Podcasts about Jira

Anamaria Ungureanu: Building Self-Awareness in Overly-Technical Product Owners Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Master Storyteller Anamaria highlights a Product Owner who excelled at storytelling and vision communication, making every team member feel aligned with project goals. This exceptional PO consistently explained the "why" behind requirements and painted compelling pictures of how the team's current work would create future value. Their storytelling ability kept the team engaged and motivated, demonstrating how great Product Owners apply agile mindset principles to create shared understanding and purpose. The Bad Product Owner: The Monologue Specialist Anamaria describes a technically-skilled Product Owner who transitioned from a tech lead role but fell into the anti-pattern of excessive monologuing during sprint planning sessions. This PO, despite good intentions, overwhelmed the team with lengthy technical details, causing developers to withdraw from interactions and leaving them confused about project purposes. Through one-on-one coaching focused on building self-awareness and establishing working agreements, Anamaria helped this PO learn to communicate more effectively and engage collaboratively with the team. Self-reflection Question: How do you help Product Owners transition from technical expertise to effective team communication, and what signs indicate when detailed explanations become counterproductive monologues? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Anamaria Ungureanu: Tracking Scrum Team Behavioral Evolution Over Time Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Anamaria defines Scrum Master success by focusing on team behavioral trends and performance evolution over time. She monitors how teams increase trust with stakeholders, demonstrate commitment, and apply agile behaviors consistently. Her approach emphasizes seeking regular feedback from stakeholders and conducting honest self-assessments to ensure the Scrum Master role is truly maximizing team performance. Success isn't measured by a single moment but by sustained positive change in team dynamics and delivery capabilities. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Stop/Start/Continue with Enhanced Focus Anamaria recommends the classic Stop/Start/Continue format but emphasizes the importance of varying the questions and bringing both quantitative and qualitative data to drive meaningful conversations. She suggests picking specific themes for each retrospective (like testing) and ensuring that discussions lead to concrete, actionable outcomes rather than just surface-level feedback. Self-reflection Question: How do you currently measure your effectiveness as a Scrum Master, and what trends in your teams indicate genuine progress versus superficial compliance? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Anamaria Ungureanu: Practical Strategies for Organizational Tool Rollouts Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Anamaria shares her approach to successfully implementing JIRA across an organization by focusing on practical value rather than forcing adoption. Her strategy involved identifying early believers within teams, conducting open discussions to gather feedback, and demonstrating concrete benefits like improved dependency management. Rather than trying to convince resisters, she concentrated on working with willing teams to showcase the tool's value, providing real-time support during implementation, and ensuring team members felt supported throughout the transition. Her method emphasizes being present to answer questions immediately and building momentum through successful early adopters. Self-reflection Question: When leading organizational change, how do you balance addressing resistance with amplifying the voices of those ready to embrace new approaches? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Anamaria Ungureanu: The Tech Lead Who Nearly Destroyed the Team Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Anamaria describes a seven-member software team that initially seemed engaged but began self-destructing when a senior tech lead refused to embrace transparency and knowledge sharing principles.  The situation escalated when this key team member's four-day absence completely blocked the team's ability to deliver, creating a dangerous single point of failure. Through careful retrospective facilitation and strategic motivation techniques, including offering the specialist new learning opportunities while gradually transferring their legacy knowledge to teammates, Anamaria helped the team overcome knowledge silos and establish sustainable collaboration patterns. Featured Book of the Week: Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss Anamaria recommends “Never Split the Difference” by Chris Voss, a negotiation masterpiece because it taught her essential communication strategies for establishing trust and navigating tense situations. She emphasizes that negotiation is a critical Scrum Master skill, and Voss's techniques help build rapport with stakeholders while managing difficult conversations that arise during team transformations and organizational change initiatives. Self-reflection Question: What knowledge silos exist in your teams, and how might you motivate specialists to share their expertise while providing them with new growth opportunities? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Anamaria Ungureanu: Goal Clarity—The Missing Piece in Agile Team Performance Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Anamaria shares her experience working with a platform implementation team that appeared engaged but was actually struggling in silence. Despite initial assumptions that everything was fine, the team's quiet demeanor masked their lack of understanding about project goals and deliverables.  Through strategic intervention including goal clarification with the Product Owner, confidence level assessments, and story mapping sessions, Anamaria helped transform a disengaged team into one capable of successful delivery. Her approach emphasized the importance of fostering constructive conflict, asking open questions during sprint planning about demo expectations, and facilitating better PO-team interactions to create transparency and shared understanding. In this episode, we refer to User Story Mapping and the concept of Gemba, or Gemba Walk Self-reflection Question: How might your teams be silently struggling, and what signs should you watch for to identify when apparent engagement actually masks confusion or disengagement? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

This week on The Jira Life, we're joined by Rina Nir — CEO of RadBee, Atlassian expert, and specialist in helping life sciences teams streamline their SDLC while staying compliant.We'll dive into how regulated industries like medical devices and biotech are using Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, and Marketplace apps) to build better, safer products — without getting buried in validation and documentation chaos.If you work in a regulated industry, are navigating software compliance, or are curious about how AI fits into this equation — you won't want to miss this conversation.What Rina is currently up to:- Signup for SDLC Summer Series:https://lnkd.in/e_HZDCiM- Snapshots Landingpage:https://lnkd.in/eb_TdYJt- Marketplace listing:https://lnkd.in/ee_BmxiFThank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://lnkd.in/g5834KixOr Follow us on LinkedIn!https://lnkd.in/epszdbRjBecome a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://lnkd.in/gzDWDAzNHosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortizhttps://lnkd.in/eP2TQHcEhttps://lnkd.in/ewxmQs2s- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissenhttps://lnkd.in/exhJAMVmhttps://thejiraguy.com- Sarah Wrighthttps://lnkd.in/ejT5ZAFR Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wenhttps://lnkd.in/eDEJxdt6Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://lnkd.in/eZp7w7ieOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://lnkd.in/eMpcN8rf

Secure your privacy with Surfshark! Enter coupon code BRAVESEA for an extra 4 months at www.surfshark.com/BRAVESEA Bernard Leong, founder of Dorje AI and host of Analyse Asia, joins Jeremy Au to explore how AI is transforming software development, business models, and professional roles across Southeast Asia. They break down why dev houses are losing ground, how AI accelerates coding and reshapes team structures, and why traditional SaaS and education models must evolve. Bernard shares how he replaced an outsourced dev team using AI tools, the dangers of hallucinated code libraries, and his vision for a new enterprise software model powered by prompt engineering and cloud-based trust. 00:42: Traditional software development can't keep up with AI timelines: Bernard shares how he replaced a dev house that took five months with a feature he built in 20 minutes using 50 AI prompts during a flight. This led to firing the team and redesigning the internal workflow around speed and AI tools. 06:26: Frontend moves fast with AI, but backend demands real engineering: While vibe coding speeds up prototypes, Bernard highlights backend risks like hallucinated libraries from ChatGPT. He stresses the need for strong DevOps rules, audit trails, and secure infrastructure to prevent system vulnerabilities. 09:18: Dev houses need to reskill or become obsolete: Bernard criticizes dev houses for slow JIRA-based processes and poor QA. His lean team rebuilt what took five months in just six weeks by focusing on code quality, automation, and prompt engineering. He urges retraining junior developers to stay relevant. 20:43: AI is replacing repetitive junior roles across professions: Bernard sees AI displacing junior coders, lawyers, accountants, and consultants. He shares how his ex-lawyer wife saw this coming, and cites an MIT study where only senior professionals could spot and fix AI mistakes, while juniors added little value. 23:39: Education must shift from banning AI to measuring real thinking: Bernard describes showing students how ChatGPT completes their essays in seconds. He calls for testing reasoning and prompting skills rather than memorization. 31:57: Organizations will become lean, AI-native teams: Bernard predicts companies will move from pyramids to diamond-shaped org charts. He now trials contractors and only hires those who scale with AI. Watch, listen or read the full insight at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/bernard-leong-code-without-coders Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VakR55X6BIElUEvkN02e TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Vietnamese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts

Time to go through some of the recent updates from the Atlassian ecosystem #AtlassianAnalytics #JiraAlignTerminology #SmartLinks

Joelle Tegwen: Business Analyst to Product Owner—More Than a Title Change Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. The Great Product Owner: The Collaborative Visionary Joelle worked with an exceptional Product Owner at a medical company who was leading their team into a new way of working. This PO understood both the vision piece of the work and the importance of experimentation, recognizing that the team was responsible for figuring out how to solve the problems they were trying to tackle. Working within a Large Scale Scrum framework, they demonstrated patience while collaborating with skilled team members to improve how they worked together. Rather than complaining to the team about performance issues, this PO collaborated directly with the Scrum Master to address challenges. Most importantly, they maintained crystal clear focus on customer value, ensuring every decision and direction connected back to what would truly benefit the end user. The Bad Product Owner: The JIRA Manager Joelle describes the problematic pattern of Business Analysts who receive a title change to Product Owner without understanding the fundamental shift in role and responsibilities. These individuals continue to see themselves as scribes rather than visionaries, treating their primary job as managing JIRA instead of setting a vision for where the product should go. They typically lack understanding of meaningful metrics and rely on gut-feel prioritization rather than data-driven decisions. Most critically, they fail to communicate about problems to solve or establish a clear North Star for the team. Joelle recommends providing these POs with structured formats for Epics and features that start with hypothesis, problem, and measures, helping them think at higher levels than just user story management. Self-reflection Question: Whether you're a Product Owner or work closely with one, how might you help elevate the conversation from task management to vision and problem-solving? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

We're halfway through the year, and it's time for a candid check-in. In this special mid-year retrospective of The Jira Life, we're taking a step back to reflect on everything Season 3 has brought us so far — the wins, the missteps, and the moments that made us laugh, cringe, or totally rethink how we work.And to help us make sense of it all? We've invited Mark Cruth — Atlassian's Modern Work Coach — to facilitate our retro and guide us through an honest, energizing reflection.In this episode, we cover:

Too often, product managers work as human middleware between their teams and tools, burning out great people with administrative friction instead of building energising high-performance cultures. Life is short—you need to get your time back. In this episode, Ross Webb (who built product teams at Amazon serving 80,000+ IT professionals) explores how AI transforms team leadership by streamlining management processes, reducing PM stress, and enabling sustainable high performance. What You'll Learn: Why top product leaders think like part-time recruiters and become "talent factories"How actively seeking to be wrong makes you a better, more effective leaderThe balance between decision-making authority and collaborative experimentationHow to drive high performance whilst preventing team burnout and maintaining wellbeingHow AI can automate performance tracking, workload balancing, and communication coordination Featured Guests: Jordan Burton - Talent development expert on the "talent factory" mindset and ecosystem buildingHarrison Baker - Leadership specialist on curiosity, questioning, and situational readingAnnika Schmid - Decision-making strategist on reversible vs irreversible choices and rapid experimentationKris Jones - Performance management expert on sustainable high performance and burnout prevention Key Takeaways: High-performance teams aren't about finding perfect people—they're about creating systems for excellenceThe shift from "smartest person in the room" to "surround myself with incredible talent" defines leadershipSpeed of learning often trumps perfection of planning in most product decisionsAI can eliminate the administrative burden that burns out talented team members Sponsored by FlowFocus AI - The agentic AI system that connects your entire product stack (Jira, Amplitude, PostHog, roadmapping tools, competitive intelligence) and saves product managers 5-10 hours per week. Because life is too short to be human middleware.

Chris Cunningham, founding member of ClickUp, reveals the social media strategy that drives a staggering 150M monthly impressions. This is *the* exact strategy that's also attracted major clients like VaynerMedia (yes, GaryVee literally found them through social media).Grab your notes.

