Dani Grant from Jam talking about Building Better Bug Reporting

Dani Grant: 00:00:00

there's a lot of focus on engineering teams about how to

Dani Grant: 00:00:03

improve productivity, and there's a lot of talk about tooling.

Dani Grant: 00:00:08

These things are awesome but I think that the bug reporting process has

Dani Grant: 00:00:12

huge inefficiencies and engineering teams, if they were to spend some

Dani Grant: 00:00:15

time improving that would see

Dani Grant: 00:00:17

Beyond the investment,

Richard Bown: 00:00:20

hi and welcome to Loving Legacy.

Richard Bown: 00:00:22

I'm your host Richard Bown, and this time I have with me Danny Grant from Jam.

Richard Bown: 00:00:28

Danny, thanks for joining me today.

Dani Grant: 00:00:30

Thank you so much for having me.

Richard Bown: 00:00:32

Absolute pleasure.

Richard Bown: 00:00:32

Now, perhaps you could, for our listeners, introduce yourself a little bit and tell

Richard Bown: 00:00:35

us what you do and who you do it for.

Dani Grant: 00:00:38

I am Danny.

Dani Grant: 00:00:39

I'm the co-founder and c e O of Jam.

Dani Grant: 00:00:42

We help people report bugs in a way to engineers that

Dani Grant: 00:00:45

is perfect for the engineer.

Dani Grant: 00:00:47

What's, what most people don't realize is that while most things in software

Dani Grant: 00:00:50

development has totally changed in the last 30 years, like is unrecognizable

Dani Grant: 00:00:55

to us in the nineties, the way we do bug reporting actually hasn't.

Dani Grant: 00:00:59

All, and it slows teams down and it's especially painful in

Dani Grant: 00:01:02

today's new remote global world.

Richard Bown: 00:01:06

Yeah, I'm really feeding that.

Richard Bown: 00:01:07

I'm nodding my head along as as you.

Richard Bown: 00:01:09

So you reached out to me because basically you said, I wanna come on

Richard Bown: 00:01:12

and, uh, you, you said you're a fan of the show, which is great to hear.

Richard Bown: 00:01:15

Um, so yeah, what gave you the inspiration for Jam and what was your

Richard Bown: 00:01:18

kind of journey, I suppose, for kind of getting to the situation you are now

Dani Grant: 00:01:23

Mike.

Dani Grant: 00:01:24

My co-founder and I started as product managers together at

Dani Grant: 00:01:27

CloudFlare and on CloudFlare.

Dani Grant: 00:01:29

We worked at, on a very interesting team.

Dani Grant: 00:01:32

We were this sort of this skunkworks team, and our job was to launch

Dani Grant: 00:01:35

net new businesses for the company.

Dani Grant: 00:01:37

So we had to move really, really fast and get great stuff out the door

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right away, and time and time again.

Dani Grant: 00:01:43

What we found holding us back is all of the miscommunication and back and forth.

Dani Grant: 00:01:50

Bugs and fixes with engineers.

Dani Grant: 00:01:52

And in the in-person world, what we would do is we'd repro the bug on our

Dani Grant: 00:01:56

laptops and then we'd go run around the office until we found the engineer,

Dani Grant: 00:01:59

and then we'd give the engineer our physical laptop so they could debug

Dani Grant: 00:02:03

it there, because otherwise how can they see, you know, dev tools?

Dani Grant: 00:02:06

Um, but when the world went remote, uh, there was no way to do that.

Dani Grant: 00:02:09

And so that is why we started Jam.

Dani Grant: 00:02:11

We wanted to build the tool that we needed as product managers.

Richard Bown: 00:02:15

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:02:15

Right.

Richard Bown: 00:02:16

So until then, yeah, either the, the laptop has to be there, or you could

Richard Bown: 00:02:19

copy paste, I mean, screenshotting a part of the application that you have now.

Richard Bown: 00:02:22

So Jam does that.

Richard Bown: 00:02:23

I understand.

Richard Bown: 00:02:24

So presumably before, that's another way that you could have made bugs

Richard Bown: 00:02:26

or you could have just screenshotted it, but it's just not as immediate.

Richard Bown: 00:02:30

is that, is that the idea?

Dani Grant: 00:02:31

A screenshot is such a low fidelity way to communicate something

Dani Grant: 00:02:35

happening on the web in cyberspace.

Dani Grant: 00:02:38

Uh, there's all this stuff happening in the background that the developer needs

Dani Grant: 00:02:41

that a screenshot does not encompass even.

Dani Grant: 00:02:44

Sometimes when people take screenshots, they don't even include

Dani Grant: 00:02:46

the relevant part of the page.

Dani Grant: 00:02:48

In the screenshot.

Dani Grant: 00:02:49

They include the error message, but the developer actually needs

Dani Grant: 00:02:51

what's around the screenshot.

Dani Grant: 00:02:53

Like what account are you logged in with?

Dani Grant: 00:02:54

What version of the software are you using?

Dani Grant: 00:02:56

What country are you in?

