NOEL:  Hello and welcome to Episode 40 of the Tech Done Right Podcast, Table XI's podcast about building better software, careers, companies and communities. I'm Noel Rappin.

In this episode, we're talking about what a small company can do to improve its diversity and inclusion practices. In many small companies, you can't quickly improve diversity via hiring -- your company just isn't changing personnel that quickly but there are things you can do to improve diversity and inclusion with the employees you already have and here to discuss them with me are Meara Charnetzki from Table XI, Michael Donnely from the FWD Collective and Elena Valentine from Skill Scout. Before we start the show, a few quick messages.

Table XI is offering training for developer and product teams. Topics include testing, refactoring legacy JavaScript, career development and Agile team process. For more information, see us online at http://tablexi.com/Workshops or email us at http://workshops@tablexi. We also have a free email course with tools on improving your company's career growth and goal strategy, which you can find at http://stickynote.game.

I haven't mentioned it at the top of the show recently but if you let the podcast a review on Apple Podcast, it would be great. It would really help people find the show and it just feels nice when we see good reviews, so thank you for that. Now, here is my conversation with Meara, Michael and Elena.

First of all, we have Meara Charnetzki. Meara, would you like to introduce yourself?

MEARA:  Hi, yeah. My name is Meara. I work at Table XI with Noel. I'm a software developer.

NOEL:  And I have Elena Valentine.

ELENA:  Hey, there. I am the co-founder and CEO of a company called Skill Scout. I'm sure, we'll get into that a little bit later and I am also one of the founders of Mezcla Media Collective, which is a group that was launched to bring together black and brown female filmmakers in Chicago.

NOEL:  We also have Michael Donnelly.

MICHAEL:  Hi, everyone. Michael Donnelly here. Yes, a female Michael. I know that listening, you guys all get that but when you see my name, I tend to throw people off. I am the founder of the FWD Collective -- For Women in Diversity -- and we have a platform, host summits and workshops and engage with individuals, all surrounding and dedicated to the mission of professional inclusion.

NOEL:  Right. The topic that I want to discuss here on the show today is to talk about diversity and inclusion, in particular, I want to talk about the topic as it applies to a company like Table XI, which is to say, a small company. Table XI is about 35 to 40 people, that is not necessarily going to be in a position to use hiring to increase the company's diversity or inclusivity and I want to talk about what companies can do in that situation that will make a difference in their culture and that will improve the way that their company culture works.

I guess my first question would be, what sort of advice do you give to people who are in companies like that? What's the most important thing for a company in that kind of situation to understand about what they need to do?

ELENA:  Well, I have a couple. I think there's the diversity piece and there's really the inclusion. Regardless of how big or small your current company is, really D&I could and should be implemented even when there's an employee of one. A lot of that has to do with really being blatant about the diversity you seek and the kind of inclusion you're looking to foster and so, really easy is just making it a part of the business values.

It’s writing down the mission and making it something that's public for everyone who's coming to your website or as you're promoting your business to be able to share. That's an easy one that really, regardless of how big and interestingly, I think that, especially when you're a small organization and I can relate to this as well with Skill Scout is leadership really has the opportunity to drive this in a big way and it's going to be necessary to make it part of their work stream.

A lot of it is really carving out knowing that as a leader, it's important to be involved in listening to your employees about what they care about, both at work and outside of work. Things like outings or sports, for example is also a big part of that because a lot of what we're trying to do with driving inclusion, regardless of how we're defining it at our companies is this idea of bringing your whole self to work. And so I'll certainly stop there, there's others but I'm assuming that Michael chime in as well.

MICHAEL:  Yeah, I think you brought up some incredible points, Elena. I'll just kind of spin off of what you started to share here. I think being blatant is really important, being honest and saying things without the veil of trying to be politically correct. If you're a company that's currently all white, when people come in for an interview, let them know, we're all white but we're looking to not be that way. We're looking to diversify. We're looking to better educate ourselves.

Finding the future or the diversity that you seek is incredibly important, kind of defining what that looks like from how your leadership, all the way down to the lowest position or the early stage positions of your company, can be diversified and can be inclusive. Making sure that it's really prevalent in what you're trying to build as far as the company culture.

The way that I see company culture is kind of threefold and I think this is really important because if you're a small team, the culture is formed by the people that are there. The founders or the leaders, they really decide what the concept of the company is, like what's their idea of what they wanted to be and then the culture is formed by the people there.

