Transcript: Team Titans Season 2, Episode 2 - Nick Muldoon

Jennifer Eolin: That's the height of FOMO, fear of missing out. It just slid right in there and it just was perfect. How did all of this land you where you are now, with Easy Agile, and what have you brought, the good and the bad, from both to where you are?

Nick Muldoon: My direct manager at Twitter, Steve Greene, he... Again, I have to say, I've had some fantastic leaders over the years that have really invested in me as a person, which I've been super fortunate to have, and Steve provided the opportunity for Liz and I to go with our, at this stage, nine-month-old baby daughter to go and live and work in Zurich in Switzerland for a month, and go to a conference and meet people there and basically just do a bit of a sabbatical for a month.

And living in San Francisco, before our kids, was a phenomenal experience. As soon as my daughter came along, so she's now six, but as soon as she came along you're immediately going, "You know what? The grungy feel, I really don't want you on the sidewalk." And that grungy feel kind of... Do we move out of San Francisco to Marin or somewhere else around the Bay Area where it's probably more family-friendly?

Anyway, we took this trip to Zurich for a month and one of the things that struck us, in the middle of winter it's snowing and parents leave their kids in the pram outside the supermarket in the snow while they go inside and do a 15-20 minute shop. Our experience in San Francisco was, if you left the pram outside the Walgreen's, the kid would be on the ground and someone would have stolen the pram or-

Jennifer Eolin: And the kid.

Nick Muldoon: Right?

Jennifer Eolin: Right? Yeah. 

Nick Muldoon: Knowing how much my kid screamed at the time, that was not going to happen, right? But it was a real awakening and I think it kind of said to us that living in San Francisco... And the commute! I used to walk to the Twitter office and I walked to the Atlassian office and we lived in the Mission. It was such a vibrant part of town, and it was fantastic before we had kids, but then having kids it was like, "You know what? We need to get closer to family, so let's go back to Australia."

Coming back to Australia though, to be closer to family, we didn't want to go back to the capital city. San Francisco has got a slower pace of life than Sydney and we didn't want to go back there so we chose this regional area in Wollongong, which is 90 minutes south of Sydney. You got the beach, you got the hills, you go bushwalking, you got the farmer's market on a Friday. It's a 300,000 person regional community but being here, there's no Atlassian, there's no Twitter.

There are no big software companies and so really the onus was on myself and what became my business partner, Dave Elkan, my co-CEO at Easy Agile, who'd also been on a journey from Atlassian to San Francisco and back to Australia. It was like, "What can we make here in this regional area and how can we provide employment for people that don't want to go and live in a capital city?"

Now, of course, the world turned on its head this year, and Atlassian for the first time ever is kind of embracing remote work, because that was never something that Mike and Scott were eager to do. They were always hesitant to go down that path. However, what we've established here in Wollongong is we've established a team at Easy Agile of 16 soon-to-be 17, then onwards, so it's a fairly small software company that delivers globally. Our customers are out of timezone where I will service 2500 customers around the world, and we can do it from a regional area in Wollongong and do it profitably, and so that's really interesting. 

One of the other books that I think is totally worth a read is Small Giants by Bo Burlingham, and this has been a really influential book for Dave and I and the team at Easy Agile this year so go back to your question, Jennifer, what decisions have we made? We've chosen not to be VC funded or private equity funded and we made that decision because it kind of distorts the incentives. Our incentives are to build great software for our customers.

Our incentives are not to make money at the expense of our customers, and so that means that you make choices like we are grounded in a regional community, we are trying to provide employment to the local community and support... The beer that we buy is from the local craft brewer. Just little things like that, that we're trying to do to support the local community, I think they are really important and I'm much more aware of those things and attuned to those things, having worked at companies that have IPO'd and that have scaled very quickly and perhaps not as effectively as I would like to do for my own company.

Jennifer Eolin: So you're not going to hire 1,000 people in the next three months. That's not a thing.

Nick Muldoon: It's not on the agenda but absolutely not. Gosh, but even other decisions that we make, so we don't really believe in contractors. We don't really believe in remote work. We are a co-located team and we're a co-located team because I like to bother people. I like to go out and have lunch with them. We've got a colleague, Anna, and she talks about the whites of the eyes and I'm like, "That's what I like." 

