All right, well, here we are at, what is it, SpringOne Platform 2017. We're in the lovely Moscone Center. What do y'all think of this? You like these mega high ceilings? I think it's beautiful. Massive. Yeah? It's amazing. It's pretty good. It's nice and quiet. It's very monastery-like at the moment. We're here on the Monday before most everyone comes. Yeah, it's nice to be here with them before, like, 2,000 people, 3,000 people show up. Yeah, before the storm, like, no line to get a badge. That's pretty sweet. That is pretty sweet. Rob was saying we could play football in here. Oh, yeah. So why don't y'all introduce yourselves? You want to start? So I'm Ben Romito, developer at Great American Insurance. And I'm John Osborne, chief troublemaking officer for Great American Insurance. Yeah. Property and Casualty, yeah. Yeah, so what do y'all do? So our company is an old, well-established, very successful specialty property and casualty company. So we have a bunch of business units, some subsidiaries, and we sell really cool insurance. Yeah, and you have a really nice office lobby, from what I was doing, the concourse. We do, our lab space, which is designed just like a pivotal lab, is in a hundred-year-old, beautiful building that's been in a few movies, actually. Oh, which movies? It's so pretty. It was one with, there was a Tom Hanks movie. Okay. I think it was Rain Man. Was it Rain Man? Rain Man, I think. Yeah. There was a couple of them. You can Google it. Yeah, no, that's fun. That's like fun, not being stuck in just like the tech world anymore. Yeah. There's like actual places that have been around for more than five years. Yeah, right. They have like awesome buildings and everything. Yeah. Yeah, the controversy moving into the lab was the beautiful windows that make up our fishbowl are so old, they're not tempered glass. So we had to put railing so nobody would knock a table through the window when we were playing ping pong. Oh, really? That's funny. Yeah, it was kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like that thin stuff. Yeah, yeah. I used to, the house I used to live in that we rent now, it had like, I don't know, it must have been glass that people fashioned from like old Coke bottles or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was ancient glass in it, but yeah, it is.
2:01No, these are like 15 by 30 foot pieces of glass. Yeah, it's fun. The kind of thing like in the headsucker proxy you jump out of. Exactly. Well, so you're here to give a talk and yourself as well, right? I'm not speaking. No, no. I'm here for learning. You're just here for the enjoyment. And the swag. Yeah. Yeah, Ben's one of the team members on our lab team, so I thought it'd be good if a few of them. He's the one breaking the glass, apparently. Yeah, apparently. So why don't we talk a little bit about your talk and then we'll talk about some of the stuff y'all have been doing in the lab. So I've, I don't know if worked is the right word, but I've witnessed you putting your talk together. Give a little summary about what you're going to be speaking. This is like tomorrow. Yeah, it's tomorrow and I'm freaking out about it. But the whole thing started back in, I think it was March or April. Brian Jimerson, who's a pivotal employee, gave me a call because he knew what we were working on. And he's like, hey, John, like, what do you think of this concept? Like, help us figure out how you did this because it's amazing what you guys have done in like six months. Well, at that point, it was like four months. Yeah. And so we talked it over a few times and we finally came up with this whole idea that we were actually doing this navigating the no. So like, how do you, how do you get around all the people who say, oh, it won't work here. Yeah. Or this thing, nah, we're already perfectly optimized. There's no way we can get any better. And like, how do you, how do you actually get through all that so you can get down to the business of learning how to write better software and buying a platform and doing the things that you need to do to go faster. Because that's like the new normal, right? So how do you get back to normal? So I'm going to talk about that. No technical stuff. It's just going to be about, you know, if you're starting out and you want a plan or a way to get there, here's some ideas. Right. Helped me a lot and helped us get going. And I think it'll be valuable. So first of all, like, what do you think, what do you think makes people say no? Like, what's the, what's, what's the, uh, I'm trying to, I'm trying not to say what's the problem they have, but what gives them a comfort with how things are such that they don't, don't feel the need to put in the suffering and the effort to change.