Dani Grant: 00:02:57

Like what is the language that is shown in like the experiments you're a part of?

Dani Grant: 00:03:01

Um, so with Jam, We try to get all of the relevant information for a developer

Dani Grant: 00:03:06

all packaged into one link so they have all the information they need to debug

Dani Grant: 00:03:10

right away, no back and forth needed.

Dani Grant: 00:03:12

So it's one click to screenshot or record a video or instant replay, a bug that just

Dani Grant: 00:03:16

happened and we grab a crop screenshot that you take plus the full screen.

Dani Grant: 00:03:21

So all the contact you may have missed, um, plus console logs, fully

Dani Grant: 00:03:25

inspectable network requests, and all the specs of the device and the

Dani Grant: 00:03:28

browser and the operating system and even what your network speed was

Richard Bown: 00:03:31

So you've been go going a while.

Richard Bown: 00:03:33

You've got plenty of users all over the place.

Richard Bown: 00:03:35

Um, My background is mainly in working in corporate land, and I know what it's like.

Richard Bown: 00:03:38

You got, everything's locked down, so how does it play in

Richard Bown: 00:03:42

that kind of scenario as well?

Richard Bown: 00:03:43

Is it a case if you have to be completely, fully open or

Richard Bown: 00:03:45

can you work behind firewalls?

Richard Bown: 00:03:46

Is there, is there even an on-premise solution that you offer?

Dani Grant: 00:03:50

there's no on-prem, but we do offer like advanced access controls

Dani Grant: 00:03:54

for organizations that need that.

Dani Grant: 00:03:56

And actually a lot of the.

Dani Grant: 00:03:58

People using JAM are at these large corporations because

Dani Grant: 00:04:01

the problem is exacerbated.

Dani Grant: 00:04:02

The more people you have on the team, the more countries

Dani Grant: 00:04:05

different people are working in.

Dani Grant: 00:04:07

Um, and, and the broader, the surface area of the product, which

Dani Grant: 00:04:11

more legacy companies just have a really broad surface area that

Dani Grant: 00:04:13

they've built over the last 20 years.

Dani Grant: 00:04:15

So an example of some of the companies using Jam are like

Dani Grant: 00:04:18

Dell T-Mobile, Autodesk, sort of these large corporations.

Richard Bown: 00:04:22

Okay, so backing up a little bit then.

Richard Bown: 00:04:23

So what got you interested?

Richard Bown: 00:04:25

So you like from a software engineering background in the first

Richard Bown: 00:04:28

place, what was your kind of path, I suppose, to where you are now?

Dani Grant: 00:04:31

I studied human computer interaction at NYU.

Richard Bown: 00:04:33

Oh, cool.

Richard Bown: 00:04:34

Nice.

Dani Grant: 00:04:35

And went from there to venture capital, became a vc.

Dani Grant: 00:04:38

Um, my co-founder is, uh, was an engineer turned pm and we met when

Dani Grant: 00:04:43

we were both PMs at CloudFlare.

Dani Grant: 00:04:44

So I bring the business side, he brings the engineering side, and

Dani Grant: 00:04:47

together we're tackling the problem.

Richard Bown: 00:04:49

Okay, cool.

Richard Bown: 00:04:50

How do you even start in a, from a product mindset, but

Richard Bown: 00:04:52

having technical understanding.

Dani Grant: 00:04:56

When we started Jam, the first thing we wanted to do was just

Dani Grant: 00:04:58

validate that this was not only a problem that we experienced as product managers

Dani Grant: 00:05:02

at CloudFlare, but that this was a problem people experienced industry wide.

Dani Grant: 00:05:06

And so having experience as PMs, we, uh, Said, let's, okay, let's

Dani Grant: 00:05:10

do a bunch of user interviews.

Dani Grant: 00:05:11

That's what we know how to do.

Dani Grant: 00:05:13

And so the first thing my co-founder and I did even before we quit our jobs to

Dani Grant: 00:05:16

start Jam, is we did 45 user interviews validating that this was a problem.

Dani Grant: 00:05:21

People faced companies big and small across the industry, um, and.

Dani Grant: 00:05:26

The emotion that people expressed on these calls, uh, was so palpable, uh, that

Dani Grant: 00:05:32

we knew we needed to solve the problem.

Dani Grant: 00:05:33

And actually, um, one of those first early user interviews tried to pay us and

Dani Grant: 00:05:38

set up a onboarding for his whole team.

Dani Grant: 00:05:41

And then we had to explain to him that there is no product yet.

Dani Grant: 00:05:44

We are just researching.

Dani Grant: 00:05:46

Um, so we really started from the product mindset, but.

Dani Grant: 00:05:50

Then we need to figure out, well, how do we build a product solution

Dani Grant: 00:05:53

to a problem that has not been solved yet with a product solution?

Dani Grant: 00:05:56

And both my co-founder and I, um, knew how to write code.

Dani Grant: 00:06:01

Um, he is a former mobile developer, so he took a React course

Dani Grant: 00:06:05

online to teach himself React.