I like to be able to sit down and have coffee or have lunch with the team members and talk about their mortgage and their kids and whatever else, and that's the sort of business that we've chosen to operate. At Atlassian, we had my direct manager, Josh Wahl. He was in Amsterdam and my peer, Giancarlo, was in San Francisco, and so I'd be up at 6:00 AM to do calls with Giancarlo and I'd finish my day at 10:00 PM at night with calls with Josh.

I'd go and play basketball in the middle of the day and go for a walk and have a snooze and all that sort of stuff, but again, it was a time of life thing. It's probably not something I'd be prepared to do today. Having everything co-located in one timezone is really important, I think.

Ryan Spilken: So you wanted to provide local employment, you wanted to have a really community-focused company, but what were you looking to deliver to customers? Where did that come from?

Nick Muldoon: Ah, that's great. In 2009 at this first Agile conference that I went to, I saw a talk by Jeff Patton, and he was talking about the practice of story mapping. And it was probably eight months later that I first had the opportunity to put that into practice with the GreenHopper team at Atlassian, and we did a story-mapping session for basically a complete re-write of GreenHopper, which is what we ended up doing and it became Jira Agile, and so that was my first exposure to story-mapping.

I ran these for other teams at Atlassian and at Twitter, I ran these for a lot of teams to try and bring that shared understanding about who the customer is, what are you hoping to achieve, and so starting Easy Agile, it really became a matter of, "Well, what are the gaps that I faced at Twitter as an Atlassian customer?" And especially at Twitter because we did have teams that were distributed. We did have remote people, unlike at Atlassian.

And so how did we pull them all together? You couldn't just do it on a wallboard. I mean, you could, but then you're doing it out of video conferencing and it's ridiculous, right? And so how can we provide a digital story mapping experience for distributed teams and teams that have remote team members? And so that was really the first step and we've always been very customer-led, and then it was later in 2016 that we were having conversations with some of our larger story mapping customers.

I remember one customer in particular, and they just expressed it really clearly and succinctly, and they said, "It's really hard to make a roadmap using a story map." And it was like this light bulb moment where like, "Well, hang on. Story mapping and road-mapping, they're different techniques and they serve different audiences." Story mapping's for internal, for the team to understand and get a shared understanding. Road-mapping is that external, stakeholder communication piece and you're trying to shoehorn one thing into another.

We ended up releasing Easy Agile Roadmaps to complement Easy Agile User Story Maps, so that's a product that is still around today that is still a very popular product. Actually, we found out yesterday that the most evaluations were on Easy Agile Roadmaps in August, and I say that despite the fact that there's a lot of competition in that space from the likes of Aha! and ProductPlan and productboard, Advanced Roadmaps, Simple Roadmaps, Jira Portfolio and a host of others.

It's a really busy space but obviously, it's something that's... If you look at the State of Agile survey that VersionOne publishes, it's a pretty common Agile practice, although typically people go so far out in the future that you kind of wonder whether they're getting towards that waterfall mentality rather than something that is more Agile.

And then I guess in 2018 our journey continued because we were having conversations with large customers of Easy Agile Roadmaps and they're saying, "Well, we're trying to scale Agile transformations and how do we do our PI planning? You allow us to take story mapping off the wall and put what is typically a physical activity for teams, you've allowed us to pull that off the wall. PI planning is another physical activity. Can't you help us pull that one off the wall?"

And because typically what happens with PI planning is the team or the group, a number of teams, they go away for a period of time, two days, and they come up with this huge wall full of post-it notes and string and whatever else, and someone's job is to take that and put it into Jira and then that artifact, that big physical artifact, maybe they take a few photos of it and it gets thrown in the bin, and there's no other document and there's no visualization that takes you back to that, and so that's where Easy Agile programs came along.

And so there's been this constant evolution for what our customers are trying to achieve and how can we provide a solution to assist them? And it's been a really interesting journey and we certainly haven't got it right all the time, but I hope the trait that we've got is that, like Atlassian, we take this continuous learning, continuous improvement mentality and we apply it to our company and our solutions to make sure they're becoming ever more effective.

Jennifer Eolin: I would love to hear how you think your experiences might have been different had your product that you create now existed when you started in the space.

Nick Muldoon: Oh, my gosh! Okay, well, from a road mapping perspective in my time at Atlassian, every product manager had a different format for roadmaps and there were only eight or 10 product managers at Atlassian before I went to San Francisco so even then it wasn't a huge cohort of people, but the way that we communicated with Mike and Scott differed for every product and every product manager. I mean, can you imagine the cognitive load to try and normalize that in your brain?

