My friend, welcome to the Badass Agile podcast. This week,
I'm bringing back an old favorite. There's very few people that I brought back more
than once. One is Karl Locksholm. The other one is
Adam Smith. I met Adam Smith when we were working together at one of the
big consulting firms, and there was something about him I just
liked. I think it was because, like me, he's not terribly
corporate. He doesn't necessarily fit in in a great
big design firm. Where he does fit in
is serving his customers like an artist. And I think in an age of
AI, there's so much sameness out there that
everything we look at is starting to look the same. And so what I
respect about what Adam does is the integrity with which
he treats the practice and his clients. And most
importantly, he's an entrepreneur like me, and so
I appreciate and respect the way he's been able to dig in and survive through
ups and downs. And I wanna hear all about what's happened since we last saw
him back in probably 2020 or
2021. I'm really happy that his firm, Tension,
has just passed its 4th year milestone. That's a
huge achievement. So please welcome Adam Smith. Adam, how are
you? I'm great. Thank you. How are you? I'm wonderful. It's
nice to see you. You as well. Always. So first of all,
congratulations on 4 years. That's a huge accomplishment. Thank you.
And I'm curious, how has it been? Has it been everything that you
expected? Been nothing I expected. Really?
Yeah. You know, I I I think in the beginning, it was
it was just all wonderful. And, you know, we had
some really good traction. Things were going really, really well. And
I we hit some obstacles as pretty much
every start up or or organization does. And
you I can look back, and at the time, I was pretty
negative about it. But in retrospect, I think it was probably the greatest thing
that ever happened to Tension because it forced us to
take a real hard, long look at what we do and
how we do it. And a few things changed. Obviously,
we we optimized processes. We figured out how to do things better
and faster and more efficiently. But what what's more important are the things that
didn't change. And that is, as you said and
mentioned, thank you very much. I'm I'm honored that you mentioned that, but it's
our dedication to what we do. It's our love for what
we do, and it's the care and painstaking
detail that we put into the work that we do because we love it. We
love the work. It is art to us and
we love making our clients successful. I mean, that's why
we're here. At the time, it was a lot. But in
retrospect, it it it to be honest, it was everything,
and reinforced why I started the company in the first place. Now you mentioned
that when things were tough, that you're a little bit negative about it. What what
does that mean, and what do you think you learned from it? You said that
it was probably the best thing that ever happened to you. What was the big
lesson? It made me take a really introspective look
at myself, why I started this thing, why I still want to do it
in the face of everything that we were looking at. And then it my
desire to keep tension going and to do the work that we
do and and to do it even better than we did before
never wavered. The the
roadblocks, the walls that were put in front of us, yeah, they got they got
bigger. But even even when things felt dark, it
was it was never a question of whether we continued. It
was about how do we get to a point where we
can continue. Which is usually a sign that the work is embossed in
your soul in the sense that it doesn't matter how hard the surfing is. I'm
going out every day Yep. And I'm gonna ride. And
my question well, you know what a good logical question is to ask here
is, what does tension do? Who do you do it for?
And why would someone choose Tension? Great
questions. So first, we are an experience and
design agency and user experience, visual design,
interface design. But, really, what we do is
more strategy and more getting to the
root of the real problems. Everything else sort of falls into
place during that period of a year ago. I
came to the realization that there are times now
where I find it difficult to start
work unless we have gone extremely
deep into understanding who our clients are, who their
customers are, what their objectives are, and how they want to achieve
it. And I for a period, I was thinking back. I was like, you know,
when I was when I was younger, just getting started, I could
just open up a document and start designing. At first, I was like, I wish
I could just do that again. And then I realized that, no, I can't because
now I know what I didn't know then. I know now that if I just
try to open something up and start designing without understanding the context,
understanding the subtleties of the business or the, of the market, of the
product or service we're working on, and the brand and personality of the company we're
working with. I'm gonna do it not as well as I want to and
not as well as our customers deserve. So when it all comes down to it,
that's what we do. We we we dig in. You know? We have we have
this 5 week engagement. Right? And it is
an intensive deep dive into our customers, what their
needs are, what their problems are, how we should solution them, so on and so
forth. Very involved with the clients. It's very interactive, very
collaborative. And oftentimes, we'll walk our customers through what's
going to happen. And they're like, yeah. Sounds great. 2 weeks in, they're
like, why do you need to know this? And I'm like, well, just
bear with us. Yeah? We get to the end of the week, the end of
the 5 weeks, and it's just like a light bulb goes off, and it happens
every single time. Our clients are like, now I understand
why we did all this. Now I understand why you needed to know these things.
