtown, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and they're coming for a reason They're coming to see something what most people are looking for is some lessons around what it takes to build an Intentionally joyful culture imagine half of my team had joy in the other half didn't which half would you want working on your project? We had so many requests for these tours We realized it was time to share this story with the world in a different way The space is flexible. We work two to a computer. We assign these pairs We switch them every five working days the human energy that results in this kind of organization You can actually feel the joy when you're in the room My name is Richard Sheridan, and I'm the author of Joy, Inc. Thank you So I want to just give you a little bit of peek into my personal history because I think if you don't understand where I've come from The rest of what I described. I don't think makes particular sense Oh, so I started out in this industry when I was just a little kid. I wrote my first program in 1971 it was a two-line program in basic typed into a teletype. Yes kids There were in fact computers back in 1971 as hard as that is to imagine and I was hooked Right from the beginning. I realized that I want to be in this industry I thought software was going to be one of the coolest professions ever by 1973. I had created a game That would now be term fantasy baseball, but I just wanted to play baseball on the computer side typed all the major league players and in the major leagues into the computer so my friends and I could play Games of baseball against each other in the winter months where I grow up. You can't play baseball in the winter There's too much snow on the ground and that won an international programming contest And quite frankly my career was started at that point because I got a first my first job as a programmer before I could drive in 1973 I Eventually got a couple of degrees from the University of Michigan and computer science and computer engineering and I will tell you in This period of my life. I was experiencing absolute joy in my profession I thought boy, this is going to be the coolest career ever and quite frankly the career that followed Was a wonderful upward trajectory from programmer at one end in 1982 to vice president of R&D by 1997 Everything the world would measure a success I had title position authority team size Responsibility pay stock options. I had it all There was only one significant problem. There was a different line in my life Not the line the world measures the success, but the line measured in here You see I began to fall out of love with what I did as a profession. I Didn't want to be in the industry anymore What was going on at this time for me well shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan I I got into this profession and suddenly I realized that a lot of what I was experiencing was chaos Chaos in the software industry is easy to imagine Most of you have probably experienced it Bug reports coming out of our ears missed deadlines blown budgets feeling like we're coming to work in firefighting costumes every day I would come home after work long days. My wife would look at my tired eyes The cold dinner in the microwave and she'd say honey You look really tired. Did you get a lot done today? And I'd say no I got nothing done today In the trouble of operating in chaos is eventually chaos produces negative events You end up and you can have big negative events in the software industry The one I talked about in my book is where a tired programmer in New York City mistakenly updated some server software and In the next 45 minutes Night capital groups trading platform traded seven billion dollars worth of securities. It wasn't supposed to Costing night capital group four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes Are you with me? That would be considered a negative event where you work Losing four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes. You know, there's an old saying this is to air as human to really follow Things up requires a computer and I think that's good evidence of it I was experiencing negative events. Nothing quite as serious as losing four hundred million dollars in 45 minutes But I'll tell you when your organization experiences negative events when something goes wrong There is an organizational response and my company was no different It usually shows up in the form of a three-ring binder With no value added documents whatsoever, you know in our industry. We call it a software development life cycle There's a bunch of templated documents with stage gates and committees and sign-offs and approvals and standing meetings And that sort of thing you actually have to put a police force in charge of it a project management office Now you go from chaos The full-blown bureaucracy You go from the land of never getting anything done To the land of never getting anything started Because you're waiting you're waiting for an approval to happen. You're waiting for a sign-off You're waiting for a meeting to occur a decision to be made and so on That was my life and the trouble is even in the bureaucratic world where you're trying to prevent mistakes Stuff still needs to happen. So little shadow IT groups were forming So you could work around the system to actually get things done And now I was operating in the worst possible world the world of chaos and bureaucracy simultaneously This is why my heart was breaking early in my profession I was only in my 30s at that point and I couldn't look out ahead and say I can stay in this business for another 30 years I just don't think I could do it. I don't think I had the mental energy Now usually what happens in this case is eventually the company wakes up and says hey, let's let's Back this bureaucracy off just a little bit. Let's let's create a lighter version of our processes and procedures a little stapled together document for short projects and Usually even those meetings don't happen We eventually get rid of the process and we fire the PMO and then we say we're agile now Or we're lean and usually all that means really is we're just choosing chaos again Just going back and forth and back and forth between chaos and bureaucracy This was my life for a decade So what did I do? I Was thinking of getting out of the industry. I didn't want to be here anymore But the trouble was this is what was paying for my Lifestyle, I was married three children house to cars The only way I could afford this lifestyle was to stay in this job. I was beginning to hate Now I am an eternal optimist if you put me in a room full of manure. I will keep digging till I find the pony and so my journey out led me to authors and books but not Books on technology because quite frankly technology is easy compared