Ines Garcia is an Agile coach and the author of a book on using Agile with Salesforce. In this episode, I’m discussing Agile with her. 

Throughout our conversation, Ines and I talk about Agile in general as well as how it can be used with Salesforce. We also touch on the book and the game she has created. Tune in to learn more about Ines, her early years, and her extensive experience with Agile.

Show Highlights:

  • How Ines went from studying communications to the ecosystem of software engineering.
  • How she got introduced to Salesforce.
  • The 4 values of Agile.
  • The process to becoming a certified Scrum Master.
  • How the Scrum framework abates some of the risks in software delivery.
  • What extreme programming is.
  • How Agile breaks time down when it comes to things like sprints.
  • What timeboxing is and how it’s being used to be more efficient.
  • Agile’s perspective on documentation.
  • The advantages and disadvantages Salesforce creates when working with Agile.
  • Good resources for those who have been entrenched in Waterfall but are now interested in Agile.
  • Why Ines decided to write a book and what the process of designing it was like.
  • How Ines’ game can play into improving your team and projects.

Links:

  1. Ines on Twitter: https://twitter.com/inescapinezka
  2. Ines on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/inesgarciaagile/
  3. Ines on Github: https://github.com/GarciaInes
  4. Ines’ Author Page: amazon.com/author/inesgarcia
  5. Ines’ Game Page: https://birdsnerdsandturds.com/
  6. Get Agile Company Page: http://getagile.co.uk

Episode Transcript

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, after all, it’s all about being incremental in the way that you’re improving. So the aim or the goal is not to be agile, it’s to improve.

Josh Birk:
That is Ines Garcia, an agile coach and author of a book on using agile with Salesforce. I’m Josh Birk, your host for the Salesforce Developer podcast. Here on the podcast, you’ll hear stories and insights from developers for developers. Today, we sit down and talk with Ines about agile, using it with Salesforce, and the book and the games that she has made. As usual, we start off with the early years.

Ines Garcia:
I studied communications. That was the end of my degree. I was already working as PR for Segway Catalonia. Part of the job, it was convincing politicians to basically jump into this thing, to have some kind of media exposure.

Ines Garcia:
Well, they go on holidays over summer, so I spoke with my boss and I said, “Listen, I think I’m going to go to London for a month, because there’s no one here to convince.” And so I did. What happened is that a different country, lot of things. I absolutely loved it. Three weeks in, I called back and I said, “I’m not going back.”

Josh Birk:
How did your boss react to that?

Ines Garcia:
Well, I tried to get somebody else that could take over and things like that. But life takes you to interesting paths, so you just need to make the most out of it, I guess.

Josh Birk:
Nice. Where were you from originally?

Ines Garcia:
I’m from Barcelona.

Josh Birk:
Got you, got you. Almost as kind of as a side question, because I too love London and I just love visiting there, but what are some of your favorite things about the city?

Ines Garcia:
Well, I love that has so many flavors. You could be working and within three streets is a completely different space. And it’s an ever-changing city. There is always something going on. Maybe this year, not the most. But it’s ever-changing. There is a lot of things. And you get to meet people from all over. I find that really rich.

Josh Birk:
Nice. And then how did coming to London land you into an ecosystem of software engineering?

Ines Garcia:
Well, at the beginning, I did all sort of jobs. I was still paying my flat here, my flat over there. So sometimes I would take the first plane in the morning, come back with the last one at night, because I was presenting my final project in the university. And all the time, I kind of got back to communications more in the internal side, such as business transformation and digital solutions have a lot to do with it as an enabler. By themselves, they don’t do anything.

Ines Garcia:
But yeah, this kind of took me through that path. And in one of the companies I was working for, the CEO said, “I kind of leave you guys the decision about the CRM roadmap. But one thing I’m telling you, we are going to get Salesforce.”

Josh Birk:
So-

Ines Garcia:
And we just look at each other and we didn’t know what we were selling now.

Josh Birk:
That was kind of my next question. So you kind of got introduced. You’re one of these people who sort of got introduced into the Salesforce ecosystem because the company you’re working with is like, “Here’s Salesforce. Learn it, figure it out, tell us what you think.”

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, in a sense. To be honest, I was quite drawn to it. I really like to understand how things work. So in my own time, I like spin and dev org. I actually really enjoyed. We had this 700 pages workbook fundamentals that takes you through a very long use case and you get to know the platform more, more, more, more. I loved the concept of citizen development. It really blew my mind. It comes with its dangers, as we all know, but yeah, it really blew my mind that I could be doing things to make other people’s life better.

Josh Birk:
How would you define citizen development?

Ines Garcia:
The ability to configure business flows that supports the vision or the different themes of value that that company is trying to achieve.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. And your early days working with Salesforce, you weren’t really… Agile was not something that was first and foremost to your mind, right?

Ines Garcia:
I kind of got to know the two more or less at the same time. I’m someone that likes to read a lot and is really interested, especially in the kind of business transformation. World transformation is such a heavy word, but… And the kind of work that I was doing is important to know how change and resistance to change affects in an organization and what the different things and system thinking that you should be having to enhance everybody’s life, rather than make them worse, right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Ines Garcia:
I know, but that reading and that investigation is where I came about all these agile concepts.

Josh Birk:
Got you. Did you have a moment in your career which just sort of cemented, that you’re like, “Agile’s the path for me.”?

Ines Garcia:
I think that the concepts were really interesting and I would try to make my own spin of it without really understanding the roots and the principles lying behind. So I will make my daily standup twice a week with my team, and some other random things. Not very daily and not very standing either.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, and then so I decided because it was really attracting, but something wasn’t quite fermenting in the way that I thought it should be. Then I decided to embark myself into the Scrum path. So going through the several different certifications, and you need to submit work experience and different things to go through the path.

Josh Birk:
Got you, got you. I think that’s interesting and I feel like a lot of people end up approaching agile in that manner. I feel like I’ve done agile like 13 different ways, and it’s always like kind of what fits into the team structure and the timetable. Does that make sense to you?

Ines Garcia:
Yeah. After all, it’s all about being incremental in the way that you’re improving. So the aim or the goal is not to be agile, it’s to improve.

Josh Birk:
Right, right. Well, okay, so let’s level set for everybody on what we’re talking about, what agile means. Describe to me what the Agile Manifesto is.

Ines Garcia:
Well, the Agile Manifesto is something that a bunch of guys 20 years ago came about with. But yeah, so the Manifesto itself, it kind of sort of phase from a group of software engineers, that they were already doing things differently and they decide to keep their discrepancies aside and kind of go together for a weekend on a ski resort. I’m sure drinking and skiing and chatting among other things, and come together to define what were the things that was working for them in the different approaches that was making their lives on delivering software better. So there you go, Manifesto is there with four values, 12 principles, and lot of stories.

Josh Birk:
We probably don’t have time to get into the 12 principles, but what are the four values?

Ines Garcia:
The four values, actually, I really like, because it’s like a great… You generally see this kind of theoretical values as a list of adjectives or so. But instead, the Agile Manifesto tell us values within context. So it values more individuals and interactions over processes and tools. So it’s not that we don’t have processes, we don’t use tools. Of course we do. But where the value of that is just more in those interactions and the individuals involved.

Ines Garcia:
The second one is working software, or you could be saying working product, is value more over comprehensive documentation. State docs that takes forever, and no one reads, where the value is there. Of course we document. We’ll approach it differently. It values more customer collaboration over contract renegotiation, and it values more responding to change over following a plan.

Josh Birk:
Got you. You have gone so far as to become a certified scrum master. What was that process like?

Ines Garcia:
As I mentioned earlier, it’s kind of like a path. You can sign up in the Scrum Alliance, the org. I’m a member. I try to be involved as well. You sit there for two days, and at the end of it, you pass an exam and you can call yourself a scrum master. Yet I would argue you don’t master nothing after two days of a course. But it gives you some kind of foundation of this framework, which is highly, highly used in the world, to kind of…

Ines Garcia:
The way that I describe the scrum framework is it helps you to get into a rhythm, a rhythm and pauses. Because music is not only what you hear, but it’s also the pauses in between. And it helps you to get that freedom so that you can be focusing to deliver that value earlier, right? So having the principles of that constant delivery of what type of product you’re doing, valuing those individuals and interactions, that working end product that’s where the value lies, and so on. It gives you that rhythm.

Josh Birk:
Actually, give me a little more detail about that. Compare that to… And I’m kind of putting this in quotes now because I feel like calling waterfall traditional is… I think some people wonder how much of a tradition it is at this point. But that concept of delivering value earlier, how is that an improvement over waterfall, and how does it kind of like maybe abate some of the risks in software delivery?

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, exactly. Waterfall is probably the most used thing as a, I don’t know, traditional or olden days to look at projects. That goes this way. It’s like a spate of events where at the beginning of the project, you’re going to spend a certain amount of a phase gathering requirements. After that, you would wrap that up and you will hand this over to probably a high level design, and then you’ll have this other phase. And then probably you do another wrap-up and hand over to somebody else or another team that’s going to be, hopefully by that point, start touching the product. And then after that, you may have an integration phase. Then after that, you may hopefully get to the testing phase. So it’s like a spate of events, very sequential and very defined what gets done on that particular amount of time.

Ines Garcia:
So the flow in that system is that at the beginning of the project is when you know the list that you are ever going to know about the thing that you want to get out the door. So why on earth are we putting ourselves in a pickle when… I’m sorry, but we cannot foresee the future. I think this year is a great example. We need to resist less to change, because change is part of nature. So how we react for our environment changes, for our tech changes, for our team changes, for… We are surrounded by change. So let’s make the most out of it instead of fighting against that.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Talking about some specifics about agile, how would you define extreme programming?

Ines Garcia:
Right. Extreme programming, I think for me, it would be a practice that you put on top of your agile mindset. It gives you a little bit more specific things to do that might have the mindset itself or the frameworks are trying to stay away from.

Josh Birk:
Got you, got you. Tell me a little bit more. You’re talking about waterfall having these kind of long aspects of time and planning and things like that. Talk to me a little bit more specifically about how agile is breaking down time when it comes to things like sprints.

Ines Garcia:
Exactly. You just said that sprint is like the biggest time box that you have, and what the time box is there to do is to help us to bring down uncertainty and increase agreement. We have a certain amount of time that we give ourselves a goal to accomplish. So instead of having those phases we were talking, that we’ll hand over and decide things upfront, what we do is a smaller scale where we can do everything and we’re doing it together.

Josh Birk:
In your book, you say a scrum is simple to understand but difficult to master. What exactly do you mean there?

Ines Garcia:
Scrum, it gives you that rhythm. It will give you certain ceremonies that as a team, you kind of come together. So with that common goal.

Ines Garcia:
The difficulty that I’ve seen is that you can easily get through the motions without the emotions. It misses the point of just sit there and wait or expect somebody to tell you what to do. And then every day you give a status report. And at the end, you just sit in a boring meeting, people moaning. And then you do it again. That, for me, is missing the point of each one of those things. So I think it’s very simple. When you explain scrum, I think people gets it, but use some muscles that you need to train.

Josh Birk:
So what would you define as values of a good scrum meeting?

Ines Garcia:
Depends on the one that we’re talking about. But even if we sprinkled some XP on top, each one of them needs the whole team. You need to do it collaboratively. You have certain concepts of pair programming, for example, from XP. So how can you embed those things so you can increase your team knowledge and you can enhance which of the things that you are building. So it’s not silos and it’s not handovers. So how you have that concept of whole team within each one of them.

Josh Birk:
Got you. If I’m sitting in a scrum, what should a good takeaway for me be from that meeting?

Ines Garcia:
If, for example, we are talking about the planning, so as a team, you should have a clarity and you should have been part of building the common goal for that week. So you know where you’re going. You may not have all the specifics of the world for detail absolutely everything, but you know where you’re going and you have enough to start with.

Josh Birk:
Got you. Tell me a little bit more about the concept of time boxing and how is that being used to be more efficient.

Ines Garcia:
Time is an invented concept. Okay. Without going too meta. So if we think that we live in an ever-changing environment, to be able to bring down or increase certainty of what’s going on, what we can do is to reduce time.

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Ines Garcia:
So let’s say if I look at what am I going to do next month, I can have a rough idea. Most likely, things are going to change, so things will fluctuate. But if-

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Ines Garcia:
… I look what I’m going to do now until the end of the day, it’s probably much more accurate. And because humans, we are terrible at planning far away or seeing far away.

Josh Birk:
Right, right. So in a lot of ways, by reducing things down to distinct units of time, you’re reducing risk because you’re only dealing with the things that you can kind of accurately predict, so to speak.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, and you reduce uncertainty. And you bring agreement. Because sometimes, most of the times, there is more than one way to check something. So having a small amount of time to tackle something gives you reassurance and gives you the ability to spin a prototype or to try something new. New piece of tech or whatever it is. Have a play with it and have more information so your decisions are more informed. The best of all is that ideally in a small timeframe, you can put something out there. Test it out. Your users like it, your customers buy it. If it works, great. Put more effort. If it doesn’t, stop it. Stop it.

Josh Birk:
Well, that kind of brings me to the next question I was going to say. Because when I was reading your book, I thought it was interesting how feedback and communication comes up in different ways. For instance, the concept of using something like an MVP simply to prove a point, not to prove a product. If I’m saying that correctly.

Ines Garcia:
I think in general we not only in the Salesforce world, but across as humans in our life, we should try to implement the scientific method to life, right? So scientists more often than not create hypothesis and then have statements that support the multiple statements per hypothesis. And then they would go and test to try to prove themselves wrong. So it’s that constant… It’s that way of thinking that we don’t know what we don’t know. So what is the bare minimum we can put out there to guide us? Ultimately, it’s to reduce waste. It’s not only a waste of time or a waste of money, but it’s waste of energy of everybody involved.

Josh Birk:
Nice. In talking about feedback loops, can you describe what shifting left to meet means?

Ines Garcia:
Right. When we were talking about the sequence of events of waterfall, what happened is that as… You only start judging the product quite late, or even doing the integration phase quite late, or even the quality assurance. Well, unfortunately, the very last thing of all. As you discover new things, because this is going to happen, you just push key deliverables such as testing or quality assurance towards the end. And if we were looking at the graph, it kind of makes a bombshell effect. Which the name, it kind of tells you a lot.

Josh Birk:
What to expect. Exactly.

Ines Garcia:
That explodes once you go to production. So shifting left is completely the opposite. It’s how can you reduce waste. And again, multiple type of waste. By thinking of that quality throughout your process.

Ines Garcia:
This is also because… If you asked me what I did two weeks ago, I’m going to have a rough idea, but not specific. There is so much things going on and I pushed the different things. So for me to fix something or enhance something that I did two weeks ago or worst, because some of the waterfall projects are months, things that I did months ago, it takes me much more time. Because most of what we do is conceptual, it’s creative, one will hope. So longer the time it goes from you doing something to having to revise it, the most expensive it’s going to be to revise it.

Josh Birk:
Got you. I kind of just love how everything that you just said, I feel like, has special meaning in the year 2020. Because it’s very difficult for me right now to think about what I was doing two weeks ago, to be quite honest.

Josh Birk:
To kind of wrap that back around, and especially to some of the agile values that you were talking about when it comes to this kind of communication and feedback loop, what is agile’s perspective on documentation? Kind of like how specifically is that rolled into a project?

Ines Garcia:
We think that we value more the work in whatever thing we’re doing versus boring papers. Yet we want to be able to reference things because we forget. We just talked about it. So-

Josh Birk:
Right.

Ines Garcia:
That’s okay. So it’s how can you approach documenting something in a way that doesn’t drain everybody. Especially it doesn’t drain the product.

Ines Garcia:
In the book I basically cover one of the ways I’ve seen working quite well. But what you’re trying to do is to have something which is slightly more high level in certain areas. It’s information that can be disseminated across the organization. But also how you can share that knowledge across the team. So we were talking about not having only one person maybe dealing with a specific part of an integration or something like that. So having a T-shaped team that you can help each other. Peer reviews or pair programming and things like that really helps that as well.

Josh Birk:
Got you, got you. Do you feel that Salesforce itself creates any special advantages or disadvantages when it comes to operating with agile?

Ines Garcia:
I think Salesforce is a great example. I normally quote them as an example. In 2006, you guys moved the engineering team from more traditional ways to look at delivering value to agile. Only with that move, you increase productivity by 38%. And the major releases that we love, they were wrapped up 60% faster. This is big numbers.

Josh Birk:
It’s big numbers. I have definitely heard internally that without that shift, the three RR would not happen. There was a philosophical shift that had to occur in order to get that rate of production actually up and running.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah. As a consumer at the other end, from the one that this brings is we have so many new things coming up and it kind of keeps us on our toes. So that we need to know all these new things that are being in constant, the platform. For me in a way it’s that Salesforce is kind of helping us to push us to keep us on our toes, to try new things, to constantly refine, and to waste less effort, to waste less resources.

Josh Birk:
Right, right. Because if there’s anything true about the Salesforce platform, and I remember telling my developers this all the time, is that kind of going back to that two weeks thing. You can’t trust that the solution you did two weeks or two months ago is the right solution, because you don’t know what new feature just rolled out in the spring release. And maybe that apex function just took out 10 lines of code that you used to rely on.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah. Not only on maybe some destructive things that you may need to revise, but also you may be consuming more the amounts that you necessarily have, because some of the changes, it gives you the ability to bundle things. So it’s important to keep up to date. As we say, things change constantly and it’s good to be in this ecosystem that you are basically reminded very often that there’s better ways to refine your product.