Jennifer Eolin: Yet people still do. That still happens.

Nick Muldoon: Ah, and completely unnecessary, right, Jennifer?

Jennifer Eolin: Yeah.

Nick Muldoon: And then think about Twitter and running all the story mapping sessions, we would literally have the video conferencing camera pointing at the whiteboard and we'd have someone in the room that was the scribe for the remote team members. I'm like, "This is insane" and this is why our travel budget was so high, because it's easier to just fly people around the world, and PI planning is the same. We've got one customer in New York and they gave us the figures outright.

A quarter of a million dollars every quarter for one of their groups to come together because they're bringing people from around the world. Now, that's the direct cost in flights and accommodation to get the people to New York once every quarter, a quarter of a million dollars. So that's a million dollars a year for one group. That doesn't even take into account the time that these people are away from their families, right? In my situation, if I was a product manager for that team and I had to go and travel and I'm away from my young kids for a week, what's that?

Ryan Spilken: Four times a year.

Nick Muldoon: Yeah, four times a year, and then you're jet-lagged when you get home, and oh, my gosh! So it's really fascinating that there's this direct cost that everyone's been forced to save this year, which is great. Their travel budgets and accommodation budgets have been absolutely cut this year. They just obviously can't travel due to COVID, but it also means that they're trying to find ways to... I mean, our biggest month ever in terms of evaluations for Easy Agile programs was in March and, evals have been on a tear.

And it's because companies that have been doing the status quo and doing the way that they've been doing it for so long have now been forced to find new methods of work. And it's kind of exciting and it's scary because what are all the middle managers that are just toiling away, making sure everyone's getting their work done, what are they doing now that everyone's remote? Do they really have a role and how does their role evolve? It raises so many questions.

Ryan Spilken: Well, hopefully, they're providing some value.

Nick Muldoon: Hopefully they're leaders and they're supporting their people, the mental health of their people. They can go back to the modern Agile movement and the psychological safety if that's what they try to practice, servant leadership, then I think they're certainly providing value.

Jennifer Eolin: I really like that. What you just explained is such an amazing balance of work-life balance but bringing quality to both sides, and I think that's an amazing vision to have and to work toward and be passionate about. Yeah, I just thought that was awesome.

Nick Muldoon: My co-founder, Dave, we talked about work-life balance in 2016 and he immediately pulled the plug on it. He's like, "We're not talking about work-life balance. It's not work-life balance. It's work is part of your life. It's family-work balance." And for Easy Agile today, it's kind of evolved into self-family-community-work balance in that order, and the community piece is really important and it's evolved really to add self in 2020 because maintaining the mental health of the team has become such an important thing.

Whether you're cooped up at home with the kids or whether you're solo and you have no interaction, this is now a big thing to manage and when we were all coming together, you had that community feel at work. You got it for free, basically and now we've got to work a lot more at those things. So yeah, the self, the family, the community, and then the work.

Ryan Spilken: I really appreciate the humanistic approach that you're taking to this whole thing. The philosophical implications behind it really do speak highly of your character, so that's cool. That's not something we see every day. What are the fundamental pieces of Agile philosophy that are giving rise to Agile techniques and principles being used outside of development? Why is that happening?

Nick Muldoon: Yeah, no, it does. I guess it's interesting to me. In my years from a product manager for Jira Agile to working with teams at Twitter, to working with our customers now at Easy Agile, there are people that try to do an Agile transformation by the book and so they don't have any experience with this and the easiest place for them to start is to go, "Okay, well, that's what the Scrum guy says," or "That's what Lean Kanban University says."

And I think the lesson that I've taken from over 10 years of experience with respect to Agile practices and lean principles is, start with where the team is and just continuously reflect, and if you build that continuous reflection and take one thing to improve, that is Agile, right? I mean, at its core, it's the adaptability and the openness to change, and the best way to do that is to frame things as an experiment, because it can be really scary to come to someone and say, "Hey, Ryan, I want to change your title from Business Analyst to Product Owner, and Jennifer, I want to change your title from Program Manager to Release Train Engineer."

