Niklas Helgesson CTO of NA-KD

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:01) Hello, my friends. Today I want to share with you a bit about what I've been doing to grow as a leader personally. I've been working hard to own my morning and take care of myself. Getting up and doing a quick run first thing in the morning, pushing myself to grow and expand, it's been pretty challenging, but I've been doing it for a couple weeks now. It's amazing how much more energy I have when I push through that feeling of being tired and just do it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:25) From the moment my alarm goes off until I'm out on the sidewalk is about four minutes flat. I've been tracking my exercise and my food. For the food tracking, I've been using this free app called MyFitnessPal, and it's really great because it lets you take pictures of the barcodes on the food so you don't have to enter everything. The book Extreme Ownership has really helped me with understanding discipline, which is a prerequisite for success as a technology leader. Making yourself do something that you don't want to do when you know it needs to be done is the equivalent of a superpower.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:57) I'm sharing this with you because our guest today, Niklas, is all about improving and growing. He's been engaging on LinkedIn and contributing excellent leadership quotes. Thanks, Niklas. Today we are talking to Niklas, the CTO of NA-KD, and we discuss setting core values for your team to work and live by, how to get a new tribe to accept you as their leader, and learning what drives you from your past experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:27) All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast. I'm very excited, and I'm sure you're very excited because your company is growing really fast right now.

(Niklas at 00:01:50) Yeah. I'd say that the topic for this meeting should be NA-KD and my part in that company, so I can start off with a little how I got into contact with the company because it's peculiar and quite an old company. So my—I have run into Jarno, which is the founder of NA-KD sometimes previously, since I have a background in e-commerce here in Sweden for the last ten years. And he has started a lot of very successful e-commerce companies, one being Nelly.com, which started, I think, 2005 and grew for at least, I think, eight years. It was quite fast growth. And then he sold that and started some company within, I think, pet foods online or something, which was also quite successful.

(Niklas at 00:02:43) But the attempt here in NA-KD was, I think, a really peculiar one and really fast growth. So they started in 2015, and I had heard about Jarno previously. So my first contact with NA-KD was in spring 2017, about a year ago. So I recall him from—the new CFO in the company, and he explained that they had a challenge for me. Being one of my most, so to speak, in e-commerce was the migration of platform when you move from one platform to another and the risks and processes in there. So I've done that quite a lot of times.

(Niklas at 00:03:25) So they had gotten word of me, and now they had a really important business project for NA-KD, which had outgrown their current platform, and also the business model for the company had changed. So it was really important to change the platform to a more suitable one and also to accommodate for the tremendous growth. So we actually sold this as a challenge in one of the, I think, top 30 or 40 fastest growing companies in Europe. And this was also in the fashion retail fashion industry, which I, of course, was completely new to, although I had been working in retail previously. And this was a small company out of some startup, more of an industrial facility in quite rural Gothenburg.

(Niklas at 00:04:13) But he was actually able to sell this since he explained that this was more of a business project than an IT project since the project was—they were very afraid that it would fail because they were, I think, one third of the time plan was already past, and they hadn't actually gotten any progress at all. So I was curious. So I went to them, and I spoke with the founder, Jarno, and the CFO and them. And they explained that this was probably the most important project in 2017 for the company. And it was a migration of e-commerce and also payment system that they had included for the system architecture since previously it was a more simple e-commerce platform based on PHP and Magento version.

(Niklas at 00:05:09) So now—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:10) I'm familiar with those.

(Niklas at 00:05:11) I really like Magento as well, but for that purpose and what they had done with the Magento, it was quite skewed. So it—

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:19) Yeah, they usually do that, right?

(Niklas at 00:05:21) So it was probably in the last minute that we were able to change this. But the key here being since I realized that was probably a twelve-month project to do, the project plan was six months only. So it was quite a steep curve. And when I got aboard, I think almost two months had already elapsed. And for me to be able to deliver on this, which was—I think the predecessors had done quite a sloppy job in the whole analysis and the demand.

(Niklas at 00:05:51) So it was a really impossible project. But one of the first things I did was to accept the role as the CTO and project manager of this was to have the staff, the developers, to elect me as their manager, not to be appointed by their CFO or CEO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) You have to get the buy-in from the team.

