Stories, Points, and Backlogs with Pivotal Tracker, guest Ronan Dunlop (Ep. 31)

Episode 18 · 53:31 · SRT · archive.org · all Tanzu Talk

well hello everybody it's a another edition of Pivotal Conversations this time we're back to our usual format with with richard myself and a uh and a guest we had a few i guess you could call them live because that sounds cool a few live to tape recordings that we did at spring one platform but now uh now that's all over with and we're back in our geographies and not sucking in the exciting vegas air it's a dry heat there people would tell me if you show up in las vegas from texas everyone's obsessed about differentiating their heat but i finally met someone from uh uh mississippi and you know we had some common ground about the i guess the wet heat as it were how about yourself richard did you have fun uh figuring out how the heat is different than up in seattle i did yeah i live in seattle i was in los angeles last week where there was just heat i guess it was dry you know 100 is 100 so i i guess heat is heat at some point you're just trying to justify uh the types of clothes you're wearing and how many showers you take yeah yeah that's that's a constant justification we do a roi pivot table on that showers and clothes changes and uh based on your top line growth never mind the bottom line optimization which is always expanding so totally unrelated to that comment why don't you introduce yourself guest hi uh happy to be here my name is uh ronan dunlop and i head up marketing for pivotal tracker which is uh pivotal's product management tool of choice well so we're gonna dive into that uh such a such as we we do diving in the the i get the second sort of half of the show but first we have some news items to go over just very little brief things so first of all i uh i mentioned we are back from SpringOne now we've at first i think because you know you have to edit the videos and stuff there was a bit of a trickle of videos that we have but i just noticed this morning one of our our uh our sales people john gross handler like posted a big old playlist of videos we have on youtube there's like no legion or nothing you can just go go check them out and there's uh there's one there i did a

presentation there and ignite one and one of those is in there and i think most all of the keynotes uh from from customers and users of pivotal are in there with all sorts of other delightful ones and we'll put a link to it in the show notes but man there's there's a lot of viewing in there yeah i think there's a hundred or so in there and then i think john uh jumped the gun which is exciting because once you share links then you can't tell people their embargo i know that's that's the uh the secret the secret of the secret of pivotal guerrilla marketing is just uh just post it see what happens but yeah there's no these are a lot of the high priority videos uh we have a a syndication deal with infoq we're going to also be publishing a lot of more technical talks through infoq over the next many months but these are a lot as you mentioned the keynotes a number of great customer case studies i don't know i mean you and i Coté attended a lot of us and then i was impressed with the quality of the case studies so it was fun to watch some of these i know some have already gotten shared socially and getting some good traffic yeah they are pretty nice well i'll be you know i think all of us will be but uh one of the things i always do with this these kind of things is is watch them and go in and like make urls of the time codes specific things because i was talking with someone recently you know a lot of the a lot of the type of content work and talking with people that i do kind of depends on uh extensive footnotes so i was remembering back when i was learning to write in middle school they used to make you write down facts on four by five note cards and it's sort of like you know you got to go into the videos and gather up all those note cards and as i understand it once you have a sufficient number of note cards an essay spontaneously creates itself so so that'll be fantastic it'll just be essays everywhere fantastic we should really call what we produce in like uh corporate marketing like essays wouldn't that be quaint like not a white paper like this is an essay that we have on on migrating from an esb good old essay right long form essays well speaking of essays another news item is that the uh gartner infrastructure as a

service magic quadrant is out i you know in one of my uh my other podcasts just last week that software defined talk we we talked about it in our uh i don't know kind of raunchy and rebald kind of way very we're a very clean family friendly podcast here very professional but uh there there's a reprint that you can get that and and so you can kind of read over it and and i'll you know i'll give more of a pointer to the i did a blog post of highlights from it and we talked about it in the podcast but i think for me uh you know i mean there's two things of interest one there's not that many uh vendors so to speak on the quadrant which is kind of interesting to think about and there's basically two groups as called out by the commentary itself the winners which if i remember are amazon and azure and then everyone else and that's that's that's the other part that's kind of a an interesting theme uh throughout the commentary of the magic quadrant is uh this i think i think the wording they have is like this phase of of the ias market is is over and check in back in like 2018 for another phase of it if it should occur and that other phase they kind of highlight a little bit of what they think um i forget all the authors it's definitely lydia and her gang but it's uh it's essentially like it's it seems to be that ias and paz are emerging more and more or that the leading ias vendors have a lot of paz functionality and they start they start showing up hand in hand which of course we care a lot about being in the don't call it a paz paz market ourselves yeah it's a good read i mean i we've got the reprint link in the show notes and it is a beast there's a lot of content in there but i think as you mentioned the top line takeaways are a azure is catching up and then b everyone else's niche i mean those are probably your two biggest takeaways coming from this and as you mentioned there's a lot of other good meaty stuff in there around kind of this convergence of application concepts and infrastructure concepts there's plenty of mode one mode two sprinkled in there for for goodness but overall i mean this is a culmination of a lot of work before

