Nick Van Weerdenburg - CEO at Rangle.io

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Nick, the CEO at Rangle, and we discuss cultivating alignment as a leader, the factors that determine a successful proof of concept, and what enterprises can do to better prioritize performance. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:32) How you feeling today? You feeling good? It's Friday.

(Nick at 00:00:35) I feel pretty good. The days sort of blend into each other, so Friday's good. But yeah, Saturday I'll be here again, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) Are you at home? Are you going to the office? What are you up to?

(Nick at 00:00:48) I'm at home. That is a picture of my office, so it just looks better than my other background.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:55) I love it. Man, I get really excited when I get to talk to CEOs that are in the technology space because you get the entrepreneurial aspect of growing something and doing difficult things. I'm a big fan of doing difficult things. So what is Rangle?

(Nick at 00:01:14) So Rangle is a modern innovation and development company, consultancy. And we're a little unique in that we were born in the sort of the modern customer experience era. So we're going to be seven years old in about a week. And I started the company in May 2013 when I got really excited about HTML5, mobile responsive web, a whole rewriting of the web. And our first tagline was "The Web Inverted" because after a decade or longer working with companies, helping them move everything to the server and web-based application architecture and thin client, we were going in the exact opposite direction.

(Nick at 00:01:55) We're building thick clients. We're going back to client-server because browsers have gotten so popular that they created a much better experience if you built the application to run in the browser. And that was where Rangle started. And we jumped in right when it started taking off. So we were, as far as I know, the first JavaScript-only web development consultancy in North America, because nobody actually could build full applications using just JavaScript, maybe six months before, from a practical perspective.

(Nick at 00:02:29) And from a market timing perspective, it was really about the distribution channel. So JavaScript had been around for a decade. Mobile was taking off, but everything always had to be supporting older browsers. And with HTML5 and Chrome driving a standards compliance level that we've never seen in the world, really, from an open source perspective, that started creating these open source platforms and the ability to start building these new applications. So the way I sort of described it is, I think around January, February 2013, the number of devices that were running pretty much HTML5 compliant-type browsers was over 90%.

(Nick at 00:03:19) And once that happened, you no longer had to go through these hoops and build server-side applications. And with mobile and the rewriting of the web, that was really the start for Rangle. And we got there early, and we just kept evolving with that and bringing in new capabilities. So we started in the era of mobile responsive HTML5, and where agile had become an accepted way of building things, which was also new. Because agile as a practice never really got very far in the services world because of the way contracts were normally done and the way companies work.

(Nick at 00:03:59) So we also started when agile also crossed a certain threshold. So we've never been anything but agile in our history. And that's resulted in our evolution to this modern digital consultancy that's focused on customer experience, lean agile practices, and the ability to scale digital in a way that is just different because we don't have any legacy sort of built into our DNA.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:31) I really like the brand. I checked out the website. I like the style of the brand. I also like how you guys had the navigation organized—about, who we are and about us, what we think. The structure and the substructure was actually very human and it's exploratory, right? You could tell that there was a lot of intelligence behind how you structured it, because those are the questions that people are asking. Now, the most popular page on our site is the about page.

(Nick at 00:05:02) Yeah, and we tried to build the website to reflect our purpose and what we do for our clients, and it's evolved a lot over the years. But one of the interesting things about what we do is we partner with our clients in a transparent manner. So when you're working in a very accelerated agile fashion, you're effectively—we do continuous delivery all the time, and we're always delivering to the clients, which means that the conversation and the relationship is much more at the point of work being created. So it's not in the deliverables. It's in the interactions around the deliverables. So we start building something for a client, and we partner with a continuous delivery model. And they know everything that's going on all the time. All of our people are client-facing. And as a result, we've got a very strong symmetry with what we do and what our clients do and want to do.

(Nick at 00:05:59) Our client value proposition, our brand to our clients, is the same to the people that join Rangle. There's a unique symmetry there, which is one of the reasons we were able to grow fast when we were, from a start seven years ago to about 200 people today, is that symmetry. And we've kept continuously evolving as the industry's evolved and stayed ahead of it, so that we've become the scaled digital customer experience consultancy and transformation partner for our clients.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:30) Are you guys doing a lot of proof of concepts?

(Nick at 00:06:33) We are doing—in some respects, our model is that everything should be something you learn from. So proof of concept is in the continuous delivery model. We do a lot of exploratory work. We do a lot of proof of concepts. We do a lot of MVP work. So we worked with one large global medical company where the model was POCs, MVPs, and then scaling and market. And one of the reasons for that wasn't just about finding the market and finding the concepts, but for internal organizational alignment. There's nothing quite like trying to get something done to find out where the friction is and find out where the alignment needs to come.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:16) So I got a question for you. So my background—I've been engineering for 17 years—and one of the conversations that I've had with a couple different people where they were discussing the topic of, if you're building an MVP or proof of concept, some people say it's okay to be really lazy with the code and rack up a ton of technical debt. Other people say there's no reason why you shouldn't do best practices from day one. What are your thoughts on this topic?

(Nick at 00:07:46) I'd say it's, like everything, it depends. It always depends on what the context is. So if you really are proving something out and there's a high amount of uncertainty, then throwaway code can be useful. But what we found is as we work in a certain way and we do high quality code, we test our code, even in shorter projects, that tends to deliver more value because it's forcing you to think better. And you're building faster because you can think better about your code and you can explore more.

