Evolving Your M&A Function

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I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with Deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during MA deals. Hi. Today I'm here with Christina Amiri, head of M and A Strategic Operations at Atlassian. Today we're going to talk about tools and practices you can apply to evolve your integration function and produce better outcomes. Quick backstory. About two years ago at this time, I came to you, Christina, about using Agile techniques and you bluntly told me not to write another playbook but make it into a framework. And a year ago the Agile M and A book was published. Today it's a growing community effort to create and share techniques. And today we're going to talk about how to change your M and a strategy in 2021. How are you doing today, Christina?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me back.

Hey, my pleasure. Once a year I get to interview you. So this is it for anybody watching.

Yeah, that's great. We've done four deals since we last spoke last summit in June, so we've been busy.

Yeah, I'd love to hear. It's been a while since I last saw you and it sounds like you've been busy. How has it been going? Completely virtual. What's that like?

Atlassian announced last year in the summertime that we are pivoting to be a remote first company. And that means that everyone has the option whether or not to go back to the office when the office is reopened. In Atlassian, it changed where we work, but not how we work because we were already a highly distributed company. Our headquarters, our official headquarters is in Sydney, Australia, where our co founders are. We have a large presence in San Francisco, in New York, in Austin, the Netherlands, India, many, I think over 13 countries now we're in. So luckily our products that we sell and we use actively in the company really help us and enable us to collaborate and work together already in a virtual setting. So it hasn't been as big of a mine since that shift for us as it is not going to the office and just being more social with each other. I'd say the biggest impact of this change though, to being remote first to our acquisitions has been we've not been asking people to relocate in the same way that we had been before going virtual. When we had teams who were smaller part of an acquisition, we would ask them to relocate either closer to an office where Atlassian has a larger presence. And so now we're focused more on trying to make it work across the globe and we're focused less on being in an office versus being just in a time zone where you can work well and collaborate well with other teams as long as you have a few hours of overlapping time together. And that doesn't always line up perfectly. There's a lot of times that we've had people working from Australia to Virginia, for example, for our most recent acquisition, and there's virtually no time zone overlap there. And so we're really piloting how we can leverage teams in between, like in San Francisco, to be the conduit between the east coast and Sydney to work asynchronously, doubling down on how we use our own tools and technology to help pass information along, keep everyone informed and aligned, really helping to make sure that we've got well coordinated work together.

Speaking of recent acquisitions, congratulations on your recent acquisition of Chartio. Can we walk through this deal and how things have evolved since deals you've did a year or two ago? How did you do diligence effectively, for example?