to organizing human teams effectively So the books I was seeking out were books like Peter Senghe's book the fifth discipline on the art and practice of building a learning Organization Tom Peters book in search of excellence Peter Drucker's books on management John Nays this book mega trends all these books for pointing away to a bright future They just didn't tell you how to get there But I was determined to find it. I knew I would know it when I saw it and quite frankly in 1999 two years after I became VP I had a click moment. I Read a book by Kent Beck called extreme programming explained I saw a video on an industrial design firm in California called IDEO and suddenly the future was clear for me I knew where I was going. I knew how I was going to get there and for the next two years. I Transformed a tired old company a tired old public company to look much like what Menlo looks like today and in 2001, maybe you remember 2001 this thing called the internet bubble burst and Suddenly hundreds of thousands of people like me were out of work. I Had laid off my entire team and then the California company that had purchased my company said rich We don't need a VP anymore for a team of zero. So you lost your job, too I went home and told my wife. I I was on I Was out of work and she looked at me with tears in her eyes and she said you're unemployed. I said no, honey I'm an entrepreneur now remember eternal optimist It took her six months to figure out that entrepreneurship actually pays less than unemployment in the United States But then we were profitable because you see in 2001 when I lost my job They could take everything away from me, but one thing Yes, I lost my title. I lost my authority. I lost my team my paycheck my stock options Everything taken away from me, but one thing they could not take away from me what I had learned in those two years. I Hear voices. I Realized there was an antidote to this world It isn't a choice between chaos and bureaucracy. Those are not the only two choices. We have There is actually a third path out and it was the one I discovered in those two years And it's the one I'm gonna draw you through and I believe why you're here Why you're here at this conference to learn about these things and the word I use for it is structure simple repeatable measurable visible structure based on human relationships that feed human energy You know, there's an there's a lot of talk these days about sustainability of Ecosystems of climate of energy sources and so on I Think it's time. We start introducing a topic around sustaining the humans who work for us Because the human energy crisis in our workplace may be the biggest energy crisis we have in the world right now And that's what I want to explore with you today and I describe it in the context of joy And I will tell you this is a weird word in a business context to write a business book that has the words joy and love on the cover I wondered if I'd be taken seriously Well given the number of airplane trips I took last year and the number of conferences I key noted I was on a plane every week last year Speaking about joy around the world clearly the world is hungry for a different kind of business message and the one They've been being fed for quite some time And for me this joy is very personal See, I remember Thinking about the title of the book and thinking why joy why would I talk about joy and people started actually questioning They said rich. Where does the joy come from for you? And I I thought back to that little kid in 1971 and The typing in and those first two lines of code and having the computer come back in a roll of paper and clock out High-rich because that's what I told it to do and I thought yeah, that's where the joy came from But then I thought about I said no not really That's not really where the joy came from for me. I had to go back further I had to think about myself as a ten-year-old When my parents had bought the equivalent of a an Ikea bookshelf They didn't have those back in the United States in those days But it was the same kind of thing a piece of furniture and a cardboard box that needed to be assembled and My parents had gone out to dinner in a movie that night And ten-year-old me said you know what? I'm gonna build that bookshelf And I went out in the garage of our house, and I put it all together It's eight feet wide and six feet tall It was 50 pieces of wood and 200 little nuts bolts and screws, and I was so excited I couldn't wait. Oh, no. I built it in the garage and my mom wanted it in the living room So for the next hour ten-year-old me inched it out of the garage and Up the sidewalk and through the kitchen and I pushed it right into place in the kitchen and Or into the living room and I set up my dad's books and my mom's little nicknacks in the stereo system And I had music playing when my mom came in the door. She she was so delighted. She cried And I realized that's joy That's why we get into a profession like we do like any you know anything where we're engineering products for the world What we want more than anything else is to delight other people with the work of our hearts our hands in our minds When you choose engineering as a profession you are choosing a service oriented profession You are building things for others and you're building it to delight other people And that's quite frankly where the joy comes from for me And it's clear wherever I go in the world the heart of the engineer is the same We want to delight other people. We want people to be amazed with what we've created and That's what I pursuing inside of our company at Menlo and There was that time where this was taken away from me Where my joy that early childhood joy turned into fear I learned to be managed with fear And then I learned to manage with fear it didn't come naturally for me But I thought it was just the right thing to do and I spent a lot of time away from my family And then I lived in this chaotic world which quite frankly felt like I was coming in every day in a firefighting costume you know a rubber coat and plastic helmet and a visor and oxygen on my back while the Processes where we're using at my company felt like the Metaphorical equivalent of flicking lit cigarette butts everywhere while carrying sloshing gas cans and we wondered why there were fires everywhere That's because we were setting most of them and Then finally the saddest story of all in our industry is when the work that we do never sees the light of day When the boss comes in and says hey that thing you've been working on the past two or three years it got canceled But don't worry. There's another project coming. Oh boy exciting You see we want to see our work get out into the world don't we we want to see it Delivered we want to see it shipped and we want people to