Join us for an insightful conversation with Robert (Rob) Hean — a creator, Atlassian expert, and passionate advocate for growth in the ecosystem. In this episode, we dive into: Rob's journey creating content in the Atlassian ecosystem  How to balance a full-time job, life, and building a personal brand  Behind-the-scenes insights from TEAM '25 — Atlassian's flagship event  The evolving landscape of Atlassian training and certifications  Tips for new creators and power users in Jira, Confluence, and beyondIf you're using Jira, Confluence, Trello, or any Atlassian tools — or if you're building your presence as a creator or admin in the space — this episode is packed with value. Whether you're an Atlassian admin, power user, or just Atlassian-curious, Rob's story will inspire you to scale your voice and impact.Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-jira-life/Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/joinHosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortiz https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexortiz89/ https://www.youtube.com/@ApetechTechTutorials- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissen https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgnissen/ https://thejiraguy.com - Sarah Wright https://www.linkedin.com/in/satwright/ Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wen https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051/Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatinstinct

Your nice host return to the complex and sometimes underappreciated world of quality assurance in the game dev space, and also explore discovery as a design focus. In this episode: Lydia is still looking for recommendations while at the Serious Play Conference (answer in Discord!), Mark hates on Jira and Stephen finally catches up to the latest gaming trend a couple of months late.Chants of Sennaar -  Rundisc, Steam0:06:27QA WorkflowsWhat Is A Kanban Board? The Ultimate GuideLaura Hennigan, Cassie Bottorff, Rob WattsForbes0:50:37Designing Discovery

In Season 25, Episode 10 of the "Building Better Developers with AI" podcast, Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche revisit one of their most practical episodes: decluttering your code and digital life. However, this time, they utilize AI tools like ChatGPT to elevate the conversation and provide even more actionable ways to streamline your workflow, sharpen focus, and enhance developer productivity. Why Developers Should Declutter—and Level Up Developer clutter goes far beyond messy code. It creeps into your tabs, your file system, your brain, and your workflow. Rob and Michael explore how revisiting the original topic through the lens of AI created deeper, more structured insights. AI not only confirmed their past advice—it elevated it. As Rob puts it: “Clutter doesn't show up in your IDE, but it absolutely shows up in your performance.” AI helped them reframe the conversation into clear action steps that help you level up your development workflow by decluttering at every level—from code to cognition. Clean Code Is Smart Code: Use AI to Level Up Your Refactoring A central theme of the episode is simple: Great developers delete code. Michael and Rob walk through common bad habits—commented-out code, legacy logic, stale TODOs—and how they quietly accumulate technical debt. They recommend using tools like ESLint, Prettier, or Flake8 to automatically flag issues. More importantly, they encourage developers to make cleanup a weekly routine, not a once-a-year emergency. AI Tip: Utilize ChatGPT to refactor lengthy methods, rename ambiguous variables, or break down complex classes into more manageable components. It's a quick way to make your code easier to read, test, and maintain. Optimize Your Tools: Streamline and Standardize Your Workspace If you want to level up your development workflow truly, decluttering extends beyond the codebase. Your workspace setup—browser tabs, IDE extensions, terminal scripts—can either streamline your productivity or sabotage it. Rob's key practices: Limit browser tabs to 10 or fewer Disable unused plugins and extensions Stick to a consistent folder structure Use shell scripts, makefiles, or Git aliases to speed up routine tasks Michael reinforces the idea with his “kitchen sink” app concept—a reusable codebase that acts as both a portfolio and a best-practices toolkit. Silence the Noise: Declutter Your Developer Brain Clutter isn't just digital—it's cognitive. Rob and Michael emphasize how context-switching kills focus and creativity. To combat this, they recommend: Turning off nonessential notifications (on phone, desktop, and wearables) Using time boxing (e.g., Pomodoro technique) Auditing your calendar weekly Creating interruption-free zones for deep work Pro Tip: Play white noise or ambient focus tracks to drown out distractions and stay locked in. These habits allow you to protect your most important asset as a developer—your attention. Make Decluttering a Weekly Habit and Watch Your Workflow Level Up Don't wait for a meltdown to clean house. Rob and Michael suggest building decluttering directly into your dev rhythm—especially at the end of each sprint or workweek. Their weekly checklist: Archive stale Git branches Delete unused files and TODOs Refactor one file for clarity Restart your system Review your inbox and calendar Even a 15-minute Friday cleanup session can give you a cleaner slate and a sharper mind going into Monday. Bonus: Fewer Tools, More Flow Tool overload is another form of workflow clutter. Michael recommends consolidating everything into one platform—whether it's GitHub, Jira, or Notion. “Let the business be disorganized,” he says. “You bring the order.” Rob echoes this with a challenge: Take one week to migrate everything from your old tools into your primary stack. You'll save time and reduce friction moving forward. Final Thoughts: Use AI to Clean, Simplify, and Level Up Decluttering isn't just about tidiness—it's about creating space to do your best work. And with AI now in your toolkit, you can automate, refactor, and optimize like never before. Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, there's always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at info@develpreneur.com with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let's continue exploring the exciting world of software development. Additional Resources Balance Your Time in a Busy World: Tools and Techniques Boost Your Developer Efficiency: Automation Tips for Developers Code Refactoring: Maintaining Clean, Efficient Code Cleaning Your Task List Building Better Developers With AI Podcast Videos – With Bonus Content

Too often, product managers work as human middleware between systems and stakeholders, drowning in administrative overhead instead of driving strategic change. Life is short—you need to get your time back. In this episode, Ross Webb (who led product transformations at Amazon and Just Eat) explores how AI transforms leadership effectiveness by handling administrative burden, freeing leaders to focus on strategic thinking and meaningful change management. What You'll Learn: Why compassion alone won't drive lasting transformation in established organisationsHow to standardise platform integrations to unlock 30% year-on-year growthThe balance between rigorous planning and genuine agile principles (not "lean theatre")How to build crucial stakeholder alliances when you're the outsider coming inHow AI can automate status updates, reporting, and process coordination Featured Guests: David Behlich - Transformation specialist who's driven change in 70,000+ person organisationsDominic Le Garsmeur - Platform strategy expert who achieved 30% YoY growth through standardisationKris Jones - Strategic planning advocate who balances preparation with agilityNiko Korner - Organisational politics navigator and stakeholder alliance builder Key Takeaways: Successful transformation requires both inspiration AND enforcement—some people need to be movedFocus on foundation before chasing growth; sometimes slow down to speed upUnderstanding organisational politics is essential for senior product leadershipAI can eliminate the administrative friction that keeps leaders reactive instead of proactive Sponsored by FlowFocus AI - The agentic AI system that connects your entire product stack (Jira, Amplitude, PostHog, roadmapping tools, competitive intelligence) and saves product managers 5-10 hours per week. Because life is too short to be human middleware.

Let's Talk... Comments. Yes, Really.Join us for a live podcast conversation with Sarah Wright where we dive deep into one of the most underestimated parts of team collaboration: comments.

ZAMAN RAYUWAN JIRA

ZAMAN RAYUWAN JIRA

Too often, product managers work as human middleware between tools, teams, and market intelligence. Life is short—you need to get your time back. In this episode, Ross Webb (former Principal PM at Amazon and Just Eat, who took products from 0 to £50M+ revenue) explores how AI agents are transforming go-to-market success by automating research, competitive analysis, and cross-functional alignment workflows. What You'll Learn: Why B2B2B environments require different GTM strategies and how to navigate complex stakeholder layersThe "echo-back approach" that transforms customer problems into quantifiable business valueHow to build genuine harmony between sales and product teams (not just tolerance)Ecosystem design thinking: ensuring every piece needed for market success is alignedHow AI agents can automate competitive intelligence and market validation workflows Featured Guests: João Moreira - Product leadership expert on B2B2B complexity and cross-team collaborationTzvika Shahaf - Strategic consultant on customer problem validation and business value translationDavid Moore - Sales-product alignment specialist and relationship building expertAlba Simon - Ecosystem design thinking pioneer and organisational strategy expert Key Takeaways: Product-market fit requires orchestrating the entire ecosystem, not just building great productsDirect customer engagement beats secondhand feedback from sales teams every timeUnderstanding each team's KPIs and workflows creates win-win collaboration opportunitiesAI can automate the administrative burden of market research, freeing PMs for strategic thinking Sponsored by FlowFocus AI - The agentic AI system that connects your entire product stack (Jira, Amplitude, PostHog, roadmapping tools, competitive intelligence) and saves product managers 5-10 hours per week. Because life is too short to be human middleware.

Want to use Atlassian tools but the Premium price is giving you sticker shock? Then, you'll want to join the TJL crew as they welcome Liz Tanner, who has 12 years of independent contracting experience squeezing every drop of performance from the Free Plans!Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-jira-life/Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/joinHosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortizhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alexortiz89/https://www.youtube.com/@ApetechTechTutorials- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rgnissen/https://thejiraguy.com- Sarah Wrighthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/satwright/Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051/Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatinstinct

On this episode of The Founder's Sandbox, Brenda speaks with David Hirschfeld, owner of 18 year old business Tekyz, that boasts a hyperexceptional development team building high “ticket” products in the B2B space. They speak about ways in which AI is a gamechanger, how Tekyz backs their work for clients with relentless pursuit of quality, and how Tekyz practices ruthless compassion,to protect the company and enable it to grow Having collaborated with over 90 startups, he developed the Launch 1st Method—a systematic approach that minimizes risks and accelerates software company success with reduced reliance on investor funding, after observing that many companies launch a product first and then fail at a later stage – With Tekyz approach of Launch 1st exceptional founders are in love with the problem not the product.   David's expertise bridges cutting-edge AI technologies, workflow optimization, and startup ecosystem dynamics. When not transforming business strategies, he enjoys woodworking, golfing, and drawing leadership insights from his experience raising four successful sons. You can find out more about David and Tekyz at: https://sites.google.com/tekyz.com/david-hirschfeld?usp=sharing https://tekyz.podbean.com/ - Scaling Smarter Episodes. www.scalingsmarter.net - Schedule an interview https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/ https://x.com/tekyzinc https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhirschfeld/ https://www.facebook.com/dmhirschfeld       transcription:  00:04 Welcome  back to the Founders Sandbox.  I am Brenda McCabe, the host here on this monthly podcast, now in its third season. This podcast reaches entrepreneurs, business owners that are scaling. 00:31 professional service providers that provide services to these  entrepreneurs, and corporate board directors who, like me, are building resilient, purpose-driven, and scalable businesses with great corporate governance. My guests to this podcast are business owners themselves, professional service providers, and corporate directors who, like me, want to  use the power of the private company to build a better 01:01 world through storytelling with each of my guests in the sandbox. My goal is to provide a fun sandbox environment where we can equip one founder at a time to build a better world through great corporate governance. So today I'm absolutely delighted to have as my guest, David Hirschfeld. David is the owner and CEO of Techies, 17 or 18 year old business now that boasts 01:29 a hyper exceptional development team that are building high ticket products in the B2B space.  Welcome David to the Founder Sandbox. Hi Brenda and thanks for having me. Great. So I'm delighted that we  actually did a dry run in February.  We've known each other for some time  and AI, we're going to be touching on AI.  And I think that the world of AI 01:58 particularly in software development,  has changed significantly since we last spoke in February. So we're going to be getting into  some, I think, novel concepts for  the listeners of the Founder Sandbox. So I wanted to, you I always talk about how I like to work with  growth stage companies  that  typically are bootstrapped  and 02:26 It's only at a later stage do they seek institutional investment  by building great corporate governance  and reducing the reliance on investor funding  until such a time that they choose the right type of investors that can help them scale. So when I found out what you do at Techies with Launch First  and the type of work you do in B2B businesses, I absolutely wanted to have you here  on the  founder sandbox. 02:56 So let's jump right in, right? I think I'm eager to learn more about how to scale your bespoke development at Techies, right? To scale my own business? Okay. So there's a lot of different aspects to scaling my business and I bootstrapped for the last 18 years. 03:25 I've never taken any investment  with techies.  And I've  done that very specifically because  it gives me a lot of freedom. I don't have  a reporting structure that I have to worry about. That doesn't mean that I can be lazy with my team.  To grow my team, I have a philosophy 03:52 that I only hire people that are smarter than I am.  And the  ones that are in a position to hire, they can only hire people that are smarter than them. And by  really sticking to this philosophy, even though sometimes it makes us grow a little slower than we would like, it means that when we bring in people, those people  contribute immediately and contribute in a way 04:21 that it's our job to get the impediments out of their way and to facilitate them  so that they can contribute and  help us grow the company. So I call it  the ball rolls uphill  here because  my job is to support everybody that is above me, which is everybody. And then the people that I support directly, their job is to support the people that are above them. 04:51 Because if we're hiring correctly, then  people that we bring in can contribute in the area that we're bringing them in way more than the person that's hiring them. Okay. Thank you for that. So before you launched Techies, you had a career in companies like,  I  believe, Computer Associates, right? Texas Experiments and TelaMotorola. 05:19 There was a period of time between your  experience in these large corporations before your launch tech is where you actually had your own startup  and  you sold it in 2000, right? And I believe you also learned perhaps with the second startup about how hard it is to find product market fit. Can you talk to that for my listeners, please? 05:46 I don't know that it's that hard to find product market fit. It depends if that's your focus or not. If your focus is to nail down product market fit, then  it's not that hard to determine whether you can achieve that or not fairly quickly.  You can do that by  selling your product to potential customers.  That sounds strange. Of course, we all want to sell our products, but 06:14 What I'm suggesting is you start selling your product before you have a product, before you have a  full product. And I don't mean an MVP, but a design prototype. You go out to the market and you start to sell it. If you have product market fit and you've identified the early adopter in your market and you know that they have a very high  need from a perception perspective  and there's a big cost to the problem that you're solving. 06:45 then you can offer them a big enough value upfront that they'll buy your product early and you can prove that there's a market for your product and they'll buy it in enough numbers that you  can achieve a measurable  metric, which I kind of call the golden ratio, which is three to one in terms of what is the lifetime value of a customer versus what does it cost to acquire that customer? And you can get to that three to one ratio. 07:13 in a prelaunch sale model before you ever started developing your product as a way of proving product market fit. Or you pivot quickly and cheaply because you're not having to rebuild a product that you've built in the wrong way. Or you  fail fast and cheap. And every entrepreneur's first goal should be to fail fast and cheap. know that sounds backwards, but that should be your goal is that you can fail fast and cheap or if you 07:42 If you fail to fail fast and cheap, that means you've found a path to revenue  and  product market fit. And now you know you have a viable business. making the investment to build the product  is a no brainer.  And you came upon this methodology, right? Yes.  because you did yourself when you had your first company, you did not understand the funding part, right?  Can you talk? 08:12 a bit about your specific example and then how that's informed now 17 years of techies and over 90 projects with startups. Okay. So my first company was Bootstrap. Okay.  And that one was successful and we grew it despite  me, it was me and a partner. And  despite ourselves, we grew it  over eight years. 08:39 where he ended up with 800 customers in 22 countries and sold it to a publicly traded firm out of Toronto. That was in the product food, snack food distribution business because that was what our product was focused on. So I started another company about five years later, not realizing the things that I did the first time. 09:08 that made it  so successful,  which really fit the launch first model to a large degree.  But the second time I built a product that would have been successful had I followed my first model,  but I didn't. So I went the route of building an MVP and getting customers on a free version of it, and then going out and trying to raise money, which is the very classic approach that the SaaS products 09:38 take now.  And the problem is with that approach is that you end up digging a really deep hole  in terms of the investment that you make to build the product with enough functionality that you can convince people it's worth putting an investment in and you're not generating any revenue at the time. And I should have just started selling the product and generating subscription revenue right from the beginning. First of all, I would have been able to  raise money much more easily. 10:08 Secondly, I would have not needed to raise money as much if I'd focused on sales. The problem with a lot of founders is they fall in love with their product. They believe that people will buy it at enough numbers and that investors will see the potential. they're afraid of sales. I've fallen into this trap before too. I've done it both ways. And I can tell you selling early 10:38 and staying focused on the customer and the problem are the way to be successful. So founders who I find are consistently successful, they are focused on the problem, they love the problem. The product is just the natural conclusion to solving the problem, not something to be in love with. They spend their time talking to customers about the problems.  So how does a potential customer find you and work with you? 11:08 Oh, they can find me at Techies or they can find me at LaunchFirst, was spelled launch1st.com. And they can find me on LinkedIn. And then to work with me, it's just give me a call, send me an email, we'll set up a Zoom. I'll start to learn about what you're trying to accomplish and what your requirements are. And I'll typically spend quite a bit of time with any potential clients. 11:39 in  one to usually multiple calls or Zooms, learning and  creating estimates and doing a lot of work in advance with the idea that there'll be a natural conclusion at the end of this that they'll wanna start working with me in a paid fashion. So there's a lot of value that my clients get from me whether they end up contracting me or not.  And how, again, back to,  thank you for that and that. 12:08 how to contact you will be in the show notes. But what types of sectors do you work in?  You know, in your introduction, I talk about high ticket B2B, right?  who are the,  so  what founder that's has some idea today?  What would be  their call to action to find techies? And what would you, is it launch first before you go down? 12:35 No, it's not necessarily. It may be an existing company that  is trying to implement AI or implement workflow automation, or they have a project and they don't have the IT team or capacity to handle it.  We love those types of projects. It might be an existing startup that is struggling with their software development team and they're not 13:04 getting  to the end goal that they're expecting and the product's buggy, it's taking too long,  there's constant delays, they're way over budget  and they  need to get this thing done. And  I call those recovery projects,  they're probably my favorite because people  recognize very quickly  the difference  that we bring. 13:33 and they really, really appreciate us.  As far as what sectors,  business sectors,  healthcare, law enforcement,  prop tech, real estate, finance,  entertainment, I mean, we work in  many, many different sectors over the last 18 years.  So  regardless in  B2B, B2B2C,  not so much e-commerce unless there's some 14:03 complex workflow associated with your particular e-commerce, but there's lots of really good solutions for e-commerce that  don't require developers to be involved.  But  mobile, web, IoT,  definitely everything is AI now. Absolutely. And in fact, when we last spoke,  I'd like to say that you started to drink your own Kool-Aid at Techies. 14:33 you're starting to actually use AI automation for internal functions as well as projects at Techies. So can you walk my listeners through how you're using  AI automation  and what's the latest with agentic AI?  So let's do the first.  Yeah,  okay.  So there are a bunch of questions there. So  let me start with 15:02 that we're building products internally  at Techies to help us with our own workflows.  These products though  are  applicable to almost any development company or any company with a development team.  Some of them are, and some of them are applicable to companies that are, well, so one product  is  putting voice capability in front of project management tool. 15:32 and we use JIRA and JIRA is an incredibly technical tool for project managers and development teams to use to  their projects, requirements, their  track bugs, all of that.  And so your relationship with what I call relationship with project management is very technical one. If you're a client, some clients are willing to  go through the learning curve so that they can enter their own... 15:59 bugs and feature requests and things like that directly into JIRA. Most don't.  They  want to send us emails, which is fine,  and just give us a list of what's going on and the problems that they're finding or the things that they need  for a future version and the planning and the documentation, everything else. This is a real technical thing. We're going to make it a very natural personal relationship by  adding voice in front of all this so that you can 16:29 be sharing your screen with your little voice app and say, just found a problem on the screen.  And  the voice app can see the screen. It knows your project. It knows your requirements. And it can identify problems on the screen that you may not have even noticed.  And it can also prevent you from reporting bugs that have already been reported and tell you when they're planned to be built.  And all of this just with a verbal discussion with the app. 16:58 that basically knows your project.  Kind of like talking to a project manager in real time, but they don't have to write down notes and  they can instantly  look up anything about your project in terms of what's been reported in terms of bugs or feature requests  and update them or create new ones for you or just report them to you and tell you when things are planned to be built and released or. 17:24 where they've already been released and maybe you need to clear your cache so you can see the change, whatever.  Yeah. So it be like an  avatar, but it's trained and it's  specific to Jira  in your case?  In the first version, it's actually being built architected so that we'll be able to add other project management tools to it besides Jira in the future.  to begin with, because we use Jira,  it's going to work directly with Jira to start. 17:54 And this, by the way, you asked about agentic workflows,  right? So we're  building an agentic workflow  in this tool where we have more  different agents  that work together to resolve these issues.  so we have an agent that reads and writes documentation to JIRA.  We have an agent that communicates with  the user and the user might be the programmer 18:23 might be a person in QA, it might be a client for a lot of different things. And we have an analyst agent that when the person talks, the voice agent says to the analyst agent, here's what I understand. Here's the information I just got. Go do your work and come back and get me the answer. And it'll speak to the JIRA agent to get the information. It will also speak directly to us. 18:52 a vector database, which is a database where all the documentation from that project  is ingested into our own  separate AI model so that the context of all the communication is about their project and doesn't go off into other directions.  And then can  get back. So this is an agentic workflow.  The idea of 19:20 agents is like everybody keeps talking about agents. Not everybody is really clear on what that even means. Can you define  that?  an agent is an AI  model  that you can interact with that is focused on  one specific area of expertise.  So if it's a travel agent, the word agent fits very well there, then their expertise would be on everything related to 19:49 travel and booking travel and looking up  options and comparing prices. And  that would be an AI  travel agent.  So that's very different from an AI project management agent, very different from an AI financial analyst agent.  So each agent specializes in its own area of expertise and may draw from specific 20:18 repositories of information that are  specific to that particular agent's area of expertise.  And they actually look from the perspective of that type of person, if it was a person. So,  and so they'll respond in a way that is consistent with how somebody who is a project manager would respond to you when you're talking to them, asking you questions about your requirements, knows what 20:46 information it needs to be able to assess it properly, things like that.  wouldn't be very good about travel because that's  not its area of expertise. Right.  So is it  common to have companies that are creating with their own large language model, right? Or their workflow processes internally to the company to create their own agent AI? 21:14 Or is there a marketplace now where you can say, want this type of agent to get in. This is a very basic question, but  do build it? Right. Or do you buy it? Or is it something in between? It's something in between.  So there are tools that allow you to  basically collect agents out there.  And there's a difference between an agent and a context.  Cause you hear a lot about model context switching and things like, don't know. 21:44 if your audience knows these things.  Or model context protocol. A context is not an agent, but it has some agent capabilities because it's kind of specializing your model in a certain area. But you would use this, but you're not, if it's a true agent, then  it's probably tied to its own vector database. 22:12 that gets trained with specific information. It might be company's information. It might be information, let's say if I'm a security agent, then I'm going to be trained on the entire NIST system as well as all of my security architecture that's currently in place. And that so that it could monitor and 22:41 assess instantly whether there's  security vulnerabilities, which you wouldn't ask Chet GPT to do that. No. Right? Because it couldn't. Because it doesn't know  anything about your organization or environment. And  it  really also doesn't know how to prioritize  what matters and what doesn't at any given moment. Whereas a  security agent, that would be what it does. 23:10 I don't know if I answered that question. Oh, bad thing about building or buying.  there are- Or something in between,  Yeah. So there are tools that you can use to build workflows  and  bring in different agents that already exist. And  you can use something like OpenAI or Claude  and  use it to create an agent and give it some intelligence and- 23:37 give it a specific, in this case, you're giving it a specific context.  You could even  tie a special machine learning database to it  and make it even more agentic in that way.  And then  build these workflows where you're  like, let's say a marketing workflow,  where you're saying you first go out and research all the people who are your  ideal customer profile. 24:07 I was going to say ICP, but I'm trying not to use acronyms because not everybody knows every acronym.  Ideal customer profile.  And then it finds all these people that fit your ideal customer profile. Then it says, well, which of these people  are  in the countries that I do business? And then it illuminates the ones that aren't. then which ones, and it may be using  the same agent or different agents to do this.  Then once it's nailed it down to the very discrete 24:37 set of customers. Now  the next step in the workflow is, okay, now  enrich their data  of these people to find their email and other ways of contacting them as well as other information about them so that I have a really full picture of what kind of activity are they active  socially? they speak? Do they post? What are they speaking about? What are they posting about? What events are they going to? Things like that. 25:07 So that would be the next step and that'd be an agent that's doing all the enriching.  And then after that, the next step would be to call basically call a writing agent to go do, am I writing an email? Am I writing a LinkedIn connection post? Am I doing both?  Set up a drip campaign and start reaching out to these people one at a time  with very customized specific language, right? That  is in your voice. 25:34 It doesn't sound like it's written by a typical AI outreach thing. All right, so these would be  steps in a workflow that you could use with several different tools to build the workflows and then calling these different agents. 25:48 Let's go back to the launched first. What would be a typical engagement with a company? you know, they, um, the founders that have the greatest success in your experiences are the ones that love the problem space and not the product. All right. So walk my listeners through. 26:17 What a typical engagement. it's staff augmentation. it  full out  outsourcing? it tech?  because it's very complex. I can touch so many. can touch high  tech and high ticket B2B products,  sector agnostic. what,  put some legs on this for my listeners, please. Sure, sure. We're not. 26:46 so much a staff augmentation company, although we'll do that if asked to, but that's not  the kind of business that we  look for.  We look for project type work. So a typical engagement for launch first would be  somebody wants to launch a product, they're in the concept phase. We help refine the concept and we build out,  help that we do the design and then we build a high fidelity prototype, which is a design prototype. 27:16 When I demo a design prototype to somebody, they think that they're looking at a finished product,  but  it's not. It doesn't actually do anything. It just looks like it  does everything.  So it's very animated set of mock-ups is another way to look at it.  And it's important because you can build out the big vision of the product this way in a couple of months, whereas 27:46 it takes instead of, you so you're looking at the two year roadmap when we're done of the product. If we were to build an MVP, then you're going to see a very limited view of the product and it's going to cost a lot more to build that MVP than it takes to build this design prototype. Now we're in the process of doing this. We're also nailing down who that early adopter is. And there's a, there's a very, 28:14 metrics driven methodology for doing this.  your launch first. Within launch first, right. Okay. All right. And then  we'll help the client build a marketing funnel and help them start to generate sales.  