Continuing to implement within that value phase or the concept phase of diversity, the understanding of the importance of diversity and letting the team buy into that and then make that a proponent of their initiatives moving forward, I think are really good ways to get that moving and then engaging with the community at large, I think.

If you're not hiring right now, how are you supporting diversity groups so that you're opening up your pipeline to show that you're open to other individuals? Where are you posting your jobs? How active are you in seeking out diverse candidates? I think that's a really kind of easy way because, although you may not be hiring for 20 roles, hiring for one role is just as important as those 20 and really showing that as part of the initiative overall.

ELENA:  And I think to piggyback on this, because I know that the focus is, companies who aren't necessarily being able to use hiring as a lever, is I think seen that there's a long term gain to this, which is this may not be candidates that you can hire now but actually then just getting really involved in what your employees overall really care about in getting involved in those organizations that align with the business mission.

Social impact events, volunteer events can be huge, especially for these generations of millennials, generations where regardless if you are a candidate or an employee, you're feeling a part of the overall mission and what you're working towards inside and outside of work is certainly kind of much bigger than yourself. I really love what Michael said about just being truthful with where you're at. 

It's so funny. We get these questions all the time. We built our business on the shoulders of small to mid-size manufacturers, who wanted to bring their roles to life on video and said, "Yeah, we would absolutely love to hire and attract more women," but the truth is we just have 40-year old machinists in our shop, so how do we look inclusive when we don't have that now.

The biggest advice we can say is one, being super truthful about that, to say, "We don't have that," and let's not make that one woman who might be a machinist super uncomfortable by making her your token person but quite frankly having a leader, be it in a video or in a story to say, "This is what we're going toward but we're not there yet."

For example, a good company quite frankly they're bigger but they do a really good job of being really honest with where they're at is Lyft. If you look at Lyft's career page, I just really appreciate how they said, "We've really come so far but we're not there yet." It was something just like that and the fact that you could see there was an authenticity and truth coming out just based on that, it makes you feel like this is a place where you could have these kinds of conversations because these companies are very upfront with where they're coming from and where they want to be.

NOEL:  Meara, what kind of things, as somebody coming into an organization or somebody choosing between organizations, do you look for in terms of what makes you feel comfortable and what might make you feel uncomfortable when you see it in an interview or at the beginning of a time in a new company?

MEARA:  Yeah, for sure. I think probably the first thing I do, honestly is to reach out to my network as a woman in tech and just in general. I think in the culture that we're in, it's really important to have as much information as possible about what it's actually like in a company. I almost always try to reach out personally to someone and talk to someone who isn't on a leadership team.

I definitely consume like website materials and I do my research on a company and I do see what Elena and Michael are talking about with that authenticity of, "Yes, we acknowledge that we're not great at this and we're trying," but I think it's important to not only say that on your company website and in the outreach that you do with the community but to actually follow that through within your team in everyday situations.

That can be something really simple like maybe, the CEO sits down with every person in the company and checks in with them and gets their ideas and sees how they're doing and make sure that everyone is doing well. If it's a small company, you can do things like that. Other things like making sure that you continue to have conversations about inclusivity and diversity within the company, I think that's something that we do at Table XI and I really value that as a part of our company culture, that we continue to have these conversations just because that helps me know that my coworkers also care about the things that I care about and also want to support me and to support each other in feeling included.

MICHAEL:  Going off of what Meara was saying around the idea of companies really being deliberate about how they're communicating and connecting with and engaging with their employees outside of that happy hour culture or the pickup sports culture or this is a business development or sales opportunity event, it's really kind of being mindful of those lunch and learn topics, the people that you can bring in. If you have a small team and your team is not diverse, can you bring in consultants or people to host workshops that can help educate the individuals that are present that are already there so that, as the company has the opportunity to become more diverse, it is already becoming an inclusive culture from that early stage standpoint.

I know that we've worked with you guys and another company called Speech IRL in talking about communication diversity and talking about just general practices and worked with some outside community members, as well as some teammates at Table XI. I think that's something really cool that your team has done to really bridge the conversation from the internal team to bring in external organizations and melding the conversation amongst the room itself.

MEARA:  I think it's really important to proactively educate people, no matter what stage you are with growing your team because I think, one of the things that can be really tough as a new person joining, especially if you're the first person who is a member of a particular underrepresented group, can be that you feel like the burden is on you to do all that education for your team.