4:13Yeah. I mean, a lot of people come from a position of, of, of battle. They have battle scars to get where they've gotten. Right. And so they feel like whatever the position they're in is fully optimized. Uh-huh. So, so any further optimization just can't be possible, right? So that's, that's, that's some, some people come from that position. You know, other people come from a position of, well, it can't work for us because, and there's all kinds of reasons, like, like our employees, you know, don't want to work eight to five. They want to work seven 30 to four 30 or whatever. They want to be on different schedules. Yeah. Or the technology just isn't a fit. Like Cloud Foundry just can't help us. We've scripted everything. It's all perfect. There's no possible way we can, we can be better. So I think the point is there's all kinds of places people come from and it takes a little bit of, uh, craftiness to, to navigate around all that. Yeah. Yeah. To sort of get to a project plan that actually works. And then, and then to that end of craftiness. So when, uh, and I don't know, tell me if, if this isn't a helpful framing, but it seems like in an organization you have sort of, it's hierarchical. I mean, just in the classic way of thinking of it. And then you've got like the top people and the middle people and the bottom people, right. The, the staff and the middle managers. And, um, I don't know what y'all call it. Leadership. Leadership. People seem to like to say. Uh, and like, so when you're being crafty, like, where do you start? Like, like, well, let me lay the table more. Like you want to change the way that you're doing software and introduce like, let's just say a more agile way. Do you want to deploy once a week? Whatever. I mean, I mean, you want to, you want to change dramatically how, how you're doing your software and like, how do you start out? Like what's, how do you strategize beginning? Yeah. So that's a great question. I started in two places. One is that I, I did find that among the, um, the ground troops, if you want to call them, um, there's a lot of excitement to do something different. A lot of people have been doing the same thing for a long period of time. They see other companies going down different paths for technology and doing more modern type, um, activity.
6:14And so there's a lot of interest of them to like, just try something new. So last year, actually, I, I took, uh, three key people to SpringOne Vegas last year. And that actually helped unlock a lot of things because they came back and they were evangelizing or whatever the word is to like all their buddies. And, and so that was really good because it generated a lot of energy. And what, what types of people were those, those three? What worlds did they have? Um, they were, yeah, they're, um, architects, all, all really nice people, but they were, uh, they were, uh, basically in the architecture roles. Okay. Um, but they were highly respected by a lot of developers and stuff and they'd been around for a while. So for them to come out and say something was really, some, some good respected technical leadership. Yeah. So strategically picking the right people there was, was really good to get started because, because it would be easy to have the door shut. So I took a little risk, but not really cause I'm, I knew them and they, they just came back and did a great job. And, and what, what do you think? Like, I mean, obviously I'm at pivotal, so it's just a pivotal experience that was awesome, but more realistically, like what are the characteristics of the event or the thing that you want to take them to that brings epiphany? It's not really too strong of a word, but that brings that at the very least a benefit of the doubt that we should start thinking about how we're changing things. If, if not more, like what are the triggers? Yeah. I mean, I think the, some of the things really resonated with them as far as like having true, um, CICD and being able to push apps like right now, their, their current world. They were coming from is a multi-week process and just all the normal hoops that you have to jump through if you're an old company with, with, with, you know, reasonably old infrastructure and you're just dealing with that problem. Right. So, so I think that really resonated with them because they were working on a really big project that needed that kind of help. So they came back going, Hey, I think this will actually play out for us. So they had sort of like an existing problem and they were shown some, a glimmer of hope that there was, things could be addressed on there. Absolutely. And if, you know, of course we talked about it before they went and they did all the prep work and, you know, made sure, um, the right sessions, um, were, uh, attended.