i i joined pivotal i was working for one of the is providers in the quadrant and you know that was a feat of of effort to get that survey filled out it was it's a monster so i i say that because there's a lot of data that goes into this this is not dartboard stuff this is not just who do i like this is extremely data driven and every mq is not the same it depends on the the team putting it together but this one you know they use the products a lot of interviews a lot of inquiries and then a giant survey a good data driven stuff in here you may not like where your favorite provider sits in there but it's hard to argue with the output yeah so i mean it's definitely worth uh worth running over there yeah i i think i think anyone who's had to uh uh fill out the surveys for magic quadrants has a whole different appreciation for them so they do give you out they give you a t-shirt when you're done which which i appreciate it that'd be fantastic maybe shot out from a cannon towards you that that would be that would be appropriate well you know we have a rare opportunity i think with with the news items to ask our guest as as a potential customer of that stuff because because tracker runs as a service if i remember so so do you guys over there like do you get all excited about the magic quadrant coming out like how do you think about where you run tracker and and uh where you operate it um that's an interesting question you know we we're you know we have some uh big players in our field and i think this whole space is changing to a certain degree uh you know there's the ibm's of the world the hp's of the world am i allowed to mention other people like that i'm not too too sure um and uh and you know they've done a you know a bang up job in the past of having these these highly sophisticated uh you know uh application life cycle management tools um and uh and you know i think you know pivotal has taken a very different much more agile approach to software development and i think this is something that is somewhat new to the enterprise and i do believe that these magic quadrants do focus on the larger institutions so we've come much we've come down from a bottoms-up approach from the startup world and and we're breaking into the enterprise more and more

on a team level i guess i should say and uh we just had we had a first discussion with um with some analysts was a week or two ago and talking about our position and uh it's interesting i don't think we you know i think if anything we pop up as a as a nice footnote as something to watch but you know we're not competing head to head with uh these these very large all-in-one uh tools but uh but you know the the funny thing about tracker is that it's you know it's it's got such an affordable price point that we're we're often in in many of these enterprises but uh just teams have decided to not really tell anybody just use tracker put it on their credit card and slip the expenses in somehow so so uh so it's interesting that we are in the enterprise but not you know serving right now 10 000 people for example right it's sort of the under the radar quadrant which which is which which which we kind of like actually sure but it's hard it's hard to get customer quotes when you're flying under the radar because they actually want to remain hush-hush to not be discovered yeah yeah and even the quadrant itself i think it was clear to point out that this is the enterprise perspective of the clouds as well they're right i mean you might love digital ocean you might love one of some of these other solutions and you may think they're superior for some because it fits your use case that this is a gartner-centric view of the world so you still you know based on other criteria your rankings may be different so sometimes people get worked up i know google's amazing they're the best cloud in the world for their their stuff absolutely and for their use case maybe they are for you that doesn't mean the gartnery mode one or two world where they're looking at enterprisey tools and integrations that it is the same fit so it's interesting it's not the only playbook or the only scorecard and then the uh the last news item speaking of like uh public cloud land i you know i didn't read too much in this but i remember the headline that uh this is like maybe last week or something that that the google cloud added in at sql or sql server support which is which is uh i mean i i i know two things about

that one it's microsoft's database and i remember i remember those my favorite some of my favorite tech ads ever where there was this is many years ago but they were like little eight bit like sort of pictures and they're big these big skyscrapers and helicopters were coming in dropping off sql servers on top of them it was like a uh it was an interesting sort of perspective but two you know if i remember market share i don't know if they're number one but they're definitely in number two like their sql server is way up there and i think i think i think it's one of those market as with most market share stuff if you know it it's obvious but if you haven't really thought about it you would you would not quite realize it but by this time like sql server turns out for probably a decade or more is is kind of a big deal so uh i think i think it's a little wonder that uh you see that added to to cloud support yeah google was a little late in adding kind of straight up windows support when they first launched google cloud was all linux centric and then they added windows and as you mentioned i don't know if they're still doing drone-based delivery as you described the sql servers and uh companies but uh yeah absolutely when you look at the transaction per second all the benchmarky stuff sql servers you know usually one or two they're from sales perspective it's a great deal for microsoft so for google to show that they're enterprisey and legitimate in this space adding sql server support was huge and then they also finally ga'd a lot of their other data products like they have a mysql relational database as a service they have a column based no sql storage big table and then they've got more of a document based no sql storage option and you know these are measured in you know of course in google scale like oh this you know processes trillions of requests like of course it does because it's a google product so all of those are generally available i think it just continues to reinforce i did dip into the gartner conference san diego last week and attended for a couple days and was impressed by the google sessions because you can argue that their breadth of service is still catching up to microsoft and azure you can argue that they're not as enterprisey but boy you can't