use it We want people to be delighted with it when the work gets buried out in the backyard Before it ever sees the light of day We don't get that chance You know there was a company who I believe suffered the largest business project failure in history mankind 10,000 people were assembled for five years in a death march like culture To produce a product that never saw the light of day you all know exactly what I'm talking about It was Windows Vista as soon as it shipped Microsoft sent a coupon out with all of the New computers saying you can downgrade XP. You don't need this operating system And can you imagine how that felt to the 10,000 engineers at Microsoft who were working on that and their work never saw the light of day It's not what I wanted for me. It's not what I wanted for the people who worked for me and so I searched and I found that click moment with Kent Beck's book and the IDO video and and Boom I knew where I was going and that's what I want to explore with you for the rest of my talk The question I want to ponder with you is does joy matter? Can you see it? Can you feel it? Can you touch it and does it produce business results because if it doesn't produce business results? We can't do it for a long time Because only if we can generate a profit what we're doing do we get to play another day Now we'll tell you a lot of people come to see Menlo They come from far away Shane came from New Zealand Spent it five days with us. That's not uncommon people come from all over the planet To come see this place in the basement of a parking structure and when they walk in the door, there's Kind of an interesting moment. They're confronted first with a tour count We keep track of how many people come this is our tour count last year almost 4,000 people came through our doors last year alone just to see what I'm about to describe to you in slides And when they walk in the door what they see is one of those horrible open-office environment you read about Fast Company magazine said this is an idea born in the mind of Satan in the deepest caverns of hell And They have psychologists with data that proves these environments don't work Especially for introverted engineers who need library quiet And whenever those articles come out and they come out about once a month Everyone sends them to me And they say rich why does it work at mental and it doesn't seem to work anywhere else and I tell them It's very simple. You see we didn't build an open and collaborative workspace We built an open and collaborative culture Our workspace is simply a reflection of our cultural values and that's important because a lot of times You come to a conference like this some somebody gets an idea It says yeah, let's do what menlo's doing and they just change the physical space But they don't think about the culture at the same time That doesn't work We need to think about all the elements of our culture simultaneously workspaces simply one of them and Our space is noisy We have very few rules at menlo one of the strongest is you cannot wear ear buds while you're working We want people to overhear the ideas of others We work in one big open room all together Menlo's kind of about the size of this room and we work together Shoulder to shoulder Embracing this noise you can actually see the teamwork. It's not an org chart. It's not a hierarchy They're in fact at menlo no bosses The team work shoulder to shoulder around the tables They prefer to work this way they this environment that they work in is very flexible We have these pull-down wires from the ceiling and the lightweight aluminum tables Tell the team change me if you want to change me if you need to there are no rules around our space If you want to change the space you just drag a table over somewhere else Now the team will change the space in small ways every single day to adapt to the workflow that we're working on that week Every once in a while they get bored with the total setup and they just come in one night maybe with a Few beers and they tear the whole place apart and put it back together the next day in a different Configuration and everybody has to figure out where they're sitting In fact, I sit out in the room with everybody else. There's no corner office for the CEO The last time I changed the space. They moved me from around this pillar to around this pillar If they move me that far again, I'll be on the other side of the glass doors So I'm trying to be good these days I Don't choose where I sit. I go where the team puts me. I don't care where I sit So I figure they'll either put me where I can be the most help or do the least damage. I've learned not to ask that question The space is also very visual. We use the walls for a lot of our most important artifacts So you can actually see our process manifesting itself on the wall And yes, we built that learning organization that I desired when I read Peter Sangy's book on the art and practice of learning organizations the fifth discipline and we have books everywhere with lots and lots of books, but Books are just a small piece of the learning system. We've created at Menlo You see where we built the learning in really is how we organize the team We connected the team intellectually We connected them physically and emotionally We put them together at one computer Two people one computer working on the same task at the same time all day long The pairs are assigned and we switch them every five working days that construct alone produces so much human energy in the room and so much speed that it defies understanding at times I'm sure you'll have questions about this part of how we work We'll have plenty of time for those at the end And then we realized what we had to do is we had to change the conversation because one of the biggest challenges in the tech industry Is we speak a different language than the rest of the world? We refer to our language internally at Menlo is dolphin speak You've ever heard dolphins make sounds, you know, they seem intelligent They seem to understand one another, but no one else knows what they're talking about That's our little tech speak right, but we realized if we're really going to succeed we have to learn how to communicate Internally inside the team in a different way we have to learn to communicate differently With the people who are paying us to do the work what we do And we also need to take care of what I call a lost tribe of technology and I'll tell you about them later Now I love this quote What's most impressive about this John Nays bid quote is that he wrote it in 1982 Think about this he says the most exciting breakthroughs of where we are today are not going to occur because of technology But because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human I was at a deli in Ann Arbor not too long ago And