8:21And I think, I think it was just great, you know, a good mix of technology sessions and culture sessions. Yeah. No, that's, that's interesting. I mean, I forget if, if you and I talked about this or I dreamed it or what, where it ever came from. But like, it seems like, it seems like unless there is, to put it in the most dire ways, some external threat that makes it so you need to change. Like, it's almost like, why even try? I mean, I mean, across the board, like if everything's fine and there's no motivation, if you have no problem, then you're just like gold plating. Yeah. Right. Even if you're doing something that's clearly more optimal, if there's no, if you don't need to, then it's, it almost seems like you should not try. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because, um, you know, we look at a lot of industries that are consumer facing and a lot of those companies are under extreme pressure by competition because you can swing millions of people with a great app, right? Yeah. I mean, this is played out in, I don't know how many different ways. In our business, the assumption is as well, if that's not happening, then everything's fine. And the reality is you can still underserved your business partners dramatically, but not be under market pressure. That's right. And so in a way you're limiting the growth of your business partners because they're not being, their, their competition is internal and they can't, they can't actually gain some even better traction out of, because their IT group is just going too slow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, there, maybe there's a superset word to threat, but it's almost to use a super fancy word. There's like an exogenous reason, like some, some reason outside of the core of what you're doing. And then what you're saying is, I mean, that's another motivation is like, well, we want to grow this business and we want to make the business better for existing people. And we know that it's, it's, it's almost like you self-create the problem of, we want to do better because, because that directly leads, you know, to, I don't know, more money or whatever the answer is, right. And we know we need to improve that. So, so, okay. So then you, you get some people to like win them over and then you go back to, uh, your, your wonderful tiled ceiling.
10:21Beautiful, beautiful building. And then, and then what's the work look after that? Like, how do you. So the work after that was a very much, uh, upward facing. So, um, trying to find business partners who had real problems that could be solved, trying to find, um, a business case where we could justify licensing costs and training costs and at the same time, deliver some value and, and actually bring something to fruition. So that, that is hard work and you have to dig around and you have to like have many revisions and you're going to fail a whole bunch of times like I did, I'm sure. And, but at the end of the day, you end up with this thing that is a reasonable expectation of success plan that has some money in it and requires a little bit of investment, but people start to believe that this could actually work. Yeah. Yeah. It sort of helps them imagine what it's going to be like. Yeah. Cause in order to like explain the business case, you have to say, well, here's the good things that are going to happen and here's the actual plan. Here's how we're going to execute it and then here's how we're going to measure it. So we know that at the end of the day, we have something to compare with to say, yeah, was it a fluke? Was it real? Was it not real? Does it really work here or not? Like ultimately the nose, you have to answer the question that they're asking, that they're saying. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't work here. Well, maybe it does. And here's why. So, so in the, in this kind of change, like doing stuff more agilely or cloud native or whatever, like what are the, what are like the sticky things in a business case you need to figure out? Or I shouldn't say just sticky, but what are the, I mean, obviously it's sort of like we have labor costs, right? And then we're going to have licensed software costs and then we're going to make money somehow and then whammo, it's green instead of red. But like, I imagine there's some other inputs, some more realistic inputs into the business case that are somewhat unique. So I think so, but at the end of the day, most business cases are just benefit and costs. Yeah. Right. And you have a return on investment and you're good. But I think what's really important is that the story comes with the business case that says, here's the value we want to generate, but we're going to do it this different way.
12:23So we're going to build in some licensing costs that we wouldn't have done before. We're going to build in some training costs. We're going to build in some of these components that wouldn't normally be in the business case, but we're going to do it as an experiment to answer these questions. Can we go faster? Yeah. How do people react to that experiment thing in there? So the experiment thing is really important because it lets people feel more comfortable that the world isn't going to change as quickly. Right. Right. So the experimentation piece is really a test of the assertion that we're perfect, right? Yeah. So if we experiment and we test and we find out, hey, there's actually some real savings here, then we can turn around and decide as a business, how would we invest this savings if we actually took it? And do you find that sort of like the people you'd give a business case to, leadership and finance and people like that, do they, I mean, it's maybe counter to what people are thinking, but I would imagine they enjoy experiments, like having options, right? Everyone likes optionality who deals with spreadsheets. And so I would imagine to some extent, they're not used to IT coming to them and saying like, we're going to experiment and try something new and get inputs. And then this, I don't know, it almost gives them the tool to do something different than just oversight. But I don't know. Is that the case? You know, the really interesting, fascinating part, which caught me completely off guard for my process was that I had a business case for an actual project that we wanted to implement. And so my CIO, basically, he approved it. And then he said, okay, now what do you want to do? And like, they changed the project out right away and said, well, you've demonstrated that the value is there. So let's find the right project and not worry about the return. Let's find out what the results are going to be and worry about that piece. And we'll worry about the money later. It's more important to discover, is this going to work? Then am I going to make a dollar? Right, right, right. Because it's an experiment. You got early buy-in to like, let's try out to see if this way of thinking works out.