It can be really difficult to be like the only woman or the only person of color or the only trans person in a room and feel like it's on you to make sure that your teammates know how to include you. I think it's really, really important for people who are members of well-represented groups to step up and try to do that work, to educate themselves and to help support people as they come in, so that you don't have to deal with that additional burden of just trying to do your job and also trying to move the organization's culture forward.

MICHAEL:  Yeah. Owning all of the diversity initiatives because you're the diverse individual. I think that that really kind of ties into the notion of allies and the notion of a support system. As we're educating people before, industries become diverse or when there's minor levels of diversity that gives really to what Elena had said earlier on what inclusion really means from an organization standpoint and how we can practice that inclusivity and kind of standing up or going to bat for other people on our team before they need to go for themselves, so making the conversation available early on or the circumstance available for a more healthy conversation early on.

ELENA:  To that point, I think what transcends all of this is having a healthy feedback system period. I think it goes hand in hand with many companies that if you don't have a healthy feedback system where employees feel like they're heard and their suggestions are being taken seriously, you can't get anything accomplished. Regardless if it's D&I or not, I think a lot of it, at the end of the day is companies ensuring that their employees feel like they have a voice at work.

NOEL:  Are there some specific things that you recommend the companies can do to improve?

ELENA:  Yes, absolutely. There certainly are some tools out there. For example, one of my favorites, they're actually a Chicago-based company. They're called 'Know Your Company.' They're actually developed specifically for smaller companies, anywhere between 25 to 75 employees because that's at about the point where a founder or a CEO starts to lose touch on a personal basis with their employees. Something like what Know Your Company does is it's almost providing like a weekly pulse survey of be it things that are kind of happening in the company that employees want to share or it can even be around kind of fun questions as well, about what employees are doing.

A lot of it is just being able to foster more constant communication and sometimes, that could be meaning leveraging technology tools. It could also mean, for other companies, that they're having every Friday a weekly lunch, where they are buying lunch for the entire staff -- all coming together, just to hang out in spirit and being able to communicate in a more informal basis. It really runs the gamut.

This certainly also goes into beyond the performance reviews, which is are we talking about how we can continually improve our work outside of a six-month period. I've seen several companies run the gamut to what they do but at the end of the day, it's really about having a very kind of healthy foundation for feedback in the company. That also means that leaders are taking that kind of feedback too.

Some of this -- I know Claire Lew from Know Your Company will say this -- is a lot of this is also like a leader stepping up to say, "How can I improve? What could I do in this one instance that I could have done better?" A lot of it is leaders opening themselves up to feedback.

NOEL:  First of all, Claire has been a guest on this very podcast. She's all over the net. A couple of things that brings to mind. One is that one thing we do with Know Your Company is we also follow up with "here's some things that we are trying to do based on what we've heard from you in Know Your Company. "Also, at our all-hands crew meetings, our CEO has taken to having a little segment called "The three biggest mistakes I made in the last quarter," which is definitely interesting from a transparency standpoint.

MEARA:  I just wanted to jump in and say, I think we've been talking about small companies and in some ways, it can be tough as a small company to work on diversity and inclusivity because you don't feel that you have the recruiting abilities that a larger company might have or the HR adopts, etcetera. But I think there's also a great opportunity when you're at a small company to have real relationships with your coworkers up to and including the leadership. One of the things our CEO did when he transitioned into his role about a year ago was decide that he was going to have lunch or coffee or sit down in some way with every single person at the company.

I think doing things like that as a leader makes it clear that you are interested in knowing all the members of your team and that is a way that you can help communicate that you, as a leader are open to feedback and are interested in hearing what your employees have to say and how their experience of the company is.

MICHAEL:  Really walking the walk. That's what it sounds like.

MEARA:  Yeah and you have the ability to build relationships and build the rapport so that it's easier to let someone know that you have feedback for them because you're in a small company and you know that person and you feel comfortable talking to them, even about difficult topics.

MICHAEL:  Yeah. I think that's really important point, Meara that you brought up that the transparency and the conversations are not always easy. These are difficult topics, especially when we separate the person we are versus the behaviors that we're practicing. With diversity, equity and inclusion, they're almost turning into buzzwords in a lot of ways and that happens when we really focus on moving initiatives forward.

I think that we're seeing a lot of diversity fatigue out there, so this is kind of off of some of the things Elena brought up with Claire of Know Your Company and some of the things that I know that you guys are practicing. Mark specifically, the CEO of Table XI and Table XI in general, are finding ways to make these conversations fun and opening up from the idea of a safe space to a space that could be uncomfortable but is not going to jeopardize your future.