argue that they had don't have probably the most impressive tech underneath it as they've got this ridiculous network footprint and a ridiculous amount of compute so you know if if silly performance is your game then it's hard to argue with what google is doing speaking of magazine ads it's like on the back of every trade rag uh which is to say magazine about technology when it was in three dimensions very thin three dimensions but three dimensions nonetheless there used to be those ads that would compare sort of like uh spark chips to x86 chips and things like that and those are always entertaining what was it silly performance things just to see what your raw your raw speed was those is a great there should be some tumblr blog somewhere of old tech ads unfortunately i've recycled all those magazines but maybe i can go to the uh the used bookstore find some old ones and get you know a kajillion followers like me i would subscribe i would read it we've got at least one and then i'll i'll use a fake account to subscribe to myself and there'll be two it'll be fantastic well you know to to as an ad hoc kind of topic how how was the gardner catalyst thing how would you uh first of all what is it and then how would you summarize it yeah so gardner catalyst is their annual event i think they've been doing san diego for a little while now and this is their more technical oriented conference so this is meant to be the group that is a little more in the weeds of tech you still saw a lot of sport coats so this was not you know the hacker community this was still you know people wearing suits in some cases and and then those sorts of things but it's still meant to be more technical you know the pivotal booth is right next to mesosphere and you know and others who are doing containers and so this was not just you know show me high level load testing tools and and giant monolithic project tools so good good for that so good conference you know awesome audience i think it was like 16 1700 people great crowd good location and the content was good it was you know gardner it was definitely some higher level reviews of stuff some of the case study stuff was interesting some of the technical discussions were good but you know the

booth traffic i i did uh man the booth just as eye candy i didn't have a lot to say but i was at the booth and and listening to conversations was interesting many many many people still walking up saying we're starting our cloud journey like wow what year is this but it's easy in our my twitter tech bubble or you know when i just chat with friends to think boy everyone is just you know a week away from containerizing their legacy siebel app and then you realize that these people have just started to pick cloud you know they're just even getting into is so i i think an awesome reminder that we have to continue to blaze a trail but let's not assume that we've just moved on to the next cool thing and we're not talking about what actually mainstream technology professionals are actually dealing with day-to-day so good conference great reminder that it is really easy for us to go devops is already getting passe we're on to microservices and micro kernels like good lord people are just figuring out platforms as a service and you know accelerating cicd but let's not move off of any of these things yet let's actually double down on them yeah blazing through the blazers yeah i mean i think i i was looking at some of our uh some we were discussing the conference internally and yeah i mean what you're saying that kind of matches what what uh the sense that i get which is to to put it in another way there's this section of of the uh of it departments of the market out there which which is most of it that has this interesting chance to basically leapfrog over the past let's say five years of innovations in it and i think i think one of the things that's difficult for us uh us cool kids or said eye candy to realize is that like we have to uh we have to like proactively argue against and for a different set of things than we do in our own church so to speak right so like well we might get our cackles all up about like different container formats and like is this a pass or not a pass like

it seems like when you go talk with the mainstream market they don't understand what it is you're talking about like thankfully for them because they didn't have to live through all this weird stuff and so as as the concepts you know settle down and become mainstream it's more important just to talk broadly about like how does this apply to how you do software and things like that and anyways it's it'll be it'll be an interesting challenge for all of us who talk about this stuff over the next few years yeah people are still just in absorption mode i mean i could tell so you have a pcf booth where people would walk up and go what is pivotal what's the point of a platform all right let's go and we'd spend you know five ten minutes i'd do some some demos and they'd walk next door to core os who is super low i mean we're talking container orchestration like you're not messing around there they yeah and it's awesome tech but that same person would go over there i'm thinking what is your opening line there like hey now i know what a platform is tell me what containers are so i i don't think it is there again people are just trying to learn and saying what is out there right now because we are inundated with change so i thought it was good people are clearly just trying to pick up some nuggets we were giving we sold out of our uh we didn't sell them we gave them away but all our little ebooks on matt stein's book on cloud native architecture Kevin Hoffman's on beyond the the 12 factor we've had him as a guest on the podcast those were just getting grabbed up like candy which was great because people are looking for information not just sound bites indeed well this this is a good uh a pro pros or you know connected to this this reminds me of something that happens frequently when i'm at conferences and uh as you say uh staffing the uh the booth and that is i i've i've often said you can divide up the type of people who walk up into three buckets and i'll do it in my reverse order usually there's people who like know about pivotal and everything that we do and they might even be customers and they just come up and they just want to talk shop as it were and then second there's people who don't really know anything about pivotal at all and they just they want to know about that and you know you you talk about them about the history of pivotal and what we do and and i guess if you're a good salesperson you try to have them talk