Dani Grant: 00:06:07

And I was sort of a hobbyist developer, um, and had picked up some skills

Dani Grant: 00:06:10

and together we built sort of the first prototype of Jam just to

Dani Grant: 00:06:13

see if there were any legs there.

Dani Grant: 00:06:15

Um, we were really inspired.

Dani Grant: 00:06:17

The story of Foursquare, the CEO bought himself a Learn PHP book,

Dani Grant: 00:06:22

taught himself PHB to build the first version, and so we, we loved that

Dani Grant: 00:06:27

story and, and wanted to emulate that.

Richard Bown: 00:06:30

Yeah, because when you're launching a product from.

Richard Bown: 00:06:32

An engineering perspective, it's always about how, how we're gonna build it.

Richard Bown: 00:06:35

Um, and it's very difficult to kind of jump outta that mindset and say

Richard Bown: 00:06:38

no, rather than just exercising what we think is the, the important

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muscle, which is building stuff.

Richard Bown: 00:06:43

How can we actually think about solving a problem ? And that's

Richard Bown: 00:06:45

seems to be the perennial.

Dani Grant: 00:06:47

A hundred percent.

Dani Grant: 00:06:48

And actually, you know, when we were early on the journey, we were very

Dani Grant: 00:06:51

excited about the new technologies we could use to solve this problem.

Dani Grant: 00:06:55

Um, so, and.

Dani Grant: 00:06:57

and, and so we chose things like Kubernetes and GraphQL, and let me

Dani Grant: 00:07:01

tell you that a couple years later, if there's ever any issue in our

Dani Grant: 00:07:04

product, it is caused by one of the not boring technologies that we

Dani Grant: 00:07:08

chose, like Kubernetes or GraphQL.

Richard Bown: 00:07:11

Yeah, exactly.

Richard Bown: 00:07:12

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:07:12

Non boring, I think is the, the operative words here because.

Richard Bown: 00:07:15

You have to think about scale, you gotta think about the future of your product.

Richard Bown: 00:07:19

So I think it's very sensible the approach you took, especially just learning,

Richard Bown: 00:07:23

um, a technical solution off the bat.

Richard Bown: 00:07:25

So do you still run on Kubernetes?

Richard Bown: 00:07:26

Is that a question I can ask or,

Dani Grant: 00:07:28

Still use Kubernetes, still use GraphQL.

Dani Grant: 00:07:30

Um, but it is, it is a constant conversation on the team.

Dani Grant: 00:07:33

One of the interesting things that I had not realized in our first weeks building

Dani Grant: 00:07:38

jam is that the technical decisions we made so early on before there was.

Dani Grant: 00:07:42

Team, uh, stayed for much longer than I would've imagined.

Dani Grant: 00:07:46

The last remaining of that is when I, when it was like weekend one and I built

Dani Grant: 00:07:50

a first prototype, I used Mongo DB because it's very easy, it's very flexible.

Dani Grant: 00:07:55

It's great for prototyping.

Dani Grant: 00:07:57

We ran on Mongo DB until a month ago, and it was causing scaling issues for

Dani Grant: 00:08:04

us at our scale because it's a great database and it's great for production

Dani Grant: 00:08:09

data for an app of a different type, but we just needed a sequel database.

Dani Grant: 00:08:13

Um, and so those queries were just taking so long.

Dani Grant: 00:08:16

And when we did that migration, gosh, immediately the app sped up three or

Dani Grant: 00:08:21

four times and it, it was awesome.

Dani Grant: 00:08:23

Users noticed it was.

Dani Grant: 00:08:25

anyway.

Richard Bown: 00:08:26

The, the Mongo DB hype cycle.

Richard Bown: 00:08:28

But it's interesting, isn't it though?

Richard Bown: 00:08:29

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:08:29

Boring old sequel kind of comes to the rescue again, so Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:08:32

Obviously then you've got a legacy problem, right?

Richard Bown: 00:08:34

So you've got like stuff in MongoDB, you've gotta migrate it.

Richard Bown: 00:08:37

How did you cope with that?

Dani Grant: 00:08:39

Um, so two engineers took this on in our team.

Dani Grant: 00:08:42

, they spent six weeks, um, working on the migration they had and at, at the

Dani Grant: 00:08:47

time that they deployed the migration, they had a runbook of what to do.

Dani Grant: 00:08:51

They had practiced on staging, um, and they had a runbook of

Dani Grant: 00:08:55

what to do if things went wrong.

Dani Grant: 00:08:56

And they had, um, a list of scenarios that they thought could happen.

Dani Grant: 00:09:00

The whole migration took 20 minutes and there was not a

Dani Grant: 00:09:04

single bug report after, and.

Dani Grant: 00:09:06

It and watching.

Dani Grant: 00:09:08

I was on the slack huddle where the two engineers were during the

Dani Grant: 00:09:11

migration and they, they just, they worked with each other with such

Dani Grant: 00:09:16

respect and such like collaboration.

Dani Grant: 00:09:19

It was like a soccer team that's passing very well.