(Niklas at 00:06:10) Exactly. So this was one of the key issues for me to have the group's approval as their manager or leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:17) And how did you do that?

(Niklas at 00:06:18) I worked closely with them for a couple of weeks, and what we did was, firstly, to remove the influence of the CEO, the founder, and the CFO from the developers to actually create some stable work environment to say that you can have meetings with me, but you should not interfere with the developers because they need to have some kind of peace and quiet. That was, I think, one of the issues to actually be a filter for the developers or the upper management to be able to remove some of the really ludicrous requests and to do some kind of sanity filter. And then to create the environment of peace and quiet. And then we worked closely for a couple weeks, and then we had a discussion or the CEO had discussion of having me appointed as a new CTO, which they approved. So then, since they had selected me as their leader, I think then we could also set things up.

(Niklas at 00:07:17) So we had quite a steep plan where the product was remodeled. We had some scope reductions of things that were really not MVP. Because the important thing with this project is we did have a very, very hard, firm set deadline in November. So we were able to adjust the scope of the project and to adjust the budget somewhat. But the deadline was quite firmly set, and I will come to why that was important later on.

(Niklas at 00:07:48) So we had some tough months.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:51) I like—you made a good point because rather than saying, oh, we're gonna hire 20 more people so we can meet the deadline, instead you just adjusted the scope, right? That's what you do.

(Niklas at 00:08:01) Exactly. And you have—so, of course, a balance, because you cannot hollow out everything or take too many shortcuts. So you have to have some kind of baseline on what to deliver. But the thing is that the CEO, the founder, had some unrealistic expectations of this. And the case that the old platform would never have stood close scrutiny because it was really—I can talk about it now as an amusement park because the operations went up and down, and we had some severe shortages and major incidents.

(Niklas at 00:08:38) So I think it was probably—it was running, and we sold quite good, but we would never have been able to continue the growth we have now. So we were at peak, and we were really having issues maintaining that old platform. And also, we are, of course—we had a new round of investors in the fall of 2017. And one of the key things that we would never have gone through any tech DD or due diligence with the old platform because they would have, of course, realized that it was not sustainable for the new sales. So for us to be successful in the new financing that fall, it was critical to have the new platform up and running.

(Niklas at 00:09:21) So what we did also, we, of course, had—we had fun. So we had some three o'clock beers where we could take a beer at work Friday afternoon, and we had some quiz teams. So we had a lot of—we worked harder and we had to increase the pace as well. So we did some quite tough weeks at the end of this project. But what is also interesting in this company is that most of the staff are quite young.

(Niklas at 00:09:47) So out of 150 employees, about, let's say, 80% are below 27 years of age. So it's quite young staff and highly motivated and still into the startup kind of vibe. So when we did some acceptance testing in November, we had a weekend where 25 staff members from non-IT departments like marketing and purchasing came and did a weekend with us to do acceptance testing. So it was kind of a cool company involvement, which is also quite nice to have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:24) Yeah. When you bring all the departments together and everyone feels that sense of culture. Does the culture in your development team match the culture in other parts of the company?

(Niklas at 00:10:33) I'd say that prior to these changes we did then—because it's also what really drew me to this company and to this project and to this role was that I think no one actually believed that we could pull this off because the IT department had a reputation of having had everything 80% completed 80% of the time. So they really never finished anything and delivered on things. So we were always late. And the first—the first platform they started in 2015, starting the company, was, I think, six months delayed. So what we did here that we actually delivered on time changed everything.

(Niklas at 00:11:15) So going from being like almost some kind of internal joke for development and IT department, we actually gained a lot of notoriety in this project and with what we set with the new platform, which was actually what catapulted us into 2018 because we also, in late 2017, received funding from a French company which invested $40 million in us. So we are now building NA-KD 2.0. And that would never have been possible without the new platform.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:47) So just so I recap. So you come in here, you've got a department that's getting 80% of the stuff done 80% of the time, so they're not producing much value at all to the organization. Just a lot of incomplete projects. They accept you as their leader through you working with them for a handful of weeks, maybe two weeks, very closely, and then they vote you in as their leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:08) You then shift the culture so that the rest of the company's culture matches the technology, or so that you pull the rest of the company's culture into technology so that they're in sync. And then from there, what you do is you build an actual useful product that brings value to the rest of the organization, which then gives your department or the technology department, like, notoriety and respect from the rest of the company because they're actually bringing value and helping them with what they're trying to do.