(Nick at 00:08:23) So I think that line—where writing high quality tested code, where it used to be, I would say, maybe you're six weeks into a project, then you've got three people and you're going to continue to work on it, you want to make sure that you're doing your testing and the high quality code—I think with everybody being really good at it and the way that it drives thinking and evolution of a codebase, I'd say if you're doing something that you expect may continue on, start with the high quality. Because the challenge is, if you've incurred too much technical debt, it becomes very, very hard to recover from that, particularly early on. One thing we found when we were working with clients early on—so in AngularJS, one of the technologies that we kicked off with as the world's sort of first AngularJS consultancy, one of the first—when people didn't think about quality until they were six weeks in, then they didn't know how to do it anymore. The code wasn't really amenable to refactoring it, because quality comes from really clean code, decoupled code, things you can think about it. It's been challenged continuously, which testing does. And you get too far in and you never recover.

(Nick at 00:09:40) So I would say that if you think you're going to go past two weeks, then I'd say go all in on the quality.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:46) How do you approach determining of these proof of concepts? You build a proof of concept for something, maybe a client. How do you determine its success?

(Nick at 00:09:55) Everyone has a different goal when they build something, and there's a different number of assumptions. So the first thing is to really understand what the proof of concept's for. And often, people have a high level of enthusiasm for an idea, but the idea that they're really enthusiastic about is down in the future, and it's very hard to get there. So if you're going to build something really, really effective and find a way to market from a lean startup product-market fit perspective, you have to understand where you're trying to go in the short term, because it's like sailing a boat. And if a proof of concept is going to prove something could be done in a useful way, that's a user experience outcome. If you're trying to see if it's going to attract a potential client, then you need something that's going to go in the market and see if you can actually attract users. So success really depends on the hypothesis and having people who think about product from a business value perspective and can come up with that sort of incremental iterative value that you're going to deliver and measure against. And if you can knock out different hypotheses, business ones, as you move through, then your initial POCs lay the foundation for building a product MVP.

(Nick at 00:11:17) So you've eliminated a lot of the risk, and you found enough to prioritize. And then every single increment should be a clarification of something. And that's where a lot of innovation breaks down, because there's not the ongoing sort of hunger to learn and evolve. It becomes, "We're just going to build it," and it turns into a feature race, and there's not that sort of evolution.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:46) So you're several years into this business. I want to know, what's keeping you excited? Why are you getting out of bed in the morning still?

(Nick at 00:11:55) Yeah. Software is an incredibly rewarding, but difficult profession. So I've been in the field for over 20 years now, and the amount of things that we build that are wasted and the things that are speculative and the things that, you know, that is a huge human cost. And building better software and finding ways of building better software, so we're not always restarting and we're creating things that deliver more value—the better value we can deliver, the more value we can deliver, it's a better world we make. So the my passion for software and digital building, it comes from that. And there's still so much so far to go in terms of our industry and our practices in terms of innovation and transformation and customer experience. And there's so many industries that need to evolve into digital-centric businesses that, for me, the journey is only just starting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:00) That's exciting. What makes you tick, personal hobbies, when you're not doing the company or building the software empire? What are you doing?

(Nick at 00:13:12) So that's a bit of an area of shame, I guess. Building a company is really, really hard. So I did wake up one day and realize I wasn't really talking to my friends. I didn't have any hobbies, wasn't doing anything for fun. I spent a lot of time with my kids, which is great, and they're getting older now. But yeah, I wasn't really taking care of myself that well, and I've tried to improve that in the last year. Still hard, because obviously with COVID-19, there's a huge focus on business. But I started teaching myself piano about a year ago as a hobby. And there's a couple of things that I've learned. And one is having a hobby is great because it just spins your brain in a different direction. And acquiring other skills, because it's easy to fall into a trap, especially as an entrepreneur and CEO, that you're constantly trying to have the right answers. And you never do. It's always changing. The market's always changing. And so to continuously stay learning and not get trapped and becoming too operational—and I think that's a personal, that's where companies start to be challenged because they become all about the operating and the risk management and the efficiencies. And you can become the same as a person, and then you burn out. You don't find joy in the work. And so I found that by maintaining more discipline, I can maintain my enthusiasm, and it doesn't go away. Because if you actually pay attention and you learn and you read and, you know, especially the really the brilliant stuff that's coming out, it just never stops.

(Nick at 00:15:05) There's always something amazing to do next and try to build and innovate. Just when you get stuck in your own head that it seems like it's getting dusty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:14) Do you ever follow Jocko or David Goggins?

(Nick at 00:15:18) I read all of those books. I'm not following the podcast, but yeah, "Extreme Leadership," "Dichotomy of Leadership," both incredible books. Particularly, I love "The Dichotomy of Leadership" because—

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:36) Is that Goggins?

(Nick at 00:15:37) No, that's Jocko Willink.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:39) Oh, I didn't—I only read his ownership one. There's the extreme ownership one. I didn't know he had a second one.

(Nick at 00:15:44) Well, the second book was a bit of a mea culpa because people got carried away with extreme ownership, and a lot of people interpreted it as sort of micromanagement. And that's not what it is. You own the outcome, and you're there to create the team and the systems that the outcome happens, but you're not creating the outcome. You're creating the environment. And so they wrote "The Dichotomy of Leadership" because everything is on a spectrum. And they talk about, you know, sometimes you should micromanage, sometimes you should let people run. And you see this a lot, especially with new managers. It's like, "I like to empower my people," and it's like, well, you just let them fuck up all the time. Excuse my language.

(Nick at 00:16:25) But, you know, they don't know how to do the job yet. So let's see a little micromanagement until you've given them the knowledge to do the job. Andy Grove captured that really well in "High Output Management" where he talked about task-relevant maturity. You can take someone who's brilliant in one job—that doesn't mean they're brilliant in the other. They're suddenly junior again, and you have to evolve everybody in a new role, particularly in an organization that's scaling. So, but yeah, and I read David Goggins's book a couple of months ago, so...

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:00) I didn't know he had a book. I just follow him on YouTube. I'll check his book out.