14:23And then we'll worry about the hardcore stuff. But I still had to do the work to say there's actual value available. Yeah. I mean, that's what I always found working in strategy is there's, kind of like you're describing, there's kind of like three phases. There's this idea is crazy enough to work. Right. And then there's like, now I'm almost going to, it's almost like hazing. It's like, I'm going to make you go do all of this work that then I'll reveal to you was actually not necessary because I was going to let you do it anyways. And like gauge your commitment to it and see if it actually works out. And then if that works out, then you're going to do a whole bunch of actual hard wheel work. So are you saying I was played? Well, I mean, I think, I think it's basic, like, uh, I thought I was driving like basic, basic management. Think of like, I mean, if they really want to do it, let's figure it out and draw the guidelines. I mean, that is like, that is, I mean, I, I hesitate to put it this way, but there is some fun in working in a business case. Cause I think, I think you described one thing that I think most people would assume you don't have is you do have to come up with a story, right? Like, like there's a huge, it has to be a narrative. Yeah. There's a huge creative element to it of like what we're doing here and how's this going to pan out. And the numbers just kind of are the safety net for all of that. Absolutely. The numbers mean you're not going to get fired if it doesn't work. Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then, and then, and then so, so like just, I mean, there'll be a recording of your talk that people can check out and everything, but like kind of at the, what does the end state look like? Like when you get towards the end of your phase of doing things, it's almost like those initial successes. And then you get the chance after that to scale it out some more, but how do you know when you're at the end? So that's really interesting. Um, there's still, um, some skepticism that our first project was, uh, wildly successful. Uh, I think that's starting to, I think that's starting to, uh, dissipate. But, um, one thing, it actually won't be my talk, but that I was maybe next year, like
16:232.0 already. Uh, one thing I was caught off guard about was the first project, um, was actually so smooth and so well executed by both pivotal and great American employees, um, that it's now real. So figuring out what to do next has become like a problem. Like people don't want to decide what's next and I don't want it to be my world that changes. How about your world? Yeah. It's very fascinating. I, I, uh, I didn't think the ramp part would be harder than the start part, but it's turning out that way. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess there is oftentimes a phase in change management where it's be careful. You don't inadvertently get drawn and quartered, right? Like, like, don't get ripped apart by your success. So we've made the decision to scale and now, now we have to decide what to do. Yeah. Yeah. That's a little, that's a little more complicated than I thought it was going to be. That's true. But we're still doing it. So, so, so how many at this point, like how many, uh, I don't know, we're supposed to say product instead of project, but whatever, how many projects, how many things do you say that you've tried out by now or have been in this umbrella of stuff? We have maybe four to six roughly after how long, how long after we started in July. So now it's pretty quick early in December. So yeah, yeah, pretty quick. Um, and we have tons and tons more that we could just dive in our, you know, the, the ramping has more to do with getting people up to speed than technology. Frankly, the technology is the easy part. Yeah. Getting people in the methodology and, and, and pairing, teaching that and all these different aspects of the cultural changes is the hard part. Yeah. But getting access to people is hard also. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Getting people to move from one department to another is very challenging. That's always everyone problem. I mean, I imagine like, even if you want to find people to dig holes, it's probably hard to find them. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Getting people to come do work for you is a perennial constant task. Sometimes it's difficult. So, so then speaking of what, uh, how did you get involved in all of this stuff?