(Niklas at 00:12:33) Yeah, exactly. And the thing here is when I first got approached by this, I'd say that there was probably one person in the entire company or in the entire project that believed that this could be done besides me. And then it was also a matter of convincing. Because both the CEO and the IT department themselves were in serious doubt about this being done at all. So it was also a matter of, bit by bit, building up the confidence and trying to show that this can actually be done and being the stubborn person who actually came to office first and left lost, and to show that it's just a matter of—it's like to say, how do you devour an elephant?

(Niklas at 00:13:18) Yes, you divide it and take it bit by bit to be able to create something bigger. And also what complicated—we had a supplier which was like a premium partner for this e-commerce platform. And they started the project, the six-month project that really should have taken twelve months. They started this with taking six months of vacation, all of them. So they actually also kind of a big stress factor for the company that they were not—that they were procrastinating. So I'd say that they also didn't believe that this could be done, and therefore they didn't put any effort in. So I'd say it was a lot of politics and PR in having this done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:03) Wow. And so when the French company came in and put money in, was that because everyone saw the transition and saw how fluid everything was going well? Is that what brought in that investor?

(Niklas at 00:14:16) Yes. I'd say that the new platform and the IT was probably one third or 50% of this. So it was also since we are a product company in fashion. It has to do with the designers and the purchasing and the brand. So the NA-KD brand is actually very highly valued. And if you search for those statistics from Google and see the other, like, H&M and other Swedish brands, the NA-KD brand will rate higher in global searches because the brand awareness of our customers, which would be women between 18 and 35, we have extremely high brand awareness.

(Niklas at 00:14:52) So as I say, the IT platform is a means to deliver on that brand. So without that, we would not have gotten the funding, definitely. And I also want to stress what we did in IT department with the developers was we set some core values, aligning to the failure to deliver previously on that everything was almost 80% done all of the time, which partly was, of course, because upper management were constantly involved in replanning things for IT. And we claimed that we worked in some agile Scrum methodology, but it was mostly like one continuous ever-growing sprint that never was completed because they never were able to keep, like, sprint planning and doing proper framework. So we brought out three core values, which the staff themselves put out, and one was transparency.

(Niklas at 00:15:50) Like, we should always be transparent within the company of what we are working with and our roadmap and what is to be delivered on later. Because now that we have set the pace and we have shown that we can deliver, they will actually not push things because they know it's in the roadmap. So they know that it will be built eventually. Number two was integrity that when we promise something, we always deliver on it. So we should not make promises that we cannot deliver on, and we should make to the fullest extent to try to deliver on promises that have been made.

(Niklas at 00:16:21) And that's solidarity. So we work as a team, and we help each other out. And those are the core words, I think, that also contributed in bringing the team together and to making us much better on delivering on promises.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:35) I agree. I mean, those things that you established, those core values, are not just nice to have. They're prerequisites to you hitting the goal and to being able to pull everyone together.

(Niklas at 00:16:47) Definitely. Definitely. And the thing is that now we are at more of a—it's been a tough transition because it means that I've had to take a lot of fights with the CEO and other upper management to be able to get this leeway or, like, how should I put it? They believe in us as a department that we will work in the sprints and with the roadmaps so that we don't interfere or might try to micromanage us. But now we have that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:18) I have a question. Yes?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:19) So I'm really interested in the core values for a second. So you talk about them. Right? I can see how, you know, you would address the team and you would talk about them and establish them. But how would you bring them up in a day-to-day life to sort of like establish the culture?

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:35) Like, how would you continuously bring them up? I mean, did you print them out and stick them up on the wall? Did you constantly bring them up in conversation? How did you keep those three core values in front of you and not just an exercise that you did, and make it something that you actually lived?