Yeah, thanks. We're pretty lucky and excited to have Chardio join Atlassian. Just a quick background on them. They are a cloud analytics tool, business intelligence focused and they had their headquarters in San Francisco with a large presence in Blacksburg, Virginia. So imagine trying to work with that team and stretch across San Francisco and Sydney. It made diligence really challenging. We had people working really odd hours and trying to share information literally across the globe. We completed the deal at the end of Feb and by that time it was our fourth deal that we had done as a company. Fully remote, fully remote from diligence all the way to execution. That being like the fourth one that we had done. We had a lot of practice doing diligence effectively and improving with each time. We manage our entire diligence process using three key tools. Now, first is Confluence. Of course, you got to plug Atlassian products. Confluence is what we use. For those of you, it's internal corporate wiki. It's the place where all of our documentation lives. We even use it. Some of you may use Google Docs or word docs, where it's a place where people just capture ideas or thoughts. It doesn't even have to be something in a wiki or reference format, but we really use that a lot for every asset in the diligence process. So creating our over the wall list, the people that are disclosed in the deal, we use it for a deal team to write a business case. What's this acquisition about? Why are we doing it? We use it to manage our diligence schedule, our agenda, our diligence questions, our analysis and all of our write up. Everything in long form goes in confluence. And every functional team in our Confluence space has their own subsections where they can map out their diligence plans, but more importantly to share it with each other. So if someone goes into diligence session on Monday, the team going in on Tuesday can read what the first team did, their questions, their findings and and that helps them get a little smarter going into their sessions, maybe finding things that they can double click into and also help to not repeat certain questions or topics that they covered. The other thing we use is jira, of course, our flagship product, Jira Chardio was the first deal that we used Jira to manage the diligence process. And for those of you that may or may not be familiar with Jira, it is typically known and used by our customers in a software development context or by technical teams, engineers, product managers, typically working on development projects to manage their work. And we're really pushing the envelope of how we're using it in a business context setting. So no matter what tool any of you use in your company to drive work, the concept is that we're planning the work, planning the milestones, capturing all the decisions that need to be made, the issues that we're finding in an actual central system that everyone can use and understand how all the pieces fit together. And that makes it highly collaborative in the way that teams can plan together and then also all of the output from our work is there for them, the next deal team to use going forward. And it helps make them smarter, gives them a good foundation to build off of. And then Slack, that's our chat tool of choice is Slack. We have a different Slack channel for every area of diligence. So for example, we have a Slack channel for diligence that's focused on all of the people related topics. We have one that's focused on sales, marketing support. So like all the customer facing topics, we have one for R and D and then we have a diligence Channel where everyone is invited and can see the latest news and updates and information that's being shared out. So this really helps us with that global reach of making sure that everyone feels like they're part of the right conversations, can see questions being asked amongst colleagues that they are not together with, but they can follow along. And then also just keeping them informed so that when they go into their next set of meetings they have the latest and greatest information readily available. And then Zoom, everything we do is always recorded, always shared, always well documented so that we can pass over to other teams and have artifacts that we can go back to pretty easily.

So your tech stack is Confluence, Jira, Slack and Zoom. Yes, these are all connected together.

These are all connected together, yes. That is by design. If you can follow the whole tree. It's almost like our whole work plan is in Jira. In Jira we have links to Confluence pages. The Confluence page might be the long form design or explanation or analysis or research that was done that supports that deliverable that's captured in Jira. And then there may be links to Zoom recordings in there as well. And then as people are updating things that can, that conversation can be happening in Slack. Hey, I just saw that new issue that you logged in Jira. Want to follow up on that? Okay, great, let's meet and talk offline or. Hey, I just flipped this to completed. We got through that major blocker and we were able to complete that deliverable. Those types of conversations happen in Slack, so it can be a little daunting at first when you are learning the dance, but once you get it down, it's been pretty effective for us to just move really fast and have a very agile team.

You know, I'm a tech nerd, so I gotta dig into the technology. That's the part I like because you got the stack connected and essentially you're working out of a single database through that lifecycle of a deal. And the key things, I think fundamentally why it's working well for you because you mentioned the planning, the decision making issues all being documented in this centralized environment that's also acting in real time, enabling that collaboration, which I feel is like the big shift from firms that may be using Excel trackers, emailing them around and next thing you have information silos. I'm curious if you've experienced this where as you go through a process and you're bringing in new people. I'm assuming, and I'm curious in your perspective if getting them up to speed ends up being a faster process since you have information put together.

Yeah, it's a little bit of both. When we bring people on, they're very appreciative that there is so much information that they can just sink their teeth into and really start to learn, ramp up quickly. But it's almost information overload. It becomes, wow, this is a lot of information that I need to try and process. So I'm trying to get better of how to synthesize it to something in more bite sized chunks. But I'd say the pivot to really having a more systematic approach and using tools and technology is not, I mean, this is probably for us, six months in the making, or six to eight months, I would say. Like, we've tried this in previous deals and just have fallen flat. I think a lot of times we were trying to fit our process to the technology and what we realized is M and A is its own beast. You can't fit it into a software development lifecycle. And so the only reason, or one of the key reasons why we've been successful is because we really started from scratch and we have hand configured our own JIRA instance or software tool of choice to fit the deal flow, to fit the integration flow and the way that we sequence and structure our work. So once we started doing that and speaking the language and even calling things like the terminology that we that are working on integration or the deal understand, then we start started to see the light bulbs go off of, oh, okay, I understand now how to plan my work here. And it's just a simple change of instead of putting that in a flat page that doesn't go anywhere, you have to come back to it. No one's updating a status now. It's just something that is dynamic and something you can track on a daily basis. And people are excited by the vision of that. But it's still very daunting, especially to people on the business side who are like, ooh. But no, only our engineers were in these tools. Like, you want me to track my work like a roadmap in this? We're like, yes, we want you to. So take this PowerPoint slide that you have. You see all these nice work streams and arrows that you have, you just translate it in JIRA and look, you create a ticket, start an end date and you just start to show them and you see like the light bulbs go, oh, it's the same thing, but this time everyone can see it and they're not waiting for my slide to change color to know what's happening with it. I think that's been a really cool thing too is just to see like the mindset shift and the business transformation that has come from being virtual, not being able to work together and then really how do we lean on our tools and technology to make that better way?