(Nick at 00:17:06) Yeah. There's a generation gap showing up there. I'm reading all the books, and most of the people that work at Rangle, it's like, I asked someone what book they learned JavaScript from, and they looked at me like I was—"Look, you learn everything on the internet, dude." And it's like, I guess that's pretty true, right? So...

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:24) Yeah, I do a lot of Audible, and then I'll follow a couple different people's podcasts. I'll follow people who interview great people, and then that way, that gives me — then I'll run off into a corner, consume all of this person's content, then come back to the Joe Rogan podcast, listen to him interview more great people, and then go follow down into another hole. And that's kind of the pattern I've noticed myself getting into.

(Nick at 00:17:50) Yeah. So for whatever strange reason, the last two years, it seems every book on leadership I read has some chapter on the Navy SEALs. It almost has to be there. So I read — or special forces. The extreme ownership, great book.

(Nick at 00:18:11) I read all of the General Stanley McChrystal books, Team of Teams, One Mission, which are fabulous from actually looking at modern digital organizations because it's about how fast can you respond in a complex environment where things are shifting all the time. And it's a great definition of what happens in Lean Startup and what happens in modern development. And it's a team of teams model, and it talks about how problems that emerge at a cross-functional level can only be solved at a cross-functional level. And typical organizational hierarchies, everything escalates up and down, but you lose so much information and context that if you have three different groups escalating up, everyone at the top tries to solve the problem, and they invariably make it worse. So how do you solve those kind of organizational challenges?

(Nick at 00:19:06) And they do a really good job of articulating that in the McChrystal's books.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:12) Oh, thanks. I actually saw — I think I saw it on my Audible, that Team of Teams book cover, I think yesterday or the day before. And I was like, oh, that's actually pretty cool, because I talk a lot about autonomous team scaling and structure, and Team of Teams is the most perfect, succinct title ever. Right?

(Nick at 00:19:30) It's a great book too, because most books that are written, they're usually written early on and they're written to talk about something new. So they have that consulting, for lack of a better word, sort of lack of depth, and they don't really get into the hard, hard human bits. And what I liked about Team of Teams is it goes into a lot of the hard human bits, and there's a lot of just exploration of all the dark corners where things fail, and they talk a lot about that. And One Mission does a similar thing. So it's — they do as good a job as I've seen from a Lean Agile perspective, an agile transformation, digital transformation, and illuminating the shadows of the dark corners where the friction comes and the failures come, and what kind of investment and effort's required to overcome that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:21) Speaking of this, I'm curious about health, wellness. I recently started getting into that, and I was looking at a couple different wearables. They've got rings, they've got straps. Have you ever experimented with any of the wearables?

(Nick at 00:20:34) Yeah, I have. Apple Watch pretty much for the most part. I got really into that for a while. I still use it. I find having some feedback mechanisms is helpful.

(Nick at 00:20:45) So from staying on top of things. And it's pretty incredible. I didn't even realize how deep it went until I started seeing what I could measure, and it turned out pretty much everything. So I got a little carried away. I did.

(Nick at 00:21:00) That got me thinking about it too much, so I did for a while, and that was interesting. The ability for the trackers to be accurate's a little questionable. So after I did that for a while, and that was great, then I started just using on iOS — it actually tracks your sleep for you pretty much if you turn on the bedtime thing. And it just notes how long you haven't moved your phone for. And that's actually been what I've been doing lately. So on a weekly basis, I make sure I hit a certain threshold because I did discover by sleep tracking that I actually slept — I was overestimating how much I slept by about 45 minutes a day.

(Nick at 00:21:42) I just sort of assumed I was sleeping seven, seven and a half hours a day. And when I actually started tracking and I looked at the data, I was clocking in at six and a half, six, you know, six and three quarters. So that's given me a little more discipline to pay attention, and that's been actually very impactful from a health perspective.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:58) Yeah. I was using the sleep tracking app that was pretty good, but it listens to your movements, you know, when you're sleeping. But then in my experimentation as a scientist, right, I was trying different things, and I tried the sound machine to sleep. And that actually negates the thing, so I fell back to the bedtime feature that you were talking about, which is accurate. The other thing was more accurate, but I sleep better with the sound machine now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:25) And so it's like you said, you know, you kind of get into it a little bit, you play with it a little bit, you figure out if it's something you want to — how deep you want to go down the rabbit hole. But yeah, I haven't gotten any of the straps. I haven't gotten the watch. I was looking at this other strap. I can't remember what it was called, but it was $180, and then there was a ring called Oura. I remember what the ring was called, but it was a Go strap or something. I don't know. But I was looking at a couple different ones thinking, you know, what would it be like if I had something strapped to my wrist because my wife has the Apple Watch. And I was just asking around to see what other people thought of them.

(Nick at 00:23:01) Yeah, it's — I find it interesting because I didn't wear a watch for years, and then I bought the Apple Watch because what really got me to buy it at first, I was interested in the voice feature. So by being able to have a sort of a voice thing strapped to your wrist, I was wondering how useful that would be from a user experience perspective. It turns out it's still — it's not the best for rapid voice recognition, so that gave me some insight into that. And then I wanted to decouple from my phone.

(Nick at 00:23:32) So I sort of thought it'd be interesting to just be able to leave my phone behind and not always be carrying it around. And then once I started wearing the watch for a while, now I just feel weird when I don't wear it. So now I just wear it all the time because it's become a habit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:47) So you — it's stuck. You like the watch?

(Nick at 00:23:49) Yeah. Yeah. I love the watch. I feel weird when I'm not wearing it now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:53) Yeah. My wife got the watch and it stuck. And she's been wearing it for a year now, and she really likes it too.

(Nick at 00:23:58) Yeah. I'd also did a few other things from a measurement thing. So if you wear it when you sleep, your best time to sort of measure your resting heart rate is just before you get out of bed. So you automatically get your resting heart rate. That's a strong predictor for mortality and general sort of cardio health, so that's a pretty good one.