(Nicholas at 00:17:50) I'd say that part of this was the first exercise where we actually brought forth the core values that we should have in IT, because I think that you should have some core values and they should be created as a group effort that you together with the staff will establish. And secondly, we, of course, we had them written down and we talked a lot about what the meaning was of those words. And I'd say that the most important is that you actually live like you learn, or so to speak, that you, when you speak about transparency, you will also have to invite and show it to others. And I had a discussion about one of my latest staff employees, a very senior developer, had gotten promised something from our CEO, something regarding his employment. I wasn't part of that discussion, and I don't think our CEO remembers it.

(Nicholas at 00:18:46) But it's very important to me as their leader to actually deliver on what we as a company have promised—the integrity core value. So I say that you have to actually set an example and actually show this for the staff as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:00) And then when there was like a violation, did you just address that independently, one-on-one with the individual?

(Nicholas at 00:19:08) Always. I'd say that I have had staff, like manager role, for about 10 years, and I have never taken a resignation from any staff. I have unfortunately been forced to terminate some employment, but I never have an employee resign on me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:28) Fantastic.

(Nicholas at 00:19:29) Yeah. And, you know, it has always been like a very, very fast-growing business, which is an issue of itself, or or a very fast decline, which is also very hard. So it's always been companies that have been very fast-shifting. But I say there's—I think it's an American that speaks a lot about leadership called Simon Sinek.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:54) I love Simon.

(Nicholas at 00:19:55) Yeah, yeah. And he—yeah, I think he has a lot of this figured out, that like why you have to start with the why, et cetera, and always the why. Why does leadership last? So it's one example of, I think you have to be a part of it, but also to be standing on the sideline and just allow staff to go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:14) Yes. So that's really interesting. So you obviously have read Simon Sinek's book. And what other things do you do? Like, I—what I do, I'll tell you what I do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:25) I just constantly read and listen to Audible, and I'm always consuming different sorts of leadership content. And I keep it around me all the time so that it's, you know, in my focus because if you stop paying attention to a topic, it fades into the background. So do you do the same thing? Do you keep leadership material in front of you frequently, like Simon's and other leaders?

(Nicholas at 00:20:49) Yeah. And I try to, because I think the—Simon is one, but I think there is like a paradigm shift in coming from an old industrial society where you worked in the factory and you had a manager which was like hardcore appointed boss, which set the rules, like an authority figure, into shifting into more and more of the—what Simon talks about—the leader being more of an informal role that you don't necessarily have to be appointed to. You can have a manager, but you can also have a leader in the same department. They're not necessarily the same person. So I think like in the digital era, what we are now, the rule of the leader would be very much more important.

(Nicholas at 00:21:33) And then the perhaps the old manager type of figure will diminish some. So I think there's a lot of interesting like TED Talks, et cetera, about the topics of the new—the new type of management being decentralized, they will run in—

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) Oh, I was talking to the CTO of TED this weekend. He only lives an hour from me.

(Nicholas at 00:21:54) Oh, very nice. Very nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) Yeah. He's a real cool guy. His name is Gavin. But no. That—you make some really good points about leadership.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:05) And I'm kind of curious to know, like, where do you see your next stage in leadership? Like, where are you focusing on in growth in your role? Like, what's on the top of your mind lately?

(Nicholas at 00:22:18) I'd say that I'm very comfortable where I am right now because NA-KD is a very—most challenging but also extremely interesting company, because it's a never dull moment and every day will give you new challenges, which is good. And I think when we started in 2015, the—say the new site was up six months later. So March 2016, then we sold, like, we'll see about $20 million the first year, and then it was $50 million last year, 2017. And we will probably $100 million this year. And that kind of growth produces exceptional challenges on everything—staff, facilities, IT, of course.

(Nicholas at 00:23:10) So I say that I am very happy with my current position in this company. And I am 43 years of age now, and I'd probably not ever going to be like the strategic PowerPoint-making plans kind of leader. So I'm more comfortable with being part of a smaller team. We are now 10 FTEs in the IT department at NA-KD, so with my consultants, so we are like 16, I think, totally in the product.

(Nicholas at 00:23:42) But I would always be the person who like to roll up the sleeves and the shotgun and to dig into things and be part of it more than just standing in the board meetings and producing problems.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:56) Me too. So how many people are on the development team total?