Describe remind of our company moving to Google Docs like seven, eight years ago. It was just big shock and change. We edit this real time.

We get a lot of that shock. We still, it takes a while too. Like for example, some of our acquisitions, they'll still write an email and I will respond in Slack. So I think that whole just mindset shift of open and real time collaboration, I think for us has been the big unlock. When we think about how quickly we've been able to build this integration muscle at Atlassian, it's only because the culture was already open and collaborative. Like people were used to sharing their work, even if it was work and draft or work in process. Like it was not something that we really had to change. So it felt like it was more just part of the natural flow than oh my gosh, we're going to have to go through this big transformation to make this work. And it wasn't something that Corp, Dev or M and A was doing out in left field all by themselves. That really helped us and it's probably something a lot of organizations struggle with that are trying to make that shift agile.

How is your engagement with acquired company evolve? For example, do you approach announce in day one differently?

Yeah, we've had to do that too. Continuing with Chardio as an example. Again, fourth deal in we started in our first couple deals of oh yeah, that was easy, let's all get on a zoom. Let's say yay, announce and you know, congratulations and welcome and then we drop off the zoom. And that was it. We didn't really start to understand the impacts of that, of not having everyone in the typical way we would do announcements, which is a lot of people probably coming together, showing their support, feeling that energy, starting to build those relationships and connections live. We didn't understand the impact of that until we saw some of our earlier acquisitions. Not seeing them a couple months in and realizing that they still felt a bit disconnected from the rest of the organization. They still felt like now we're just this entity that lives over here, but we haven't seen anyone because we haven't been in the office. We don't get to run into anybody and have chance encounters with our senior leaders. They don't get to go on off sites or any of those things that you know they typically would. So we have really, since then and starting with Chardio, done a better way of what we think is a better way of engaging with them. And so we've opened up our tools more, for example, to them, for example, like our Slack channels. We have a couple Slack channels that we'll have with them as part of the diligence process to get that communication going. Since we don't have days or weeks that we're spending together in diligence, we will also open up our Confluence pages to them, like Confluence and Google Docs pages to them. And we will start to collaborate on things like their customer announcements, their employee announcements, all of the things that we might have typically just thrown over the wall to them. We try to do that now together and in real time. And then alongside that we also have checking calls with them over Zoom where we're making sure things are flowing the right way, they're feeling good about the process. And that for us has been really helpful to just make sure we have good representation and are starting to build that relationship with them early on. And that has really helped us then approach things like day one announce and communications a lot differently. The way that the Chartio timeline flowed was we announced to their employees about a week before the deal closed. So think of it as like the Thursday before the next Thursday's deal closed. So Thursday went out to employees acquisition. In that announcement it began with their CEO and founder thanking them for all the hard work, recognizing the journey they'd been on, and then really talking about the company's values in its early days. And then we led into a video that was prerecorded by one of our co founders and CEO Mike Hannam Brooks, who's based in Australia. So he couldn't be there at 2am his morning. So we recorded a video for him to just welcome them and really acknowledge the shared culture and passions and missions of the two companies of hey, we were a young scrappy startup like you. We had big aspirations of Conque World. Our mission is to unlock the potential of teams. We think together we're going to be awesome. For these reasons that was really for them felt like wow. Their co founder CEO took the time to welcome us and acknowledge that and then he handed over from the video to another product exec that we had who was actually the executive sponsor of the deal. And luckily she was in a time zone. She was in California so she could join live welcoming the people in Virginia and all over the US so she could join live and she kind of double Clicked a little bit and talked about why was Chardio in the area of analytics and visualization and customer insights so important to the company and how were they going to be critical to that success and how our values tied together that was going to make that super successful. It's another executive they're meeting. Double clicking a little bit more