I was sitting there having a coffee and a bagel and there was a young couple sitting next to me with their two Young children and it was a Saturday morning when family should be together and the entire time the parents were sitting there with their two young children They were like this and the kids just sat there quietly and I will tell you having raised three daughters myself With my wife all I wanted to do is grab those parents and tell them you have no idea how fast these years go past Spend time with your children our technology is tending to separate us rather than draw us together This is something we need to think about as teams We think we can solve human relationship issues with technology and I will tell you that's the most difficult way to solve it At Memlo when we communicate internally with one another inside the room. We don't use electronics We use what we like to call high-speed voice technology The hardware was pre-installed at birth includes vocal cords tympanic membranes auditory nerve stimulation of the brain supplemented by body language and eyebrows and tonal inflection In fact if we want to call an all-company meeting at Menlo. Do you guys have meetings where you work meetings? Anybody have meetings show hands who has meetings at work. Okay, great. We hate meetings We think they're mind-numbing spirits sucking energy draining devices of management So we pretty much eliminate them and the ones that we do have we keep them short So if we want to call an all-company meeting at Menlo All we do is we say hey Menlo and hey rich so you're gonna practice it with me. Hey Menlo And the whole place goes quiet Awesome. Now you're in an all-company meeting You transact the business of the meeting nobody moves no book the conference room. No CC all emails no checking calendars Hey Menlo hey rich boom quiet do the meeting say thank you back to work our all-company meetings usually last about seven or eight seconds, it's awesome In fact, if you ever come and visit You can walk in the front door and say hey Menlo you should say really loud just like our gut yell this morning And they'll go hey you Because they don't know who you are and they'll all go quiet no wait and they'll be looking at you So you should have something to say you can just tell them rich told you to do that No, I'll laugh and go back to work We do have one meeting a day. It's our daily stand-up meeting Our daily stand-up meeting is called by the dartboard on the wall Why a dartboard has an alarm clock? We have no idea, but it was programmable. We're programmers So we programmed it to go off at 10 and every day at 10 o'clock And everyone gathers in a circle Yes, we have stand-up meetings of 60 or 70 people all at once It's crazy Everybody comes even fern the dog comes to stand up She knows she's gonna get walked after stand-up And then we pass around the iconic symbol of Menlo the two-horned plastic Viking helmet We like the plastic Viking helmet for its practical purpose and value you see we work in pairs So we report out in pairs this controls the meeting. This is Tracy and Joe talking about some QA work. They're doing here's Nate and Katie talking about some of the programming work that they're doing and Thomas and Carol two of our high-tech Anthropologists will talk about that in a minute Talking about the work that they're doing The token moves around the circle of 70 people and Complets and our stand-ups take 13 minutes It's crazy. How do we know they take 13 minutes because we look at the dartboard and usually at the end of the meeting It says 1013 I Define most organizations to begin a meeting of 70 people in 13 minutes Let alone call it assemble it started hold it give everyone a chance to report out Complete it and go back to work in 13 minutes It's crazy And then we had to change the conversation with our customers. You see the problem with software is software is theoretical Until you can actually touch it This is one of the things I appreciate about an iterative and incremental approach to software design and development Is that we now have a chance for the client to check in with us to see how we're doing and the way we do this when our Customers closest we invite them into the room They are put front and center They sit at the keyboard in the mouse while the software is projected on the screen and the team that worked on the software is sitting Around them while the customer is going through the software. We built the previous five days everything in menla works in a five-day cycle and The customer is showing us our work. We don't show it to them and This draws them right back in because we realized one of the biggest challenges in software is keeping your sponsor engaged People who don't know what we know but are paying lots of money for us to do what we do And we get off track Software teams always get off track, you know, somebody describes to us what they want done We go do it and they come back later and what do they usually say? Well, is that what you thought we meant? That's not what we meant Our answer is awesome We worked on a story card four hours and less than five days later. We found out we got it wrong boom make mistakes faster It's not that we prefer making mistakes. We would prefer not to make mistakes We just know we're going to we're human. There's going to be no matter how good with job We do a communication. We're gonna make mistakes. So let's make them quickly so we can correct them while they're still small This actually feeds one of the fundamental elements of our culture to pump fear out of the room You see fear has an insidious effect on a team, doesn't it? Fear doesn't make bad news go away Fear makes bad news go into hiding and when bad news going through the hiding we can no longer do anything about it It's really easy to say. We're done in software when we actually aren't done Isn't it? So by putting the customer front and center they can see exactly what we've done Sometimes they look and they do that gee that's you that's what you thought we meant that's not we meant at all Sometimes they look and they say, you know what what you did is exactly what I was hoping for It's exactly what I'd imagine but now that I see it. It's not what I need Awesome. We worked on a four-hour story card in less than five days later We found out we built exactly what you wanted and now you find out. It's not what you need. What do you need? So again that iterative and incremental approach gives us a chance to actually succeed because you see our focus of attention Is on joy and we define the joy In one simple way we want to see the work of our hearts our hands that are mounds get out into the world and delight the people We intend to serve the users of the software and then we do this crazy thing We go into a paper blade based planning