(Nick at 00:24:19) I bought a blood pressure machine that syncs up with the phone. So now if I go into Apple Health, I've got my cardio, I've got my meditation, I've got my resting heart rate, I've got my blood pressure. I've got my sleep. And so all of a sudden, it's pretty compelling. And I don't have to look at it all the time. Even if, say, at the end of the month on Sunday mornings, I can just sort of flick through it and see how I'm doing because I'm not actively thinking about any of those things. It's just all being aggregated.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:50) Have you gotten any actual actionable insights? Like, oh, if I don't eat, you know, three hours before bed, I sleep better, or have you gotten anything from the data?

(Nick at 00:25:02) Not so much. I didn't drink any alcohol for 10 weeks before Christmas. I took off 10 weeks, and my resting heart rate went down a little bit. That was one measure, and that was the only discernible sort of measure I got. I didn't see any difference in my sleep patterns or anything.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:23) Have you ever gotten a food sensitivity test?

(Nick at 00:25:25) No.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:26) Okay. So get this. So my stepmom and my dad, they own this clinic called Peaks of Health. And I saw them start it. And then over the past five years, it's growing really big. I see it just keep growing really big and really fast. And so, eventually, I was like, what do you guys do there? Why is it growing so fast? Why is it doing so well? And they're like, well, we do personalized, individualized health medicine. And it's not like insurance. It's you just go and you pay cash. And so I said, well, I'll check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) And they had these food sensitivity tests. And I spent $600 and got 96 foods checked. Right? So they drew a ton of blood, and I got the results back, and it was — I was basically 50% allergic to my entire diet. And just so you know, I wake up, I go for a run, I eat two eggs, no junk on them, two pieces of whole wheat organic toast, and you know, a protein bar. And then I'm just a very clean, organic type person. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:33) Because I used to be 300 pounds. I used to be really big. So I got these habits from not wanting to do that. And so I was like, what? This is unbelievable. What would happen if I — if I'm having these immune responses and these allergen responses that they can tell from the antibodies in my blood? Like, what would happen if I change my diet? And so I did, and I felt just enormous amounts better, significantly more energy, you know, within 48 hours of eliminating these items from my diet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:05) What we found was there was one food — what was happening is there's one food, a wheat reaction, a wheat sensitivity, and that created this thing called leaky gut. And so what happened is I'd eat this whole grain wheat. Right? Really, really natural and everything. And my body would have a small reaction to it, although I couldn't physically pick up on it. Right? And then that would create this issue where things would leak from my gut into my bloodstream, and then my body would start attacking those things as foreign bodies. So it basically takes your entire diet and turns it against you.

(Nick at 00:27:44) Wow. Yeah. I read a bit about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:46) It is very real. I'll tell you there are handfuls of things, you know, there's all this health stuff all the time. Right? But this was a very, very real thing. So they put me on an 18-month plan to seal up my gut.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) And I'll tell you what, man, just within 48 hours of — you have to find the origin food that's causing the leaky gut problem. Completely eliminate that. And then even though there's other foods, you still have to completely recycle your diet again to completely different foods. Wait 18 months, and then now it's fixed. You never go back to the food that caused the problem, and then you can go back on your normal diet.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:27) And this whole process I've gone through, you know, it's not a one doctor visit thing. It's been this six-month thing I've been going through. But I will tell you this, it completely changed my available amounts of energy in my life, my sleep quality, and all of that. Far more impact than all of the small things I've done in my fitness life up into this point. So I've been recommending it to people now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:50) You know, spend a couple $100, get the food sensitivity test, get 96 food or a high number of foods, and then just check. Because if I would have talked to my past self, you know, six months ago, I'd be like, dude, I feel fine. There are days when I have more energy. There are days when I have less energy because it's relative to you. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:13) Yeah. And so there would have been no way to really convince myself, but I don't know. It's just something that I'm going to figure out a better way to talk about it in the future. This is actually my first time talking about it with you today. I've never talked about this on the podcast before, but it's just made such a difference in my life that I'm encouraging people now to go get food immune response and allergy response tests.

(Nick at 00:29:41) That's interesting. Yeah. I've never thought of getting that done. So I have — my health regimen is doing intermittent fasting, so I'm a little trendy on that. So noon to 8 p.m. And I take a bit of omega-3, vitamin D, a little bit of magnesium, and then I'm done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:57) So I like the magnesium. I take that before bed. It helps me sleep.

(Nick at 00:30:02) That actually does seem to help a little bit. So the magnesium.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:07) Yeah. Well, let's talk more about the company stuff. One of the things I am curious about is, you know, there's always different configurations of how your teams will interface with your customers. What does your company do? Do they go work at their offices? What's your style?

(Nick at 00:30:24) So we put together teams that work out of the mostly out of the Rangle office. So we built our culture being working face-to-face with our teammates because of the Lean Agile principles that we're building the company around. And then we use continuous delivery model to partner with our clients. So we set up a CI/CD pipeline. We integrate into our clients' infrastructure.

(Nick at 00:30:51) And then we work with their stakeholders, ideally a product owner on the client side. And we put together elite sort of high-performing teams, and we build out customer experiences, and we deliver rapidly, and we work with the client to remove the blockers that get in the way. So — and we're so used to delivering fast and the continuous delivery model. You can — it's been an interesting experience. So as we partner with different clients, they traditionally have the siloed waterfall process.

(Nick at 00:31:23) Even if they ostensibly have agile delivery on their technology teams, it's really incremental delivery from a technology perspective, but there's no agility across the rest of the organization. When you're trying to move faster and we work in one-week iterations and you're working cross-functionally and you're trying to ship all the time, you're pushing against the organizational boundaries. And what we've done over the years is we've just constantly tried to build out the capabilities to remove more and more of the blockers so that we can continue to deliver in a continuous delivery, fast manner. And we measure cycle time as whether we're being successful or not. So our cultural sort of norms are high quality, cross-functional, low cycle time where we're trying to define and ship features in under three days.