We're not doing the selling, they're doing the selling. And it's important that founders do the selling because they need to hear what customers are saying about the thing they're demoing, why they want it, why they don't. 28:43 So that  if we need to pivot, which we can do easily and quickly with a design prototype,  then we can  pivot and then go and test the model again, two or three or four times in the space of a couple of months.  And we'll either find a path to revenue or accept the fact that this probably isn't the right product for the right time.  But in the process of doing this, you're learning a lot about the market and about the potential customer. 29:13 I want to be clear about something. Almost every founder that comes to  that I meet with, they love the product, not the problem. They started out with a problem that they realized they had a good solution for and they forgot all about the problem at that point. And so I spend a lot of time with founders  reminding them why the  problem is all that matters  and what that means and how to approach customers, potential customers so that 29:41 you're syncing with their problems, not telling them about this product that you're building because nobody cares about your product. All they care about is what they're struggling with.  And if they believe that you really understand that, then they  care about whether you can solve that problem for them or 30:01 And can  I be  audacious and ask you what a typical engagement duration is like? So this would be for launch first. Yes. If it's a,  and our hope is that they'll  find a path to revenue and start building the product and engage us for the development. Cause that's really our business is building the products.  So, but it's not a requirement.  And,  and our typical engagement with our clients are several years. 30:32 Not all of them, but most of them, would say. Once they start working with us, they just continue to work with us until they decide to bring in their own in-house team  or they fail eventually, which many of our clients do, which is why I  created Launch First. Right. You often talk about your hyper exceptional team at Techies. What is it that's so highly exceptional? Talk to me about your team. Where are they? Yeah. 31:02 And if you go to my website, which is tekyz.com,  you'll see at the very top of it  in the header above the fold, it says hyper exceptional development team. And I don't expect people to believe me  because I write that down or I tell them that I expect them to ask me, well, what does that mean? Do you have evidence? And  that's the question I want to get because I do.  Because when you work in an exceptional manner, 31:31 as a natural consequence of working that way, you produce certain artifacts  that the typical development teams don't produce. And I'm not saying there aren't other exceptional teams, but they're really few and far between. And what makes a team exceptional is a constant need to  improve their ability to deliver  and the level of quality that they deliver as well and the speed at which they develop. It's all of these things. 31:59 So,  and, you know, after 18 years, we've done a lot of improving and a lot of automation internally,  because  that allows our team to work in a really disciplined protocol manner without having to feel like they're under the strict  discipline and protocol of,  you  know, a difficult environment to work in.  And so we  create automation everywhere we can. The voice... 32:27 tool is one of those automations.  The way we  do status reports, it's very clear at the level of detail that we provide every week  to every client in terms of status reports  where we're showing here's what we estimated, here's the actual, here's our percent variance  on how much time we spent and how much it's costing.  We want to always be within 10 % above or below. 32:56 Either  being above or below is not,  know,  the fact that we're ahead of that doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing, right? So we want to be accurate with our estimates.  And we are typically within 10%. In fact, our largest customer last year, we did a retrospective and we were within six and a half percent of what our estimates were for the whole year.  and that's a,  we're pretty happy with that number. 33:24 I think most teams are looking at many, many times that in terms of variance.  it's not that uncommon for teams to be double or triple what they're or even higher what the actual estimate was. So  when we do invoicing, we invoice for each person at their rate. 33:50 based on their level of expertise, which is all part of our agreement upfront. So the client is very transparent every month for the hours that they work. And we attach the daily time sheets to every invoice. I'm the only company I know of right now that does that. I know there are others. I've seen monthly, but I've never seen daily. Yeah. Yeah. Because for me, if I could ask, well, 34:18 why did this person ask a work that many hours that last month? What did they do? I hate that feeling that I get when somebody asks that question. I know they're only asking because they have to justify it to somebody else or whatever the reason, but I don't like the way it feels because it feels like my integrity is being questioned. I don't get upset at people for asking me that. I just feel like I'm not giving them enough information if they have to ask me that question. So we started about eight years ago. 34:47 providing the daily time sheets because I don't like that question. And we never get questioned on our  invoices ever anymore. I bet you it's informed you  as well in  future  projects,  maybe on  including workflow automation in your own internal processes, right? When you see people's time sheets, right? And you've gone over budget. So it informs you internally. So it's not only for the client. 35:16 I suspect, right? No, it's not. Right. And we use it ourselves to also, because it also helps us looking at our overhead costs because not everything gets built to the client. And so we track all our own times, you know, what we're spending doing what. And we don't get to, it's not like a developer has to spend a lot of time or a QA person or whatever, putting in a lot of detail. We just need a couple of bullets, you know, every day in the time sheet with the, whatever they spend. 35:45 If they spent four hours on one thing and three on another, they'll just break it into two entries just to make it easy.  And that's important for us, or they may be working on two different projects and each project. So when we do the timesheets also every month, we give our clients a breakdown by project. So if we're working on four different projects  for a client  or even one project, but it has four different really 36:15 functional elements that are very clearly different. Like let's say a mobile app and a web app  and a  particular client implementation. Each one of those gets assigned its own project and we break down summaries of the time spent on each of those every month and who spent the time on those, along with the daily time sheets, along with the invoice.  And nobody else does that because it takes a lot of discipline and protocol and you have to have lot of systems in place 36:45 to do that without  literally getting everybody to quit, right? That works for you. And nobody minds doing it because it's easy because of all the systems we put in place to do that.  That's the whole point, right? Right. were  not particularly happy of getting asked that question oftentimes. So eight years ago, you set out to  provide the information on a daily basis, which is incredible.  We started that with blended rates like a lot of companies do. 37:14 And then I didn't like that because at the end of a project when most of it's QA, people would start to get frustrated that they're still getting billed the same blended rate, even though for the more expensive period at the beginning of the project,  I thought, okay, forget this. Well, just bill based on individual.  And then I didn't get those questions anymore, but then I would get questions about individuals on the month. And that's when I started doing the time sheets. 37:43 And like I said, I'm sure there's other companies that do it, but I haven't run into  one or somebody that works with one. So  that's an exceptional thing that we do. But it also allows us to do  really, really good reporting to the client on status on what we've spent our time on, what we're expecting to spend our time on  next week, what we just spent our time on this week, where we are. 38:12 in terms of our plan for the month, things like that.  So let's switch gears, David.  Yeah. Back to  actually the podcast and  some of my guests and listeners  are corporate board directors. So they're sitting on either advisory boards or fiduciary corporate boards.  And with all the hype around AI. 38:39 it's not uncommon for them to be asking, what are we doing, right? For existing companies, right? And  I'd like you to walk my listeners through while it's in the, you know,  in the imaginary realm, what is it? I think any founder today that's actually scaling, right? Has to have some AI element. At least I've even heard you need to have it. 39:08 an AI officer in the company. So what's your take on that? What would you respond to either to your board of advisors, your advisory board, or your board of directors?  So,  and of course, a lot of it depends on the type of company you are. Absolutely. Right. If  you're making  alternative material I-beams, for example,  for skyscraper construction, then 39:37 AI, other than maybe in the design process of these specialized materials,  AI may not be as big a critical factor, although for invoice reconciliation and  distribution and  scheduling and all that, AI could be a huge value to you if you don't have super efficient systems already.  For most everybody else though, if you have not embraced the need to 40:06 leverage AI and everything you're doing,  then you're way behind already.  That doesn't mean you have to be in a race to do this. just, because  I'm  of the belief that  you have to slow down to speed up. But you do need to make it a priority.  And in a lot of different ways. Number one is, 40:36 The most obvious is workflow automation. You should be probably tackling  workflow automation as just a part of your constant improvement program  to become more efficient, whether it's with AI or not.  But AI is particularly good at workflow automation  because it can tackle steps in that workflow that couldn't be tackled without AI.  So the  first thing 41:06 the companies should be doing if they're not doing it is documenting all of their processes,  all of their tribal knowledge into playbooks. So when you have somebody who's an expert in something in your company and they're the person who's the only one that knows how to do it and so we can't live without them, that's a bottleneck for scaling. Because if you bring somebody else in to expand their capacity, they're going to... 41:32 put a big dependency on that person with all the expertise, which is going to cause problems.  So  anybody in a position like that should be documenting all of their  procedures and protocols and especially all the nuances and all the edge cases into playbooks.  And there should be some centralized playbook repository for the company. And this becomes part of your intellectual property and part of your value if you ever 42:02 you're trying to raise money or you're trying to sell your company. So it increases your value. So you do that, then AI,  you start to look at automating those workflows because now they're documented. So now what can be automated in them from just a workflow automation perspective. And then how much can you implement AI in there? Because now AI can learn to make the same kinds of decisions that this person is making. 42:31 And this is like the low hanging fruit that I'm talking about right now. Right. Exactly. Right. Because the bigger stuff is if we implement AI in here, what workflows would we totally  throw away and start from scratch?  Because we can think of way more sophisticated ways of addressing this now that we have intelligence involved in all these steps.  But that's later. 42:57 worry about that once you get your arms around implementing AI,  automated workflows and then- So workflow automation. So playbooks, workflows and AI in your automated workflows. That's sort of the stepped wise process. Excellent. You heard it here  on the founder sandbox. Thank you, David.  And if you're not sure how to do all that, 43:25 ask AI, okay, here's my company. What should I be focusing on if I wanna implement playbooks, workflow automation and AI? And AI will help you figure this all out. Right. That's a jewel here. So what'd you do? Chat GBT, co-pilot, what's your complexity? Where would you go to? All right. Well, it just depends on the flavor of the day. Right now. 43:53 I was using chat GPT primarily for this stuff just because it was a first and I'm very comfortable with the apps. have them everywhere. And Claude's recently come out with a  new version and it's in some ways I'm just finding the output way more organized and smarter. And so I've been using Claude more in the last couple of weeks, but that'll change in another week or two.  Any one of them will do a pretty decent job. 44:21 I'm  not using perplexity because it's built on top of the other ones.  But perplexity is a great tool if you're newer with this because it makes some of the... It's a little bit more accessible for somebody who doesn't know how to use AI.  Gemini is also  really good, but that's  more of a technical... And there's so many things you can do. 44:49 with AI that you wouldn't even think about. And I'll give you an example, more as a brain opening exercise for everybody than anything else. Because this is something I did about seven weeks ago.  I,  chat GPT had just come out a week or two before with their vision capability in the mobile app. And for  those of you who don't know it,  with chat GPT, there's a talk 45:19 button. It's not  the microphone. It's the one that looks like a sound wave  in the mobile app. You tap that, and now you have a voice conversation with chat, which I use this constantly. Even when I'm working with,  I've got some contractors at my house whose English isn't very good, so I ask it to do real-time translation for me. And it does matter the language.  And I start talking, and it translates to their language. And they respond 45:49 in their language and it translates to English and it's doing it perfectly. And so I can have a very natural conversation with anybody just holding my phone up in front of them now.  Right?  But it has this vision capability  where when you go into that voice mode, you tap the camera next to it, and now it's looking out the front of your screen while you're talking to it. And so I'll give you a couple of examples where I've used it  six weeks ago and again, like 46:18 weeks later and I now used it many times like this.  I was in  Lowe's, which is a  store for home improvement.  And  for some project I was on, my wife calls me and says, I need fertilizer for a hibiscus. And I say, well, what do I get? She says, anything that says hibiscus on it, it'll be fine. I said, okay, fine. And if anybody that knows these big box stores, there's like hundreds of bags of fertilizer of different brands. 46:48 And I couldn't find one that said hibiscus. This is a typical thing with my wife. Oh, just look for this. And of course, there isn't that. So I asked Chess GPT, okay, I'm in  Lowe's  and I'm looking for a fertilizer for hibiscus.  What would you suggest? And it said, oh, there's a number of brands that are high acid.  And I said, we'll recommend a brand. Tonal is a really good brand. And I said, okay. So I'm looking and I can't find it. 47:18 So I walked 30 feet back and I'm talking, right? I'm having this, know, people are looking at me like, what the hell is he doing? And I walked 30 feet back because there's many, many shelves, you know, columns of shelves with fertilizer. I walked back and I turned on the vision and I say, okay, there's all the fertilizers. And I'm moving my phone across all these shelves. say, do you see tonal here? And it says, yes, look for the one in the red and white bag. 47:48 And  I see it on the shelf. So I walk straight forward. see a red and white bag. That's not tonal. said, this isn't it. And she, cause it's a woman's voice that I have, she says,  it's two shelves to the left, second from the top.  I walk over there and it's right where she said it was. Crazy. And you're not a beta user. So this is available today. This is available. It's been available for a couple of months. And then 48:18 My daughter-in-law asked me to get something from the pharmacy, from CVS, another  big box pharmacy store, right? And this is something I don't even know if I'm in the right aisle because it's something I've never bought. So I ask it, I say, I'm looking for this brand  and I'm not sure if I'm in the right aisle or not, but I'm going to walk down the aisle and tell me if you see it. As I'm walking down the aisle, holding it straight forward so it can see both sides.  And it says, well, 48:45 Yes, I'm familiar with the brand. You should look for it in a green and white box. then she goes like this. Oh, I see it. It's down there on the right on the bottom shelf. And I turn and I look and it's right by my right foot. 48:58 You heard it here. This is crazy. think it's a bit creepy.  How many times have you been looking for something on a shelf? You know, and you're like, oh, how long, how many hours is this going to take me to spot it?  Good internet connection and all that. So, oh my goodness. It's creepy and it's wonderful. So  same time.  the same time. Yeah. Yeah. For quality of life and even for,  um, yeah.  So 49:25 That's a mind opening thing is all the reason I bring that up. Excellent. Hey, let's go. Let's continue on in the founder sandbox. I'd like to ask each of my guests to  share with me.  I'm all about working with resilient, purpose driven and scalable companies in the growth phase. So what does resilience mean to you? You can either answer, you know, what's the first thing that comes out of your, you cannot use chat, GBT. I'm not fancy. No hands. 49:55 No hands, and I don't have the voice version going because you'd hear it. Podcast we could do it.  And we are real. We're not. Yeah, we are real. We're not. So I think that's, I don't think that's a difficult question to answer. Resilience means opportunity. So no matter what happens, even if it seems terrible, what  opportunity does that create? Excellent. If you ask that. 50:22 keep reframing everything from that perspective,  it creates resilience. Right. Thank you. What about purpose-driven?  Purpose-driven  means having  a clear  long-term path and goal  and  asking yourself if the things you're doing keep you on purpose to that. 50:56 Scalable. What's scalable mean for you? Scalable for me means  eliminating tribal knowledge or not eliminating it, but documenting tribal knowledge.  First of all, figuring out how you generate revenue and then how you expand your ability to generate revenue, which means growing your 51:25 growing your team, growing your capacity  and identifying the bottlenecks and focusing all your energy on the bottlenecks. And usually the bottlenecks have to do  with tribal knowledge or with  lack of workflow automation. Wow, you know, it's easier said than done though, that tribal knowledge, it is resistant, right? Oh yeah,  because it's  career,  what's the word I'm trying to think of? 51:55 It  keeps you in your job forever if you're the only one that knows how to do the thing. Absolutely. That's for another podcast, David. My  final question today is,  did you have fun in the Founder Sandbox? Oh, yes.  I had a lot of fun. Thanks. That's a great question too. Thank you, Brenda. Did you have fun? 52:20 Did you? I had had fun. And particularly in this last part, right? Cause we're talking about some heavy duty, you know, uses of, um, agentic AI, right. And scalable, you know, LTV, CAC and all that. And then we get to hear these real life, you know, kind of creepy, um, uh, uses of, um, on our phones today with, um, with AI, which is, which is quite amazing. But I also know that in your world of techies, 52:50 your team, which is distributed, have a lot of fun events too. So you probably- have one more thing on the whole scalable thing. You have to be compassionately ruthless or ruthlessly compassionate, however you want to say it. Okay. So that the people, every, and the ruthless is anything that's going to get in the way of you growing your company, which benefits everybody in the company. 53:19 it needs to be addressed in a ruthless way. But if you build a culture of ruthlessly compassionate, then all the people that work for you feel that same level of ruthlessness to protect the company and make it grow. And you practice what you preach, I suspect, at Techies. Yes. Yes. It took me a while, but if we accidentally hire the wrong person, either because 53:45 we made a mistake in the process or they faked us out and we recognize they're not smart enough. Literally, that's usually the problem. They're not smart enough to carry their weight. We fire them immediately. We don't try to bring them along because you can't improve somebody's IQ. You can improve any other aspect, but their IQ is their IQ.  And  that will be a bottleneck forever. 54:13 in our team and it'll require other people to carry that person. And it sends the wrong message to the team that I don't value them enough to make sure that we only surround them with people that are going to inspire them and help them grow. Excellent. And I suspect they are not fungible by AI, your employees, not techies. I mean, we've gotten better and better. 54:40 at not making those mistakes over the years. So that doesn't typically happen. takes us, we're much more careful about how we hire.  AI gives us the ability to recruit faster, more broadly,  along with workflow automation. But  what I mean by real, this is the compassionate. Once my team understood this, now they embody that and  they will get rid of somebody if they made a mistake. I don't have to force the issue ever anymore because 55:10 they recognize how much, important it is to protect their teams. So to my listeners, if you liked this episode today with the CEO and founder of Techies, sign up for the monthly release of founders, business owners, corporate directors, and professional service providers who provide their examples of how they're building companies or consulting with companies  to make them more resilient, scalable, and purpose-driven. 55:40 to make profits for good.  Signing off for today. See you next month in the Founder Sandbox. Thank you.  