on why that's important. We had, I think, one or two more speakers after that. But what we really wanted to do with the employee analysis, which is make them feel excited about the possibility of joining Atlassian and see why we were two compatible companies and employees, groups that were compatible and could do great work together. So we left it as that and we said, tomorrow we're going to come back to you with a little bit more. So then that whole rest of the day, people are giving their employee offer letters, managers are having their conversations. It's like this cadence in this roster of, did you have. Yep, I delivered their employee offer. Okay, this is what happened. This is what you know. So we're like managing this behind the scenes. And then we say, okay, the next day is Friday. We're going to come back. And they did this without us, like charlieo just had in all hands without us. And that's when they just opened it up, get it all out. What are your hopes, fears? What are you worried about? What are the questions? It ran the gamut. Oh, my God, I'm so sad. We thought we were going to go conquer the world ourselves, too. I've been a huge fan of Atlassian. What a great company to be a part of and everything in between. And we felt that that was just a great way to just get that energy out that they typically would have done in the office the next day. It would have been buzzing of, oh, my God. But yesterday, the announcement, and they didn't have that because they were still working from home. So we wanted to give them that space. So we said, Friday, suggest you guys, you tell us where you want us to plug in. If not, we'll talk to you on Monday. And so we had another meeting on Monday where we shared the integration plan, like at a high level. And we had a lot of discuss and debate about, isn't that, shouldn't we include that as part of announcement? We realized that when you think about the employees and how humans process change and major news like that, they're just focused on, do I have a job? What am I going to talk to my family about? Am I on this ride? They're not even worried about what integration plans they don't care. They just care about how is my team, how am I going to land. So we said let's save that for Monday, the weekend. They're going to be talking about this with their family. Monday their ears have stopped ringing and they will be able to digest more. So that's where we shared a little bit more of here's what the org chart is going to look like day one. Here are the high level goals that we're working towards, here's the rough timeline that we're going to be working on together and here are the leaders that your leadership is going to be partnering with to work on this together. So I think in that way it set us up for building that joint sense of trust of okay, Atlassian has a plan. They've been thinking about it, but we're going to be part of those conversations to really help map out that plan together. We didn't want to show up with a fully bait plan on day one. We really wanted them to feel like they were sharing as much as we can with you. And the next couple of weeks will be our leadership and your leadership together planning the rest of this out. And so then fast forward to the end of that week. Is actual deal closed. So this whole time no one in Atlassian knows except for the deal team and whoever was part of diligence. So if you can imagine, they're like, okay, I want to get started. And we're like, no time out. You can't get started yet. Atlassian doesn't know about this. You have to wait till the deal closes. So the deal doesn't close till Thursday. We send out a company wide blog announcing welcome Chartio. We post to our website to let our customers know they're sharing with their customers. And then we do a following day is the official day one with Atlassian. And so we have our other members of our executive team join like our chief revenue officer and our chief Administrative officer who's head of legal and hr. And that was just a way to say congrats, not have any slides, not have an agenda. All it was was a virtual toast. So wherever you are in the world, grab a drink and let's just toast to you being together with us. It was a great way again to sprinkle in more of that executive engagement. They got to know, okay, here's our chief revenue officer, here's what they do. And then our chief people offer here's what she does and just get to know them. And then the human element of let's just toast and let's just celebrate. And it was funny. They decided to take it up a notch. They sprung on us that they had also made it a Zoom background contest. So they were going to give away a prize to the team. They had asked the entire team to have Australian inspired Zoom backgrounds. And whoever had the best background was going to win the contest. And they made our executives the judges of that. So you can imagine all the crazy Zoom backgrounds that came up with wombats and Victoria bitters beer and Vegemite and all the things that you could think of related to Australia's people's crazy backgrounds. But it was just like a great way to say, wow, you guys are really embracing this. Or just have like a good laugh about it.