(Nick at 00:32:17) And then solving all of the organizational sort of needs around that so we can do that with any organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:25) I like that. What are your best customers look like?

(Nick at 00:32:29) Usually, there's an alignment. So they have a strong commitment to agile transformation, but they're usually in earlier stages because that's an almost near-impossible task in a large company, and digital transformation now is the sort of the next wave. We do a lot of work with Fortune 500 companies, a lot of global retailers, financial services companies, banks, insurance companies. We also do a lot of work with startups as well. We try to maintain a balanced portfolio so we don't get stuck and, you know, lose our Lean Agile roots and the cultural norms of high quality sort of fast, innovative delivery.

(Nick at 00:33:16) So we've worked with, because we started in the technology space, one of the unique things about us is our clients have been pretty global from early on. So we have a large client in Japan. We have a large client in Europe. Canada is actually a very small percentage of our clients. The majority of our business has been in the United States over the last six years, and we're able to reach that market because of our focus and our core discipline.

(Nick at 00:33:43) So we're well known in the JavaScript community. We're well known for what we do, and we're able to reach into those different communities.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:53) When you work with the enterprises today, because that is part of your portfolio, what do you notice that they're doing as far as performance and prioritization?

(Nick at 00:34:04) The shift that we're seeing now—and this has been, we've worked with, I think, four of our clients for about four years now, and so we've seen their evolution over the time period. And things that were not norms or accepted or even understood are now quite well understood. So we've always taken a position of doing everything at the best, the best practices, and really developing those capabilities. So very early on, we would put actual experienced scrum masters on projects. The vast majority of our clients didn't think that was really that necessary because they already have project managers, or they put people on a course for a couple of days, or they had somebody who knew how to sort of schedule stand-ups in the calendar.

(Nick at 00:34:55) But there was no understanding of the dynamics of cross-functional team creation, nurturing, coaching, doing retrospectives, continuous improvement, and all those things that get a team working together as one and sort of creating more value. And that shifted. So, like, as of, say, about twelve months ago—yeah. And these are some clients that we've been working with, so I like to think that we've had an influence. But these are large organizations.

(Nick at 00:35:23) I can see that, you know, as I think digital transformation, agile transformation with large companies, everyone plans to do it in three years, but it takes like fifteen because there are so many cultural and organizational challenges that take a while to become generally understood in the industry. And once they're generally understood in the industry, now the next time, like, the third or fourth time you try to do a change management initiative within the organization, it actually takes, because the common knowledge, the zeitgeist, if you will, around how to run a digital team is—the common understanding is now closer to the end goal. So you see people actually getting experienced scrum masters, and they exist now too, which is another thing. Right? It takes multiple turns to actually produce the talent and the leadership.

(Nick at 00:36:19) You see a product focus. You see companies moving to persistent funding. You know, with scaled agile, the actual practices, which were wildly inconsistent two years ago, are starting to become, you know, pretty good. And there's a lot more traction happening. So now I think we're getting to that next stage where it's going to be really interesting on what companies do next, because the cross-functional sort of end-to-end innovation capabilities of companies is still—it's still a huge lift.

(Nick at 00:37:03) It's still a big journey because companies are still optimized for functions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:09) Do you have any projects that you're particularly excited about that you could talk about?

(Nick at 00:37:15) I guess that's always challenging. You know, I can't speak specifically for most of our clients, but yeah, I can say that we work with a large medical device company, and we've put—you know, we've done HIPAA-compliant medical device software development in a purely agile fashion and got it through regulatory approval and end market. And that was an incredible journey and an amazing commitment from the client and a huge learning sort of experience, and, you know, what it takes to be able to do something. And a good example—like, if there's a strong enough commitment to achieving an outcome, you know, people are very industrious. And if there's enough motivation to stay the course and actually get something done, you get through that change.

(Nick at 00:38:06) And that was pretty profound. We've seen a lot of our clients start to get pretty adept at doing scaled agile, so SAFe PI planning. And what's been really interesting for us is because we roll up with high-functioning sort of agile cross-functional teams, and we work in a continuous delivery model, we don't really find a lot of difference in different scaled agile practices because, you know, we have our own sort of model and our own instincts, and it's really built into our culture. But what we would find is you roll in and everything is just the old practices being done in new sort of forms, and the teams would struggle a lot because there wasn't any appreciation for the quality of the requirements going into the team and creating a decision space for the team and the autonomy. It was functional specs being chopped into user stories.

(Nick at 00:39:06) The ability to remove problems or get service level agreements across different functions wasn't there. Common understanding was missing. And so the friction was there. There'd be these teams that were agile that just couldn't move things through the organization, and that's where a lot of the respect came for our teams, is because we just kept things moving. We're very sort of, yeah, committed to shipping.

(Nick at 00:39:33) It's sort of like ship high-quality things frequently, and we just keep churning at it and sort of provide some of the energy for the change management. And then the organizations do change and they do evolve. And what I saw last year was there's been a massive surge in the number of chief digital officers in the industry as people realize that the next big sort of wave to be successful is that we have to have a unified digital teams, and it's not—you know, business and technology aren't separate things. They're the same thing. And technology was something that was provided for a business; that's vastly different than technology being the business.

(Nick at 00:40:15) And I'm excited at seeing the impact of chief digital officers in the industry, but also in the expanding roles of CTOs and, you know, them taking on that function as well because of the—it is the business. I mean, that's the big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:33) No, I've been seeing the rise of the chief digital officer too, and that's definitely the way—I mean, things are going more digital. Right? They're not going less digital.