Finding opportunities to really have those complicated and complex, I guess is the better word, conversations, where we can make diversity, equity and inclusion an interesting conversation. There can be excitement around it and really kind of going around the ideas that this is something I learned from Monica Black of Diamond Angels that diversity is innovation. If we remember that and if we know that all companies are trying to innovate and that companies with diverse teams make 34+% higher percentage of revenue, then that's an overall business objective. When we come back kind of full circle to why it's important, it's important for our bottom line. It's also important for our creativity and our innovation standpoints and then from a humanistic perspective.

NOEL:  One of the ways that we levered into this at Table XI and I think this might be valuable for other small companies that want to find a way to talk about inclusivity that's relevant to the people that they have. We started to talk about a perception in the company culture that extroverts were favored over introverts, that a lot of our meetings, the people who were loudest were people who got heard and that was kind of interesting because it allowed us to get into accommodating different communication styles without any of the potential baggage that anybody might have associated with different groups or different stereotypes. But it was a way for all of us to start thinking about different communication styles and accommodating needs of different people and suddenly, we got a little bit better at handling remote people in meetings. It put it on the radar as a topic to talk about in a way that I think made the later more potentially uncomfortable conversations over diversity and inclusivity easier to have because we had started with a foundation.

MEARA:  I think it's important to realize and just to acknowledge that a lot of the things that we do under the umbrella of diversity and inclusion and trying to help underrepresented people feel like they can be successful, also benefit pretty much everyone. Any time that you're trying to make communication better or trying to be more understanding of people's personal lives outside of work and trying to accommodate people's entire lives in what you do at work, that helps everyone.

Like parents aren't only women. People who are more soft-spoken aren't only women. People who might have other communication challenges, like neurodiversity kind of things, like that, everyone can be affected by that and all of the work that you do towards including anyone, I think helps everyone feel that they're more able to contribute.

I think there's a lot that you can do to further diversity and inclusivity aims without specifically calling out this is for diversity and inclusivity because it's not just about including underrepresented people. It's about including everyone and underrepresented people may benefit disproportionately because maybe, they disproportionately were being included before but at the end of the day, that helps your whole team be more successful.

ELENA:  I really love that Meara said, just around that at the end of the day, this is just about getting personal with people and allowing people again to bring their whole selves to work. There's a really interesting study -- I should find it and share with you -- that recommended that leaders when they go out to lunch with their colleagues and staff, start out with just get personal. Ask them about their kids, ask them about their softball game or kind of their wood-shopping project and then in doing so, you actually get more productivity and motivation out of that colleague, than if you were just straight talk about work. It's really interesting how even things around diversity and inclusion, just being able to just have conversations with your employees, regardless of underrepresented group or not, is actually fully beneficial.

NOEL:  What do you do if you are an employee in a small company, you're not in a leadership role but you feel like the company has a lot of D&I work to do, what are some of the ways that you can make the company aware that they have this need and how can you get things started?

MICHAEL:  I'll jump in there. I think that's a space that FWD Collective fills. It's creating those opportunities to start conversations without that entire package of work or lair falling onto the person who brings it up. I think, especially in small company cultures, there's sometimes the overall engagement that if you point out a problem, then you better have the solution and you better be willing to take it on, which is complicated and frustrating at times, which is where you see some problems to continue to fluctuate.

But why we started the FWD Collective and this movement overall was to have all individuals join the conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion, and give that engagement factor for learning from experts that give the opportunity for individuals too, as a company or as an individual, attend and participate in discussions led by experts that are traditionally not seen on stage. Then really, bridge the gap in overall communication around that inclusion message. I think going to events or suggesting that the team go to summits overall or happy hours is a cool way that you don't necessarily have to take on the full burden but can bring up the conversation and start the dialogue.

NOEL:  I think that food and offsite events and things like that are tricky because on the one hand, they're really good ways to include a lot of people. On the other hand, you really have to make sure that you try to include everybody because there's something about being, for example -- this is not me -- the vegetarian at the company barbecue that you need to be aware of when you're planning anything involving food. That's a very personal issue for people, I think.