It's so interesting. It sounds like way more work than just having a big party with a ton of booze.

It is, yeah. If you just think through like the way that we went from it's just one Zoom meeting, we're off and on. And then we instead said, how do we layer this into different moments of engagement? And what are the ways that them understanding where they are in the change process, understanding how we want to help them feel more connected, and then also helping just make sure that we're placing some of the human interaction that doesn't happen live anymore. That's a lot to try and layer in which I didn't actually realize until trying to prepare for this. So I was like, huh? Okay.

Christina. The challenges that I commonly hear in diligence is the lack of early integration planning and the knowledge chasm of the diligence team and the integration team. As you transition from diligence to integration, how do you overcome that? Do you have special tools or techniques that you use?

Yeah, there's a couple ways that we've been able to overcome that effectively. One is just the human aspect of it. We've just dedicated more M and A roles across the company. People that are purely dedicated to M and a, meaning like 100% you have M and A in your title. We went from one person two years ago, that was me, to now we've got 13 people in the company. So as a company, we have really embraced and really supported and literally put our money where our mouth is and invested in it. So now we have it Finance two legal customer success and support, field operations or sales as we call it, couple in hr. And so across the company, we've got a lot of key roles and the functions that deal after deal, regardless of whether it's a product tuck in or a whole new business. We're acquiring. These are commonly the teams that we partner with on every deal. So they recognized the value that having that continuity and having that knowledge continue to build in their organizations provided. And also just the volume of our deals have gone up a lot. We do four to five deals a year, so it's every quarter something new. And we're still closing out integrations on the other ones. So I think that has been big. Having people with deal over deal, knowledge building and deal over deal. They recognize the plays that they need to do. Oh, that's this kind of tuck in. I need to do this. We need to work through these dependencies. We've seen this type of project before, situation before. And then the other thing that we've done is going back to our products and tools, using that as a way to be very open and collaborative. It's hard to have a knowledge chasm when all of the work is out there. It's more about finding it and knowing what's relevant. So as we're using Confluence and JIRA and Slack and our other tools, those are the areas where we're really jointly creating across teams how all of their plans map up together and then all the goals that we're working on. That's really helped a lot. And because we've got that continuity, we've been able to continuously improve and evolve our plays and our framework as well to go along with that.

You listed some of those tools because the other challenge I was going to mention is functional leads. Working in silos is a really frequent thing I hear. Is that sort of the main driver for tackling that challenge or do you have other approaches?

Other approaches that we've used are we've pivoted from really focusing on the functional integration to really more focusing on the cross functional work streams that support the goals of that acquisition. And we do that not only by grouping people together. By saying, for example, employee experience. I don't really want to hear or want to know about what's happening in the payroll integration or in the facilities integration. But I do want to know about how the whole integrated employee experience integration is going. It's almost like by saying, hey, you four teams are part of this employee experience track. You are going to really map out that journey for how employees experience this through their comp and benefits, through where they physically work, the change in their roles, the stakeholders they work with and their long term career kind of development and their engagement as an employee. Right. Like when you think of it as a whole like that. And we've Got, you know, six different cross functional work streams that are organized in that way. That has really helped us to force those teams to not work in silos because they're working on the integrated experience and that experience has to be in support of the acquisition goals. In some cases it's building a new product, some cases it's just growing their business through more revenue. So it really depends.

I like that. It's a very agile thing to do in terms of having that cross functional structure of the team. How early do you implement that? It sounds like your integration team gets involved pretty early. Is it? How early do you start forming those cross functional teams?