Only a few Atlassians can make the TJL crew change their livestream recording time and we're excited to have one such example on this week's show. Sherif Mansour, Distinguished Product Manager for Atlassian will talk to us about the latest news regarding Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo.Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-jira-life/Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/joinHosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortizhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alexortiz89/https://www.youtube.com/@ApetechTechTutorials- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rgnissen/https://thejiraguy.com- Sarah Wrighthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/satwright/Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051/Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatinstinct

In this episode of Building Better Developers, hosts Rob Broadhead and Michael Meloche explore how to improve team collaboration in software development through the lens of AI-driven insights. Whether you're a solo developer, part of a tight-knit team, or scaling across departments, collaboration remains the backbone of efficiency and success. What Does Collaboration Mean in Development? AI kicked off the discussion with a powerful insight: define “efficiency” in context. But more importantly, it highlighted that collaboration fuels efficiency, not just working faster, but working better. Effective collaboration avoids: Redundant work Misunderstood requirements Tech debt and burnout Rob emphasized that a productive team isn't rushing through tasks but solving the correct problems—together—on the first try. Collaboration Strategies for Solo Developers Even solo developers need structured collaboration between their tools, their future selves, and their automation stack. Top collaboration tips for independent devs: Use opinionated frameworks like Next.js or Rails to minimize decision fatigue. Automate repetitive tasks early to save time in the long run. Commit code regularly with meaningful messages. Document workflows using Notion, Obsidian, or Jira—even if you're the only one using them. Containerize development environments for repeatability and rapid setup. “Solo doesn't mean siloed. Collaborate with your tools, your past decisions, and future goals.” Enhancing Collaboration in Small Development Teams For teams of 2–10 developers, Rob and Michael discussed how tight feedback loops and structured communication are essential to avoid chaos. Recommended practices for small team collaboration: Short, focused daily standups Shared development environments Lightweight Agile or Kanban boards Early investment in CI/CD pipelines Use of pair programming or mob programming for knowledge sharing Michael emphasized Agile's power in synchronizing team efforts, avoiding duplicated work, and solving problems more efficiently as a unit. “Agile helps teams collaborate—not just communicate. It keeps everyone moving in the same direction.” Solving Common Bottlenecks Together AI highlighted four universal collaboration pain points and solutions: Slow Code Reviews - Use SLAs and rotate reviewers Unclear Requirements - Kick off with 15-minute clarification huddles Testing Paralysis - Focus on integration tests and avoid overtesting Context Switching - Block dedicated focus hours Michael zeroed in on testing paralysis, especially in early-stage projects, where developers are too busy scaffolding to write tests. Without collaboration on testing plans, critical issues may be overlooked until it is too late. Rob addressed context switching, warning against excessive meetings that fragment developer flow. Leads should shield devs from distraction by delivering distilled, actionable feedback. Final Thoughts on Collaborative Development As teams grow, minor issues scale fast, and so do inefficiencies. Tools, meetings, workflows, and expectations must all scale intentionally. Rob reminded leaders to summarize and distill information before passing it to their teams and to make clever use of tools like AI, recordings, and summaries to keep everyone aligned without wasting time. “If you're building better developers, you're also building better collaborators.” Take Action: Build Collaboration Into Your Workflow Reassess your standups and review cycles Empower solo devs with documentation and CI/CD Streamline onboarding with containers Test early, test together Protect team focus time Stay Connected: Join the Developreneur Community We invite you to join our community and share your coding journey with us. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just starting, there's always room to learn and grow together. Contact us at info@develpreneur.com with your questions, feedback, or suggestions for future episodes. Together, let's continue exploring the exciting world of software development. Additional Resources Embrace Feedback for Better Teams Using Offshore Teams and Resources – Interview With Tanika De Souza Moving To Mobile Teams and Building Them – Sebastian Schieke Building Better Developers With AI Podcast Videos – With Bonus Content

Atlassian is a suite of products including Jira, Confluence, and Trello.The Atlassian suite offers powerful tools for business organization and knowledge management that can be adapted for jewelry retailers, with special focus on Trello and Confluence.Send us a text Send feedback or learn more about the podcast: punchmark.com/loupe Learn about Punchmark's website platform: punchmark.com Inquire about sponsoring In the Loupe and showcase your business on our next episode: podcast@punchmark.com

Join the TJL crew this week as we sit down with Dave Meyer, Vice President and Head of Product, Jira at Atlassian. Dave will talk about the journey to unify Jira and the steps taken (some of which is causing heartburn for a certain TJL cohost, can you guess who?)Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!  / the-jira-life  Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/...Hosts:Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortiz ⁠  / alexortiz89  ⁠⁠   / @apetechtechtutorials Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissen ⁠  / rgnissen  ⁠⁠https://thejiraguy.comSarah Wright    / satwright   Producer:"King Bob" Robert Wen   / robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051  Executive Producer: Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codes   / monstercat  Outro: Fractal - Atrium   / monstercatinstinct  

Stuart Tipples: Defining Scrum Master Success and the 4L's Retrospective Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Stuart redefines success for Scrum Masters, moving beyond organized JIRA boards and well-structured stories to focus on team dynamics and behavior. True success means seeing healthy conflict that leads to insight, having transparent priorities, and watching teams call out their own behavior through self-checking mechanisms. Stuart emphasizes that happy teams aren't just content - they're energized by embracing obstacles and challenges. He stresses the importance of reinforcing great behaviors when you see them, creating an environment where teams can thrive independently. Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: 4L's The 4L's retrospective format is Stuart's favorite because it strikes the perfect balance between warmth and honest feedback. The format covers four areas: Liked (appreciation), Learned (growth opportunities), Lacked (identifying gaps), and Longed for (dreaming big). This structure prevents people from freezing up while uncovering golden moments and building psychological safety. As a bonus, the format allows facilitators to bring fun elements and themes, making retrospectives more engaging while maintaining their effectiveness in driving team improvement. Self-reflection Question: Does your team demonstrate healthy conflict that leads to insight, or are disagreements avoided and issues left unresolved? [Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Imagine saving as much as 75 days of work within a six-month period, all through intelligent automation.Building on last week's discussion about the critical shift from passive metrics to active productivity, host Ben Lloyd Pearson and LinearB co-founder Dan Lines now look forward to realities like this: 19% cycle time reduction and reclaiming significant engineering time. They move beyond common narratives surrounding AI to present actionable success stories and strategic approaches for engineering leaders seeking tangible results from their AI initiatives. This concluding episode tackles how to safely and effectively adopt AI across your software development lifecycle. Dan explains the necessity of programmatic rules and control, detailing how LinearB's gitStream technology empowers teams to define precisely when, where, and for whom AI operates. This ranges from AI-assisted code reviews with human oversight for critical services, to enabling senior developers to make judgment calls, and even automating merges for low-risk changes. Ben and Dan also explore the exciting future of agentic AI workflows, where AI agents could manage tasks from design and Jira story creation to coding and deployment, making developer control even more critical. Check out:The DevEx guide to AI-driven software developmentSurvey: Discover Your AI Collaboration StyleFollow the hosts:Follow BenFollow AndrewReferenced in today's show:The Pentagon launched a military-grade Y Combinator, signaling that defense tech is officially cool on college campusesJapan Post launches 'digital address' systemReddit sues Anthropic for scrapingMy AI Skeptic Friends Are All NutsSupport the show: Subscribe to our Substack Leave us a review Subscribe on YouTube Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn Offers: Learn about Continuous Merge with gitStream Get your DORA Metrics free forever

In this Checkout episode, we go behind the scenes with Suzie Young from Metagenics to uncover the tools, brands and habits driving her success. From buying tiles and lounges online with Koala and TileCloud, to drawing inspiration from Scott Galloway's Prof G podcast, Suzie shares how her approach to ecommerce blends curiosity and structure. She reflects on exceptional service moments from legacy retailers like Harvey Norman and Strandbags, reveals why Trello and Jira are non-negotiables for her team, and unpacks the challenge of balancing quick wins with long-term strategy in a digital-first business.Check out our full-length interview with Suzie Young here: https://shorturl.at/7UWrMThis episode was brought to you by: Deliver In Person + KlaviyoAbout your guest:Suzie Young is a results-driven Marketing and Digital Leader at Metagenics, with deep expertise across ecommerce, CRM, CX and digital transformation. She's passionate about agile leadership, building high-performing teams, and creating digital experiences that deliver long-term customer value.About your host:Nathan Bush is the host of the Add To Cart podcast and a leading ecommerce transformation consultant. He has led eCommerce for businesses with revenue $100m+ and has been recognised as one of Australia's Top 50 People in eCommerce four years in a row. You can contact Nathan on LinkedIn, X or via email.Got an idea, opportunity or just want to get involved? Whether you're keen to sponsor Add To Cart, interested in jumping on the mic as a co-host, or have feedback to help us make the show even better, we'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at hello@addtocart.com.au and let's chat! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week the TJL crew discusses the Atlassian Community and the myriad ways you can get involved, whether online, in-person or a mix of in between.All that and the latest going on in the Atlassian ecosphere!Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-jira-life/Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/joinHosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortiz https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexortiz89/ https://www.youtube.com/@ApetechTechTutorials- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissen https://www.linkedin.com/in/rgnissen/ https://thejiraguy.com- Sarah Wright https://www.linkedin.com/in/satwright/ Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wen https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051/Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatinstinct

Joining the TJL crew this week is recently-minted Lead Architect of AI, Bill Wood! Come to hear all about the AI and non-AI related tidbits that came from TEAM '25!Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-...Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/...Hosts:- Alex "Dr. Jira" Ortizhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/alexortiz89/https://www.youtube.com/@ApetechTechT...- Rodney "The Jira Guy" Nissenhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/rgnissen/https://thejiraguy.com- Sarah Wrighthttps://www.linkedin.com/in/satwright/Producer:- "King Bob" Robert Wen.Executive Producer: - Lina OrtizMusic provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codeshttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercatOutro: Fractal - Atriumhttps://www.youtube.com/c/monstercati...