Dani Grant: 00:09:22

It's sort of practice for the bigger problems that may come along, and you're

Dani Grant: 00:09:24

learning how to execute on the smaller problems so that when you have to do

Dani Grant: 00:09:28

big and difficult things, you can, and I just felt like, okay, we did a big

Dani Grant: 00:09:32

and difficult thing together and, and.

Dani Grant: 00:09:35

and now we can do anything.

Dani Grant: 00:09:37

So it, that was a moment of pride.

Richard Bown: 00:09:39

And that was pretty recently.

Richard Bown: 00:09:40

Yeah.

Dani Grant: 00:09:41

That was one month and one day ago.

Richard Bown: 00:09:43

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:09:44

Congratulations on that.

Richard Bown: 00:09:45

So how big is the team then now at Jam?

Dani Grant: 00:09:47

Small team of seven.

Dani Grant: 00:09:49

Uh, one thing we learned at CloudFlare is when something is important and you want

Dani Grant: 00:09:53

it to go faster, it's actually better to have fewer people on it, not more.

Dani Grant: 00:09:57

And so we really live by that.

Dani Grant: 00:09:59

We're very inspired by Instagram.

Dani Grant: 00:10:00

There are 13 people, they were 13 people at a billion dollar valuation.

Dani Grant: 00:10:04

Um, my dream is for a jam to be 13 people at a billion dollar valuation.

Richard Bown: 00:10:08

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:10:08

So what does the future then look like?

Richard Bown: 00:10:10

So you're very excited to get almost to 15,000 users.

Richard Bown: 00:10:11

That's brilliant.

Richard Bown: 00:10:13

Are they all paying users?

Richard Bown: 00:10:14

Uh, how does the licensing model work?

Dani Grant: 00:10:16

we we're students of CloudFlare, so large, free tier.

Dani Grant: 00:10:19

Um, we love that.

Dani Grant: 00:10:20

We, we love that, uh, we can build something that everyone can use, um, no

Dani Grant: 00:10:25

matter their ability to pay and then build features on top that only companies need

Dani Grant: 00:10:29

and companies have the ability to pay.

Dani Grant: 00:10:31

Um, we are so determined to.

Dani Grant: 00:10:34

Bring bug reporting out of this sort of archaic manual, outdated phase that

Dani Grant: 00:10:39

it's in and change it, uh, modernize it, bring it to the 21st century of how we

Dani Grant: 00:10:44

do things in software development today.

Dani Grant: 00:10:46

Um, wherever there are bugs we.

Dani Grant: 00:10:48

trying to build product solutions for that.

Richard Bown: 00:10:50

So it sounds like yeah, you're very aligned then

Richard Bown: 00:10:52

with the developer experience.

Richard Bown: 00:10:54

I mean, obviously it's great from a product, um, experience as well, from

Richard Bown: 00:10:57

a, from a company's point of view, but the emotional words that you're using

Richard Bown: 00:11:00

there about kind of pain, it seems to be aligned very much with the things

Richard Bown: 00:11:04

that developers will feel when they are confronted with the bug report, which

Richard Bown: 00:11:07

doesn't have enough information in it.

Richard Bown: 00:11:08

Is that fair?

Dani Grant: 00:11:10

Uh, yes.

Dani Grant: 00:11:11

And to be honest, the product managers, the support team members and the QA

Dani Grant: 00:11:16

testers who are reporting bugs to engineers are just as frustrated.

Dani Grant: 00:11:19

It's a communication problem, so it really has to be solved on both ends.

Richard Bown: 00:11:23

Okay, so the fee, showing that feedback loop again,

Richard Bown: 00:11:25

which is the important part of any development or product process.

Richard Bown: 00:11:28

So what happens then with these?

Richard Bown: 00:11:31

Cause I've tried the tool out and I really like it.

Richard Bown: 00:11:33

Um, but I'm just on the free tier of course, but so what's the value add, I

Richard Bown: 00:11:36

suppose then for the, for the next stage?

Richard Bown: 00:11:37

What do you get?

Dani Grant: 00:11:38

Most of the value add, um, under the paid tier has

Dani Grant: 00:11:41

to do with access controls that companies of a certain size need.

Dani Grant: 00:11:46

We want to give the value add away for free, which is, spend less time

Dani Grant: 00:11:51

debugging for engineers, spend less time manually reporting bugs for PMs,

Dani Grant: 00:11:54

work together better as a productive, fast moving team for everyone.

Dani Grant: 00:11:57

Um, and then under the paid tier, we have advanced access controls,

Dani Grant: 00:12:01

privacy, security, um, that only corporations, uh, are really asking for.

Richard Bown: 00:12:07

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:12:08

So yeah, that's the bit I'm interested in then.

Richard Bown: 00:12:09

So, cause I know there's a couple of sites, for example, won't

Richard Bown: 00:12:12

let you record so Google won't let you record stuff on it.

Richard Bown: 00:12:15

Is, or is that something that's configured within the tool itself?

Richard Bown: 00:12:17

How does that work?,

Dani Grant: 00:12:18

in the extension, we allow people to set all sorts of settings,

Dani Grant: 00:12:21

like, um, if they want to disable jam on any site, uh, for any reason or

Dani Grant: 00:12:26

if they want to do the opposite and enable it only for specific sites.