(Nicholas at 00:24:00) I have 10 FTEs now, and we are right now—we are 10 consultants working from remote. So we are 20 in total, but 10 employees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:14) Nice. And then how—have you faced any challenges with—so you're in the growth, and so you're picking up some consultants because you'll probably need some specialists. Right? Because we all have generalists and specialists that we need. But what have you noticed as far as the culture when making the team more remote?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:34) Have you faced any challenges with involving the remote team back into the company culture, or what have you learned there?

(Nicholas at 00:24:41) Yes. I'd say when I started here, I had some, almost like—what's it called?

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:51) Preconception.

(Nicholas at 00:24:52) Yeah, pre—exactly. That's the one. Preconception. And then I was dead against the remote things. So I thought that if I have consultants, quite expensive ones, I'd like to keep them in the team because both to transfer knowledge, but also be able to keep track on the hours. And, you know, if someone is misbehaving, it's a good chance to talk with them. And that has changed working here because now we have—we have the daily stand-ups, the Hangouts. So everyone is able to work from remote, even the staff in customer are able to work from home if necessary. So we work quite dynamic.

(Nicholas at 00:25:26) Yeah. We have 9:00 a.m. We have the daily stand-ups for about 15 minutes, quite disciplined. And we have, we have time logging in. So it's—and I think it's possible to work almost from everywhere. And I say it's easiest—matter of setting the structure and in today's work environment, I don't see any issues at all with having it distributed.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:48) So how do you involve them in sort of like the human aspect? So the time tracking, the deliverables, all that, I understand. But what do you do to intentionally kind of like involve them in the company aspect, or are they at a distance?

(Nicholas at 00:26:04) I agree with you that it has been an issue of consultants being remote. We had some like almost work exchange where some of the developers from my team went down to the consultants, which are—they're about 300 kilometers away, which—two, two and a half hours by train. It's not that far, but they went there and they were on some—we had a couple of programming and they worked very tightly with the consultants for a couple of days. And we did that for for a couple of months, which I think was also very successful. And then we had some—we had have had some events where we went out, went out and have a dinner and had some beers, et cetera, also. So it's—but it yeah.

(Nicholas at 00:26:47) I agree with you that it actually complicates the human part of it. The coffee machine talk, et cetera, will be less. So we use Slack for daily communication, but it's not comparable to actually human interaction, unfortunately. So—

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:01) There's actually a reoccurring topic that has been coming up on the show, and it's sort of like the work-from-home depression that you get because you're not going out into the world for large portions of the day. So that's something that is new because we didn't have a lot of work-from-home, you know, 25 years ago, but we're getting a lot more of it now. So now we need new skills and techniques in order to not become, you know, too depressed and and to be—in order to get that human interaction that we need because we're built as people to interact with each other. And sometimes you just need to look into someone else's eyes or like have a conversation or a high-five, you know, like the water cooler stuff you were talking about.

(Nicholas at 00:27:44) Definitely. Definitely. So I'd say that we try to have—and I also substitute to some of the consultants that were in the team that were 300 kilometers away from some local ones in Gothenburg that are able to see with it in our office, just because, as you mentioned, there is the extra dimension of the presence in the office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:10) Oh, that's really smart. I'm taking notes over here because because it's really cool how you do that. You found consultants—yeah. Because you understand remote is part of it, but you have intentionally sought out consultants that have the potential to be able to come into the office from time to time to develop those relationships.

(Nicholas at 00:28:30) Yeah. I'd say it's—and it's funny because we are now doing—we have very like a balanced work schedule. So we deploy and release them. In the project that we did last year was more—and was quite—within some 60-hour work weeks as well. And so now it's balanced out. We do normal 40 hours—which, and it's actually some of the developers that mentioned that they missed the old times when we did the project, when we did the late-night pizza and beer, and we worked very much like startup. So what we have done is we also tried to involve the consultants in customer to be part of the—but it's of course, it's a balance. You cannot push 60-hour weeks for very long. So it's a matter of proving something, and then—then it's actually—it's always been voluntary.

(Nicholas at 00:29:23) So those who were family or et cetera are, of course, not required to work long hours.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:29) Do you have any children?

