Nice Work!

Rob Castaneda, founder and CEO of ServiceRocket, told Lacey Carlyle that he started scheduling time on the executive team's calendar before and after the core meeting. He almost breezed by it. Lacey didn't let him. Thank goodness. Because the idea is quit smart and practical. Exec meetings are usually long, and execs don't exactly have a lot of time, so blocking off more time on people's calendar seems counterintuitive. Until you see the the behavior. During the 30 minutes of blocked calendar time before the meeting, people come into the meeting room and start preparing for the meeting. Updating reports and responding to action items from the prior meeting. This makes for a much more productive meeting. Participants prep before the meeting and not during the first 30 minutes of the meeting, while they are not talking, and not paying attention to the meeting. In other words, not being present in the meeting. This pre-meeting blocked time allows people to be present during the meeting because they are prepped. 

Lacey did something different on this episode of Nice Work. She interviewed Bill about his new book, "The Art of Agile Marketing: A Practical Roadmap for Implementing Kanban and Scrum in Jira and Confluence." Many of you have heard of the agile manifesto. A group of software developers created it on a mission to improve the value software development teams deliver to customers. Did you know there is an agile marketing manifesto? Well, there is. Google it. It's real. Listeners will learn a fun fact on the show that Nick Muldoon of Easy Agile, and two-time guest on Nice Work (Episodes 19 and 8) is one of the original signers of the agile marketing manifesto. So, agile marketing is a thing, and marketing teams are running agile methodologies like kanban and scrum. Some are even using Jira to do it. "The Art of Agile Marketing" is a story about how one team runs scrum on Jira, how they set it up, and how they have evolved over time from lessons learned doing it. 

Have you ever stopped to think how to build a high-performing remote team? I know, I know. You have Jira and Confluence and Bitbucket and Stride. You have remote team members, and they can all chime in. You have the tools. But do you have the culture and the processes and the deliberate tactics to "include" remote works and create an environment in which your entire team can thrive? Think about it. Because tools are not enough.  Peter Bell, who runs a remote team of instructors the Flatiron School, organizes CTO Summits around the world, and writes books, joined Lacey on Nice Work! An Atlassian Ecosystem Podcast, to talk about how to create an ideal environment for remote workers. And we get specific.  Learn more about the Flatiron School (which was recently acquired by WeWork): https://flatironschool.com/ Learn more about Peter's CTO summits here: https://www.ctoconnection.com/ Learn more about Peter's books: https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-GitHub-Non-Technical-Peter-Bell/dp/1491949740/ref=la_B01N03AW6D_1

The best way to become a CTO is to start your own company and call yourself CTO. That's what Dave Shanley did. And now, after starting two technology companies, the last one was acquired by Jama Software and has become Jama Analyze. Naturally, Dave is now VP of Analytics at Jama Software. We talked about a lot of things with Dave. To name a few: How to go from couch to public company executive in six years. How to successfully launch new products by focusing on "why," and why implementing software in your organization requires both a top down and a bottom up approach. According to Dave, "Top down helps but bottom up definitely works." Learn more about Jama Software here: http://www.jamasoftware.com.

You wouldn't think the concept of done is a very controversial topic. If something is done, it's done, right? Not so fast. Across the set of teams in a typical software development lifecycle, done means different things to different teams. This then begs the question, "What does done mean?" Trevor Bruner, Sr. Product Manager at Tasktop joins the Nice Work! Podcast to help us answer this question. 

We are doing something a little different in this episode of Nice Work! Every now and then, we will stray from the trail known as the Atlassian Ecosystem and talk about interesting topics that help us all improve in our work...and even in our personal lives. This episode is the first. Nick Muldoon from Easy Agile is our first returning guest, and this episode was his idea. If you remember from episode 8, which we know you don't, Nick told us he wanted to come back on the show to talk about the vivid vision process. Lacey and Bill read the book in preparation and to get the most out of the show. Nick shares how he got started with the vivid vision and it's now surprise he learned it while he worked at Atlassian. In fact, he like the process so much, he created a vivid vision for his own company, Easy Agile. He even wrote one with his family. This makes Lacey and Bill feel a little like slackers. Nick inspired us to create a vivid vision for the Nice Work podcast. This episode will inspire you, too. 