Because for us to help create an
experience around your business and your product
or service, we need to understand your business and product and service as
well, hopefully, as as, you know, many of you do, at our
clients. Probably not to the granular detail that they do, but we
have to get pretty close. Because if we're gonna work on behalf of our clients,
and that's what we are, we're we're we're design servants to our clients,
right, and extensions of of them with
design expertise. If we're not there with them and understanding as much as they do,
then we're not we're not able to deliver it at the level that they need
it to be delivered. Right. And in agile, we struggle with
this stuff because we've been taught that there should be no upfront planning. There
should be no upfront documentation. K. And yet,
what are we what are we what spec are we building on if we don't
understand these things about a customer? Now not to say that we should spend 6
months planning something before we start building it. But
nonetheless, one of the things that agile people don't get quite frequently
is what is the business? Who is the customer? What are they what are their
desires? What do they fear? What what is it that they
want when they experience our product? Some people want
nostalgia. Some people want realism or authenticity.
Some people want a certain tactileness. Some people want pure simplicity. Just give me one
knob, one button. And it really depends on
the context of the customer, what they're doing, who they
trust, why they trust it or don't. Like, there's so many questions to
answer around understanding the customer that makes future decisions so much
easier, and I think most people miss that.
Let me ask you this. How's your business changed since you started
it 4 years ago given global pandemic, recession,
all different kinds of war breaking out all over the world,
layoffs, you know, economic trouble and pressure and
inflation. All of these things change the nature of our business. How does it
affect not just your business, but what you do?
And don't forget by the way, don't forget AI. Probably the biggest single
change. We can leave that last one to its own topic.
But I'll be honest. The pandemic never
really had much of an impact in terms of change
for us because we started the company 1 week before
lockdowns. We've always operated in a remote
model with our clients. I think that the economic
uncertainty over the last year, probably
the wars as well, have led to a little bit of
less consumer confidence with our customers. Now with the market in
general, to be quite honest, everybody was sort of consciously
prepping for a recession. And a recession that, for the
most of the country, actually never really happened. It didn't really impact
us too, too much in that respect. Most of the changes that have
come to us over the last 12 months or so was
a re restructuring of the founders of the company.
My, my ex founder left in February
of 2023, and we had a bit of
a a change in how we wanted to to grow and how we wanted
our team makeup to look after that. We've brought
in pretty senior people in in in the time since
then that, has really helped us and, frankly,
me be able to offer better services and, you know,
sometimes sleep well at night. I have a question for you about the
name of your company. Tension is such a great word. Yes. In
storytelling, which is something that I talk a lot about now and in
communication, tension refers to the distance
between where you are and where you wanna go. It refers to the constantly
changing landscape of getting where you're trying to be.
Okay. And it's what makes a story tick. Yep. If there's no tension,
there's no roller coaster ride. It's like having a track that's completely
flat. The tension is the hills and the anticipation
that's released when gravity takes over and you start
heading downhill, which is the fun part. It's the thrill part. It's the uncertainty. What
does tension mean? Why did you choose that name for your business? There's a number
of reasons behind it. The most important is, with what we do and and what
we do in experience design,
with what we do and and what we do in experience design,
there's often a push pull between multiple
parties or or 2 opposing objectives
or two sides of the same coin from, for example,
customers, business. The tension between those, it's not
about one winning. It's not about one yanking the other.
