E170: Selling and managing an agile structure with Jeremy Jackson

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Jeremy Jackson’s passion lies in pairing excellent design and technology to create beautifully-crafted digital products. He has worked in product development, UX, graphic design, and development for the web since the mid-’90s and was Director of Technology at the innovative international digital product and design studio, Method.

In 2012, he founded Shift Lab, an NYC-based agency of design-minded technologists hell-bent on creating truly collaborative and iterative working relationships between designers and technologists. His clients have included Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

Episode highlights:

• Why Jeremy thinks designers and developers butt heads.
• How Jeremy has created a collaborative agency that has grown to 20 people.
• Agile pods: what they are and what they do.
• Objections to not having a specific scope and how they’re handled.
• Which KPI’s Jeremy uses to keep track of his team.
• The secret to getting large clients like Google and Facebook.
• How to give bonuses to positions like developers.
• Best advice ever received: Bucking the concept that work isn’t supposed to be fun.
• Habit that contributes to success: Obsessiveness.
• Recommended tools: Jira
• Recommended book: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice as much in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland
• Run time: 33:50

Links:

• Shiftlab.co 
• Jira
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice as much in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

Quotes:

• “I had to figure out my own value in the company.”
• “What we’re selling is the process.”
• “We have missed some opportunities because we wouldn’t put a fixed price on something.”
• “Being okay with it isn’t something that I’ve just arrived at.”
• “The mindset was always: doing good work with good people.”

Takeaways:

• Keeping a simple, positive mindset will help bolster the growth of your business and the happiness of your team.