system, this is the way we plan all these little tokens represent Estimated story cards. I actually brought some examples here with me All work at Menlo is First handwritten down on five and a half inch by eight and a half inch index cards Then the cards are estimated in hours We don't use t-shirt sizes or story points or gummy bears We estimate in hours and then we fold the card to the size of the estimate So an eight-hour card ends up being half the size of a 16-hour card. Does this make sense? If it doesn't let me show you what a four-hour card looks like if you're not getting it. We tape a full-size Sheet of paper to a 32-hour card, which makes it twice as big as 16 And then what the customer does is they make decisions around their budget by picking up these little folded sheets of paper and Laying them down on a sheet that represents the three fundamental characteristics of professional project management Time one week humans two people Budget 80 hours worth of effort two people working together for 40 hours Yeah, that's a crazy thing about Menlo is we work 40 hour work weeks We never work weekends. We never deny or delay vacation requests and when you go on vacation You're not allowed to check your electronics It's truly a vacation. Why do we do this because we want a humanly sustainable pace to our work? Now, I know some of you are here maybe to get some additional training additional certification You might even be taking notes right now. So I'm gonna teach you our project management system. Okay? No, so get your notebooks out. Here's how it works This is the ad function Did you see that? That's delete Delete. Okay. You've now learned our project management system. I'll leave the edit to your own imagination So what the customer does is having been trained like I just trained you and our project management system They start making choices. They start deciding what's in the plan. They work collaboratively alongside of our team They fill up these sheets and they decide What we should be working on what are the highest priority things we should be working on and Interestingly they also decide what we should not be working on One of the things that confounds most software projects is ambiguity If I don't know if this phrase is used here in India, but in the United States Often people who run meetings will say things at the end of a meeting like We're all on the same page now, right? Have you ever heard that phrase? We're all in the same page Okay translates good. I just never sure culturally whether So so you know somebody says well on the same page, right? Ask an annoying question at that meeting Say, hey boss. I'm okay being on the same page. Which page are we talking about? Are you talking about the whiteboard the flip chart the notebook the laptop the email comes out after meeting? I'm okay being on the same page. Just got to tell me which page But when we say we're all on the same page, we are literally all on the same page It's not possible to have any any ambiguity around that now The other thing if you want to be even more annoying at that same meeting where you said what page are we on? Say what did we decide not to do? The boss will look at you kind of funny and say well we decided not to do everything. We didn't decide to do. Oh, that's clear Can anybody see in this picture based on my Lengthy description of our project management system. Can you see what we've decided not to do? Is it obvious? Somebody just shout out. What did we what do you see what we decided not to do? Yeah, the things that are still up here on the table. Look at I didn't have to teach you that part of our system You could infer it right if it's still on the table. It's not in the plan. We're not gonna work on it And here's a fundamental truth of any project management. I don't care if we're going back to the Egypt pyramids We never have enough time to do everything we imagine. I Bet they were planning on building five pyramids in Egypt and they only built three Thank goodness the project management system Focused on value. Otherwise, we would have had five pyramids 75% complete And they'd all have a hole in the top They're like no, let's build three complete pyramids awesome great idea It's the same thing. We're trying to do here with our planning system Our customers get very invested in this. This is our client looking through these simple Handwritten story cars now. We love paper. I will tell you again. I don't know if this translates well But we have this very simple sect in the United States called the Amish you guys ever hear about the Amish They don't use electronics. They still ride around in horse-drawn carriages Some people call us the Amish of software development because we plan with paper But we love paper See even if I just do this I'm lighting up so many neurons in your brain right now because humans are visual tactile creatures Right. So we choose tools not because they're not electronic. We choose tools We believe work better for humans back to that John Nasebic quote and we find that humans work really well with these paper-based systems Because they're very approachable. They're easy to learn. They're very scalable amazingly And it's very collaborative. It's a multi-user system All supported by simple handwritten artifacts We we believe in handwriting because we think it's cognitively impossible to not read something you wrote by hand Whereas electronics you do cut and paste and grab attachments and put them together in a document It may be the case that no one not even the creator of the document has read it Then we put the work plan up on the wall for all the sea It's not tucked away in a server somewhere. It's up on the wall Every one of these swim lanes represents two people who are assigned to work together for the week They have their 40 hours worth of work outlined for them They work from top to bottom on each of the story cards. They work on one card till it's done We don't believe that humans can multitask. So we work on one thing till it's done You know my old life I used to manage people with percentages. Have you ever been managed like that? We're like you're 25% on this project. You're 50% on this project. You're 10% on this project You're 15% on this project. You're 35%. Yeah, you know, I'm over a hundred percent now, right? Humans can't do that. It's not possible. What does it mean to be 25% in a project? Does it mean well? Let's see. I should work, you know 12 hours and then this and then stop and then work on it Or should I like do 15 minutes every hour and then stop and then switch or should I like be thinking about it? Well, I'm doing other things. Is that what I'm supposed to do? No, in our world you work on one thing till it's done The cards are placed next to the day that we expect them to complete based on the