It's about finding that perfect balance that creates the tension
between the 2 in the same way that the three
points of a sail creates the tension, against the
wind and pushes the boat forward. Mhmm. So that is a that is
a huge thing. There's also we are generally multidisciplinary
here at Tension and the needs and objectives
of so many of what we do, whether it be developer
partners that we're working with or marketers or brand strategists
or product owners, designers, UX designers, researchers.
We all kinda need to know the same thing, and we all
need to start from the same place. What we do with that information is slightly
different, but it's finding that tension between
those multiple perspectives that allows us to create a
single vision that works and is
going to drive the ball forward and everyone can work together towards.
When I think about like the researcher the research that a marketer would do
upfront, it's very similar to research that we would do. And it
also factors into everything that we do, whether it be a click or an interaction
or an animation. So there is definitely that tension.
There's also a tongue in cheek reference to things like
working with me being tense. Is that true?
It can be. It can be. Yeah. I'm a I'm a little bit
dogged when I believe in something. And I'll
push and fight for what I think is right for the business and and for
our clients and and their clients. That's an
interesting point because I was about to ask you,
why does user experience or experience design
matter? Because a lot of people would say, look. You know, I can
get chat gpt to generate an interface. And I can
get Canva to make me a design. Like, these things are so
pedestrian. Why would you write a book with a pen
when a word processor is right in front of you make it so much faster?
Why does this why does this still matter? I think the word
processor processor to pen, analogy is is
really fitting. There's a tactile nature
to user experience in, in the same way there is, a
feeling the, the, the ball or a ballpoint pen roll over
nice paper. Right? Can you create
user experience? Can you create visual design through
AI? Sure. Sure you can. But is it
going to embody the personality? Is
it going to embody the brand? Is it going to
give the user and hold their hand when you know
they particularly need to have their hands held? Not
necessarily. There is so much more to it. And as you
inferred right at the beginning, there it's an art and it's very much
a unique expression, balancing the the customer,
balancing the business, and baling balancing the objectives of the
application. What you get with AI is a facsimile of
the most popular other ideas that are already out there.
Right. So it's it it it's very much an echo chamber. Mhmm.
And if if that's all that you wanna do, like, you wanna
copy Uber or copy some kind of an application,
Probably gonna be enough. Sure. Is it going to
make your customers or your users feel
loved and appreciated? No. No. Right.
And so so here's a question for you. I think what I'm really getting at
because this is the essence of you is that you're
creative. And I think in 2024 and beyond,
creativity is gonna become more important than it ever has been. And here's why.
Here's a perfect example. When you go on YouTube, every
video thumbnail, every what they call a cover
is the same thing. It's the owner of the channel
with their mouth hanging open in some sort of mock, shock,
and surprise gesture
pointing at something on the screen, usually the title or a device or the
thing that they're unwrapping or trying to sell. And
that's what catches attention and makes people think, well, this is a glossy video. This
is a professional. I should pay attention to this. But when all of
the videos look the same way, aren't we
lying to everybody? Aren't we just creating
noise like so much stuff, so much so much,
signal and nothing really stands out. And I think to me, the word tension
means in this aspect, creativity going against
the grain, doing not what others are doing
because we know it's scientifically tested to attract attention, but rather
doing what we believe is our truest and most
authentic expression because that's what describes
the brand accurately. It's honest. It's authentic.
And it may not be faster, better, or cheaper Okay. To
get what we're trying to do done, but it's more right.
And I think in 2024, people want more right. What what's your opinion
on that? Yes. That's my opinion.