We start forming that in integration and I suspect that we will start to pull that up a little bit more into the diligence process. We have not, because I think we, we really want to do a deep dive in each of those areas. And sometimes with the cross functional pieces, you focus more on the top layer, which for diligence is not a good thing. So we typically kick off the cross functional work streams as part of integration planning and integration planning. We typically kick off before the deal closes. So there's typically some period of time, one week, maybe two weeks between when diligence is considered complete, when all of the diligence findings are all written up, the reports and analysis are all shared out, say, okay, we have wrapped everything up from a diligence perspective. There's that period of time where we use before the deal closes to say, hey, we've got these diligence teams that are engaged. We should kick off and use this as a time to do that handover between the diligence team to anyone new that they're adding to help with integration. They can do that knowledge sharing, they can ramp them up on the deal. And typically from when we're doing diligence, there's probably about like 20, 30 people that are really deeply involved for each of their functions total. And then by the time we get to integration kickoff, that number is at least doubled. A month into integration, it's probably about 100, 150 people across the company who have all been brought in some way, shape or form. So we're ramping up pretty quickly. So it's important for us to use any downtime we have like in between diligence and close to just start at least getting the key leads together to start doing that knowledge sharing. That's been really helpful for us to hit the ground running on day one.

You have some overlap where some of the people that may be involved with integration are involved with diligence early on?

Yes, definitely. The 13 folks that I mentioned that are dedicated to M and A, they're typically in diligence as well as integration and they will have some specific subject matter experts that are supporting them in diligence, but maybe a different set that are supporting them in integration.

So it's not a complete handoff. It's essentially bringing more people in.

Yeah, there's some continuity. I don't think we have any cases now where there isn't at least two or three people that are providing continuity.

Walk me through your integration process. How do you kick that off and get that going?

Aside from doing the kickoff, we do that cross functional kickoff before the deal closes, but we'll also do a kickoff with the acquired leadership team. We'll talk with them about. We start with. Here's an overview of just high level what happens in integration. At Atlassian we have meetings. You're going to partner up with someone, we're going to identify the goals together, spend a couple weeks planning and then we'll get into execution. Just walking through them at a very simple level because at that time they're still really overwhelmed with their day job, going through the acquisition and also trying to onboard. So we typically do a light kickoff with them and then start to pair people up. So we'll start to publish. Here are the teams, here are the leads of each of these cross functional work streams. Here are all the sub teams that are part of that and we start to develop like a roster that we share out and give people timeframe of within the next week you're gonna meet with each other, you're gonna get to know each other, you're gonna identify a date to bring your teams together and just get to know each other. So we've really also tried to carve out that integration planning as even an introduction and get to know you space like we've learned time and time again, don't dive directly into planning work. Get to know each other and help to understand each other's side of Let me tell you about my team, our processes, who the key people are, what we do, how we work with other teams and then share across the table. Okay, you guys, you share with us. Once we started building that into the integration kickoff process, we've gotten much better feedback too from the acquired teams of like, I didn't feel like we were just driving into work on day one. Like you were just like, okay, didn't care about us as people. You just wanted to get the work done. It felt More like, okay, this is a partnership. We're starting to build relationship and understanding of each other. Okay, now we're open to ideas. It feels collaborative. I think before we were so focused on just getting the integration done that we forgot the human element of it. Again, that common theme of bringing the human interaction and relationship building back to the forefront.

How early do you start thinking about integration planning in general?

When we're developing the business case.

Okay, so it does actually happen early, but it sounds like a lot of the meat and potato comes a little later.

Yes, the meat and potato comes later because Agile. But it's our deal team as they're working with the business on what is this acquisition, how would it fit in, how does it align to our overall goals and strategy? That is a key part of how the integration thesis forms. So I typically get brought in very early on, typically pre letter of intent and I usually have a briefing of here's the rationale behind this deal. Here's things that we consider to getting to this point of yes, we want to move forward with going through this process. And typically there's a short write up on what the integration thesis is just a high level based on these assumptions. This is how we think it will go. Part of what happens in diligence is that we, the integration team is doing a little bit of integration diligence. Right. Of like you said, you didn't need this team. You said this was going to happen and this product was going to launch in this timeframe and we're looking for the things that maybe help support that integration thesis. Or we're saying, hey, we learned a lot of things. We're actually, we need to pivot this integration thesis and this is actually what's going to be our integration strategy and our operating model on day one. So it is like increasing levels of fidelity and awareness of that more solid thinking.