Dani Grant: 00:12:29

Um, engineers especially have all sorts of different preferences around

Dani Grant: 00:12:33

their browser and extensions that they use, and so we just try to accommodate

Dani Grant: 00:12:36

that and make everyone feel really like in control when they're using.

Richard Bown: 00:12:40

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:12:40

But would this be suitable also for customers?

Richard Bown: 00:12:43

So would you.

Richard Bown: 00:12:44

Providing it to customers or would a, um, a solution provide it for customers?

Dani Grant: 00:12:49

When we started, Jam, we wanted to fix the internal

Dani Grant: 00:12:52

communication problems between like, Product support, QA and engineers.

Dani Grant: 00:12:56

But actually what we're seeing is that a lot of teams are sending jam to

Dani Grant: 00:12:59

their customers and saying, we can't reproduce the bug you just reported.

Dani Grant: 00:13:02

Please log it with this tool and then we'll be able to, um, action it.

Dani Grant: 00:13:06

And so we're really excited to see that happen, but definitely are excited

Dani Grant: 00:13:09

also in the future to build something more focused towards customers.

Richard Bown: 00:13:14

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:13:15

And it integrates with other, other tools as well, so kind

Richard Bown: 00:13:16

of, can you use it with Jira or.

Dani Grant: 00:13:19

we integrate with all the major issue trackers.

Dani Grant: 00:13:21

So, for example, if your team uses Jira, we wanna make it really fast

Dani Grant: 00:13:23

to get all the relevant debugging information into a Jira ticket.

Dani Grant: 00:13:26

So Jira, Asana, GitHub, slack, uh, wherever you are reporting bugs, uh, we

Dani Grant: 00:13:30

want jam to make that faster and better.

Dani Grant: 00:13:33

We have this idealized.

Dani Grant: 00:13:35

Version of, of what might happen, which is like someone spots a bug,

Dani Grant: 00:13:38

creates a Jira ticket, engineer fixes it, but nine times out of 10,

Dani Grant: 00:13:41

that's actually not what happens.

Dani Grant: 00:13:43

Um, typically someone reports a bug and they want to get more information

Dani Grant: 00:13:48

before they create the Jira ticket.

Dani Grant: 00:13:49

So they put something sort of vague, um, into a Slack channel.

Dani Grant: 00:13:54

Like, um, login isn't working.

Dani Grant: 00:13:59

, the vagueness of any issue creates a lot of fear because it sounds like

Dani Grant: 00:14:04

a big deal without more details.

Dani Grant: 00:14:06

And so a lot of engineers will see that message and be like, okay,

Dani Grant: 00:14:09

I need to stop what I'm doing on and focus on the critical thing.

Dani Grant: 00:14:12

And because there was no sort of, um, orchestration, many engineers

Dani Grant: 00:14:16

will now stop what they're doing to focus on this versus being

Dani Grant: 00:14:19

like, one person picks it up as a.

Dani Grant: 00:14:22

From there, there's a lot of back and forth with the original bug reporters.

Dani Grant: 00:14:26

These engineers are trying to repro it on their machines.

Dani Grant: 00:14:29

They're not seeing it.

Dani Grant: 00:14:30

They're asking back and forth, what environment are you in?

Dani Grant: 00:14:33

What browser are you in?

Dani Grant: 00:14:34

What device are you using?

Dani Grant: 00:14:36

Um, like c can you send a screenshot?

Dani Grant: 00:14:39

And ultimately, um, if, if they're able to resolve it with that, great.

Dani Grant: 00:14:44

But then ultimately they usually need to hop on a call with the.

Dani Grant: 00:14:47

Bug reporter and everyone's busy.

Dani Grant: 00:14:48

So you're orchestrating schedules and maybe at the end of the day to

Dani Grant: 00:14:51

contact, switch back to this and get on a call with a bug reporter.

Dani Grant: 00:14:54

And then like, um, they share screen.

Dani Grant: 00:14:56

You have to help them like open up dev tools and click where it says console,

Dani Grant: 00:15:01

click where it says network and like guide them through something that's.

Dani Grant: 00:15:04

quite confusing, um, and reproduce the bug.

Dani Grant: 00:15:07

And at the end of the day, it could have been something like, oh, the person had

Dani Grant: 00:15:11

the wrong password, but that front end error wasn't bubbled up to the user.

Dani Grant: 00:15:14

So login wasn't broken, it's just a front end error was not bubbled up.

Dani Grant: 00:15:18

And so, and it's just the, and that's just one bug, and it's something that

Dani Grant: 00:15:23

could have been identified and fixed in five minutes and instead took

Dani Grant: 00:15:30

an afternoon for several engineers.

Dani Grant: 00:15:33

and for that to be the case in 2023 when we have amazing other technical tools

Dani Grant: 00:15:40

and software development has come so far.

Dani Grant: 00:15:42

Um, is, is, is bunkers.

Richard Bown: 00:15:47

Good word.