That is that is my philosophy described probably
better than I've ever thought about it myself. It's about
doing the right thing for regardless of what's popular,
regardless of what's standard or the way things are normally done. None of
those things really factor in for me because when you
operate and I'll I'll jump back to, like, really understanding your clients. When
you look deeply at the problems that are actually
being faced, and you look at them holistically and
understand the audience that are facing those problems, It's really
difficult to just take an off the shelf solution and and try to make it
work. What you're going to do in that scenario generally is via ripple
effect, create more problems. So for me,
it's it's never been about faster. It's never been about
hypergrowth, at least for me or for, the
organization, my organization. It's about doing what's
right. And when you believe what you're
doing is right, oof, it's hard to get off that train. Is that
what's kept you going for the past 4 years? Is that, like, at this point,
if someone said to you, you know, the entrepreneurship thing, it's not paying
off real big. Why don't you go back to the kind of job you used
to have? Working for someone else's agency, working working in a shop,
working as part of a consulting business. Would you be able to go,
I mean, it's not perfect, but sure. It's work. Or is it like, I
can't like, dude, I can't. I I I I've spent the
better part of my career significant better part of my career,
independent. Mhmm. And it it allows
us a freedom with our customers that you
just don't get in other models. We work with
them directly. Like, we we we talk to them directly. We talk to their
customers. We can influence them and work with them to
help them understand the implications and ramifications of their business.
It's far more than what anyone
who would hire someone as a user experience designer or,
interface designer would allow the, audacity
to try to solve, you know, and and we get to work on bigger, deeper
things about this way. You know, I I was just thinking,
and having a conversation with one of my employees today that he's
he's been exposed to a way of working with customers
that is just unnatural for a lot of user experience
folks. And the expectation
of how our ideas are received by our clients
is is relatively unnatural, and and,
hopefully, he never leaves. But if he does, he's in for kind of a
rude awakening, at the next place Jim goes
because we we work with such a level of
trust with our customers that in the same way that in those
first 5 weeks in the middle, they're like, I don't know what's going on, but
let's see what happens. Once we've gotten past that, once we get into
prototyping and testing and validating and and, they can see
how our work is being shaped by the voices of their
customers and their own internal processes and how that sort of
molding and, like, evolving into a product. That
level of trust there is really, really
powerful. And to be honest, I think we
have we have probably some of the best customers ever,
but I think we've also manufactured them through our process. Yeah.
How how so? Explain that. Oh, so because of your process. You
know, I, I'm about as transparent and candid
as you get. I wear my emotions on my sleeve. I,
I try to make our our work environment enjoyable.
I try I try to make our engagements enjoyable. We have
candor. We have an openness. There's
always an open ear, for our customers. Everything that they
have concerns with, we'll we welcome.
We address it as best as possible, and and we create this
environment where we are just essentially, like,
extensions of them. And we show that with our deep
interest in how they work, how their customers
work. You know, oftentimes, we'll we'll be in situations and I'm when I say often,
I mean, like, 80, 90% of the the time, we're talking to our clients,
telling them what their customers are going through and they don't know.
They don't know. It's and it's not that they don't talk to their customers. They
do. It's just the questions that we ask, the scenarios we
put those customers in, just things come out.
And we become like, when I say we're an
extension, it very much so is, and that's a really sweet
spot to be in. And they can see that we're working
diligently and and with with a level of passion and care
for their business. So those things combined
really creates symbiotic, but it it it's it's very
much a relationship based on trust. You know what it sounds
like? We were speaking about tension before and the concept of a roller coaster.
So think about one of those modern roller coasters where it's usually just like
one, it's like one beam. You know, it's not a set of
tracks. It's one beam. And the car
has wheels wrapped around that railing. And it's very
secure and it's very smooth, but it's almost like
saying, okay. Forget the car. I want you to ride the ride on your bike.
You know what I mean? It's the exact same ride but there's no rails.
And so all of the tension now comes from the fact that it's up to
you to stabilize and balance on that ride. So the freedom that
you describe, Agilists will understand this
natively. Many Agilists love their process. You said you had a
process. I'm gonna bet. If I saw your process, it's a heck of a lot
less prescriptive than even a modern
Agile process, much less a project management process.
And so the freedom in having a process that's
lightweight, meaning we can make our own decisions, we're free to suggest what we want,
we don't have to follow anything rigorous, and we certainly don't have
to get approval from the big boss to recommend what we think is
best for our client, means that the whole terrain is unknown.
Unless you're being asked to repeat something, it's like that thing that you did for,
you know, Downey. Can you do that for us too?