CodeRabbit, led by founder Harjot Gill, is tackling one of software development's biggest bottlenecks: the human code review process. While AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot have sped up code generation, they've inadvertently slowed down shipping due to increased complexity in code reviews. Developers now often review AI-generated code they didn't write, leading to misunderstandings, bugs, and security risks. In an episode of The New Stack Makers, Gill discusses how Code Rabbit leverages advanced reasoning models—OpenAI's o1, o3 mini, and Anthropic's Claude series—to automate and enhance code reviews. Unlike rigid, rule-based static analysis tools, Code Rabbit builds rich context at scale by spinning up sandbox environments for pull requests and allowing AI agents to navigate codebases like human reviewers. These agents can run CLI commands, analyze syntax trees, and pull in external context from Jira or vulnerability databases. Gill envisions a hybrid future where AI handles the grunt work of code review, empowering humans to focus on architecture and intent—ultimately reducing bugs, delays, and development costs.Learn more from The New Stack about the latest insights about AI code reviews: CodeRabbit's AI Code Reviews Now Live Free in VS Code, Cursor AI Coding Agents Level Up from Helpers to Team Players Augment Code: An AI Coding Tool for 'Real' Development WorkJoin our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game. 

Fresh off Red Hat Summit, Chris is eyeing an exit from NixOS. What's luring him back to the mainstream? Our highlights, and the signal from the noise from open source's biggest event of the year.Sponsored By:Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices! 1Password Extended Access Management: 1Password Extended Access Management is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device isn't trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:

IT'S OUR BIRTHDAY! Join the TJL crew as we look back from the obscure beginnings at TEAM '23 to key moments happening today. Discover what the Peanut Gallery actually is!Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!  / the-jira-life  Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:   / @thejiralife  Hosts:Alex "Dr. Jira" OrtizRodney "The Jira Guy" NissenSarah Wright"King Bob" Robert WenLina Ortiz   / alexortiz89     / @apetechtechtutorials     / rgnissen  https://thejiraguy.com   / satwright   Producer:   / robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051  Executive Producer: Music provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codes   / monstercat  Outro: Fractal - Atrium   / monstercatinstinct  

Deniz Ari: Why Your Process Changes Are Failing—The Stakeholder Alignment Problem Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes. Deniz explores the challenges of implementing change in organizations, emphasizing that change is always a long and difficult process requiring patience and trust. Drawing on the Change Curve concept, Deniz shares a personal experience trying to improve project visibility by cleaning up backlogs in JIRA for 10 in-flight projects. Despite good intentions, Deniz found themselves as the only person using the tool, with team members and Product Owners using different systems that better suited their specific needs—POs wanting only high-level items while the development team needed to split items into smaller tasks. Through this experience, Deniz learned the crucial importance of having all stakeholders (Product Owners, development teams, and managers) aligned on using the same tool, and understanding the unique perspectives of each group before implementing process changes. In this episode, we refer to the Change Curve.  Self-reflection Question: What changes have you attempted to implement that failed because you didn't fully understand the different needs and perspectives of all stakeholders involved? [The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

Mike Mahlkow spricht mit Fabiola Munguia, Gründerin von Secfix, über den Aufbau eines Unternehmens, das Startups und KMUs dabei hilft, IT-Sicherheit und Compliance zu automatisieren. Sie teilt ihre spannenden Erfahrungen als Immigrant Founder in Deutschland, erklärt die Grundlagen von ISO 27001, SOC2 und anderen Zertifikaten, und warum sie für Unternehmen, die mit Enterprise-Kunden arbeiten wollen, essenziell sind. Fabiola erklärt, wie Secfix den Zertifizierungsprozess radikal vereinfacht und Startups dabei unterstützt, schneller und effizienter vertrauenswürdige Partnerschaften mit großen Kunden aufzubauen. Außerdem gibt sie Einblicke in die Herausforderungen und Vorteile, als Immigrant in Deutschland zu gründen, sowie Tipps für den Aufbau eines Remote-Teams. Was du lernst: Warum Compliance für Startups wichtig ist: Was ISO 27001, SOC2 und andere Zertifikate bedeuten und wann sie für Unternehmen relevant werden Warum Compliance nicht nur eine Pflichtaufgabe ist, sondern ein entscheidender Faktor für den Erfolg im Enterprise Sales Wie Secfix den Zertifizierungsprozess automatisiert: Wie Secfix IT-Sicherheits- und Compliance-Prozesse mit Tools wie AWS, Jira, und Google Workspaces integriert und Daten automatisiert verarbeitet Der Unterschied zwischen zwölf Monaten manueller Zertifizierung und einer automatisierten Lösung, die in nur zwei bis vier Monaten Ergebnisse liefert Trust-Building durch ein Trust Center: Wie ein öffentliches Trust Center auf der Unternehmenswebsite hilft, das Vertrauen potenzieller Kunden zu stärken und Sales-Prozesse zu beschleunigen Warum ein professioneller, automatisierter Ansatz die Chancen auf Enterprise-Deals signifikant erhöht Immigrant Founder in Deutschland: Welche Herausforderungen Fabiola als Immigrant in Deutschland meistern musste, von Bürokratie bis hin zu Visum-Problemen Warum Deutschland trotzdem ein attraktiver Standort für Gründer ist, insbesondere durch Netzwerke und Förderprogramme wie Exist Remote-First-Company Building: Wie Secfix ein 100% Remote-Team aufgebaut hat und warum Transparenz, Overcommunication und Result-Driven-Work die Schlüssel zum Erfolg sind Tools wie Notion, Gather und Slack, die helfen, ein Remote-Team effizient und kollaborativ zu führen ALLES ZU UNICORN BAKERY: https://zez.am/unicornbakery  Hier findest du Fabiola: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fabiola-munguia/  Website: https://de.secfix.com/  Mehr zu Mike: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikemahlkow/  Website: https://fastgen.com Join our Founder Tactics Newsletter: 2x die Woche bekommst du die Taktiken der besten Gründer der Welt direkt ins Postfach: https://www.tactics.unicornbakery.de/  Kapitel: (00:00:00) Wer ist Founderin Fabiola Munguia & was kann Secfix? (00:04:57) Was sollte ich als Gründer über Zertifikate wissen? (00:09:37) Risiken für Startups beim Regelbruch (00:13:12) Der Nachweis von Mitarbeiter-Compliance (00:17:58) Wer braucht die ISO und SOC2 Zertifikate wirklich? (00:23:26) Hilft Secfix auch beim Sales Enablement? (00:28:54) Wie optimiert Secfix Prozesse? (00:33:33) Welche Zertifikate sind noch relevant? (00:41:20) Wie ist die Akzeptanz des neuen ISO 42001 und wann wird das gebraucht? (00:47:37) Immigrant Founder: Warum Deutschland und was sind die Herausforderungen? (00:54:18) Deutschland, deine Bürokratie: Ohne Visum keine Gründung, ohne Profitabilität aber kein Visum (00:58:34) Wie organisiert sich Secfix intern? (01:04:47) 100 % remote: Was sind die Herausforderungen?

This week, the TJL crew brings in community stalwart Bryan Guffey for birthday wishes and a discussion of the change of pace happening with Atlassian products such as Jira and Confluence.Thank you to Revyz for backing us up and making The Jira Life possible. https://www.revyz.io/The Jira Life=====================================Having trouble keeping up with when we are live? Sign up for our Atlassian Community Group!https://ace.atlassian.com/the-jira-life/Or Follow us on LinkedIn!  / the-jira-life  Become a member on YouTube to get access to perks:https://www.youtube.com/@thejiralife/...Hosts:Alex "Dr. Jira" OrtizRodney "The Jira Guy" NissenSarah Wright"King Bob" Robert WenLina Ortiz   / alexortiz89     / @apetechtechtutorials     / rgnissen  https://thejiraguy.com   / satwright   Producer:   / robert-wen-csm-spc6-a552051  Executive Producer: Music provided by Monstercat:=====================================Intro: Nitro Fun - Cheat Codes   / monstercat  Outro: Fractal - Atrium   / monstercatinstinct  

Blink, and you've already missed like 7 AI updates.The large language models we use and rely on? They change out more than your undies. (No judgement here.) But real talk — businesses have made LLMs a cornerstone of their business operations, yet don't follow the updates. Don't worry shorties. We've got ya. In our first ever LLM Monthly roundup, we're telling you what's new and noteworthy in your favorite LLMs. Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion: Have a question? Join the convo here.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:ChatGPT 4.1 New Features OverviewChatGPT Shopping Platform LaunchChatGPT's Microsoft SharePoint IntegrationChatGPT Memory and Conversation HistoryGoogle Gemini 2.5 Pro UpdatesGemini Canvas Powerful ApplicationsClaude Integrations with Google WorkspaceMicrosoft Copilot Deep Research InsightsTimestamps:00:00 Saudi Arabia's $600B AI Investment06:44 Monthly AI Model Update Show08:11 OpenAI Launches GPT-4.1 Publicly11:52 AI Research Tools Comparison16:29 Perplexity's Pushy Shopping Propensity19:55 ChatGPT Memory: Pros and Cons22:29 Gemini Canvas vs. OpenAI Canvas25:06 AI Model Competition Highlights28:25 Google Gemini Rivals OpenAI's Research32:30 "Claude's Features and Limitations"37:05 Anthropic's Educational AI Innovation39:02 Exploring Copilot Vision Expansion41:38 Meta AI Launch and Llama 4 Models46:27 "New iOS Voice Assistant Features"47:54 "Enhancing iOS Assistant Potential"Keywords:ChatGPT, AI updates, Large Language Model updates, OpenAI, GPT 4.1, GPT 4.0, GPT 4.5, GPT 4.1 Mini, Saudi Arabia AI investment, NVIDIA Blackwell AI chips, AMD deal, Humane startup, Data Vault, AI data centers, Logic errors moderation, Grox AI, Elon Musk, XAI, Google Gemini, ChatGPT shopping, Microsoft SharePoint integration, OneDrive integration, deep research, AI shopping platform, Google DeepMind, Alpha Evolve, evolutionary techniques, AI coding, Claude, Anthropic Claude, Confluence integration, Jira integration, Zapier integration, ChatGPT enterprise, API updates, Copilot pages, Microsoft three sixty five, Bing search, Meta AI, Llama 4, Llama 4 Maverick, Llama 4 Scout, Perplexity, voice assistant, Siri alternatives, Grok Studio, AI social network.Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Ready for ROI on GenAI? Go to youreverydayai.com/partner

Why $200M games flop — and how LiveAware's “always-on” player insight flips the odds.• Echo-chamber dev culture & launch disasters• Quant vs qual data gap killing velocity• LiveAware's one-click capture → AI analyze → auto-Jira flow• Surfacing bugs & sentiment from Discord, YouTube, surveys• Dashboards that feed artists, designers, engineers the clips they need• Case studies: Dead as Disco, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, Treehouse competitive intel• Indie-friendly pay-as-you-go pricing + roadmap to multi-channel feedback nirvanaOUTLINE:0:00 Underwhelming game launch failures4:00 Vision vs player expectation gap8:00 Quantitative vs qualitative data gap12:00 LiveAware capture analyze share workflow16:00 One-click streaming and transcription20:00 AI clusters themes and clips24:00 Tailored dashboards and auto Jira28:00 Multi-channel feedback aggregation explained32:00 Indie vs AAA use cases36:00 Dead as Disco success story40:00 S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 QA integration44:00 Signal vs noise management48:00 Feedback philosophy continuum debate52:00 Future roadmap and pricing plansSUBSCRIBE TO GAMEMAKERS:- Newsletter: https://gamemakers.substack.com/