18:27So when the opportunity arose, it was, um, a volunteer basis for developers to basically join this team to go out to Denver for 11 weeks. And how did they recruit that volunteering thing? Was it in some little email newsletter that was telling you to think about trees or they come talk to you? No, uh, there's a, my manager kind of briefly touched on it and told me to start talking to John and see, you know, really what the real deal was and what was all behind it. And then I think there's some, uh, corporate communications that got sent out and there's like a, a formal, um, application where we basically just sent an email saying, you know, why would we want to be a part of the team? Yeah. We did some, uh, lunch and learns and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And then there was a brochure too. Remember the brochure? A brochure? Yeah. We made a brochure. Wow. Like a little triptych thing? Internally. Yeah. Tri-fold. That's awesome. We have our own great printing department. They printed it up. It was, it was pretty awesome. Huh. You'll have to find some of those. Yeah. Put on the shelf. Exactly. I had one of my desk left over. Yeah. Yeah. So, so then what, what, what, uh, what made you want to do it? Um, really, I mean, I guess kind of what John was saying before, where is it with the way the three architects that went out with them to, to Vegas? I mean, it's super exciting. Yeah. Um, I mean the new, a new space, something different, something that's, that's, you know, you're getting all over, over all these hurdles that is slowing your job down. And now you tell me that all goes away and I can develop full speed and have a blast and be able to deploy, you know, in a day rather than in three weeks. I mean, that all sounded, you know, super awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And then moving to Denver for three months. Oh, and then you got to move too. Yeah. Well, at least for a temporary trip. Temporary. Right. What are they, you get an apartment for that or something or? Um, yeah, I jumped around between Airbnbs, but I was pretty much open to however you figured it out. Yeah. They need to have a loyalty program. Then I'd stay there more, but anyhow, it's good for family. But so, so what was your, your background coming into it? So, so coming into it, I was, um, I've been at the company for two years full time, uh, as a .NET developer. So I was in the windows world using, you know, ASP.NET and C sharp and visual studio. And then coming into the project and the engagement, I was basically told you're going to switch
20:29to Java. You're going to switch to IntelliJ and you're going to switch to Mac OS X. All right. So it was, uh, kind of a full shift for me that granted, I mean, uh, C sharp is, is Microsoft's Java. So there was a lot of things that were very similar. Um, but I mean, it's still pretty intimidating to go, go up with some new things and the syntax changes and, uh, to go with, uh, you know, the pivots, you know, these world-class experienced developers is a little intimidating, but you know, within three weeks doing the whole pairing process, I mean, like I was up to speed, feeling pretty confident. It was pretty incredible. Yeah. So what's that, what's that like pairing with despite working here, I've never actually paired with anyone. They always try to do it sort of in marketing and then I tell them no, but it's like, what are you going to do? Like stare at some texts and be like, I don't know. I think we should use the word for there. Or like, how do you spell necessary? Like, I mean, I don't know. It's, it's, uh, it's, if you really think about it, it's like talking out loud and thinking out loud. Hot tacos. That's right. It is really, I think that's one of the best benefits. And then you've also got the, the training, whereas if you're pairing with somebody who knows more, you know, is a little bit more experienced where you're going to get up to speed in something much, much faster. So in my case, you know, I didn't know much Java syntax, you know, this, the difference is there. Whereas I just asked my pair, Hey, how do, how do I do this? This is what I want to do. You know, they, you know, instantly. Right. And what kind of project were you working on? Like, what did it do? Just a web application. So, I mean, your, your standard MVC kind of stuff and, you know, your backend and your front end and the sorts of things. So you think it took about three weeks or so to come up to speed on like Java? Yeah. Yeah. So I've already had experience in the object oriented world. So, I mean, I already knew most of the concepts, but I was actually using the tools and knowing where everything was and some keyboard shortcuts. I mean, when you first, keyboard shortcuts, when you first sit down with those pivots, man, they fly, they're going all over the place. Yeah. Yeah. Ask them, wait a minute, do that again. Show me again. Stop. Unplug your keyboard. Let me do it. You know, it's just, just that kind of stuff. And then, and then, so how long, how long did you like work a day when you're doing