(Nick at 00:40:42) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:42) Did you see the Elon Musk interview with Joe Rogan the other day?

(Nick at 00:40:49) No. I'm always scared to watch Elon Musk at the moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:53) There's no weed. He didn't smoke weed on this podcast, on this latest one. But no, he just talks about how we're already—one thing that's interesting is he talks about how we're sort of already cyborgs. It's just the bandwidth is really low because we have to type things in, get information, and consume it back out. And he thinks that that's just going to collapse. Right? Like, it's going to just become closer and closer and closer until we have the neural links in our head, and we can just get the results and communicate how we want. Does that future—does that excite you, terrify you? What are your thoughts on that?

(Nick at 00:41:27) I think there's two phases. There's the initial phase where it terrifies me, and then it excites me. And I can explain a little bit about that. It's, you know, when you start a company, you have immediate alignment because you're just there by yourself. And you have a vision, and you have a goal.

(Nick at 00:41:50) And everyone just respects the fact that you're not out of business yet, and survival is a huge victory. And the people who join your company, they agree with the idea, and you interview them all yourself, and you build a really cohesive early culture, and the world doesn't change that fast. So you've got fifteen, twenty people, and you're all aligned. And because everybody sort of self-selected in. And when a company gets bigger, that starts to drift because you have more people.

(Nick at 00:42:23) And the best description I saw of this is the company's culture has to shift from tribal to the customer at some point because you need something external to align a larger organization. And if you try to maintain that tribal instinct, it really doesn't respect people's agency. It doesn't respect that people are different. It doesn't respect different ideas. What's interesting from a leadership perspective—where everybody just agreed with you because they joined because they agreed with you—now you're shifting and your goal is cultivating alignment.

(Nick at 00:43:03) And, you know, you're putting together teams and practices and plans and measurements that get everyone focused on the external goal and on the customer and on the strategy, and alignment is the goal. It's a drift away from, you know, sort of the initial shared idea. It's now shared goals. When I think about technology—sorry, this is a little bit of a long setup.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:30) Keep going.

(Nick at 00:43:31) Things fragment really, really quickly in a culture because everybody has great ideas and there's so much information out there. And you see it in our culture now in North America, particularly the polarization of political views and thinking and practices. And, you know, being able to focus on a few things that are aligned with your goals is very profound from a human sort of health and mental wellness. And, you know, it's about your identity. It's about your focus.

(Nick at 00:44:08) It's about where you put your energy. If you're always trying to figure out everything all the time, you start to develop a lack of focus, and you end up with anxiety because you're just trying to find a common picture in a soup of ideas. And to me, that's what digital is. That's what the news is now because it's, you know, the click-baity aspect of it, the algorithms driving content. It's not actually driving strong human outcomes.

(Nick at 00:44:40) When you think about a team and you think about a goal and you think about how you work, you know, I would fully support someone hiring a company that does waterfall project delivery because there's a need for that kind of work in certain types of industries with certain types of human sort of risk factors and whatnot. Um, but Rangle is not interested in that because that's not who we are. Right? We are focused on a particular market segment. We provide lean agile solutions and a continuous delivery partnership model to create customer experience-centric outcomes for companies that don't have those capabilities themselves.

(Nick at 00:45:20) That doesn't mean that's the only way of doing things, but it allows everybody to focus on that. And that means we get to keep our sanity. We get to be innovative. We get to be creative. We get to create real value.

(Nick at 00:45:32) We get to help our clients. And we know where we stand. As soon as you have technology guiding you, you just don't have an environment that is sane, really. So taking that a little further—so we improve the bandwidth from our digital. And, you know, ultimately, what I think we need is something that understands, you know, more of the human spirit and the human mind and the importance of how we do storytelling and how we think about things.

(Nick at 00:46:10) And we need to curate our experiences. And, you know, we've traditionally curated our experiences through all art and culture. And I found, like, in a very interesting way, I become much more passionate about things—maybe because I'm getting older, I don't know. But things that are human, that have art, that have, you know, human spirit, I find that helps because that allows me to orient on purpose and orient on things outside.

(Nick at 00:46:39) Otherwise, we just start, you know, reacting to everything. So I think it's going to be terrible at first, and we'd need to find—and I think we're getting better, like, you know, people have recognized the issues with social media and whatnot. But there's probably going to be this period where you almost want to stay somewhat disconnected until it's good enough to be connected again, because it's going to be not very human and not very effective until the technology is good enough that we can create the technology to support us in a more human way. So I could see AI becoming effective in, you know, not in sort of brainwashing us, but curating our experiences so we can, you know, live in a focused way as opposed to a manipulated sort of random way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:31) Yeah. Well, I mean, I brainwash myself. Right? Like, what I choose to curate in my environment is performing that outcome of brainwashing. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:42) If I surround myself with, you know, leadership books or people who are motivated and people who are changing the world, that has a direct impact on my thoughts and my behaviors and my actions and my future.

(Nick at 00:47:54) Yeah. And I guess what I worry about is we lose that. Right? That control, because we're now getting so much information that's coming, you know, at us, and that's being curated for us, and we're not in control.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:09) And that's where that little laser beam of focus comes in. And so I'm always trying to figure out, like, if I just did one thing today that would move me forward towards one of my goals, like, what would that be? I also started waking up in the morning and making goals for the year, but only about three. And they're kind of big. By the way, getting good at goal-making is really hard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:34) I mean, I've been working at this for years, and I've tried all these different styles and methodologies and different things. And I've kind of figured out what works for me, but I've put together these macro goals. Like, I want to improve my health. And then I just ask myself, like, what's one thing today that I'm going to do to move that goal forward? And then I'm only ever working with, like, three goals.