more so you can find out about them but i can as as people can predict i usually can't help myself uh and and then third we have there's usually someone who comes up and you have to be really careful with this third set because they'll be like oh we use pivotal we've used that for years and this and they talk about it and they're all happy and they're like yeah we have other people who use like jira other things and i don't know i like i like the pivotal thing and then you realize oh what they mean is they know tracker and and like basically tracker has this uh kind of cult following out there for many many years and it's i i find that there's a lot of people who know who know pivotal they know they know trackers so well associated with pivotal that they just call it pivotal like they don't always call it tracker so how's that how's that first you're gonna try to make that transition but you've missed the fourth category which i have to point out which is those swag monsters who literally don't make eye contact walk up grab whatever you're doing and fill their santa bag full of giveaways for their for their family so they want the pivotal launcher rocket so we we did only have a few of those but you can't leave out that fourth precious category yeah those those i like the ones in that fourth category who are so optimized and self-aware that they just hold their badge out to you to scan it just like we know why we're here let's transact and be done with it that's right but speaking of that so here here we have uh what why don't you why don't you tell us about yourself and uh and then segue in yourself into like how you got involved with tracker special guest yes hi yeah no uh it's funny you mentioned that whole you know people going oh yeah we use tracker i think it's you know the reaction you get from the larger pivotal team is is excitement and frustration at the same time it's like um tracker does have you know it's kind of like oh yes tracker and it's great for us i mean we've we've grown word of mouth we've been around for 10 years now so we've grown organically word of mouth uh in great part thanks to you know our our relationship with pivotal labs so pivotal tracker is a product management tool that was created in-house a while back when

we were experimenting when the company labs was experimenting with ruby on rails and uh and um they decided to build something to build up their chops in that in that space and uh and lo and behold tracker was built and um it you know became a tool of choice for all internal projects and then when clients left they asked if they could keep on using tracker so we gave them access and then over time people that we had no relationship with were saying oh you know i've heard of tracker can i get access and it just kind of grew from there and then only in the last five years did we decide to start charging a nominal fee for it because uh it just became so popular and we were dedicating a lot of bodies to it so so uh so yes a tracker is um is really uh it's an interesting tool you know we we're you know grown organically and we never started you know the thing about track which is interesting is we never originally planned to market it it was never meant to be a big cash cow or money maker it's just anything it's been a very good uh brand recognition tool among the development side yeah and i think i think the uh you know it's funny i'm i'm i'm also one of those people where like i i remember tracker from way back when and it's always been around and kind of in the periphery uh and so i i was familiar with it from uh i don't know from whenever but you know i i think i think recently with this idea of a a circle of code if you will which is you know we've got several versions of of this uh this idea but but the first part of it i think is where tracker fits in pretty well which is like well if you're going to be doing software development it's a pretty good idea to know what it is you're going to be doing and and then it follows from what you from that is like and then as you're doing it as the name would imply it's a good idea to kind of track it and keep up up with it and and it's really you know what i haven't actually used tracker uh from a developer perspective but it seems like a lot of what what tracker specializes in is if you're very focused

on uh what i would generally describe as like an agile iterative process it's pretty much exactly the type of tool and and the tracking that you would need for doing that and and then also not only from a developer perspective but facilitating what the the product owner and the managers around it would need to do as well yeah absolutely i think that you know um it's uh i think tracker's done a phenomenal job of avoiding the trap of uh over listening to customers and just adding layers and layers of features and functionality to the point where the tool becomes really complicated to use and i think at the end of the day you know our our message on our and on the pivotal biosite um where you know our corporate message is transforming how the world builds software we're we're much more uh we're less and we're less uh ambitious than that you know our message for tracker is transforming how teams build software and um and i think at the end of the day the functional team has has really evolved in the last five to six years to uh to be just to be more than just developers uh with a maybe an anchor developer managing the project it's becoming you know uh product managers and design and and and and and testers so so tracker is uh trying to keep pace with that evolving modern software team i think that they're you know and then i know right now with the circle of code and that uh and that new message that we're putting out there i think tracker just fits beautifully into you know pivotal's larger mission now and it's it's uh yeah it's nice to see us uh see us being you know part of the the larger pivotal story well you know what one thing i've been curious about is is uh we have a very like like in pivotal labs the part that does a uh you know well well the namesake of the company and the part that does a lot of um agile consulting and and pairing with people to to work on these projects there's a there's a pretty

opinionated specific way i think even people call it the pivotal way of doing things and and yet we don't really have like a book there's not sort of like the manual of how to do it and so i wonder like how how much does tracker like mirror what the pivotal way is versus being somewhat general like like where do you guys draw the line between like so when labs goes in and does a consulting project this is the way we do it realized in a tool versus like here's a general purpose tool and you know you know i don't i don't think the right answer is like general purpose like a like a trello or something because because then you have to spend a lot of time configuring it and setting it up and so i wonder like where that that line falls in there sure i mean yeah there's a i could talk for hours now on this topic um um you know it's interesting i think that uh on the one end you have these these powerful tools like trello that are open-ended and and very flexible but uh let you do anything and then on the other end so we like to see ourselves as you know having trello on one end of if we're in a spectrum of a small little range uh one end and then uh atlastian on the other end which is highly customizable and uh you know you can build your perfect project planning tool what distinguishes us from those two is that you know we are a planning tool right out of the box we are we have a structure we have a process we have a flow that's already baked into the tool whereas these others you have to i guess you know assert yourself on it you get you have to apply a methodology to make them work efficiently and tracker has always struggled with well how how prescriptive should you be like how flexible do you want to be because we you know we came from a place where pivotal labs has a pretty strong opinion on how software should be developed and and our tool was designed to support that process um but at the same time you know unlike pivotal labs we're out there in the world and people are using our tool without without the benefit of us saying you know well this may be a smarter way