22:29that? Like how, how did you break up the day? And cause I, had you, had you done pairing stuff? No. So this was my first time doing pairing and that's where the, that intimidation came in. You know, you got to admit that you don't know some things. You got to admit that the first time you write something that might not be the best and you know, and that's part of what it's about, you know, they're going to make you better. They're going to catch your, your typos. They're going to, they're going to catch those small things or you start going down the wrong path. They're going to get you right away. But I mean, it was like, you know, you come in, you work, you have a four hour section before lunch and a four hour section afterwards and you're focused that whole time. We'll take a 15 minute break in the middle for ping pong. Yeah. Another little pairing activity. Yeah. We have our little breaks, but for the most part, I mean, you're zoned in, you're focused, you're, it's a constant conversation. Right. Right. And, and so, uh, have you, have you had the chance to like pair with other new people after this or, or like, like, have you, have you moved over to the side of being the instructor? Yeah. Yeah. So basically when we were out in Denver, um, maybe I guess eight or so weeks in, we had another guy come out. And so there was a chance that you could kind of, you know, get him up to speed. And then when we came back to the lab, we have an intern that we've all had a chance to basically sit with and kind of get her up to speed and, you know, within about a week and a half, she was there with us, you know, right along. And it wasn't like she was new anymore. You know, she was. So, so then on both sides of that experience. So being the new person, like what are, I don't know, what, what are some things you didn't realize that would be like good tips to tell people? Like, here's, here's a tactic you should use to make this go well, or here's a thing you should ask about, or here's something you should avoid, or like, uh, I assume it's good to shower each day. Oh yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, general hygiene. Yeah, of course. Uh, that's just a good life tip in general. Well, I don't know if you work from home, you'd save a lot of water, but anyways, go ahead. Um, really is being, being open and being honest and, and asking lots of questions. Uh, no matter what happens, you're going to argue, you're going to, you're going to butt heads at some point and being able to have a logical, rational discussion and not letting your emotions kind of take hold. Okay. No, that makes a lot of sense. Which that's, that's a very hard thing to kind of, kind of do in the moment. Yeah. You know, you get a little bit of an ego.
24:29You want to be right. You want, you know, no one likes being told they're wrong. No one likes being told. Yeah. It's hard to shift into that pedagogical mode on both sides of the, uh, keyboard as it were. Yeah. So being, being open-minded and, you know, wanting to learn. Yeah. That's the, I think those are the huge key things. So then on, when, when, when you start doing the instructing side of thing, what were some things that you like sort of tripped up a bit on where you had to be like, Oh wait, I'm, I'm part of what I'm trying to do here is instruct someone new. Yeah. You got to slow down. That's, that's the hardest part is thinking is you want to go at the same speed that you're going with, with someone that knows everything already. Yeah. And whenever they, they got to stop and ask questions or they might let you kind of do something. And then 10 minutes later, like, wait a minute, I don't get this. And you know, you got to go back and kind of re-explain. Yeah. But that's all, that's all part of the process of getting up to speed. Letting them drive and handle the keyboard is probably the best thing to do. Right. Right. So, so what do you, what do you think? What do you think you'll do with more .NET stuff or more Java stuff or like how. I'm all Java now. How are y'all going to divide it out? Are you just going to do one or choose both or like. I think we're, for the most part, we're Java right now and that's, that's pretty much for the future to keep people up to speed and keep people in the same, same language and on the same page. Yeah. But I mean, Cloud Foundry, there's no reason, there's no stopping us. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. One of the things that from a management perspective that's really nice about pairing is it tends to homogenize the software. Yeah. Yeah. So that means it's approachable by everybody, right? So as you rotate between teams or you rotate your pairs every day, you're not completely switching contexts, like to a different language or to this crazy software you've never seen before. It all kind of looks the same, which sounds boring, but it actually means you can make better progress because you can get in there and add something to something else that somebody else did before you. Yeah. And it really helps, helps go faster. Yeah. It wouldn't work without pairing. I've been curious to, I mean, this is one of those things I'll probably never do, but like it would be, it would be interesting to put it in the passive voice to study like standardization and homogenization nowadays, right? Because I feel like when I was in back in the two thousands, when I was being a developer