Agile Is Broken, So What Should Startups and Tech Companies Do Instead?Look, no matter where you stand on Agile, Scrum, or Jira, no one can name-call their way around the fact that continuous delivery and continuous improvement have, more often than not, given way to over-management, over-documentation, and over-scrutinization of the software development process, turning development into a joyless slog where nothing new and innovative gets done, and certainly not quickly — even at, and especially at, tech startups.How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Wait.... how's this make sense?↪ Meta is going after ChatGPT's business. (AI app) ↪ ChatGPT is going after Amazon's business. (Shopping) ↪ Amazon is going after Google's business (Powerful LLM) ↪ And Google is going after..... OpenAI's business? (AI mode) The tech trillionaires are at it again, going blow for blow with drool-worthy AI updates. Don't spend hours on your own trying to catch up. Spend your Mondays with Everyday AI as we bring you the AI News That Matters. Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode PageJoin the discussion: Thoughts on this? Join the conversation.Upcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTopics Covered in This Episode:Amazon's Nova Premier AI Model LaunchMeta AI App Powered by Llama 4Google's AI Mode Available in USDuolingo Replaces Jobs with AI ToolsTrump AI Pope Image ControversyApple and Google's Gemini AI IntegrationAnthropic Claude's New App IntegrationsNotebookLM Enhanced with Gemini 2.5 FlashOpenAI's ChatGPT Shopping Feature IntroductionTimestamps:00:00 Amazon AWS Unveils Nova Premier AI05:11 Meta Unveils AI Competitor to ChatGPT09:14 Duolingo Replaces Contractors with AI12:52 AI's Growing Impact on Hiring14:32 AI Image Mocking Catholics Sparks Outrage20:49 "Zapier Enhances Claude's Research Utility"25:09 Gemini 2.5 Update Enhancements26:19 "Gemini 2.5 Flash Enhancements"29:55 "ChatGPT Enhances Product Research"34:06 OpenAI Ventures into Affiliate Marketing37:29 Weekly AI News HighlightsKeywords:Meta AI app, Llama four, generative AI, Amazon, AWS, Nova Premier, AI model, enterprise applications, text and image inputs, long form video, 1,000,000 token context window, model distillation, AWS bedrock, Google, chatGPT, OpenAI, Meta, social media integration, Ray-Ban smart glasses, user preferences, conversational AI, Google Shopping, AI mode, search labs, AI-enhanced local business features, Duolingo, AI first business model, contract worker replacement, Donald Trump AI image, AI-generated content, political controversies, Apple, Google, Gemini AI model, Siri enhancements, Claude, AI integrations, Jira, Confluence, Zapier, Anthropic, advanced research mode, NotebookLM, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Google AI, shopping buttons, OpenAI shopping feature, affiliate fees, conversational product recommendations, Nespresso, Amazon AI, Rufus AI, personalized shopping experience, 2025 technology trends.Send Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Ready for ROI on GenAI? Go to youreverydayai.com/partner

Scrum Masters Are Useless — Product Managers Should Run Their Own ScrumWe've all been there. It's 10:00 AM. You're in a standup, sipping your third coffee, while the Scrum Master dutifully asks each developer, “What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? Any blockers?”Someone mumbles something about JIRA tickets. Another person reports, “Same as yesterday.”Meanwhile, the Product Manager (PM) is frantically jotting notes, trying to connect the dots between what was promised and what's actually happening.And the Scrum Master? They nod, write things down, and move on.Here's the controversial take: Do we really need a dedicated Scrum Master for this? Or should Product Managers just run their own scrums?How to connect with AgileDad:- [website] https://www.agiledad.com/- [instagram] https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/- [facebook] https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/- [Linkedin] https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

Topics covered in this episode: Huly CVE Foundation formed to take over CVE program from MITRE drawdb 14 Advanced Python Features Extras Joke Watch on YouTube About the show Sponsored by Posit Workbench: pythonbytes.fm/workbench Connect with the hosts Michael: @mkennedy@fosstodon.org / @mkennedy.codes (bsky) Brian: @brianokken@fosstodon.org / @brianokken.bsky.social Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky) Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too. Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it. Michael #1: Huly All-in-One Project Management Platform (alternative to Linear, Jira, Slack, Notion, Motion) If you're primarily interested in self-hosting Huly without the intention to modify or contribute to its development, please use huly-selfhost. Manage your tasks efficiently with Huly's bidirectional GitHub synchronization. Use Huly as an advanced front-end for GitHub Issues and GitHub Projects. Connect every element of your workflow to build a dynamic knowledge base. Everything you need for productive team work: Team Planner • Project Management • Virtual Office • Chat • Documents • Inbox Self hosting as a service: elest.io Brian #2: CVE Foundation formed to take over CVE program from MITRE Back story: CVE, global source of cybersecurity info, was hours from being cut by DHS The 25-year-old CVE program, an essential part of global cybersecurity, is cited in nearly any discussion or response to a computer security issue. CVE was at real risk of closure after its contract was set to expire on April 16. The nonprofit MITRE runs CVE on a contract with the DHS. A letter last Tuesday sent Tuesday by Yosry Barsoum, vice president of MITRE, gave notice of the potential halt to operations. Another possible victim of the current administration. CVE Foundation Launched to Secure the Future of the CVE Program CVE Board members have spent the past year developing a strategy to transition CVE to a dedicated, non-profit foundation. The new CVE Foundation will focus solely on continuing the mission of delivering high-quality vulnerability identification and maintaining the integrity and availability of CVE data for defenders worldwide. Over the coming days, the Foundation will release more information about its structure, transition planning, and opportunities for involvement from the broader community. Michael #3: drawdb Free and open source, simple, and intuitive database design editor, data-modeler, and SQL generator. Great drag-drop relationship manager Define your DB visually, export as SQL create scripts Or import existing SQL to kickstart the diagramming. Brian #4: 14 Advanced Python Features Edward Li Picking some favorites 1. Typing Overloads 2. Keyword-only and Positional-only Arguments 9. Python Nitpicks For-else statements Walrus operator Short Circuit Evaluation Operator Chaining Extras Michael: Thunderbird send / other firefox things. Joke: Python Tariffs Thanks wagenrace Thanks Campfire Tales

What happens when tools like Jira, Confluence, Loom, and AI-powered agents come together under one unified strategy? At Team 25 in Anaheim, I sat down with Sanchan Saxena, Atlassian's Head of Product for Work Management, to explore the company's new Teamwork Collection and what it means for the evolving nature of collaboration. With leadership experience at Coinbase, Airbnb, Instagram, and Microsoft, Sanchan brings a pragmatic lens to building products that meet teams where they are. In our conversation, we unpack the thinking behind the Teamwork Collection, a curated set of Atlassian tools designed to help teams work more seamlessly while delivering real, measurable outcomes. This isn't about adding more tools to the stack. It's about reducing the noise and giving teams a single, integrated space to plan, document, and communicate with clarity. We also explore how AI is being used to reduce manual overhead, surface relevant information faster, and make daily tasks feel less like busywork. Sanchan shares practical examples of how companies are already using these tools to boost productivity, make meetings more actionable, and give teams back valuable time. For leaders focused on change management or wrestling with tool adoption, there are actionable insights here on overcoming cultural friction and designing for long-term success. Recorded live at Team 25, this conversation reflects a broader shift in how work is organized and supported. Whether you're in IT, product, operations, or leadership, this episode offers a look at how Atlassian is building for the future of work—one where humans and AI collaborate without the chaos. How are you designing your workflows to stay ahead of that curve? Let's continue the conversation.

What happens when one of the world's most loved productivity tools decides to reinvent itself for the age of AI? At Team 25 in Anaheim, I sat down with Gaurav Kataria, Head of Product for Trello at Atlassian, to unpack the biggest release in Trello's history and what it means for individuals and teams navigating the chaos of modern work. Gaurav describes the new Trello as “an AI-powered to-do list,” built not to replace project management tools like Jira but to complement them—especially for those personal tasks, scattered action items, and mental notes that get lost in a sea of email, Slack messages, and SaaS app notifications. With half a million users opting into the beta within 48 hours of launch, it's clear that the new direction is resonating. In our conversation, we explore how Atlassian is using AI to enhance, not overwhelm, individual productivity—by capturing inputs from everywhere, organizing them intelligently, and helping users block time visually with integrations into Google and Microsoft calendars. This isn't about automating your life; it's about giving you clarity and control without friction. We also talk about how Trello remains deeply personal. From list colors to card covers and mobile widgets, the design philosophy centers on reducing cognitive load and sparking focus. Trello isn't trying to be a super app. It's trying to be the app that respects your mental model, works the way your brain works, and empowers you to get meaningful work done on your own terms. If you're overwhelmed by task sprawl or skeptical of AI's growing role in daily workflows, this episode offers a grounded look at what thoughtful, user-centered innovation looks like in action. How do you strike the balance between simplicity, automation, and human creativity? Let's explore that together.

Today I am going to try to answer a fundamental question: how should you actually measure user experience, especially with data products—and tie this to business value? It's easy to get lost in analytics and think we're seeing the whole picture, but I argue that this is far from the truth. Product leaders need to understand the subjective experience of our users—and unfortunately, analytics does not tell us this. The map is not the territory.   In this episode, I discuss why qualitative data and subjective experience is the data that will most help you make product decisions that will lead you to increased business value. If users aren't getting value from your product(s), and their lives aren't improving, business value will be extremely difficult to create. So today, I share my thoughts on how to move beyond thinking that analytics is the only way to track UX, and how this helps product leaders uncover opportunities to produce better organizational value.  Ultimately, it's about creating indispensable solutions and building trust, which is key for any product team looking to make a real impact. Hat tip to UX guru Jared Spool who inspired several of the concepts I share with you today.   Highlights/ Skip to  Don't target adoption for adoption's sake, because product usage can be a tax or benefit (3:00) Why your analytical mind may bias you—and what changes you might have to do this type of product and user research work (7:31) How "making the user's life better" translates to organizational value (10:17) Using Jared Spool's roller coaster chart to measure your product's user experience and find your opportunities and successes (13:05) How do you measure that you have done a good job with your UX? (17:28)  Conclusions and final thoughts (21:06)   Quotes from Today's Episode Usage doesn't automatically equal value. Analytics on your analytics is not telling you useful things about user experience or satisfaction. Why? "The map is not the territory." Analytics measure computer metrics, not feelings, and let's face it, users aren't always rational. To truly gauge user value, we need qualitative research - to talk to users - and to hear what their subjective experience is. Want *meaningful* adoption? Talk to and observe your users. That's how you know you are actually making things better. When it's better for them, the business value will follow. (3:12) Make better things—where better is a measurement based on the subjective experience of the user—not analytics. Usable doesn't mean they will necessarily want it. Sessions and page views don't tell you how people *feel* about it. (7:39) Think about the dreadful tools you and so many have been forced to use: the things that waste your time and don't let you focus on what's really important. Ever talked to a data scientist who is sick of doing data prep instead of building models, and wondering, “why am I here? This isn't what I went to school for.” Ignoring these personal frustrations and feelings and focusing only on your customers' feature requests, JIRA tickets, stakeholder orders, requirements docs, and backlog items is why many teams end up building technically right, effectively wrong solutions. These end user frustrations are where we find our opportunities to delight—and create products and UXs that matter. To improve their lives, we need to dig into their workflows, identify frustrations, and understand the context around our data product solutions. Product leaders need to fall in love with the problems and the frustrations—these are the magic keys to the value kingdom. However, to do this well, you probably need to be doing less delivery and more discovery. (10:27) Imagine a line chart with a Y-axis that is "frustration" at the bottom to "delight" at the top. The X-axis is their user experience, taking place over time. As somebody uses your data product to do their job/task, you can plot their emotional journey. “Get the data, format the data, include the data in a tool, derive some conclusion, challenge the data, share it, make a decision” etc. As a product manager, you probably know what a use-case looks like. Your first job is to plot their existing experience trying/doing that use case with your data product. Where are they frustrated? Where are they delighted? Celebrate your peaks/delighters, and fall in love with the valleys where satisfaction work needs to be done. Connect the dots between these valleys and business value. Address the valleys—especially the ones that impede business value—and you'll be on your way to “showing the value of your data product.” Analytics on your data product won't tell you this information; the map is not the territory. (13:22) Analytics about your data product are lying to you. They give you the facts about the product, but not about the user. An example? “Time spent” doing a task. How long is too long? 5 minutes? 50? Analytics will tell you precisely how long it took. The problem is, it won't tell you how long it FELT it took. And guess what? Your customers and users only care about how long it felt it took—vs. their expectation. Sure, at some point, analytics might eventually help—at scale—understand how your data product is doing—but first you have to understand how people FEEL about it. Only then will you know whether 5 minutes, or 50 minutes is telling you anything meaningful about what—if anything—needs to change. (16:17)