estimates that came from the team themselves This project every project in our space has a five-day cadence This particular one starts on Wednesdays and ends on Tuesdays for one simple reason the client picks the day They want to check in with us. That's their show and tell day this particular client picked Tuesdays The project ends on Tuesdays the yarn indicates where we are in the week and the color-coded sticky dots give us a sense of status The sticky dots are important When a pair starts in a card they put a yellow dot on the card that says that's the one we're working on There should only be one yellow dot in your lane because you only work on one thing till you're done And when you think you're done you put an orange dot on the card you and your pair partner I emphasize think you're done Because programmers have as many different definitions for done as Eskimos have words for snow You've probably heard many of these different definitions. Maybe you how many of you have programmed for a living Coded programmers. Yes, like me. You probably use these terms like I did you'd say things like well, you know It's done, but it's not done done. Well, it's finished, but it's not ready Now it's ready, but it's not complete. It's complete, but it's not installable. Well, it's installable, but it's not deployable Right, you see where I'm going with this, right? So our programmers can only self-declare they think they're done and Then QA our quality abguts come around check your work, and if QA likes what you see you get a green dot It's an endorphin rush for the programmers If QA doesn't like what you see you get a red dot That's endorphin rush for the QA team Any QA people in the room? Oh Excellent, you're gonna love this. Okay. This is my favorite moment. Let's talk QA people when when you're checking stuff Okay, I need to like make eye contact with at least a couple of you so raise your hands again QA people excellent Great, so you're checking stuff, right? And you find something wrong every now and then, right? You're you're going through and like oh this didn't work the way it's supposed to and you kind of walk down the hall or whatever to the Programmers, you're like calm on the phone say hey, um This thing isn't working, right? What's the most likely thing a QA person is to hear from the programmer? Yeah, it worked on my machine, right? It's another definition of done it worked on my machine now QA people if you learn nothing else in this conference from any other Speaker take this one home with you as soon as you hear a programmer say it worked on my machine Grab their machine and ship it to the customer It's amazing how much of a cheer that gets It's like what's the point the program was trying to make right it worked on my machine so what? Right, can we get it to work on at least one other computer on planet earth that would be really cool, right? Now if you grab their machine and ship it they can never say it worked on my machine again because they don't have their machine anymore And I want to channel the heart of the QA people because I'm telling you I think QA people get a lot of grief Because people like what kind of person would delight in breaking things Like what kind of personality is that well, let me tell you what kind of personality is QA wants to break it while it's still in the room QA takes it personally when broken software gets out into the world you want that mentality on your team So let's give it up for the QA people just for a second here Now I want to talk about the Lost Tribe Yeah, if you think about Lost Tribes, I think about like that Amazon Forest You know the anthropologists are hacking through the jungle and one day they come across this tribe No one has ever seen before there's never been any contact with humanity before this other you know the tribe with itself Of course, but the anthropologist like oh my gosh, we've never seen you before in the technology industry We call them the users No, let me be more accurate. We call them stupid users. Don't we? Right now and then we write dummies books for those poor people right What other industry can get away with through their entire history calling the people they serve stupid? Oh, you know, they're just stupid users, right? So What we need to do is Change that mentality. These are the people we serve We need to think about how to delight them with the work that we do At Menlo, what we did was we injected something completely new into the system We have a set of people on our team who are called high-tech Anthropologists their job go out into the world and study people in their native environment Observe them Not ask them questions not interrogate them Not send them survey forms not do focus groups actually observe them doing work in their native environment And with empathy and compassion bring back the knowledge they've gained through this process And turn it into screen designs that will actually be understandable By the people who are going to use the software See it's amazing to me how used to things we've gotten in the technology industry Let's face it. We're the industry that gives you if you want to shut down your computer Please press the start button That's intuitive, right? Or if that's too hard control-alt-delete is even easier, right? Like we've gotten used to this stuff right people don't understand this they don't We call them stupid we don't want to do that Now our anthropologists have their own set of paper-based tools who knew that if you wanted to do user-centered design You might put a story about one of your most typical users in the center of a design artifact It's pretty simple. This is a device. We call a persona map What we do is we go out in the world and we discover there's different types of people out in the world They're going to use a software We're building so we define them in these little archetypal forms of personas And then we have our client prioritize these personas But because I will tell you this if you build a piece of software that you want to work for everyone It will work for no one in particular So we do is prioritize the different types of users in this persona mapping exercise We force our customer to pick a primary persona That's the person. We're going to primarily serve every design decision is then filtered through this device We're going to add a feature in if the name of the primary persona is Gary in this case We will say how will this feature work for Gary? If you said well, it's not for Gary It's for one of the secondary personas is the tertiary personas say, okay So we're going to make it work for bill rather than for Gary How do we add it in for bill in a way that doesn't interfere with Gary's work? Because Gary's primary I'll just give you a simple example of how this works because it's amazing what you