26:29and doing stuff, it was, there was a lot more value in heterogeneity. But I think in retrospect, that was just like, we don't want to be all Microsoft, right? It was basically like all Microsoft or heterogeneous, right? And I think nowadays that kind of whatever that falseness is doesn't exist. And there's almost like, there's a lot of benefit to all standardizing. And I don't know if it's quantified very well. Like it's not part of the lore that like we should actually all be doing things in the same way. There is no benefit to doing things all differently. Somebody, I think it was in compliance, maybe internal audit. Somebody asked me where our coding standards were. And I said, it's a club foundry, spring boot, Java, and parent. That's my coding standard. And they weren't, but what about tabs and spaces? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Trust me. They take care of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That stuff all gets fiddled away. Well, great. Well, uh, what was really nice is when the team came back from Denver, their pace was maintained. So they went out, they got enabled, they came home. No, that's, I was going to wrap up, but that's, that's a good point. So that's, that's always a difficult transition is the, uh, the journey going back. And, and so, so how, how did that, like, how did that go? Like, like, uh, let's, let's say it's the week before you're going to go back. I'm sure someone brings some cake or donuts or I guess in Denver it's healthy, right? You don't have donuts, but they're, they're, yeah, exactly. Avocado. Lots of avocado. But, but like, like, what's it like going back for the first few weeks? Um, so we, when we came back, the lab space, we were told, we weren't sure if it was going to be completed or not, um, back in Cincinnati. And so when we got there, I mean, it seemed like everything was fairly set up. So we spent the first day, set up our machines and kind of getting our development environment all taken care of. Yeah. Which we were all thinking that's going to take us two or three days and we got it done four or five hours kind of thing. So we were coding day one. I mean, that was, that was a huge, that was, that was much faster than we thought. And, um, I guess without the training wheels or the pivots, it was just kind of like, I think it was a quick test to see, you know, how ready we were. And I don't think we had any issues.
28:30You know, we, the people that, I guess people stepped up where we needed to, or, you know, whenever, whereas when we were with a pivot, you know, they kind of tended to do a little bit more of the driving. Well, it was just, well, now one of us is going to have to do it. So we just fell into the roles as we needed to. And y'all have been able to like maintain the, uh, disciplined use of the process. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And if, if, if there's, if you start to kind of wean off that way, then your pair gets you right back on there. Yeah. So I, uh, I added one person to the team, um, who was a skeptic of pairing and, um, it turned out great. Now he's our culture advocate. Oh, so he's our culture champion for the process. Yeah. He keeps the team going down the right way, but he started, he started out as a skeptic and now he's following. Yeah. I wonder if his, that makes me wonder if there's like a psychological tool of like, often you hear the, the skeptics become the best, uh, advocates advocates. And maybe it's like that. If you have enough energy to be skeptical about something, you can judo that energy into being enthusiastic about it, which versus like other people who are just more like not skeptical or either way. Yeah. They're maybe not great advocates. Huh? Well, great. Well, thanks for going over that. And, uh, yeah, I'm looking forward to your talk tomorrow. Great. That'll be fun stuff. Appreciate catching you in the hallway and doing a quick podcast. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Uh, well, as always, this has been a Pivotal Conversations. If you want to get, uh, old episodes in a browsable format, you can go to soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations and, uh, you know, you can subscribe to it and do all that other nonsense. We'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.