Right. I guess we could also plug in the interview we did last year with Steve Elliott and I believe it was called M and A Integration from Both sides of the Table. So that dives a little bit more into it and also gives the CEO target company's perspective in terms of how they were involved in thinking about integration early as well. You didn't leave them with much surprises is what I heard.

No, we didn't. We try to do that on purpose. There's so much already that's a surprise that we try to almost preview for them. This is the experience that we're going to go on together so that when they're in the experience, they're like, okay, I knew this was going to happen and then, okay, this is. I expect now for us to come. The output of this is X, Y and Z. So that's really helped them because there's so much cognitive load already, right of like meeting so many new people, learning a whole new culture and set of tools and processes as much as you can, prepare them and set expectations up front. I found that to be a much smoother process and more welcomed than trying to introduce something later right before they need to do it and then getting the, oh, I got too much on my plate, I can't take that on too. I think that's really helped them when they understand the why behind it.

During integration. Common challenges in this phase are avoiding burnout, stakeholder alignment, silos of work streams and big picture alignment. How do you handle those?

The ones that is talked about that we've done a pretty good job of handling are around the avoiding siloed work streams and the big picture alignment. Those are the two big ones. I think having us focus at the cross functional work stream mode, it's really helped us not dive too much into the details because we really look at how each of those pieces support the goal and then we really trust those leaders to manage their own plans. And now that we have more dedicated people and continuity, that's really helped a lot. The area we haven't tackled really well is burnout. I think because we're so open and collaborative, it has its pitfalls of like people feeling like they need to be on all the time or feeling the pressure whether it's real or not to be responsive because at any time someone is always online around the world. So we've had to work a lot on things like Slack etiquette, how to manage calendars effectively, manage schedules effectively. Like one very small tactical thing that we started doing that's actually helped us is we have a Google Calendar for the integration program and everyone can see it. One of the big things, especially if you can't see each other's calendars or and doubly if you're working across teams where there's only one or two hours in a day where you overlap, everyone is trying to book meetings on top of each other, trying to get in time with each other. So what we've done is created a shared Google Calendar for the integration and everyone adds or invites that calendar to their integration related meeting. So all the Chartio integration meetings or Mindville was one where we started this. Everyone can see like, oh, okay, Every Tuesday at 9am is the weekly support integration meeting. I shouldn't book over that. This is when the steering committee meeting is happening every month. Okay, that's good for me to know so that I can tee up some topics or things that I want presented at that meeting. And then it just helps people to not just step over each other's toes. So little things like that, like how do you use Slack? And the other tools that we use more effectively has helped with the burnout.

That's actually great examples. So change has always been hard for people. What methods do you use that have been most successful when it comes to creating smooth transition?

I'd say the common theme there is around, like, building trust and building relationships. That's the most important thing because it's so foundational to everything. And we've tried to unpack what we've been doing, especially in this more virtual or remote world where we have to try and unpack the layers of how we're building that trust and how we're building those relationships. So it could be everything from how do the integration teams kick off? You start with a conversation, you introduce your team, or it could be, how do we get them more exposure to our executive team so they have confidence of, oh, that's our cto. Okay, I understand his vision for engineering. Okay, I understand why these strategic initiatives are important. I understand how we fit in. So all those moments are around that, centered around that building trust, relationships. So the way that we've been, I think just trying to manage that change is like, through more intentional interactions and engagements and just making sure that we're trying to time it appropriately for where they are in their journey. Like, not trying to cram too much information all at once because we want them to know so that they can do the work. No, it's not about us, it's about them. So sometimes we might have to pump the brakes and really slowly layer things in and expose them to more and more as they're feeling comfortable with being part of the company, more familiar in their roles, using our tools, understanding how things are done, and that's really helped a lot, is just to have more of that human lens to it.