(Joel Beasley at 00:48:53) Like, I want, you know, my business to be profitable to a certain dollar amount. Okay. That's my goal for 2020. I just—now I have freedom. Like, what am I going—what projects am I going to execute against, or what can I do today to just put me in a better position, reduce my probability of failure against achieving it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:13) And I found that that works because I'm a pretty creative person, and so that gives me these cement pillars to orbit around, to anchor myself on. So I know I'm moving myself forward on a life path, but at the same time, I get creativity to how am I going to chip away at that every day.

(Nick at 00:49:32) Yeah. I like that. You know, similar experience. It's, you know, ultimately, it's about what works for each individual in the way that your mind is wired. So my wife, she looks at my sort of enthusiasm for planning tools and task management and things, and she just sort of looks at me like I'm crazy because she just writes down a simple list of what she needs to do.

(Nick at 00:49:58) She does it, and then she continues. But I tend to have a lot of diverse interests, and I get distracted fairly easily, and I don't have the same attention span that she has. So, you know, so I try to do these lists, but these lists tend to get out of control. And then I sort of declare list bankruptcy, and I'll start again. And that was what happened, you know, for a number of years.

(Nick at 00:50:20) So, you know, I found out that, you know, going with less is very helpful. And I had to really, you know—I love information and I love learning, but I got very, very disciplined at just, you know, not collecting things and being very comfortable with just deleting things and reducing the clutter. And so I have a discipline now where I have less clutter, mental planning sort of initiatives, and get down to a few things that are really the key things that I need to focus on. And don't let myself get distracted by anchoring on that. I started doing seventy-day plans, so where I focus on a few things for seventy days, and I picked seventy days based upon the, you know, sixty days, sixty-six days for a habit.

(Nick at 00:51:15) And that's where I didn't drink, you know, between first—it was seventy days. It was ten weeks, and I just sort of loaded that up and figured I'd run with that. And then at the end of the seventy days, see what I've learned and, you know, certain things become habits, and then I roll into the next. So that's how I started meditating again last summer, and I've done it continuously now since then. I took up cycling because I had a foot injury.

(Nick at 00:51:40) I couldn't run for a while, so I took up cycling and, you know, so I focused on that and that became sort of ingrained in my habit. So a lot of focus also on pushing things into the habit space so I don't actually have to think about it and exercise my willpower.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:56) Isn't that amazing how that works, especially as, like, I'm getting older? I realize I can get things programmed. I look at myself as a computer, and I'm like, I can program things into me, and then they get done without me thinking about them.

(Nick at 00:52:07) Yeah. It's pretty fascinating. And, you know, things that were tiring aren't tiring anymore because they're just instinctive. And if it's instinctive, it's just a much different impact on our brain and our willpower. Like, it becomes free from a willpower perspective, which is a huge, huge win.

(Nick at 00:52:29) And when you think of all the things that we have to do in life and all the things we have to focus on, you know, if something can become sort of automatic, then it frees up our capacity to tackle other higher value things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:40) It's like programming. Like, the work is creating, writing the program. And once it's written, it operates.

(Nick at 00:52:48) It is. And then it's actually one of the things I'm really excited about. So from an organizational perspective, you know, the ability to focus and, you know, what it's talking about. But from a personal perspective, there's a lot of similar concepts. And I read Thinking Fast and Slow last year by Daniel Kahneman.

(Nick at 00:53:05) And I've just been seeing the whole world through the system one, system two filter since, and it's been pretty fascinating. And the concept of biases and recency bias, availability bias—he did a great podcast with Tyler Cowen on noise. And he actually states in it that he thinks noise is a more profound challenge for humans than bias. And most of Thinking Fast and Slow is about cognitive bias. So he has another book that'll be coming out sometime this year, I think, on noise.

(Nick at 00:53:38) So I'm pretty excited about that. But that concept of programming ourselves is actually really, I think, resonates well when you read that book, because, you know, once things become available, we just—you know, they're the things that shape our worldview. So by making something else a little stronger, you know, in our minds or hacking our minds, so to speak, then we can, or using other framing tools, we can perceive and see things differently. So it speaks to a healthier sort of mind and a, you know, a self-understanding that gives us a better, maybe more tolerance and better instincts around different points of view.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:18) How would I find that podcast you mentioned?

(Nick at 00:54:22) It's on noise. So Daniel Kahneman, noise, and Tyler Cowen, C-O-W-E-N.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:30) Awesome. I'm gonna listen to that because that's a good way for me to describe the difference between before having my diet the way it was and after is it was a profound experience where the best way to describe it was things just quieted down. It was like a clarity or just like a noise, like a signal versus noise. It's like somebody just turned the white noise down. It's like somebody's like, here's a knob.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:52) I'm just gonna turn the white noise down. And I was like, well, biologically, with my limited medical understanding, if your body is, like, fighting itself, right, and that's creating a lot of—that's like a subroutine. Like, it's like a subprocess running that's taking up the memory. And if you just kill that thing, right, it frees up the memory, and you have more working memory. You have more clarity. You can enjoy life more.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:15) And I haven't even, like, stacked more things on my to-do list. What I've—for me, it's just been, like, enjoying my overall experience. Like, I'm just going through, you know, this past week with just more memory, like, just a better, clearer feeling while I do the things that I already know drive revenue and create results.

(Nick at 00:55:34) That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:35) Yeah. My instinct was to pile a bunch of new stuff on. And I was like, no. I get so unhappy when I do that. You know?

(Nick at 00:55:43) So I started a new habit earlier this week, and it's sort of interesting because you just—you do lose certain momentum or you get tired of something. So I used to come home at night and I'd watch a couple of TED Talks. That's what I would do. So I wouldn't watch a TV show. I'd watch a couple of TED Talks.