to use it or this is maybe you know this is this is how you could use this tool better so they're they're they're out there you know and adapting it to their own processes and environments and uh and facing situations that you know are are unknown to us um you know pivotal labs is really uh a nice safe place to code i guess you could say right it's uh and i think and uh and so you know tracker in that environment works great really well and so um it's optimized for that environment where it's all about the developer it's about you know short iterations and test driven development and pair programming and it's all this is beautiful you know uh sacred uh place it's almost like a monastery uh for developers and um and uh so i think trackers had to you know walk that line of like well that's we're great in that environment but outside of that environment how do we be more flexible and i think that we've done that rather well i think that you know at the end of the day we're still a one-page app i mean everything is visible it's on one page all the stories are there there's a few basic columns and it's a bit kanbany but you know i try and avoid that term because you know we're not strict kanban but it's very visible the idea was that this tool was designed for pivots to be able to work through there you know to develop code and efficiently and fast and uh and not get in the way of that so i think we've still we're still delivering on that ease of use side uh and i think for a tool that's 10 years old that could have gone down the path of you know jira and atlassian i think uh you know that's a huge win for us is the simplicity uh of of its use because when you make a tool simple to use and this is you know something that slack has proven and you know lots of other tools it's the iphone and the enterprise um people will use it and if people use your tool then the data you collect from that tool will be much more accurate than other tools where somebody's just putting in their time two weeks after the fact or

adding comments to a story or a project that they built that they completed you know a while back so this is a tool that's used daily live by engineers and product managers and ux and um and uh so you know at the end of every day or even during the day minute to minute um you know a product owner can can get a good read on where things stand and also the nice thing about tracker one of the it's little special features is that you know we do this whole pointing system maybe we can get back that in a second but we are we're predictive to the extent that if your team uh is moving at a certain pace and depending on how much work you've already put into the pipeline for tracker to to digest uh we can we can help you predict when you'll be done with your the specific project on your product so um i could ramble forever why don't you tell me what else you want to say you touched on a few things i mean you name dropped a few key agile terms as we think about you know stories and points in your backlog and so i mean clearly tracker has a certain model can you help folks listening who may be familiar with i don't know microsoft project if that's what their their world is but you know the people who might be thinking of heavyweight project management tools what is the what is the agile overlay that sits on top of tracker as you think about backlogs and ice boxes and epics and so what is that kind of architecture not technical architecture but what are those components that make up a tracker story or solution yeah uh yeah i'm the marketing guy right i'm not even the product marketing guy so um uh so we're not gonna get too technical on tracker but um you know i think at the end of the day it's all about um movement and and you know and the true term of agile is agility right to be able to move forward and for the whole team to be able to to do so and not just one or two two individuals um you know tracker is uh as i said a one-page app that breaks uh the work down into

tasks that we call stories and each little story is like a its own individual email if you would like it's a self-contained bucket of uh that that communicates to the team what is required so whether it's as simple as i want to be able to drag this item into the shopping cart or i need to be able to delete this item from my shopping cart how would you go ahead and you know flow that so um and all the conversations that the team needs to have happen in these you know little stories and uh and tracker has four flavors of stories we have a feature story which is the major the core component of tracker and uh it has a few baked in elements such as uh the ability to point the story and to assign team members uh as well as um you know attach documents that have conversations in there then we have a very simple bug tracking tool so you can either choose a story to be a feature or a bug and at the end of the day this is you know not an overly complex bug tracking tool if you see a bug you write up your story label it a bug and that's the bug and then your you know your testing team can decide on on if they want to have like a template that they want to add to each of their bug stories but uh and then we have uh release markers and chores so it's a very simple process uh and you know it's one of those things that a development team can get it within half an hour or an hour even if they're not that familiar with agile they can get the basic work workflow and uh and they can hit the ground running right away and um but you know i think what people discover is that the more that they you have to embrace agile to a certain degree so if you're coming from a microsoft project world where uh it's it's a bit of a rude awakening because there's a certain there's a philosophy that's baked into tracker and when i first was exposed to agile i was a little bit it was a shock to the system right when you you know it's it's shoot first and second it's kind of