Unless you're dealing with highly repetitive work, which you're not.
Everything is a blank slate. Everything is adventure.
Everything is risk. And the biggest challenge we have as Agilist
is convincing other people on the team, other
people in the organization or the leaders, the people who are paying for our
services to just trust that process.
And that failure and cocreation and collaboration
is what's gonna drive us to a desirable outcome. Would you say
that's true for your organization? And the second part of that
question is that the future of work, would
we be better off with less process? Because we're not we're
not running jig saws and band saws. I'm not worrying about you cutting your
thumb off here. It's just a question of you make a drawing and the client
doesn't like it. It's not the same kind of risk. Should the
future of work be more free in your
opinion? It has to be. For people to be creatives, you
need that freedom. You need that risk. You need that
fear. And I don't mean, like, a deep seated, like, sitting in the
corner shaking fear, but the the unknown
is one hell of a motivator. And whether you whether
you choose to make it known
or avoid it is up to you. But those with the
freedom to explore,
to investigate, to play within a problem space,
and a willingness and desire to make the unknown known,
yes. That is absolutely the future of work. It has to
be. And I don't I don't particularly mean
somebody who's traditionally considered a creative. Solutioning
in anything is an act of creativity.
And as long as you're working to solve real problems, then
solutioning is pretty important regardless of how
Mhmm. How you how you implement, whether you're an accountant,
developer, or a designer, really. Maybe creative accounting.
Let's let's strike that from the record. Sure. But I think
everyone everyone has the opportunity to be creative.
It is kinda scary because with creativity comes
paramount accountability. Mhmm. It is on you,
You know? But we've create and and in corporate, we've
created a world where it's easier and safer to not
be creative because it's easier and safer to not put your
neck on the line and throw an idea out there because it's because
it can be wrong. I love being wrong. I literally
love being wrong There you go. Because it allows me to figure out where
I need to fix it. Our entire process is, like, exposed.
It's it's right out there in front of our clients. They're watching as we go.
We're building. We're changing. We're learning what wasn't right. And there's
no let me explain it this way. The first thing we ever do
with our clients when we're talking about an experience, once we figured out what the
real problems we should be solving are, what those solutions should be, first thing we
do is we hand them a paper sketch because I could care less if
I crumpled up a paper sketch and throw it away. There's no
ownership. Exactly. None. Am I accountable for that idea?
Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. Yeah. A lot of
times compared to final outcomes, yeah, it is. Mhmm. Can
you can you tell that it's a couple generations before that evolution?
Yeah. Absolutely. But we're okay with
that. Being okay with being wrong is is absolutely
critical, and it's part of our process. In fact, being wrong
as early as possible really defines our entire
design process. Right. There's there's no pride. There's
no pomp and circumstance to it. There really isn't. Right.
What would you say then is the most important quality that you
need when you're working with someone, I e, an employee Mhmm. Or a
partner in the organization? When you're working on a team, what is the most important
quality they need to have, and what is the most important quality that a client
needs to have? Great questions. So an
employee needs to be able to to draw upon
the experience that they have, but but
be instantly willing to drop what they've
learned in order to learn something new or
apply it in a different way. Oftentimes, you know, it's like, well,
this is the way it's done. We're gonna do it this way. It doesn't. It
doesn't. Obviously, the the years of experience that a
practitioner brings to the table is tremendously important. What I like to
think about the way I like to think about it and the way I I
I I like to to communicate it to my team is it's like you
know, those those engineering animations where they'll take a object and then they'll
blow it out and then you'll see all the little pieces. I like to do
that. Like, that's that's the way I think our our
operation works. My brain works for sure this way. I'll take it apart
and I'll take something else apart. I'll take a piece from over here and a
piece from over here and a piece from over here, remix it, and hit it
back to you. It's it's being able to
take the ideas and notions and
extract them from the structure from which they existed previously
to create something new and a new structure around it, and
be absolutely comfortable with
putting it out there. And as I said, being wrong have to be
wrong first. So that's interesting. I call that the concept
of novelty plus, familiarity. So in
all studies of virality or memorable,
what's the word I'm looking for, memorability? That's probably probably not the right word. But
things that stand out in our memory are generally something that's comfortable enough
for us to accept it and embrace it without too much resistance, but
novel enough to, again, create a bit of tension. Because
tension creates attention. And so
you're basically saying the same thing that if we're if you're making
a Super Bowl ad this year, you don't want to make something so crazy that
nobody can relate to it. But you want to make it different enough that it
doesn't resemble last year's winner because that's not what clients are paying you
for. They're paying for you to get that one piece of attention
in a 32nd spot that never comes again.