(Nick at 00:55:59) Then I stopped and so I thought, oh, I'm gonna go make lunch because I'm at home, like everyone else. So what I do is I fire up a TED Talk because you can listen to a lot of them. And then, you know, what I do is I just sort of cook and listen, and then I go and, you know, watch the rest of it while I eat. They're about eighteen minutes, so I'm done, and I've got some sort of insight. And what I found, you know, I was talking about this a little earlier, is it just starts surfacing my creativity because it links to my other experiences, and it creates an external sort of focus.

(Nick at 00:56:33) You know, it gets me out of my head, out of just thinking about the business, thinking about Rangle, you know, and it opens up my creativity and my passion for things. So, you know, the one I was listening to today was an amazing talk about storytelling and someone who got hired to run storytelling workshops for medical students and doctors. And what they found was that it had a tremendous impact on mental wellness because it would get people to sort of share with other people and sort of connect with other people, understand other people had similar challenges, but also more have people remember, you know, the purpose behind what they're doing and the value and getting that reinforcement. And so it was interesting. It was a fascinating talk.

(Nick at 00:57:23) And then there was one right after I ended up watching too, and it was on mental wellness and teaching. And so, you know, with COVID, we think, you know, we hear a lot about frontline workers and the impact on them. Doctors have that all the time, and it's actually pretty stunning when you hear about the impact on doctors, their mental sort of wellness and just a regular sort of environment. And then teachers as well who are continuously, you know, responsible for educating these other humans, and those humans come in with all their other sort of challenges in life and the impact there. So there's really inspiring but also, you know, humanizing couple of talks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:04) That's a good point you just brought up. Like, I'd say there's the change or the evolution in the business world. Today, it's like, you know, we have underperforming people who normally perform pretty well. It's common knowledge or at least penetrating the common knowledge that we would, you know, talk to them like a human and figure out, like, what's going on, you know, like, as part of our diagnosis process, you know, just be real with them. And that just drew a parallel to, like, what do teachers do when they have a, you know, an eighth or twelfth grade student or maybe a college kid?

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:40) Like, are they getting involved on that level? I'm curious now.

(Nick at 00:58:47) It really depends on the teacher. And even if they're not, they're still—like, the one talk I saw today was you just still absorb it. Right? So, and you absorb it, and you just—you can't not. Right?

(Nick at 00:59:02) And so it was pretty touching on, you know, that, just, you know, a teacher that is really seeing that year after year after year. All those stories, all those people, all those victories and all those challenges and, you know, the toll and the impact is—and how do they maintain their sort of mental wellness in that kind of an environment and doctors as well. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:34) This is great. What's, like, the big call to action that your customers respond to or how they find you?

(Nick at 00:59:41) So there's two different areas right now. So I talked about our start and putting together these, you know, customer experience application teams. That's often how they find us because they're trying to build something and they find us and they like how we talk about it and they reach out and we work with them or we meet them at a show. I talked a lot about, you know, linking the organization and creating the ability to, you know, build and ship customer experiences without getting stuck in the organizational friction. And so we've been doing a lot of work in design systems lately.

(Nick at 01:00:18) And design systems are an integrated sort of strategy design and development platform where you capture as much of the strategy, the design, the brand, and you create a single source of truth so that your front-end customer experience teams can actually problem solve. And, you know, I think the need to get customer-centric and companies just can't do that—that's where we're really looking to partner with our clients. You wanna get customer-centric, you need to find a way to create front-end customer-centric teams that have the ability to problem solve. And that is the biggest challenge in organizations because there's so many walls that go from budgeting and strategy and design and governance. By the time there's a team building something, almost all of their ability to make a decision has been removed, and they don't even know why certain things exist.

(Nick at 01:01:20) So overplanning paralyzes teams. You need to create teams that have a goal, and they need to be able to chase that goal, but that's hard in an enterprise. And so using design systems and lean agile practices and front-end teams and continuous delivery, we're partnering with our clients to fix that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:45) Excellent. So we'll put links in the show notes, and the website is just rangle.io?

(Nick at 01:01:52) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:53) Excellent. Is there anything else that we need to cover we didn't get to today?

(Nick at 01:01:58) Yeah. I actually had one prepared answer. So if I could go back in time, you know, what would I tell a younger version of myself? So, you know, when you're younger, it's all about sort of figuring it out and especially if you're coming at it from a technology perspective. It's about—it's an invention thing.

(Nick at 01:02:19) And, you know, and everybody sort of knows this if you've been involved with any kind of startups, and it's like, you know, no. It's not an invention thing. It's a team thing. And if I were to give myself advice, a younger version of myself, seize the opportunities to develop leadership skills earlier in addition to your sort of, you know, technology and consulting skills. Because, you know, ultimately, it's not just about an idea.

(Nick at 01:02:47) It's not just about an invention. It's not about problem solving. It's about working with other people and executing on something. And I think almost any company can be successful if they can find better ways to execute and deliver more value. And almost any startup can succeed, you know, if they can survive long enough to find the market that probably exists for their idea.

(Nick at 01:03:12) And that's leadership. That's team building. That's—and that's something that I was pretty oblivious to until, probably—I'm not even gonna embarrass myself by saying when, but I'll say in my thirties, I started getting a little more sort of aware because up to that, I was just too busy learning about the work I did. And I never spent enough time learning about people. And, you know, that's the advice I'd give my younger self.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:40) Amazing. Well, you're killing it today, my friend. Beautiful company, growing, building cool products. I'm really happy to know you and get to spend some time with you.

(Nick at 01:03:49) Yeah. And really enjoyed the talk as well. It was inspiring for me. I was good to hear your story, and I'm gonna see about getting myself tested for food sensitivities.

(Joel Beasley at 01:03:59) I would definitely do that. I think any human should do that. Right. Alright. Awesome.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:04) Talk soon.

(Nick at 01:04:05) Talk soon. Thank you so much, Nick. Thanks. Bye.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:06) Bye.