basic philosophy and you kind of readjust because you have these very quick feedback loops these short feedback loops that allow you to course correct at any given point in time um six months or in a year that's uh that's no longer the case we know we're all about what can we do this week and what can we start what can we even do this day right i mean that's and that's i think i mean you touched on it just with that statement but somebody who comes in and thinking we're going to add our traditional 36 month projects backlog into tracker and kind of put all those into one monolithic release like i don't even know if correct tracker would collapse under the weight of you know 8 000 stories in one release but i mean there's the whole point you're trying to it almost the tool helps encourage you towards quick rapid releases no that's absolutely and i and i and i i i'm going to i'm on account of you just said i mean tracker actually doesn't collapse under that level of that number of stories i mean trello does uh but but tracker actually is extremely robust and we can handle an infinite amount of stories i think that i think that uh you know what's what i like to you know describe tracker as is a much more honest product management tool than most i mean there's no way that a product owner can predict what's going to happen a year from now and have everything mapped out to be aligned perfectly with that release date and make that happen in a very smooth orderly fashion from day one to day 365 from now it's just not possible um people come and go uh needs change requirements change it's just too far out and you know and one of the core tenets of of agile is that you know developers are are terrible at uh determining how long it will take to do something so you know one of the things that's that's a core component of track that i think many of our users get but it's one of the more challenging aspects of tracker is is the pointing system and then when you break work down and you try and point to all your features is is thinking in terms of complexity how how difficult

will it be to to you know develop this feature and is it going to be easy or is it going to be medium or is it going to be hard and developers are much better at doing that and having the conversation as a group around what constitutes easy medium and hard and and when that happens uh they get better at it when they have these conversations and uh and over time that's where tracker can kick in and help help help a team be predictive as to when stuff will get delivered um but you know when we've always we've seen when people start trying to guesstimate how long something will take it becomes it's it's much harder even though those two are very similar it's a fine line between talking about complexity because after a while people will know that okay well if i can do 10 points in a week and that breaks down to about two points a day then is 1.4 hours uh maybe but then you start falling into the trap of measuring in hours and we try we try we try and encourage you know we encourage people to avoid the whole tracking in time just tracking complexity and everything else will sort itself out yeah you know as as you're going through this that it it it occurs to me that's a great phrase but uh you know i i'm i i was wondering like i was using the phrase that the uh uh the pivotal way is very opinionated because people say that all the time and and to some extent uh it's almost not any more opinionated than any other system and and in fact you might even think that like it has it only has a few like strongly held opinions but everything else is basically like just figure it out which which is to say as reflected in something like tracker um like i remember one of the last tools i used when i developed software uh it had like i don't know 80 fields for a bug which which is pretty ridiculous and and i might even joked about this here i mean it's sort of like to use a metaphor like those 80 fields were like if you read through your uh your house mortgage like every line or every sentence in a mortgage is like a history of everything that's gone wrong with buying a house like it's very well

documented there and may not be appropriate for the current transaction anyways you're absolutely right you're absolutely right i mean i just want to kind of say i mean i think that's that's that's the the leap of faith i think that we ask of customers who get into agile is is as opinionated as people think we are we are we asking you to be less opinionated and more opinionated about where things are going and it's really stressful for a lot of people to not because to a certain degree you're trusting the process and you have to under control it's like it's like under steering it's like it's like turning into the curve when you're skidding on the road as opposed to turning away from it right it just doesn't feel natural if you're new to agile but once you get into the groove it uh it it's surprisingly powerful and liberating i know and and i think i think i think you you uh you're summarizing what i was thinking there in the sense of if if if you trust in the process let's say if you trust in the software more than the meatware right and you trust the process is gonna do everything for you then you would expect a project management tool to have a lot of fields and a lot of things right because the job of the people in there is to fuel the process right to be kind of like the raw fire that makes raw wood that makes the process fire go uh to be all emulation or emeloting or however you say that there anyways but i i feel i feel like a lot of the opinions that that uh that we at pivotal have and people in the agile world is like all the complexity is up in a person's head and so let's shift all the complexity there right like the reliance is more and more on the meatware than the tools that you have around it and so that's why there probably isn't like a 500 page manual somewhere and why there aren't there isn't you know the so-called infinite configurability in something like tracker like it really just focuses on a few fundamental things and everything else is just like done by the people around it which i think i think to the point about uh uh there's probably some snappy title out there like in search of certainty or something but once you sort of accept that like like most software uh

certainty doesn't really enter the picture that it's more it's more like the uh the renaissance like sort of phase of science where it was just like i don't know let's see what happens and hopefully i don't blow my face off or like but it's more about like setting in in place a process where you're learning and discovering things rather than just executing unknown things over and over again having certainty and so you need you need tools that support that kind of uh that exploration and i think i think the point system is a i don't know if it really fits to that view of things but it's an interesting example of that where we don't have enough certainty to really over time accurately predict time that things will take but we can kind of make up this thing called points that's sort of like this overlay on reality that that helps us scope and size things and it gives us a very relativistic but still useful way of thinking about how big is this thing and therefore how big it is determines how long probably we need to spend on it or more importantly the attention we need to pay to it and how we think about it through the process versus like oh this is a five-hour task this is a 15-hour task like that doesn't in internet in a process that has a lot of uncertainty in it the amount of time it takes isn't extremely helpful for you well and i think at the end of the day you know what tracker tries to do is just make teams be honest and have an honest conversation about what needs to be done i think what you know the the main friction points in software development always come down to poor communication or poor articulation of direction or you know uh somebody not you know explaining what what they wanted or what they manage or what what the what the what the hurdles are so i think at the end of the day you know these point discussions it's not about how long it takes is it's how long do you think how complex do you think this is and if you think it's a complex thing let's discuss it because then maybe i didn't realize how complex it was so you know we're all about breaking helping people