MEARA:  I would say just as a person who has worked at a few different companies who were at varying levels of success with their diversity and inclusion, this is something that is not necessarily the most optimistic message but sometimes, you kind of have to read the room and there have been moments where I just felt like there wasn't enough of a communication line open, where it was going to be helpful to bring it up. Sometimes, you have to make the call that like, "I don't think I am able, with the resources that I have in this place, to make that change, to shift that conversation."

If you are really in a place that isn't going to be inclusive of you and you have the ability to find a different job, maybe you should. I think that's a tough thing to reckon with but I think that points to the fact that we all need to actually really be conscious of this stuff, as allies of people who aren't in underrepresented groups. I think it's really important, if you are not the only person of color, to check in with them and let them know like, "If there's anything I can do to help you, let me know," or try to call out casual microagressions when you see them happen and try to make the changes that you can as an ally because sometimes for the person who is experiencing these things as that member of that underrepresented group, it can be really overwhelming and just not worth it for them to speak up about it.

ELENA:  I think it's the old adage that people don't leave companies, they leave people and to be totally candid, it starts from the top. If there's some serious issues of people not feeling included or feeling their voice is not heard, there is some serious change management that has to happen and that's not going to happen from one entry level colleague or middle management. It's really has to come from leadership, at the top. The most successful companies that have done this, be it from a big scale or small, are those leaders who stepped up and did it. They have to be the ones to model this and that's really the kind of the flat out answer for how this is going to work.

MEARA:  I think people vote with their feet, like people leave people, as you said. I think if you are in a position of influence within a company, whether that's formal leadership or not and you notice that you feel like the people who you really wanted to hire, maybe you're really excited about bringing that first female engineer or that first non-binary engineer or that first person of color onto the team and then, somehow those people never seem to stick around. They’ll be there for six months or a year and start off being excited and become more and more closed off or start leaving and that's something that you have to pay attention to as a leader, that those people might not feel that they have the ability to speak up.

They may not feel that they will be heard if they try to say something or that they won't experience consequences for trying to bring up that there's work that needs to be done. You as a leader or you as an ally need to kind of take that on yourself to notice that stuff and to try and open those lines of communication and help people feel comfortable and make sure that those negative consequences won't happen if people do speak up as much as you can and that's how you turn that around. Right.

MICHAEL: I think that when you're not a leader standpoint and I know that's kind of the levels of conversations because that's a complicated side of things, like when we noticed something within, I wanted to go back a little bit to what I was bringing up earlier around external groups and external communities that you can then highlight for your internal office, so that if you're interested in bringing up the conversation around diversity and inclusion but you're not looking to necessarily be the one that has to run the program, groups like FWD Collective, groups like women in tech founders, groups like ImBlackInTech, host events that you can go to and I wanted to be careful because I know that you had said that if you're the only vegetarian attending these communities and our communities are very specific to be as inclusive as possible and if there's food being served, we'll cater to the food if.. the conversation is really the most important part.

If you're at that earlier stage or there's more entry level positions in companies, it's shooting over a note to the leadership that says, "I saw this on Twitter about diversity and inclusion in tech. This is something that I would like to attend. See if the company will pay for the ticket, invite some colleagues, maybe toss it in the group Slack channel. Here's a summit around this conversation and I know that this is something that we, as a company could benefit from," so kind of expanding that engagement.

It doesn't always have to fall 100% within the company. Whether that is from a leadership position or from an entry level position, there are a lot of groups locally here in Chicago, nationally and internationally, that are having these conversations and creating space for different types of communication, different individuals, diverse groups to come together, celebrate and then continue to move the conversation forward.

NOEL:  I do want to follow up on something Meara said and it was another thing that we did at Table XI, which was when you notice that people are leaving. We noticed at one point a couple of years ago, that several women had left the company in a relatively short, like a six to eight month period of time and for different reasons and mostly for good reasons but it was curious. One of the things we did as a result of that was we hired somebody to do exit interviews with everybody that had left the company over the course of about a year and these interviews were not presented as being about diversity but diversity and inclusivity were among the questions asked.

In presenting the findings of that, I think that the existence of incidents that people remembered, even months after they had left the company, the fact that those incidents were among the things that people remembered were very instrumental in getting Table XI's management's attention on this as being a problem to the extent that we had it as a problem, that it was something that we needed to really work on and improve on and it really caught... our management... caught was probably not the right word but it really impressed upon our management that people were having experiences that they didn't necessarily know about and they didn't want people to have and it really pushed the company to become more aware of things that might happen in meetings and things that might be said and how people might make take them. I think it made a noticeable impact in a relatively short amount of time. That was where a lot of our D&I initiatives came out of that initial understanding and the first couple things that we did about it.