can discover when you go out in the world This is really important to go out in the world and watch people in their native environment because you will learn things through observation You won't normally learn other ways We were working on a handheld touchscreen tool for diesel motor mechanics people who fix trucks The first observation we did was at the Ann Arbor Transit Authority where they fix buses for the city that we live in and The first thing Bubba did that was working on a bus is he put on a pair of rubber gloves to do his work Our anthropologists didn't even realize that the capacitive screen that was picked for the hardware would wouldn't work with rubber gloves They brought that information back to our technical team and our technical team said Well, he's gonna have to take off his gloves. Whatever uses the device and our anthropologist said you've never met this guy He's not going to take off his gloves. In fact, he'll sabotage the device before he takes off his gloves. You'll slow him down So we call up our customer been in this domain for 30 years and we said hey guys Do you know you users were rubber gloves when they work? There was silence on the other end they'd been in this industry for 30 years And they said they do And one of their engineers said man, you guys are so lucky. We said why is that he said you get to talk to our end users? He says I've been here 12 years. I've never even met one of our end users Remember the hacking through the job look You're here Go out into the world and study the people you intend to serve our anthropologists bring this information back They synthesize it because it starts out. It feels very ambiguous at the beginning So they have to bring this information back and synthesize it and then eventually boil it down into a pixel-perfect screen designs That our software developers then turn into working software. It's a very different kind of role on our team Now I want to leave you with an idea Because I know how these conferences work. I've been to lots of them You're gonna get ideas today. You might have gotten some from me. You might get some from the other speakers But you're here to learn something and you're here to get excited You're here maybe to bring something back to the office with you But I know how those conversations go because your colleagues aren't here There's people back at your workplaces who didn't come with you And you get some idea You run back to the office the next day and you grab the first person you meet it wasn't here and says I've got this idea And you tell them what you what you learned here and that person looks at you in the eyes us. Oh, that won't work That's not us HR won't allow that and Right then the idea dies doesn't it and you just go off you got emails to check you got meetings to go to you Just go and do this okay I want to arm you with one simple response when somebody looks you in the eye With your idea and says that won't work. You just look them in the eyes. Yeah, I know Let's run the experiment. Let's try something before we defeat it. Let's see what happens Let me tell you a story of how this played out in our world at Menlo Now this is a story about dogs and babies, okay, but if that's all you remember You will have missed that earlier point because this is really a story about let's run the experiment It's just a fun story a fun application of it. That's do with dogs and babies So nine years ago One of our team members one of our revered team members Tracy had little Maggie She was off on maternity leave and she was ready to come back to work. She came to me and she said rich I'm ready to come back to work. I said awesome. We can't wait to have you back How soon can you be here and she said well, there's just one small problem The daycare we plan to put Maggie in is full Grandparents live too far away to help my husband and I don't know what to do with the baby Now I will tell you in this moment There was a screaming match that occurred in my head that Tracy never heard You know how these go. There's the dark voice on one shoulder and the bright voice on the other one The dark voice said don't you dare say what you're about to say HR will kill you The lawyers will freak out the insurance policy will go through the room The bright voice said to your company or an entrepreneur. You can do whatever you want You don't even have an HR department So I looked at Tracy I said bring her in now if I don't need a camera in that moment to catch the look of bewilderment on her Phrase she says what do you mean? I said bring her into work? She said I said sure She said Every day I said why not and she looked around that big open room And she said rich where will I put her I said Tracy? She's not going anywhere. She's three months old I said put her in a bassinet on the floor wherever you're working Put her in a peck and play put her in a stroller or whatever put her in a car seat She said rich. What if she makes a fuss? I said here. It's like a noisy restaurant. You'll never hear She goes come on rich. There will be those moments. You've raised daughters. You know what it's like There's gonna be a big baby fuss. It'll disturb the whole room and I said Tracy. You're the mom I trust you. You'll do the right thing. Let's work it out together Let's run the experiment Now isn't she beautiful Funny thing is that's not Ellie there. That's not Maggie. That's Ellie. That's that's mental baby number eight Oliver I left when I left the office to come here Oliver was there mental Oliver's mental baby number 13 in the last nine years This experiment has been beautiful part of our culture the babies come in all day every day for months at a time There is often usually a baby in the room with us because I don't know We're prolific crowded memo or something we we think we know what's causing this now Now I have to tell you when you run experiments, this is important expect the unexpected and when you bring a baby into a room Unexpected things happen Now the things that we expected to happen. Of course. They did did Maggie fuss. Of course. She did was baby What we didn't expect was the response of the team The team was like no, it's my turn to hold the baby They're just grabbing the baby in their can these babies were raised by the village Right. I lead a lot of the tours. They would just oh Richard leading a tour Nice warm chest deep voice. It's nap time. You can put a baby to sleep as good as anybody So they just handed me the baby and I'd be carrying a baby around on tours, right? And then we found out that Ellie learned wanted to pair program Ellie wanted to go to design meetings This was a delightful addition your culture Henry came back to visit Visited Tracy Menlo mom number one Tracy Henry is Menlo baby number seven Fern wanted to get in on the conversation the dog