break things down into manageable chunks because when you think about i'm going to launch this new app or this crazy new thing a year from now and we're starting from scratch it can seem overwhelming and everything is overwhelming right but it's the whole idea of like the a long journey starts with the first step so how do you break it down into that first step and what are the first steps what's the next step what's the step after that and i think that that's where tracker really shines is that it really encourages people to be have honest conversations with each other about what needs to be done how complex is it going to be and and over promising to you know product owners down the road that oh yes we'll get this done really soon because i just told the team to do it so so uh you know i think it's uh it's it's this honest communications tool that i think that that's where tracker shines really and what makes us different and it's you know and it's also for everyone on the team that's the other thing i find that a lot of these other product management tools are there's a product management owner and you have to be certified and trained to be able to go in there and even massage and coax it into performing the way you want it to perform and that's not tracker to that point so i mean where do we who else do you see you know is this something you ever see teams have up on a board where multiple teams are looking at it and you know beyond just hey dude you know you're talking about with pivotal devs jump in and update stories and and jump into that is that where again you see you you know you can only have it on his conversation if everyone's actually participating uh yeah i think so and otherwise you know people's yeah i think so i think so i think that you know that that's that's uh that's tracker's intent i mean there there's this is the team is going to be developing this then a team has to have a voice and a say and that's why we point as a team and and stories are you know because we have the iteration planning meetings right you know at the beginning of the week the team looks up the stories they're going to tackle this week they go through them they talk to discuss them is that has any information come their way that has uh changed what they believe is the complexity of of the individual story and also have new stories been thrown into this week's workload that they weren't aware of and if that's the case how is that going

to impact their release date that they may have in here but um you know so tracker is a very you know people dismiss as a lightweight tool as uh you know as a you know it's not a fully functioning aln tool i think at the end of the day what we challenge people to to assess is how complex of a tool do you really need so and i think that that's where tracker you know has proven itself you know year in year out is that people who like tracker realize this is enough otherwise the process gets in the way of the app um anyway so you know i think you know i i i could bend your ear on this forever uh but and tracker and and where where i think our strong suit is and i do think we're different from a lot of other tools out there um but you know the future of trackers is is is very bright and uh and right now we've been very focused on uh on small teams and startups and in that environment but we are aware that we need to function uh better in a larger team environment larger structures and that's where we're that's where we're going right now with you know working with the circle of code and making sure we're we're we're pulling our weight in that environment and uh as well as uh you know for larger enterprises we've got to worry about single sign-on and uh infinite project history and and things like that and you know better team management dashboards so that they can add and remove people more easily um all these things that you know were not an issue for a much smaller startup team and these are just some basic things that need to be done on just the managing the tool um but you know our hope is that well we'll add that layer of of sophistication for for teams uh that the core tracker will be the same for for everyone so and then finally just keeping our base happy i think that's going to be our that's our third point is that we have a very fanatical is too strong of a word but we have a very loyal happy customer base and that's opinionated themselves right we have an opinionated tool that has some very opinionated users and uh and we're

very mindful of you know uh keeping them happy and uh and i think that's also going to be another big push this year is is uh what is it that makes them really happy and how can we do a little more of that so so before before we wrap up i i want to i want to get some free consulting here uh from from you it's it's it's a bit of it's a bit of an abstract thing but uh so so i i uh i uh and i'll try to make it a shave dog instead of a shaggy dog lead up to it but like you know i i stopped doing development in like 2006 and uh i i'd always been a programmer my professional life and i just like learned that from high school and then i went into like the white collar world right so so just envision right like i i'd learned how to do project management and fit in with a team and like deliver on something as a software developer and then i go into uh let's call it the white collar world right like of excel and word and mbas and like it always struck me that they do pretty much absolutely no project management right like there's no like when you move into this area there's not really like there might be like a gantt chart and there might be like a weekly status meeting with the vp that has some powerpoint slides in it with like the christmas tree status for stuff and so like you know me and some other like troublemaking colleagues were always trying to pull in some project management from the developer world right and then along i think more recently towards the end of the 2000s along came like all this kanban stuff and like cards and stuff and and we would try to introduce that and you know long story short like i have never really seen at least in my experience which is totally anecdotal based on me like very rigorous thorough project management outside of like the engineering world and so i'm i'm more interested in in in your take on this like like it seems like it would be useful because because a lot of you know there's there's some white collar work that you do which is just like gather the information put together the tps reports like do the stuff like we could basically call it the robots haven't