(Nicholas at 00:29:30) Yeah. I have two. I have a daughter of nine years and a son of one and a half. So it's interesting. It's that they challenge my leadership skills constantly.

(Nicholas at 00:29:45) So it's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:47) Isn't it like watching little machine learning algorithms gain experience?

(Nicholas at 00:29:52) Yeah. Definitely. And then it's also—what it puts—it puts time in a very peculiar perspective because my nine-year-old daughter, I remember being one year old quite recently. So it's a very, very, very rewarding but also challenging experience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:11) Yeah. It's also challenging for you to watch them grow so fast and see, wow, time is just speeding up.

(Nicholas at 00:30:19) Yeah. Definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:20) And then you have opportunities like this. Like, you know, obviously you're inside your life, but from the outside, you seem to be really in a great position as far as you doing something great. Like, it looks to me—these your whole 10 years led up to this moment now. Right? Like, like NA-KD. Right? Because you've gone in there and you've leveraged a full decade of experience to execute, come through, and be responsible for bringing the platform that has allowed this growth.

(Nicholas at 00:30:53) Yeah, definitely. And I think that one benefit from from being a senior is that you should really learn both about your experience and your mistakes and what drives you, and also what will deter you from taking an assignment or a challenge. And what I've learned about myself is that it's like the roll-up-your-sleeves on the short and to get your hands dirty—we talked about recently.

(Nicholas at 00:31:23) That businesses are either in fast growth or in fast decline is something that I really enjoy working with because it's a quite severe situation and also high stakes and quite complex problems. But when you have actually stabilized and you're going into more of a maintenance phase, I quite rapidly lose interest because it will be too much of a regular nine-to-five and quite predicted. And here, I think I can tell you that there is no day like the yesterday. So there will always be a quite fast touch, but also quite good challenges.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:12) Yeah. So I've been thinking a lot about that too because, you know, I talk to different CTOs of various sized companies all the time, and, you know, I've been one myself for quite a while. So getting to know yourself is incredibly important. And I found that much like you, I crave that variety in the project. And then recently, I've been playing—now I haven't tested this recently, but I've been playing with it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:36) Right? Is can I get that variety need solved through the culture and the relationships at the business and allow the business itself to continue to grow at its pace and maybe be a little boring? In one sense, someone may see that, oh, you just wake up and go there every day, or, oh, you just continually do it like this. And so from one perspective, from someone who's outside the culture, it can look boring. But from being inside with the relationships and the challenges that we're choosing to seek out and solve, it's actually quite not boring. It's very exciting.

(Nicholas at 00:33:12) Yeah. I agree with you because there might be—and it's also from NA-KD, I say, we are quite lucky that most—or it's a culture thing that most of the employees are the people who like the challenge or the variety. And if you were like—so someone would prefer to work at the IRS or something to to point papers, you would probably not fit or you would not apply for a job there. So we have that in our DNA, like driven by very, very fast change, and it's also something I think has led to this tremendous growth. So it's not just an IT success, but it's successful in entire company, which also makes my role quite challenging because there is a lot of requests, changes on IT.

(Nicholas at 00:33:59) We don't have any physical stores, so the IT—the e-commerce platform is our—we have some business-to-business as well, but that's quite recent. So it has always been the e-commerce platform that is our main sales channel. And there can be a lot of—most of them are good, but there are some ludicrous requests as well. But it's a challenge of being able to funnel it into some kind of sprint or road map or something and to explain to the business that you can have this, but you cannot have this right now. So we have to prioritize.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) That's what you're learning at home, though.

(Nicholas at 00:34:31) Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:34) So yeah, this has been a fantastic call. I've learned so much. You've answered a million questions. What other big topics are on your mind that you really want to get out into the world?

(Nicholas at 00:34:46) I'd say that it's of course important to have fun, to laugh at things. And sometimes in stand-ups, I do some little joke or something just to lighten tension up. And you should remember to have fun because it's not always the biggest challenges or worst talk that it's all about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:12) Hey, you bring up a great point because as a leader, one of your abilities has to be to feel the energy of the room in your team, to understand it, and then to be able to intentionally change it by bringing it up or down as you need. Right? If it's way too high and everybody's way too excited all the time, nothing's getting done. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:33) There has to be that ebb and flow of balance, and you as the leader are the one who gets to set the pulse. You get to set the tone, the rate at which you go up and down, and then you have to be always aware of it. I have found that learning that is something I've only learned in the past two years. But once I figured it out, it's been incredibly beneficial to me to be able to pull together people.