Welcome to Databank Brawl Rewind! Databank Brawl was a series that ran on ForceCenter from 2016 to 2020, and it remains one of our more beloved shows. Though Databank Brawl is on hiatus, we wanted to celebrate it along with longtime listeners of the podcast and reintroduce it to the ForceCenter listeners who began listening to the podcast after the end of the show's run. Though all of the episodes remain on our podcast feed, it can be daunting to scroll back and find them, so we're launching Databank Rewind. Here's your chance to go back to those episodes week by week and laugh with us at old jokes, memorable moments, unforgettable guests, and, yeah, old microphones, recordings, and perhaps some Star Wars predictions that came true alongside many that most certainly did not. Databank Brawl -- where Star Wars characters are plucked from the entries of the StarWars.com databank and forced to fight it out in an off-the-cuff podcast moderated by Joseph Scrimshaw. It's time to fight...From the minds of Ken Napzok (comedian, host of The Napzok Files), Joseph Scrimshaw (comedian, writer, director of Dead Media), and Jennifer Landa (actress, YouTuber, crafter, contributor on StarWars.com) comes the ForceCenter Podcast Feed. Here you will find a series of shows exploring, discussing, and celebrating everything about Star Wars. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. Listen on TuneIn, Amazon Music, Spotify, and more!Follow ForceCenter!Watch on YouTube!Support us on PatreonForceCenter merch!All from ForceCenter: https://linktr.ee/ForceCenter Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A challenge I frequently hear about from subscribers to my insights mailing list is how to design B2B data products for multiple user types with differing needs. From dashboards to custom apps and commercial analytics / AI products, data product teams often struggle to create a single solution that meets the diverse needs of technical and business users in B2B settings. If you're encountering this issue, you're not alone!     In this episode, I share my advice for tackling this challenge including the gift of saying "no.” What are the patterns you should be looking out for in your customer research? How can you choose what to focus on with limited resources? What are the design choices you should avoid when trying to build these products? I'm hoping by the end of this episode, you'll have some strategies to help reduce the size of this challenge—particularly if you lack a dedicated UX team to help you sort through your various user/stakeholder demands.      Highlights/ Skip to  The importance of proper user research and clustering “jobs to be done” around business importance vs. task frequency—ignoring the rest until your solution can show measurable value  (4:29) What “level” of skill to design for, and why “as simple as possible” isn't what I generally recommend (13:44) When it may be advantageous to use role or feature-based permissions to hide/show/change certain aspects, UI elements, or features  (19:50) Leveraging AI and LLMs in-product to allow learning about the user and progressive disclosure and customization of UIs (26:44) Leveraging the “old” solution of rapid prototyping—which is now faster than ever with AI, and can accelerate learning (capturing user feedback) (31:14) 5 things I do not recommend doing when trying to satisfy multiple user types in your b2b AI or analytics product (34:14)   Quotes from Today's Episode If you're not talking to your users and stakeholders sufficiently, you're going to have a really tough time building a successful data product for one user – let alone for multiple personas. Listen for repeating patterns in what your users are trying to achieve (tasks they are doing). Focus on the jobs and tasks they do most frequently or the ones that bring the most value to their business. Forget about the rest until you've proven that your solution delivers real value for those core needs. It's more about understanding the problems and needs, not just the solutions. The solutions tend to be easier to design when the problem space is well understood. Users often suggest solutions, but it's our job to focus on the core problem we're trying to solve; simply entering in any inbound requests verbatim into JIRA and then “eating away” at the list is not usually a reliable strategy. (5:52) I generally recommend not going for “easy as possible” at the cost of shallow value. Instead, you're going to want to design for some “mid-level” ability, understanding that this may make early user experiences with the product more difficult. Why? Oversimplification can mislead because data is complex, problems are multivariate, and data isn't always ideal. There are also “n” number of “not-first” impressions users will have with your product. This also means there is only one “first impression” they have. As such, the idea conceptually is to design an amazing experience for the “n” experiences, but not to the point that users never realize value and give up on the product.  While I'd prefer no friction, technical products sometimes will have to have a little friction up front however, don't use this as an excuse for poor design. This is hard to get right, even when you have design resources, and it's why UX design matters as thinking this through ends up determining, in part, whether users obtain the promise of value you made to them. (14:21) As an alternative to rigid role and feature-based permissions in B2B data products, you might consider leveraging AI and / or LLMs in your UI as a means of simplifying and customizing the UI to particular users. This approach allows users to potentially interrogate the product about the UI, customize the UI, and even learn over time about the user's questions (jobs to be done) such that becomes organically customized over time to their needs. This is in contrast to the rigid buckets that role and permission-based customization present. However, as discussed in my previous episode (164 - “The Hidden UX Taxes that AI and LLM Features Impose on B2B Customers Without Your Knowledge”)  designing effective AI features and capabilities can also make things worse due to the probabilistic nature of the responses GenAI produces. As such, this approach may benefit from a UX designer or researcher familiar with designing data products. Understanding what “quality” means to the user, and how to measure it, is especially critical if you're going to leverage AI and LLMs to make the product UX better. (20:13) The old solution of rapid prototyping is even more valuable now—because it's possible to prototype even faster. However, prototyping is not just about learning if your solution is on track. Whether you use AI or pencil and paper, prototyping early in the product development process should be framed as a “prop to get users talking.” In other words, it is a prop to facilitate problem and need clarity—not solution clarity. Its purpose is to spark conversation and determine if you're solving the right problem. As you iterate, your need to continually validate the problem should shrink, which will present itself in the form of consistent feedback you hear from end users. This is the point where you know you can focus on the design of the solution. Innovation happens when we learn; so the goal is to increase your learning velocity. (31:35) Have you ever been caught in the trap of prioritizing feature requests based on volume? I get it. It's tempting to give the people what they think they want. For example, imagine ten users clamoring for control over specific parameters in your machine learning forecasting model. You could give them that control, thinking you're solving the problem because, hey, that's what they asked for! But did you stop to ask why they want that control? The reasons behind those requests could be wildly different. By simply handing over the keys to all the model parameters, you might be creating a whole new set of problems. Users now face a "usability tax," trying to figure out which parameters to lock and which to let float. The key takeaway? Focus on addressing the frequency that the same problems are occurring across your users, not just the frequency a given tactic or “solution” method (i.e. “model” or “dashboard” or “feature”) appears in a stakeholder or user request. Remember, problems are often disguised as solutions. We've got to dig deeper and uncover the real needs, not just address the symptoms. (36:19)

Ivan Zhao is the co-founder and CEO of Notion. Ivan shares the untold story of Notion, from nearly running out of database space during Covid to finding product-market fit after several “lost years,” and the hard-won lessons along the way.—What you'll learn:1. Why you sometimes need to “hide your vision” behind something people actually want—what Ivan calls “sugar-coating the broccoli”2. How Ivan and his co-founder persevered through multiple product resets and complete code rewrites3. Why Notion prioritized systems over headcount, keeping the team small and focused even at scale4. Why Ivan believes in craft and values as the foundation for product development, balancing technical excellence with aesthetic sensibility5. The surprising story of how Notion nearly collapsed during Covid when their single database almost ran out of space with only weeks to spare6. Community-led growth tactics7. Ivan's unique journey from a small town in China8. Much more—Brought to you by:• Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments• Airtable ProductCentral—Launch to new heights with a unified system for product development• Sinch—Build messaging, email, and calling into your product—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/inside-notion-ivan-zhao—Where to find Ivan Zhao:• X: https://x.com/ivanhzhao• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanhzhao/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Ivan Zhao(04:41) Ivan's early life and education(07:46) Discovering the vision for Notion(10:49) The lost years of Notion(13:56) Rebuilding and perseverance(17:14) Layoffs and company morale(18:53) Advice for startup founders(25:08) Product-market fit(29:56) Staying lean and efficient(34:27) Creating a unique office culture(37:20) Craft and values: the foundation of Notion's philosophy(38:44) Navigating tradeoffs in product and business building(41:24) Leadership and personal growth(49:11) Challenges and crises: lessons from Notion's journey(51:08) Building horizontal software: joys and pains(01:02:40) Philosophy of tools and human potential(01:06:17) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Ürümqi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cr%C3%BCmqi• Notion: https://www.notion.com/• SpongeBob SquarePants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpongeBob_SquarePants• Augmenting Human Intellect: https://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Engelbart/Engelbart_AugmentIntellect.html• Alan Kay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay• Ted Nelson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson• Steve Jobs on Why Computers Are Like a Bicycle for the Mind (1990): https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/12/21/steve-jobs-bicycle-for-the-mind-1990/• Xerox Alto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto• React: https://react.dev/• Simon Last on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-last-41404140/• Magna-Tiles: https://www.magnatiles.com/• Design on a deadline: How Notion pulled itself back from the brink of failure: https://www.figma.com/blog/design-on-a-deadline-how-notion-pulled-itself-back-from-the-brink-of-failure/• Bryan Johnson on X: https://x.com/bryan_johnson• Tobi Lütke's leadership playbook: Playing infinite games, operating from first principles, and maximizing human potential (founder and CEO of Shopify): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/tobi-lutkes-leadership-playbook• Smalltalk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smalltalk#:• Lisp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)• DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/• Shana Fisher: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/shana-fisher• LAMY 2000 fountain pens: https://www.jetpens.com/LAMY-2000-Fountain-Pens/• Macintosh 128K: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K• Toshiba rice cooker: https://www.toshiba-lifestyle.com/us/cooking-appliances/rice-cooker• Transistor radio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_radio• Jira: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira• Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com/• Zendesk: https://www.zendesk.com/• Misattributed McLuhan quote: https://mcluhangalaxy.wordpress.com/2013/04/01/we-shape-our-tools-and-thereafter-our-tools-shape-us/• Phin Barnes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/phineasbarnes/• Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/• Pablo Picasso quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/629531-good-artists-copy-great-artists-steal#:~• Connections with James Burke on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/amzn1.dv.gti.484e32c5-60bd-4493-a800-e44fd0940312• The Enneagram Institute: https://www.enneagraminstitute.com/—Recommended book:• The Romance of the Three Kingdoms: https://www.amazon.com/Romance-Three-Kingdoms-Luo-Guanzhong/dp/024133277X—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Keith Coleman, the VP of product at Twitter/X, and Jay Baxter, the founding ML engineer, are the minds behind Community Notes. Here they reveal how a small, scrappy team built the most trusted crowdsourced information system on the internet—one that's changing the way we understand truth online. What you'll learn:1. How Community Notes actually works—a deep dive into the groundbreaking algorithm that rewards “bridging agreement” instead of majority rule2. The seemingly crazy yet brilliant way this idea survived multiple CEO changes—from Jack to Parag to Elon3. How this project started with a dumpster fire GIF (literally)—the untold backstory of its early launch4. The secret to running ultra-fast, high-impact product teams—no OKRs, no Jira; just one Google Doc5. What Meta's adoption of Community Notes means for the future of online (mis)information—why this open source system is becoming the industry standard—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Productboard—Make products that matter• Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies—Find the transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-x-built-the-best-fact-checking-system-on-the-internet—Where to find Keith Coleman:• X: https://x.com/kcoleman• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-coleman-19b12b46/—Where to find Jay Baxter:• X: https://x.com/_jaybaxter_• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaybaxter/• Website: http://jaybaxter.net/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Community Notes(06:56) How the “bridging-based” algorithm works(13:33) The impact and scale of Community Notes(17:24) Understanding the note publishing threshold(21:32) Challenges and philosophies(26:26) The effect of notes on re-sharing content(29:41) Origin story(35:46) Embracing small teams for big impact(40:23) The thermal project approach(47:47) Algorithm development and internal competitions(50:34) An inside look at how the team operates(58:56) Working with Elon(01:05:30) Launching Birdwatch(01:10:48) The core principles behind Community Notes(01:26:15) Anonymity and pseudonymity in contributions(01:32:17) Sustaining the project through leadership changes(01:37:57) Future directions for Community Notes(01:42:12) Final thoughts and optimism for the future—Referenced:• Community Notes on X: https://x.com/CommunityNotes• Sign up to be a Community Notes contributor: https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/contributing/signing-up• The Making of Community Notes: https://asteriskmag.com/issues/08/the-making-of-community-notes• “Readers added a Community Note to this Tweet”: https://x.com/HelpfulNotes/status/1718103364792205704• Note-ranking algorithm: https://communitynotes.x.com/guide/en/under-the-hood/ranking-notes#matrix-factorization• Study: Community Notes on X could be key to curbing misinformation: https://giesbusiness.illinois.edu/news/2024/11/18/study--community-notes-on-x-could-be-key-to-curbing-misinformation• Study Finds X's (Formerly Twitter's) Community Notes Provide Accurate, Credible Answers to Vaccine Misinformation: https://qi.ucsd.edu/study-finds-xs-formerly-twitters-community-notes-provide-accurate-credible-answers-to-vaccine-misinformation/• Did the Roll-Out of Community Notes Reduce Engagement with Misinformation on X/Twitter?: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686967• Kayvon Beykpour on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kayvz/• Jack Dorsey on X: https://x.com/jack• “Birdwatch gives me the creeps” tweet: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1589454464611540992• Blake Scholl on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/blakescholl/• Creating Truthtelling Incentives with the Bayesian Truth Serum: https://www.eecs.harvard.edu/cs286r/courses/fall12/papers/DW08.pdf• Asana: https://asana.com/• Spaces: https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/product/2021/spaces-is-here• Amazon MTurk: https://www.mturk.com/• Community notes on GitHub: https://github.com/twitter/communitynotes• What do I think about Community Notes?: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2023/08/16/communitynotes.html• X's community-led approach: tackling inaccurate and misleading information: https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2023/xs-community-led-approach-tackling-inaccurate-and-misleading-information• Linda Yaccarino on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindayaccarino/• Messi-Ronaldo rivalry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messi%E2%80%93Ronaldo_rivalry• Supernotes paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.06116v1—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe