Why we’re bringing Fractal to New York City
By: Trace Wax
Tags: Xp, Product, Agile, NYC, Extreme Programming

I’ve joined some of my favorite people to open an office in New York for Fractal, to do transformational software-, team-, and culture-building for our enterprise and startup clients here. Why?

1) To get back to basics on what works best

I feel that so many people, teams, and companies have a squandered opportunity to become their best selves. There’s so much waste, distraction, and churn when making software products. People don’t communicate well enough and earn each other’s trust. The true needs of users, customers, and stakeholders aren’t engaged or understood. Best practices aren’t established, learned, shared, grokked, improved, or replaced.

I’m grateful to have had the privilege and pleasure of working alongside so many teams, methods and challenges in my career so far. One approach that always stood out was the extreme programming culture I experienced at the height of Pivotal Labs’ consultancy practice. Pair programming, continuous delivery, and a particularly effective flavor of Agile reliably delivered on a promise some people believed impossible: taking the risk out of delivering software while simultaneously creating happy teams.

I missed that and how it felt for me and for clients, and wanted to always get back to something like it. I thought I’d never open another office for a consultancy, but when Fractal, a team founded by former Pivots (including some of my favorites!) invited me to join them and open and lead an office for them in New York City, I jumped at the chance.

The exciting thing about Fractal is that it’s more than just a return to what worked a few years ago. We’ve all learned a lot since then. For the technical among us, what we’ve effectively done is “rolled back” to a known-good state and “hard-forked” — adding on top of that.

2) I wanted to recreate on the East Coast what had made Fractal grow so quickly in LA.

The first thing I did was to get on a plane (remember when that was a thing?) and spend two months in LA working alongside Fractal’s team there to understand what made them tick — and why they had twice the demand they could handle. I observed the culture there and found a Southern California chill and water-off-a-rubber-duck’s-back attitude, combined with an almost New-York-style intense drive and curiosity.

I saw Fractal at work. We shortened planning, development, testing, and deployment alongside a RedBull client team, rallying full teams around clearer-than-ever user-facing Sprint goals, and helped make the process joyous. We leave a great team behind once we finish, including helping teams hire people permanently as soon as our clients have a culture and process where new people can flourish. This week we’re celebrating hires we’ve made for EVGo and Private Suite and that feels great.

On these client projects and others like for Disney and Starz, I saw a slew of learnings about what our clients really need to deliver great software quickly. Software that’s easy to use and consume, and is easy to scale and maintain. At Fractal, our clients’ success is our success; and we can get there without being dogmatic. We tackle juicy software, product, design, and team challenges with our clients. We meet them where they are, make them faster and more chill, and propose the right adjustments at the right time. The result? Teams hum, and positive delivery and change can take root.

3) New York has such fantastic talent, many of whom I know well, and I was eager to work with them.

Many years ago, I spent way too long building something I didn’t enjoy that people didn’t want. That business failed. That’s why working alongside client teams, and helping them to be continuously better, and helping them learn by practicing and by delivering work together has been my passion for the last decade. I’m so excited to be building that team here.

I returned to New York at the start of the quarantine, and joined forces with Jonathan Berger on design and product and Aldric Giacomoni on development, whose work I’ve known and admired for many years. Jacob Bear finds and hires the best and most diverse long-term culture fits for our clients, and Elizabeth Gansen keeps our operations running smoothly here and emerges in us a culture that sings.

I know I’ve gushed a lot here — I’m really loving this work, and wanted to share my experience. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if we can be a sounding board or help with any challenges. We love to tackle the most difficult software product, design, development, and team problems, and to help even the best teams to deliver much better.

I’m grateful and excited to be doing this here. I ❤️NY.