Richard Bown: 00:15:47

Um, yeah, I'll contend that a little bit because it depends where you work,

Richard Bown: 00:15:52

I would say as well, because sometimes.

Richard Bown: 00:15:54

You can't get a bug looked at by a developer without going via po.

Richard Bown: 00:15:57

You know, you can't look a a, a bug looked at even in the same day, week, or month.

Richard Bown: 00:16:03

No matter what it is, no matter how well it's reported, it's not re

Richard Bown: 00:16:06

because it isn't the process, right?

Richard Bown: 00:16:07

So sometimes it's a case of there will be a lot of information added to a ticket

Richard Bown: 00:16:12

maybe in, I don't know, ServiceNow, before it even gets to Jira, which will then have

Richard Bown: 00:16:15

to be translated into a separate tool.

Richard Bown: 00:16:17

So whilst I get that, it's great if everyone's moving at that kind of.

Richard Bown: 00:16:22

It sounds a little bit kind of chaotic, I'd say as well.

Richard Bown: 00:16:24

That kind of pace.

Richard Bown: 00:16:25

Then, then I can get there.

Richard Bown: 00:16:28

There's a real need for it there.

Richard Bown: 00:16:29

However, it might Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:16:31

Where I've worked, it's kind of like you can't get something looked at a, a

Richard Bown: 00:16:35

developer because they're not available

Dani Grant: 00:16:37

the, the two things go hand in hand because of the intense amount

Dani Grant: 00:16:42

of time it currently takes engineers to solve even basic issues because

Dani Grant: 00:16:45

they're not given all the info up front.

Dani Grant: 00:16:48

Um, bugs are just taking longer to solve, which means you can solve fewer issues,

Dani Grant: 00:16:51

which means customers have to suffer with more issues in the product for longer.

Dani Grant: 00:16:55

And so by streamlining the process, you also are able to solve more

Dani Grant: 00:16:59

bugs, which is really exit.

Richard Bown: 00:17:00

Does it help you also categorize the type of bugs as well?

Richard Bown: 00:17:03

So is there anywhere or would that come in something like Jira or Azure,

Richard Bown: 00:17:05

Azure DevOps or something like that?

Dani Grant: 00:17:07

Oh, uh, this is something we want to build so much, um, which is.

Dani Grant: 00:17:11

, you use jam to record a bug right on the webpage.

Dani Grant: 00:17:14

So we have a lot more information than Jira has.

Dani Grant: 00:17:17

And so, uh, we've been thinking about ways we can help with de-duplication,

Dani Grant: 00:17:21

categorization, um, and also routing because a lot of the, um, inefficiencies

Dani Grant: 00:17:25

around bug reporting is like someone reports an issue and they just

Dani Grant: 00:17:29

like route it to the wrong team.

Richard Bown: 00:17:30

Um, anything that you can avoid to have de duplication,

Richard Bown: 00:17:34

especially in Jira, because that's what a lot of people's time is spent

Richard Bown: 00:17:37

doing, you know, is looking at either.

Richard Bown: 00:17:40

Content in Jira, which has not enough information, or it's something that has

Richard Bown: 00:17:44

been reported before or it's something that's been there for two years already

Richard Bown: 00:17:46

and should already been thrown away.

Richard Bown: 00:17:48

. Could you then also, um, Not just categorize, but also give like

Richard Bown: 00:17:53

a time series version as well.

Richard Bown: 00:17:55

Like kind of you, almost like an observability platform where you

Richard Bown: 00:17:57

could say these bugs are being pop, are popping up at certain times.

Richard Bown: 00:18:01

Is there any way that you can mine that information from the tool?

Dani Grant: 00:18:04

That's, that's so cool.

Dani Grant: 00:18:06

We're actually working on something related to observability, um, that

Dani Grant: 00:18:09

we'll announce in a couple weeks, uh, that I'm really excited about.

Dani Grant: 00:18:13

If the goal is give developers all the information they need upfront, then

Dani Grant: 00:18:18

doesn't that need to dig deep into the stack and, and help them see what the

Dani Grant: 00:18:22

error was across the infrastructure?

Dani Grant: 00:18:24

So we're working on something there

Dani Grant: 00:18:26

You know, uh, there's a lot of focus on engineering teams about how to,

Dani Grant: 00:18:31

how to improve productivity, and there's a lot of talk about tooling.

Dani Grant: 00:18:36

Um, there's a lot of talk about collaboration with other teams.

Dani Grant: 00:18:40

These things are awesome.

Dani Grant: 00:18:41

Um, but I think that the bug reporting process, uh, has huge inefficiencies and

Dani Grant: 00:18:47

engineering teams, if they were to spend some time improving that, um, would see.

Dani Grant: 00:18:50

Beyond the investment, like, uh, I, I just think it's, it's one of those neglected

Dani Grant: 00:18:54

areas that with a little bit of effort on, um, has a huge impact, um, both for

Dani Grant: 00:19:00

the speed and productivity, but also the collaboration and trust within the team.

Richard Bown: 00:19:05

Definitely.