And so for your work to be memorable, I can understand
why people need to be free to take some risk to find
those edges. I always say it's like a pizza dough. When you pull on a
pizza dough at first, it goes back to where it wants to be. But
eventually, you keep tugging in all of the edges and it becomes
a crust, not a ball of dough. So the second question was,
what do you need your customers to embrace? Who do they need to be to
work well with you? Open minded, for 1.
Passionate about their own business and their customer. We can't be sec we we can't
be successful if they're not. Like, we just can't. You know, I
don't think there's many things that that that I can speak
to about our clients in terms of their market or
their industry or or their technology. None of that matters. It's a culture
thing. And a a willingness
to to be open to to new ways of approaching
things. And, you know, hopefully
it's not something that's crazy out there because
generally as a rule, if it feels crazy and out there
and unfamiliar, to your point, we're not gonna we're not hit hitting the
mark. But sometimes you gotta go there and then pull it back a little bit.
Right? It depends on the client and the situation. But
I really think it's about openness and and willingness to learn.
And and, again, willingness to be not necessarily the
authority on all things. Oh, yeah? Yes. We have most of our
clients know their their work and what they do way better
than we do. What we can do is bring that lens with the
same level of of rigor to their customers and find the balance between
them. Because ultimately, what you're doing is creating relationships with the customer.
Right? You're not doing this for the people that you work for. You're doing this
for the people who buy things from the people that you work for. I had
a question for you. Do do those
characteristics that you just described, would you call them courage? Because I'm
fascinated with the notion of courage. Because you meet people
in large organizations, and they're like, we're not
usually trusted with that decision. We're not we're not sure this is the right
move. We're not comfortable with being wrong sometimes.
And so all of this is new, and change requires courage
to fully embrace and adopt. Would you say that's true? I'm just
trying to think because generally, I I I think of it as belief.
Belief in self, belief in the idea, belief in outcomes. Mhmm. But
courage is yeah. I mean, I feels weird. Yeah.
I'm a courageous person, but I would imagine
that courage is an absolute requirement to have steadfast belief in
something. True. Very true. Here's a question that
I have for you. You mentioned something before that I wanna shine a light
on. That is all solutions are creativity. I believe when
we make things, they're almost
birthed onto the world, and now they're here. And now they're undeniable, and they're
irreversible. And those things have the potential to create ripples.
We satisfy a customer. We create an experience that connects
with them emotionally, either through nostalgia or a feeling of
being cared for, being part of something special. Any of those things
can happen because of a solution. And I
also think that one of the ripples that we create is
the culture that we change, whether it's for our clients, for
ourselves, for the community. And I don't know if you see yourself this way, but
I do. I see you as doing something that's radically different
than what most people do. It could be because you're
small, because you're nimble, because you're hungry, because you're new, because or it could
be because of you. And I know you would never
take all the credit for something like this, but I
still want I still want to assign it. And I still want to say that
a big chunk of why I like talking to you so often
is because you're that creative person. You understand the impact of what
you make. And so I want
your thoughts on that. Is that something that drives you? Is that something that you're
able to see in what you're building? Yes. Sometimes
resulting in an absolute disregard for everything.
But, yes, I I I don't I don't see myself that
way. I I I don't I know that I do things a little differently,
but I don't really know what's going on inside the heads of anyone else.