Both of you have maybe 10 years or more tied up and that's your persona. You tell people "I'm the project manager." You tell people you're a business analyst and suddenly you're questioning your sense of self. Why would I do a big bang transformation and change all these things at once? Wouldn't it be better to change little bits and pieces on an ongoing basis, on an Agile basis, on an iterative basis, and get to a better place as we learn and adapt?

And so if we frame it as experiments, I think it's a really powerful thing, and so if you look at it from that perspective, there's nothing there that is specific to software development, there's nothing there that's specific to operations or anything else. Some of the most valuable conversations that I had about lean principles at Twitter were actually with teams like the physical security team, the legal team, the procurement team, helping them change and evolve the way that they work to be more effective.

But we had this great experience. I ran a retrospective. Greg, I forget his last name now, but Greg was the person that was responsible for all of the physical security at Twitter and it comes with the territory, right? Atlassian hardly was in place, it got a lot of threats, but Twitter was a place that... Anyway, they did a fire drill and in the fire drill, three-quarters of the Twitter team members actually perished in the fire escapes and so we ran a retrospective to see, "Okay, well, what are the problems and how do we... ?"

It came down to fire doors and how do you balance the egress from the different fire escapes and all this sort of stuff, but what a great technique to bring everyone together and to have that conversation, not just lay blame on someone, right? It was a whole team effort to figure out, and then guess what? Let's run it again and we're successful. How empowering is that for everyone?

Jennifer Eolin: Imagine that.

Ryan Spilken: It's worth noting that no actual Twitter engineers were harmed in the fire drill as mentioned.

Nick Muldoon: Yeah, great. Thank you for clarifying it.

Ryan Spilken: Because I mean, if you had lost three-quarters of the company the second time, that'd been a company and a half that you'd lost in two fire drills. My math's not good, but that's too many colleagues.

Jennifer Eolin: What is the one piece of advice you would give to teams? If you were only allowed to walk in a room, lay down one sentence, and then you had to walk out, what is it?

Nick Muldoon: I want everyone to find something that they're passionate about and throw their whole heart, body, and soul into it, right? If your heart is not here and you're not feeling it for these customers, then that's cool. We will provide the support to help you find the thing that you really want to be doing with your life. I'm 36 years old, best case scenario... Well, not best-case scenario, but statistically speaking an Australian male has 87 years, so I've got 50 summers left.

Now, if I've got 50 summers left and presumably I kind of deteriorate in physical capability, I probably have 40 usable summers left, so what the hell am I going to do with the 40 summers I have left? And what are you going to do? You better do something that you're passionate about, where you're learning.

Jennifer Eolin: Oh, I love that.

Ryan Spilken: Tremendous.

Jennifer Eolin: I need to think about my summers.

Ryan Spilken: Goodness.

Jennifer Eolin: I got to count them up. I don't know, going to need an abacus.

Nick Muldoon: Yeah, but this is the thing, right? Why would we spend years of our lives doing stuff that we don't love? I understand money, I get it, but yeah.

Ryan Spilken: Wow.

Jennifer Eolin: Yeah.

Nick Muldoon: I've got so many thoughts about that. It's our journey, it's a journey, but how do you help your people? One of the people in the team, I absolutely love him. His capability to consume and incorporate into his mental model, content, is phenomenal. Right? Now, the challenge for him, in particular, is how does he disseminate that to the whole team, but I know where he's going, and our powers aren't aligned, right? He wants to educate the world and help the world have this knowledge. He wants to find a way to make knowledge accessible. 

I'm like, "That's awesome." You can do that for some of the stuff at Easy Agile, but I'm just trying to figure out how I help him accelerate that journey and I know that at some point in time our paths will diverge. But how immensely proud am I going to be if, in 10 or 15 years time, he's living in New York, right, and he's working on education and doing whatever, and we catch up for lunch and we're overlooking some beautiful skyline. How proud would I be to reflect on his journey? Ah! Yeah, I don't know. I get so excited about that. How do you allow everyone to reach their potential?

Ryan Spilken: Wow!

Jennifer Eolin: Yeah. Ah, that's amazing. Yes.

Ryan Spilken: Well, Easy Agile co-CEO Nick Muldoon, thank you so much, so much for joining us today and giving us just some fantastic insight into your world, Nick. It's a good world to live in.

Nick Muldoon: Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate your time Jennifer, Ryan. It's been fun.

Jennifer Eolin: Thank you. It's been amazing.