Richard Bown: 00:19:06

But how do you fix that?

Richard Bown: 00:19:07

That's the thing.

Richard Bown: 00:19:08

I mean, because everything is so embedded, the way that we work things, we've,

Richard Bown: 00:19:11

the firms have spent a lot of money, billions, probably hundreds of billions

Richard Bown: 00:19:16

on digital agile transformations.

Richard Bown: 00:19:17

We've had Agile coaches, we have had Scrum, we've had DevOps, what all this

Richard Bown: 00:19:21

kind of stuff's been going on, and we ended up, we've got a fixed tool set.

Richard Bown: 00:19:24

You know, it is like this is the core of the problem.

Richard Bown: 00:19:26

We put things that put a sticky into Jira or into Azure, Azure, DevOps or

Richard Bown: 00:19:30

whatever, and then we forget about it.

Richard Bown: 00:19:32

So how do you kind of flip it around and.

Richard Bown: 00:19:36

A situation where people are kind of, yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:19:40

Cause I wanna say they're fast.

Richard Bown: 00:19:41

They're, they're solving bugs faster.

Richard Bown: 00:19:43

But that's kind of not the point.

Richard Bown: 00:19:44

We don't wanna have bugs in the first place.

Richard Bown: 00:19:45

We wanna have good software.

Richard Bown: 00:19:47

So how do you kind of flip it and like, not make it about bugs and

Richard Bown: 00:19:49

not make it about stacks of bugs, but make it about a good software?

Dani Grant: 00:19:53

It's, it's funny you say that, like the tools and processes are

Dani Grant: 00:19:55

stuck in place and, uh, we've already invested as an industry so much time and

Dani Grant: 00:20:00

effort and resources on, um, on Agile and, and these new practices in DevOps.

Dani Grant: 00:20:04

Uh, when we started Jam we started with a different solution to solve the same

Dani Grant: 00:20:08

problem, which we thought we were going to be able to replace some aspects

Dani Grant: 00:20:12

of Jira, um, with something better.

Dani Grant: 00:20:14

But what we found at that time is there was a lot of resistance to that because

Dani Grant: 00:20:18

it's like, well, you already used Jira, so why take a risk on something else?

Dani Grant: 00:20:21

It is good enough.

Dani Grant: 00:20:22

And so we realized we needed to build something that would improve the

Dani Grant: 00:20:25

Jira experience from the inside out.

Dani Grant: 00:20:27

Where at the, you know, whatever process you are using, um, to run your team, at

Dani Grant: 00:20:33

the end of the day, you get these tickets.

Dani Grant: 00:20:35

And the tickets are the things that you're working on.

Dani Grant: 00:20:37

And if the tickets are of low quality, uh, It makes the job much harder.

Dani Grant: 00:20:43

And so we wanted to build some, like something very lightweight anyone can

Dani Grant: 00:20:46

pick up and start using that would improve the quality of each one of these tickets.

Dani Grant: 00:20:49

Um, but what you're saying about it's, it's not about, uh, fix

Dani Grant: 00:20:53

fixing bugs so much as it is about having a great customer experience.

Dani Grant: 00:20:58

Um, . I, I completely agree.

Dani Grant: 00:21:01

Um, I think you have to do both.

Dani Grant: 00:21:03

As a, as a remote startup, we spend a lot of time thinking about how do

Dani Grant: 00:21:07

we move faster with high quality?

Dani Grant: 00:21:09

Because as a startup, speed is the biggest advantage we have against giants.

Dani Grant: 00:21:13

And so we really care about moving really fast and still delivering great product.

Dani Grant: 00:21:17

And so we've, we've figured out a couple things that work really

Dani Grant: 00:21:20

well for us, um, that I think could work well for other teams too.

Dani Grant: 00:21:24

Um, one is a culture of code comments.

Dani Grant: 00:21:27

, a lot of issues arise when an engineer is stepping into a file they have

Dani Grant: 00:21:31

never been in or a part of the code base that they're unfamiliar with,

Dani Grant: 00:21:34

and so they make a change without understanding what are the ramifications

Dani Grant: 00:21:37

across a complicated product.

Dani Grant: 00:21:39

But if, if there's a culture of code comments where engineers don't

Dani Grant: 00:21:42

approve PRS unless there's sufficient context given, uh, and each new part

Dani Grant: 00:21:47

of the code, um, that really helps engineers, uh, keep the quality.

Dani Grant: 00:21:52

And move faster because they can get context, um, really quickly when they

Dani Grant: 00:21:55

step into a new part of the code base.

Dani Grant: 00:21:57

Another is doing an on-call program.

Dani Grant: 00:22:00

Uh, we do it a bit differently than other teams.

Dani Grant: 00:22:02

Most on-call programs, there's an engineer who is expected to be

Dani Grant: 00:22:05

on-call in addition to whatever it is that they're currently working on.

Dani Grant: 00:22:09

We do it differently where when you are on call, you are only

Dani Grant: 00:22:12

on call, and so your job is to.