taken your job yet uh category of things uh but then a lot of it is like really open-ended uncertain things right like so we came up with a new product and we need to figure out how to convince people they should buy it like you can't really write a program to do that like it's it's it's an iterative process as well and so i wonder in your uh in your like adventures and tracker if you've if you've seen like like in the outside of the development world like how do people react to it and like does it apply outside of that world or like how can we get all these white collar people to like get their act together and do some proper project management better um it's it's not possible all right well no no no yeah there you go shutting off a lot of wasted time is a good answer right to it no you know i think that at the end of the day i think you know it's because okay so you know the pivotal tracker marketing team uses pivotal tracker to manage projects and it's it's a struggle as you said sometimes we have these open-ended stories that you know require tracker is a very linear product you know and it says and it's really optimized for software development teams and the idea is that you know you you you work your way down the backlog you start at the top of the list and you work your way down the list because the product owner the product manager has done a great job of organizing and grooming what we call it back and and so uh it's take the top story do it go on the next they're going to the butcher shop right i'm taking i'm you know taking that tag taking that number taking the next number and um and and while that might sound a bit mechanical that's just the process but the the developers devour those stories yeah uh and uh and uh and it's you know and they've had discussions about it they have meetings about it before and at the end of the week and and just it's a process that works really well because they can just you know put their nose down and just and just tear through these things because all the conversations that they need to have have already happened and they they know exactly what needs to

be done and if there's any issues conversations can happen in there so trackers optimized for that i think for people where they need to get an approval from a third party and it just it gets more complex and it breaks down i think that there's you know if somebody we have a great api we have a wonderful api if somebody wants to take tracker and reskin it and and and optimize it for an other industry like maybe you know another vertical industry maybe like legal or something else i think there might be some interesting things um maybe a slightly modified process um and i don't think tracker as of yet has any plans to to to go that route yeah you know i i think it's hard i i think you're hitting on one of the the the the fundamental road blocks for me wanting to apply a developer project management mindset to the white collar world which is and and i don't think it's uncurable it's just there's a lot of work to do is is developers are taught very early on to break things into the smallest unit possible and and sort of like spend a lot of time up front more or less or and you start internalizing this but you break it into little units that are doable that hook up together you know like i hate this metaphor but metaphoric lego blocks or whatever whereas whereas it also strikes me that the mindset that a lot of uh we can pick on marketing but a lot of just as one example i mean it could be marketing or finance or hr or whatever but in all these other non-development uh disciplines they don't really break things into small chunks routinely like they might stumble upon it and do it but it's not like a part doing components is not an issue of it and then so therefore yeah you know as you're going over it like yeah you would end up with these story cards that were basically like q4 messaging right and you're just like what what does that even mean so uh yeah that that is that is a uh i don't know maybe we need to get back to the fundamentals and i i totally hear you i know one last anecdote and i and i and we can call it quits but there are developers that uh that

have used tracker to for example renovate their house right work with contractors and and and that's a somewhat linear project but at the end of the day you know that they get their spouses involved with with pivotal tracker and they try and track everything through there and i'm like i feel so sorry for the relationship if they have to inflict their thinking on their partner and their contractor it's it's a nice thought uh and and we're very happy to support that because we're free for up to three people right so tracker is definitely you know go to town do these small projects do whatever you want but uh but um it's uh you're on your own is all i guess well i i think i think i think to summarize this this topic it's uh you know using uh project management for your wedding makes a great medium post but probably not a happy spouse like you just you just want to avoid that so exactly on on on that note well thanks thanks for being a guest on this episode where where can people if people want to check out tracker or learn more about it where where should they go uh two well two obvious sites one is pivotaltracker.com uh and sign up the first month is free but we're free for up to three users and definitely and we're also free for dot edus and dot orgs uh so and we have public projects so we have plenty of ways to use tracker and then also you can find us on the pivotal.io site if you go to uh the little dot io you can find us either on the footer or under the the labs heading in the main navigation so uh so yeah give us a shot give us a and then you know any questions reach out to us we have a great great support team that's super responsive and and are you uh are you in twitter or anything like that that you want to throw out uh at pivotaltracker.com it's a great way to to reach us and ask us questions and and uh yeah that's that's our main avenue on the social media well that sounds great well as always this has been Pivotal Conversations thanks for listening if if you deign and have the time to go uh either send us a comment i'm uh i'm Coté c-o-t-e in twitter and and richard is our seroter you can you can write something to us or you could even

go super fancy and leave us a rating or review in itunes that would be nice oh boy just like make our day we'd we'd be done for the week just spend the rest of the day off because we'd be so amazed but you know uh i i think i think as always you know whether we're recounting uh what we've seen at conferences from towers of dungeness crabs to exciting powerpoints we'll be here and you can find us at pivotal.io slash podcast or if you go to soundcloud you can find us at soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations and in itunes and everywhere else out there and as always thanks for listening and we'll see you next time

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