and Then we discovered something really delightful We found out that our customers Behaved better when you bring a baby to the meeting Like you guys are awesome. They're like, oh my gosh, they're part of the marketing team. It's cool Hey You cannot deny the joy of a baby at work. This is little Henry with With John his dad You know, I told the parents I said look if we have a chance to let you guys see that one of those baby Firsts, you know the first roll over the first word the first step the first crawl whatever and you can see that at work awesome It's just been a delightful way to build our team and our culture This is Henry learning to manage. Hey, how's it going? What you're working on there? You're almost done. You stay in this weekend And then this happened We've always had dogs in our office and But this was a little different situation see Michael Here was our customer. He's coming in for a show-and-tell And he called me ahead of time. He says hey rich Do you mind if I bring Buster with me to the meeting? I'm said sure who's Buster? He says my great Dane like oh sure And he comes in with his dog. That's like almost horse size, right? And Buster greeted me because he's really friendly creature and he put his paws on my shoulders and his head was here And if you've been with me, you know, I'm a tall guy, right? And I'm like looking up at this dog It's a little unnerving. Okay, but so And it was a fun story Buster loved to hang out at the office He would take our glass doors and just pull them apart so he could stick his nose out into the smells of memo, I guess and I Realized that this story was fun for the dog, but it was actually far more important What I realized was our customer was choosing to be like us our customer was choosing to participate in our culture And I think about the trust that we work on so hard inside the team And we try and build trust also with our customer when you have your customers starting to behave like you you realize You've built a special culture indeed and I would encourage you to think about that as you think about the type of cultures You're creating inside of your organizations Michael wanted to be like us Michael couldn't bring his dog in where he worked Wasn't that he was in a bad office situation. It just wouldn't be appropriate given what he does for a living But when he chose to interact with us he brought his dog in We've actually had customers bring their children to work with to Menlo with them and then Mind-blowingly a little Lucy was Menlo baby number 12 John Who had Henry there? This is a second child The customer knew that Lucy was in the office the customer called up said hey John We need you to come over to office. They were right in Ann Arbor just a few blocks away Can you come to the meeting and they said but John do you have Lucy with you? And he says well, yeah, but that's okay. I can leave her here with some team members. It'll be all right And they said oh no, we want you to bring Lucy too So there's John walking across the Ann Arbor with a stroller going to a business meeting I Can't even imagine this stuff is actually occurring so again just think about How do we build such an engaging environment that the people we work with and around and Collaborate with want to be more like us. They want to join your tribe There's no question inside of all of this that while we have fun at Menlo I Want to be very clear joy and happiness are two very different things We are not happy every minute of every day. It's not possible that would require a medication But joy is that longer arc joy is that all that hard work We did together gets out into the world into the lights of people from it's intended and there's no way you can get to that kind of joy Without the rigor and discipline of many of the methods that you might be talking about in a conference like this For us, we've had a team together now for 15 years One of the strongest parts of our culture is the use of automated unit testing frameworks Test driven design write the test before you write the code to automate the tests and run them Probably one of the most powerful tools to ever occur in my in the history of my career And it's amazing how few teams use it. They don't teach it at universities yet systematically It's probably the most important quality tool that we've ever invented in our industry and it's still ignored to this day So don't forget that at the end of the day We can delight people with a great user experience But there has to be solid working software under the surface or that delight of the user experience will quickly erode under the crashing of broken software What I wanted to do in those early days to get out of the chaos and the bureaucracy was to build a learning organization and As Peter sang he says it is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your company's ability to learn faster than your competition That's what we wanted to do It's been an amazing journey for me. I'm glad to have come all the way to India to share it with you. I Would love to get your feedback There's a landing page. We've created specially for you There's places you can download these slides get a free chapter of the book that sort of thing There's also a place for feedback form. I am happy to take questions now. Thank you very much for bringing me into your world so attrition Yeah, so So I'll repeat the question if you don't get there quick enough with the mic So we can work together on this so the question is what kind of attrition do we have in our team? And I think our attrition is pretty standard We don't Unnaturally work to hold on to people too long if they want to go we embrace them on leaving But interestingly it's hard for us to measure attrition because people leave and they come back And often when they come back they plead with me and they say please don't ever let me leave again But you know people leave for all the standard reasons They we had three people leave a couple of years ago because they wanted to go live in Manhattan one of the big cities and In the United States and I didn't want to deny them that Pleasure and they all went together because they went as a small group and and they're just having a delightful time there And who am I to deny them that kind of? experience but you know when you build things in like bring your babies to work you do get a lot of loyalty as well, so I think We don't have to work Unnaturally to hold on to people which I think is one of the biggest things about a strong culture is because the trouble is we Start to hold on to people unnaturally if we we work really hard to keep them when they don't really want to be here I'm not sure you want those people walking in the door every day because they've got maybe a different mindset than you were hoping for Thank you very much