(Nicholas at 00:35:57) Definitely, definitely. And also to almost take a step back and to listen and observe because developers are individuals. And some would like to have more challenges, and some would like to have the same level as previously. So it's important also to realize who—like we did in the earlier project—not everyone can do a 60-hour week or wants to, and it's very important to accept that.

(Nicholas at 00:36:28) And to the ones who want to have more challenges, you can keep rising the bar and, almost as a trainer for Olympics, you can raise the bar and make them more productive or have them learn new technologies. So as I see it, it's important to realize that everyone in the team would be an individual as well as part of the team.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:52) Right. Because the people that are hungry, it's your job to keep feeding them challenges. And the people that want to do the more repeatable task or the tasks that are less challenging, provided, you know, they're motivated and they get stuff done, but the ones that want to do the less challenging stuff, it's important to take that sort of work and then assign it to them and then allow the hungry people to keep solving and feeding them challenge. Yeah, this is great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:17) Yeah.

(Nicholas at 00:37:17) And I'd say that, as I said, it might be flawed, but I think more senior developers with family, et cetera, tend to be more reluctant to extreme challenges and more junior, new fresh out of school—they really hang, really like to learn, and can dig into almost everything. So I think we have a good mix. We have some junior, some senior, and we have a good culture and good mix of that so we can keep both momentum and stability.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:53) I've also noticed that languages, programming languages, also have cultures of their own in the sense that certain types of people program in certain types of languages.

(Nicholas at 00:38:05) Okay. How—can you elaborate on that, you said?

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:08) Yeah. In general, if you look at Python versus Ruby for specifics, you'll find that if you start reading the code of Python developers, it'll be drier. And if you read the code of Ruby developers, it'll be more fun and creative and upbeat.

(Nicholas at 00:38:29) Okay. I'll have to look into that. That sounds very, very funny.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:34) And if you look at the creators of the two languages, they have the personality of their code bases.

(Nicholas at 00:38:43) I can totally understand that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:45) Yeah. Check that out. That conversation came up the other day with another CTO, and I was like, yeah, I noticed that Python developers—not all of them. First of all, it's not a blanket statement.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:59) But I noticed if I run into 100 Python developers, you know, 60 of them are very similar to each other. And if I do the same with Ruby, it's the same thing. And so I went and looked. The person I was talking to pointed out the creator of Python openly considers it a dictatorship. He's handing down orders on how Python should be done.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:21) Whereas Mats, the creator of Ruby, is more of a community, relaxed, creative style person that, you know—and then you can see it through their language and the culture of the people who adopt the programming languages too. Yeah, which is just interesting.

(Nicholas at 00:39:38) I think I've also noticed something similar in being the front-end developer or the back-end developer, which I see has to do a lot with personality. Or it becomes—you will become a certain personality if you have a back-end approach. But I can see some parallels there as well, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:00) There's a lot of correlation between the personalities. Dude, thank you so much. Did you have a good time hanging out and talking?

(Nicholas at 00:40:07) Yeah. This has been fun. Yeah. I think it's very, very interesting to have an opportunity to share experiences with other CTOs. So this is—I really like the work you do. It's very both interesting and beneficial. So thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:22) Thank you. Yeah. Thank you so much. Where are you located, Nicholas?

(Nicholas at 00:40:26) I'm located in Sweden in Gothenburg, which is the second largest city in Sweden with about almost 1 million residents. It's large for being Sweden, but not a megacity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:40) Nice. We're going to be in Sweden at the end of this year, towards the end of this year. So when I'm there, I'm going to come by and see you.

(Nicholas at 00:40:46) That would be very, very fun. Exciting. Very nice. Yeah. So please contact me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:51) We'll have a beer and hang out. Yeah. I will. Thank you so much for listening to the Modern CTO Podcast. Share this. Get the word out. Thank you guys so much. I couldn't do it without you. I appreciate it. You guys are the absolute best.