Dani Grant: 00:22:15

Make improvements that you want to see unless there is something

Dani Grant: 00:22:18

urgent that comes up or you need to help someone release some code.

Dani Grant: 00:22:21

Um, and so that way there's always one person on the engineering

Dani Grant: 00:22:24

team, which for us is meaningful.

Dani Grant: 00:22:25

It's 20% of the engineering team, um, that's working on sort of background

Dani Grant: 00:22:29

fixes, cleaning up technical debt.

Dani Grant: 00:22:31

And then the last thing is something we found is the.

Dani Grant: 00:22:36

There is a misconception about moving fast, which, uh, which people think

Dani Grant: 00:22:40

if you stop and take too much time to plan, you won't move very fast.

Dani Grant: 00:22:44

But the not moving very fast that we're afraid of is like

Dani Grant: 00:22:47

deadlines slipping by weeks.

Dani Grant: 00:22:48

It's not taking an extra day to plan.

Dani Grant: 00:22:51

and we found that if we spend about half to one day before starting to write

Dani Grant: 00:22:55

code on any project planning how it will work and give having a round of feedback

Dani Grant: 00:23:00

with the engineering team, what are some ramifications we may not have thought of

Dani Grant: 00:23:03

and half to one day at the end, cleaning things up, we found along the way, then

Dani Grant: 00:23:07

we don't have to stop and do a bunch of technical debt, clean cleanup later.

Dani Grant: 00:23:10

And that really helps us.

Dani Grant: 00:23:12

There will be bugs and having a streamline process to report and fix them is super

Dani Grant: 00:23:16

important, but also having practices that support that, um, is, is important too.

Richard Bown: 00:23:22

So would you describe then Jam or the mission of Jam then, as being

Richard Bown: 00:23:25

like kind of, not just supplementing the existing tools there, but hopefully

Richard Bown: 00:23:31

replacing them in some ways as well?

Dani Grant: 00:23:33

I mean, the.

Dani Grant: 00:23:36

We're, we're in love with the problem, not the solution, if that makes sense.

Dani Grant: 00:23:40

Um, and so, uh, we will do whatever it takes to modernize the communication

Dani Grant: 00:23:47

between all the different cross-functional teams of an organization and help

Dani Grant: 00:23:51

engineers fix and catch issues faster.

Richard Bown: 00:23:53

Well, I look forward to hearing about the journey as

Richard Bown: 00:23:55

well as you, as you go forward.

Richard Bown: 00:23:56

So sounds like it's been very exciting ride so far.

Richard Bown: 00:23:58

It's only gonna get more exciting.

Richard Bown: 00:24:00

So what are the plans for the next, so you've got something

Richard Bown: 00:24:02

exciting to announce soon.

Richard Bown: 00:24:04

Looking beyond that you've already touched on some potentially quite

Richard Bown: 00:24:07

exciting things for the future, so you're kind of, you have large ambitions.

Richard Bown: 00:24:11

Is it fair enough to say that?

Dani Grant: 00:24:13

Yeah.

Dani Grant: 00:24:13

Um, we.

Dani Grant: 00:24:16

Uh, we were talking as a team, uh, the other day and someone was

Dani Grant: 00:24:19

like, this, this is very ambitious.

Dani Grant: 00:24:20

And, and, and then we're like, yes, but everything we do is,

Dani Grant: 00:24:22

you know, needs to be ambitious.

Dani Grant: 00:24:24

Um, we feel like we're, I mean, we are just getting started.

Dani Grant: 00:24:27

There's so much to be done.

Dani Grant: 00:24:29

Um, and I'm really excited about the future.

Dani Grant: 00:24:31

We have, uh, a really special team.

Dani Grant: 00:24:33

Uh, they are awesome.

Dani Grant: 00:24:35

They care, uh, they work so well together.

Dani Grant: 00:24:37

Um, and, and they're so supportive of each other and I can't wait

Dani Grant: 00:24:41

to see what we can all do.

Richard Bown: 00:24:43

Awesome.

Richard Bown: 00:24:43

Well, I look forward to seeing it too.

Richard Bown: 00:24:44

Danny, thank you so much for joining me today.

Richard Bown: 00:24:46

It's been an absolute pleasure talking to you and best of luck in the future.

Dani Grant: 00:24:49

Thank you so much.

Dani Grant: 00:24:50

Thanks for having me on.

Dani Grant: 00:24:53

thank you for joining me today.

Dani Grant: 00:24:54

I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Dani Grant: 00:24:55

It was lots of fun to make.

Dani Grant: 00:24:57

If you would like to come onto Loving Legacy, then please

Dani Grant: 00:25:00

feel free to get in touch.

Dani Grant: 00:25:02

You can find me via social media bownrw on Twitter or via LinkedIn

Dani Grant: 00:25:07

or via my website, richardwbown.com.

Dani Grant: 00:25:10

I'd love to talk to you about anything to do with software delivery and or

Dani Grant: 00:25:14

something to do with legacy systems.

Dani Grant: 00:25:16

Of course.

Dani Grant: 00:25:18

Until next time, this is Richard Bown saying goodbye and good luck.