As we sort of head toward the end of our time here, are there pieces of advice that you can give, some other thing that you think is really important that we haven't covered yet for people or companies who really want to improve their D&I?

MICHAEL:  I think there's a really massive element of the conversation that a lot of times, it doesn't get addressed and that's around salary transparency. The negotiation factors, the understanding of what you're walking into, I think that companies are really looking to bring on different individuals or groups that will help kind of up the ante of diversity, I think it'd be important to understand like what your salaries look like throughout the company. I know that's not a direct correlation but there's been a lot of studies done around negotiation, self-value, self-worth and really showcasing what your company values from a productivity standpoint, from a job and individual standpoint, from a diversity standpoint and how you match that with monetary incentives.

At the end of the day, the whole point of working is making money. That's where a lot of us come from but as we grow into these more inclusive and more exciting cultures, where we can, as Elena was saying, bring our whole selves and get to know people and have some of that social life component. How do those overlap and how do we find that fire behind what we're doing and how the companies support that were really in it for the long haul and kind of adding that level of transparency. We've started to see it with some larger companies and posting reports and closing the wage gap.

But I think that a big element of the conversation overall is how we can work to close those wage gaps and that's where some smaller companies can really highlight their initiatives in a black and white manner, right there on paper: here's what we're paying, here's how and here's why it can matter to you.

MEARA:  I think Michael brought up a really great point about salary transparency and kind of looking at the data to see if that's equitable and also kind of building off of what you were saying earlier about looking at some data from exit interviews and realizing that maybe, there was something going on that you needed to pay more attention to as a company.

I think there are a few different things that you can look at like one is definitely salary transparency and equity. Also, in terms of how quickly do people move through the ranks at your company, like are people getting promoted? Are people growing and taking on more responsibility and getting those salary raises and better titles and leading larger teams or larger projects?

I think also being aware of your hiring. When you do hire, are you hiring underrepresented people disproportionately for junior positions? Are you seeing that your pool is drawing from as many groups as possible for all positions? I think it can be a sort of unhealthy environment to have all your diverse folks be more junior and have no one who's more senior on the leadership team or in the pipeline for positions like that, that are from diverse backgrounds. I think those are all things that you can look at as a company to see like are we doing a good job? Are we being true to what we want to be doing in terms of diversity and inclusivity?

ELENA:  This was lightly touched upon but it couldn't be over emphasized enough moving forward. You know, the future of work is going to be flexibility. It's going to completely change how we view work spaces, where we work, how we work, when we work. Certainly, when we're talking about salaries and the wage gap, there's some real reasons why that has happened. A lot of it is also just been the inflexibility of working mothers.

Certainly, flexible working structures and thinking through what that looks like at your company is going to be different. At Skill Scout, we're primarily full virtual workforce and Table XI as well, you also have a pretty flexible workforce in terms of a virtual workforce, etcetera. That will be the name of the game, moving forward to support that. It definitely should be a lever that companies should consider and think about how they're going to play in that.

NOEL:  Great. With that, I think that we are more or less out of time. Where can people reach you online, if they want to talk to you more about these issues? Meara?

MEARA:  Probably the best place is my Twitter at @m34ra.

MICHAEL:  Me personally, I'm at @RealMDonnelly and then FWD Collective, we are FWDCollective.io. The web site is .io and all the handle is just one word.

NOEL:  And Elena?

ELENA:  Yeah, easy -- SkillScout.com or Elena@SkillScout.com, if you'd like to get in touch with me personally.

NOEL:  Great. Thank you all for being here. This is obviously, only scratches the surface of the conversation but I'm glad that we're able to have this conversation and we'll be back in a couple of weeks. Thank you.

Tech Done Right is a production of Table XI and it's hosted by me, Noel Rappin. I'm at @NoelRap on Twitter and Table XI is at @TableXI. The podcast is edited by Mandy Moore and you can reach her on Twitter at @TheRubyRep. Tech Done Right can be found at TechDoneRight.io or downloaded wherever you get your podcasts, including Spotify. You can send us feedback or ideas on Twitter @Tech_Done_Right.

Table XI is a UX design and software development company in Chicago, with a 15-year history of building websites, mobile applications and custom digital experiences for everyone from startups to storied brands. Find us at TableXI.com where you can learn more about working with us or working for us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks for the next episode of Tech Done Right.