Josh Birk:
Right, right. I do want to talk about your book, how and why it was written. But I’m kind of hoping if somebody’s listening to this right now and they’re hearing things like reduced risk, and faster delivery, and more production time, that maybe they’re like, “I need agile in my life.” What starting points would you recommend? They’re good resources for somebody who’s maybe been entrenched in waterfall for years of software development that you would point them to.

Ines Garcia:
We have a world of overinformation, so you can just go get it. We also did a session with Don Robins, which is available in Pluralsight, from his Salesforce Play by Play series. The series are fantastic, and I was just so happy to give him the opportunity. So we did one just on agile. It’s going to give you some flavors of the basics, going through the principles, talking a little bit of scrum, and tiny sprinkle of anti-patterns to be careful with at the end. So that may be a good one.

Josh Birk:
Got you.

Ines Garcia:
You can get a free trial and stuff, so it’s kind of free over there. And obviously you have Trailhead, and there are some modules over there you can also do.

Josh Birk:
Right. Are there some book titles that are your favorites, or is that too many to list?

Ines Garcia:
Too many to list. There is one very interesting that I don’t know why it’s taking me so long to read. It’s called XP and Scrum from the Trenches. The book was written in a weekend, apparently. I love it. It has the second version, which is the author looking back on time, I can’t remember how many years in between, and making his director comments of, “Why did I say this? I actually think this now,” or, “Yes, I was so right.” It’s really good. It’s super tangible, what’s happened for him and his team, and what did they learn in the process of using scrum, and certain XP techniques. That one is really good.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Ines Garcia:
There is another book called Scrum: The Art of Maximizing the Work Not Done or Deliver Double in Half of the Time. It is written by one of the authors of The Scrum Guide. It’s really, really easy to read. What I love the most is towards the end, you have stories. Non-software related stories of how scrum is applied to school, so to many other industries. I just find it fascinating.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Okay, so back to your own book. When did you decide you wanted to write it?

Ines Garcia:
This book, it’s been in my mind for a good couple years. I need to do this thing. I need to do this thing. Procrastination is a thing.

Ines Garcia:
At the beginning of this year, actually, I went to Japan Dreamin. I love Japan. It was my third time there. I said, “You know what? Because I’m there, I’m just going to take a month off and travel around a little bit.” Which is wonderful in so many ways. Also, extremely lucky to be rambling about at the beginning of this year, really, in ways that I couldn’t-

Josh Birk:
Yes. Good timing.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, I couldn’t imagine. So having some headspace, things bubbled out. One of the things was the book now. I sort of thought to myself that I should do what I preach. So as soon I hit London, I gave myself a target every week. I had something specific that I was aiming towards. And yeah, a few months later, the manuscript was ready.

Josh Birk:
Nice.

Ines Garcia:
And then at the end, some things happened. I had to learn a lot of the things of KDP, and print on demand, and all these other things. But yeah, I think it’s all about giving yourself some time boxes and commit to them.

Josh Birk:
So just as a side note, I feel like traveling is a little dangerous for you because you keep having big life things that happen after you go to places.

Ines Garcia:
I love travel.

Josh Birk:
I think you just touched on it a little bit there, but would you say that you used agile to write a book about agile?

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, I do mention that in the book also. I even did that in a similar situation for the game card that I launched last year. Similar situation. Back of my mind, thinking about it, “Yeah, I should do this thing,” and then don’t do anything about it. Instead, helped myself slice the thing in manageable bites. Yeah, helping having progress towards it. As humans, it’s important to post and celebrate achievements on tiny wins. I think there is a lot more to the mindset and the frameworks and all of that, and why that worked.

Josh Birk:
Yes. A mutual friend of ours, Mary Scott, and I share a habit of effectively just putting things on a whiteboard, mostly just so that we can check them off. It’s not even an organizational tool as much as it is a miniature victory lap tool. It confuses people all the time because my whiteboard is behind me in meetings. They’re like, “What are you doing back there?” And I’m like, “Just checking things off.” Half the stuff that you see back here is stuff that’s already been done.

Josh Birk:
So both the book and the game have some lovely illustrations in them. Talk to me a little bit about the process of actually not just writing a book, but designing a book and then getting those illustrations woven into it.

Ines Garcia:
About the card game, the illustrations are made by my wife, which made everything more tense, but lovely. So it’s someone very creative, and I was playing around with Google Drawings, something ridiculous. You have the tools that you have.

Ines Garcia:
So yeah, the card game, just to bring some flavor, is called Birds, Nerds & Turds. You’re going to have illustration of these three different things. As part of trying what works and not, wisp in some kind of feedback forms, and we asked different people, because each one of them, it would mean something different, no? With the feedback, it helps us to refine the illustrations. For example, the birds. Having birds that are very neutral looking is extremely difficult. The beak makes them smiley. So that’s the kind of feedback-

Josh Birk:
That’s true.

Ines Garcia:
… that you get. You try it for that with different things.

Josh Birk:
Nice, nice. Also as a side note, I can deeply appreciate having a very sophisticated feedback loop if you’re having a project with your wife. That seems like a good time to have a nice tenant of agile there. Okay, so Birds, Nerds & Turds. Walk me through a round of that game and how would it play into improving my team and my project.

Ines Garcia:
The game itself has these three things that I mentioned earlier. And then it also have some statements how… One of the things in the scrum framework is that post to think how we done and what we’re going to try next time in terms of process, not the product. We’re so focused in the what we are delivering, that sometimes we forget the how, which have a massive difference.

Ines Garcia:
When we were talking about going through the motions without the motions, it’s extremely dangerous to what’s called the retrospective, that post at the end of the cycle with your team. Those meetings can be so draining. Life is too important to just waste it like that. So I always try to invent things and I love games. I’m a big gamer, board games and all sorts. I try to bring things that brings the energy up and helps all the voices to be heard. So that’s essentially what I have tried with the game. You guys will have to tell me.

Ines Garcia:
As I’m a gamer as well, the game has four different ways that you can play. But let’s imagine the way number one. You will have one of each, so one bird, one nerd, and one turd. Everybody of the team will have one of each. And we have this statement. So quickly, we’ll turn that statement in the middle. I’ll show it to the screen. And quickly, everybody will choose what do they think, that as a team, that statement matches to. And I have tried to write the statements in a funny way.

Ines Garcia:
So if we’re talking about having the right support that we need at hand and on time, and everybody or majority are showing a turd, well, it’s sort of facing a common understanding that there is something to improve.

Josh Birk:
Got you, got you.

Ines Garcia:
And because everybody’s voting at the same time, we try to avoid group think or some people are more outspoken than others. It’s giving the opportunity for everybody. It’s similar to planning poker on that sense, right? So everybody votes at the same time.

Josh Birk:
Yeah. That interestingly brings me back to the interview I did with Andrew Davis, because he was talking about dev ops and he was talking about a passionate retrospective. It feels like what you’re doing is you’re adding in a layer of fun that allows people to have a quasi-emotional experience with a meeting that almost everybody assumes is probably going to be painful from the onset.

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, unless you’ve been in my teams, and I make you play games. After all, you have a bunch of people that means well and stand up from their bed every morning to achieve something, right?

Josh Birk:
Right.

Ines Garcia:
So how can you focus into becoming better at what we do? That can be fun, and that has to be rich and challenging and thriving. That’s the energy that is worth to be sitting in a meeting for.

Josh Birk:
That’s our show. Now, before we go, I did ask after, Ines’s favorite non-technical hobby. And for somebody who tries to make her scrums fun with entertaining games, it really wasn’t a surprise.

Ines Garcia:
Board games. I love board games.

Josh Birk:
What’s your favorite board game?

Ines Garcia:
That’s such a tough question.

Josh Birk:
I know.

Ines Garcia:
I really like collaborative games. It seems a bit controversial, but there is one quite high straight that maybe people knows about. It’s called Pandemic. Everybody is playing together, so you all win or you all lose, and you have like seven different types to lose and only one type to win. It’s hard, but it’s really good. I really like that.

Josh Birk:
I totally appreciate that. It’s one of my favorites as well. One of the reasons it’s my favorites is I feel like every time new players get into Pandemic, chances are that board is going to lose. But at the end of the game, everybody’s like, “I know how we could have worked together better.” It’s a learning process. And at the moment, even though you lost, you’re like, “I learned how to play this game better. So the next time we do this, our chances of success have actually gone up.”

Ines Garcia:
Yeah, it’s quite addictive. I remember a couple of Christmas ago, we were playing it. Another one, another one.

Josh Birk:
I can definitely recommend Pandemic, especially for people who have had the year that we just had. I want to thank Ines for the great conversation and information. And as always, I want to thank you for listening. If you want to learn more about this podcast, head on over to developer.salesforce.com/podcast, where you can hear old episodes, see the show notes, and have links to your favorite podcast service. Thanks again, and I’ll talk to you next week.

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