So I I I don't truly know how they think and
how they operate. For me, there is no other way. This is this is
it. And Yeah. It's the one
defining factor that that is consistent in everything that we
do, and has been consistent with everything that I've done for the last
25 some odd years. Mhmm. You know, it
it's it's going in and and
just being stubborn about
finding the right thing. Yeah. Most rule breakers and hell
raisers would say the same thing. I'm just being me. I don't see myself as
a pioneer. I don't see myself as anything special. I'm just being
me. But that insistence, and you mentioned this earlier too, your insistence
on doing it in the way that you feel is right
is nonnegotiable. Like, there's just no going back to
what I did before because I didn't belong there. I'm not a rule
worshiper. I'm not a rule follower. I'm not a template
stamper. And so I think that's a big part of what makes tension so
interesting. And one of the cool things that you're doing, by the way, that people
need to know about is that you actually, in celebration of your 4th anniversary,
ran a sort of contest. Can you tell us about that? So in
celebration of the of surviving 4 years, we're
actually giving one selected company in
either the spatial computing space or the AI space,
a complete product strategy through dev ready
design engagement at absolutely no cost. My my employees told
me I was crazy. And, yeah, it is a little crazy. Yeah. But
we've had some really, really outstanding clients. Not like
we need to find something that's fun to work on. We're like, everything that we
work on is fun. But we've built this company thanks to
startups. And that's not to say we don't have large enterprise clients. We
love them too. But our company exists because of startups. And
something that I've always wanted to figure out is how do we get
what we do in the hands of more start ups as early as possible. And
this is a this is a great way to do it and to give back
to the community that allowed us to be here today. Maybe by the
time, this airs, we'll have results and we'll be able to share
that. But, yeah, it's, it's we've got some really interesting stuff
coming in. That is very exciting, and I'm sure it's a fun way to get
the word out and get people who otherwise wouldn't encounter you in
front of you and to choose a challenge that's maybe unique and something you've never
done before. Congratulations on that. Congratulations on the 4 years.
Where can people find you? I want people to know about Tension and
where's the best what's the best way to engage with you? LinkedIn, obviously.
Tension Consulting Inc. Obviously, our website,
wearetension.com. So we are Tension is my,
my son's URL choice. Uh-huh. Decide to run with it.
Anything from there, always works. LinkedIn is all I'm I'm always
on that. Direct email through the website always goes straight to me. So
When I interview you next, because we know we're going to, where do you
let's say that's 2 years from now. Where do you think you'll be? Maybe a
a larger team by a bit. I'm not here for hyper growth.
I'm not about multiple locations and trying to franchise this. I
just wanna work on cool projects, man. I just wanna do good things for good
companies. Dude, that is awesome. But that's why I think that's why what
you're doing is working because your reason is good as
they say. My friend, it's so great to talk to you. I enjoy all of
our conversations, as I said, and I love having you on the air. And I
hope that more people get to know you because of this show.
And I look forward to the next time we get to talk. In the meantime,
everything about Adam is gonna be in the show notes below so that you can
check him out. And please do because he's doing fantastic
work that in in our modern age, I think
runs the risk of being bypassed. We think that design,
intentional design, and focus on the customer is a
luxury when really it's the reason for being here. And I think
Adam is someone who gets that, and I think that's why he's doing so well.
So not only can Agilist learn from this, entrepreneurs can learn from a fellow
entrepreneur who's done it and has done it, as Frank
Sinatra used to say, doing it my way. And I really dig that. So thank
you, my friend, for being on the show. Always. Great to talk.
Well, there he is, my old friend, Adam Smith. If you're in the market for
some expert UI UX services, do me a favor. The very least
go check him out at weartension.com. Follow what he
does. He's an artist and I really respect his work and he's got
great insights into modern delivery that any Agilist could learn
from. And that's about it for this week. As for me, you can check
out my products and services at learning.fusechamber.com. We've got
some great discounts happening right now on the forge cohort 8 starting
in June 2024. Reach out to find about some special
discounts and some volume pricing if you wanna bring a few people from your
company. I'll be back next week with some new stuff, so make sure you stay
tuned. And until then, thank you for listening and stay
badass.