Surbhi Rathore, founder of Rammer.ai joins Nice Work! to talk about how to automate the collection and recording to action items in your meetings with a little AI. That's right, it's becoming possible to have your action items, spoken in a meeting, logged directly in Jira. It's coming, and Surbhi is making it happen. 

John Wessman, IT Director at Extra Space Storage, comes on to the Nice Work! Podcast to talk about how he took his team with no Atlassian Suite experience to a full blown implementation, across multiple produces, that would make a certified Atlassian professional jealous. It all came down to taking a strategy approach, defining how they wanted to work, then setting up the Atlassian tools to support that aim. That approach is probably the secret sauce to getting buy in from business teams to using Jira and Confluence. Nice work, John!

Marc Ray, Senior Leader Technical Sales and Customer Success at Zephyr, joins Nice Work to talk about QA, behavior-driven development, and why dev teams should start with test cases. Although we know QA is cultural, tools can help bring teams together and make teamwork better. Share this episode with everyone on your team from product managers to developers to release engineers. And yes, share it with your boss, too. QA is a team sport after all. 

Wouldn't it be great if you could look at each of your projects and know, in one place, which one's were most profitable without having to export data from your project management tool, time tracker, and CRM separately and then merge them together? It is a major pain, and Andrey Baskov founder and full-stack CEO of Metric.ai, is solving it with a single view that makes sense of all that data and tells you how your projects are performing. He came into the studio at ServiceRocket Media to help us understand how we can use AI to monitor project performance in Jira. 

One way James Dellow gains a deep understanding of how business users create or consume documents and collaborative content, he like to gain first-hand experience. In one case, working with a mining client who was evaluating Atlassian's Confluence, he went into the mine to gain some insight about how his client might use Confluence. 

Abbas Haider Ali, CTO of xMatters, joins Nice Work! to talk with Lacey about how the challengers to solving incidents at scale. It takes a team of people to solve incidents. Do you know who the right people are or do you just require everyone to join the call? Queue the endless conference call joining meme. Lacey also talks to Abbas about his work mentoring women in tech through the mentor matching service, Everwise.

Micky Caritte is a French expat in Canada, running Jira at a large bank as a senior Atlassian Consultant and has recently published his first app. And since he starting using Jira at version 3.5 (at least) he knows a thing or two about administering Jira. Lacey Carlyle talks to Micky about what he knows. 

If you don't know Rachel Wright, you are missing out on the full Jira administration experience. Wright is the author of the must-read Jira Strategy Admin Workbook, she is a certified Jira Administrator, and we believe she coined the term "drain the Jira swamp" to help save you from the epidemic of over-customized Jira instances.  

Anthony Morelli, director of product management at Lucid Software joins Nice Work to explain why you should use user flow diagrams for communicating way more than you do. If a picture is worth a thousand words and a video is worth a million, then a user flow diagram might be worth a gazillion words. 

Mary McInnis, project manager at Genentech, joins Nice Work to talk about how Jira and Confluence are critical tools for a project manager. Not only have the Atlassian tools been a key part of Mary's success as a project manager, but she knows how to get Jira adoption on a team. 

Nick Muldoon, founder of Easy Agile and Teagan Harbridge, who runs marketing at Easy Agile, join Nice Work to talk about making it easier to balance the long and the short view in agile, which is not always that easy with you are constantly heads down sprint after sprint after sprint. And do you know what a vivid vision is? Nick explains. We are fascinated.

What do you get when you cross a certified scrum master and an Atlassian certified professional in agile development with Jira Software? Tracy Walton. That's who.

Michael Libman is a Salesforce Developer and Apex Specialist from Reier Group Solutions. He ran into Lacey at the Atlassian booth at Dreamforce and mayhem ensued. Michael talks to us about why he loves the Atlassian tools and why the most caring gift you can give a friend at work is a shared Jira Dashboard.

What if your customers and employees could record a video explaining the trouble they are having so you can see exactly what they mean when they say, "This thing isn't working." Would you like that? And what if they could do this right from the browser in Jira Service Desk? In this episode of Nice Work, we are joined by Ryan Kennedy of Kickdrumtech and Mike Varpness of Hyfy to talk about using Jira Service Desk and video to provide better service to customers.