Got it. Put in the effort to build relationships and trust.

There you go. It sounds easy. Just two hours.

I want to put a plug because I know the big inspiration I got from you was a lot of the inner workings that you shared in terms of how you use plays and those artifacts in your M and A and be able to share it with your teams. So I'm going To post a link in into chat which is simply mascience.com plays I'm going to draw you in and collaborate with you to write some more. But it's something that we started and I think we have about 80 or so practitioners that have wrote their own plays. It's really excited to see this being an open source opportunity to share these different techniques, short form write ups that share some ideas and step by step approaches to various areas of M and A. You ready for some questions?

Yeah, sounds great.

What IT roles are on your M and A team?

Oh, what IT roles? Okay, so we have an IT lead who really serves as like the conduit for the other areas of excellence within it. So depending on how your company is structured, ours is structured based on functional area by department. So there's like marketing technology, there's support, there's employee success or what we call HRS and the people team. So we've got different areas of technology and the roles that we have are an IT kind of executive that reports to our cio so that there's always big picture kind of understanding of how any systems integration or new technologies coming in are going to impact the overall IT roadmap. Because for us that's something that's super critical and they're always really constrained in terms of like resources and timing. And as we all know, M and A is never well planned out or scheduled. So for them any change or diversion into their roadmap that they work so far carefully to craft is disruptive. So that's why it's helpful to have not only that senior leadership kind of view of things, but also someone who is great at partnering cross functionally, internally. So it's kind of like an IT manager, but a generalist whose job it is to understand the business goals of the acquisition and then how all of the supporting teams are going to rally or pivot and integrate that then might have a downstream impact to their requirements. So they're responsible for driving the IT integration roadmap, working and pulling in their peers in IT to help get them ramped up. And then after that once they've got their integration, their IT integration projects going, he's more of the making sure everyone's coordinated, reporting on status collectively and just providing visibility across the board. It's more of those teams that are driving the execution. So I'd say it's him and executive and then I think we've got two folks that are helping him that are based in India because we see the majority of the crazy work that can't be planned out is around the HR technology piece. So how do you get all the employee data loaded? How you get their benefits and payroll aligned? All of them set up in our internal systems, laptops, et cetera. All of that is highly concentrated work that requires a lot of dedicated time. So I think we've got two analysts as well supporting him for those specific day one week one activity.

What are your cross functional teams? Employee experience.

We've got employee experience, everything in our people team, payroll, benefits, comp, workplace or facilities. Legal is part of there as well. Comms, change management, recruiting, talent development. We've got customer experience so that's anybody that's customer facing it can be support, success, sales and all other customer facing teams. And then we've got trust. So that's risk, compliance, security, legal, privacy, product. One big element of our acquisitions is typically some form of product launch. So that's call it MVP minimum viable product so that that product launches, product design, engineering, infrastructure, security, legal as well can be part of that. And then we've got systems integration so that's typically it with all of their business process counterparts as part of that. And then we've got procure to pay. So that's everything from treasury procurement, accounts payable. I think privacy is part of that too in compliance and then record to report. So everything tax, finance, accounting, integration related. So you can see how pivoting, it's not so simple. It's now just seven cross functional work streams. We used to report like on all 15 of them and that used to be very like a whole different experience. We were just focusing on very tactical kind of updates and milestones where now that we can bubble it up and to see how the business as a whole or the customers as a whole are going to translate, that's really helped us just up leveled our game.

My company's Last acquisition was three years ago with two tools, SharePoint and email. Feel bad for them. Say your next purchase is 6 to 12 months out. What is a realistic goal to set from a tools perspective? Example, if the working level has to pick only a couple out of Confluence, Jira and Slack, what would you recommend in terms of our thinking process to make the choices?

If there were only like one or two tools that you could pick, which one would you pick?

I think there's an impression that hey, I can't build this whole stack in this upcoming deal but and I think there is that piece of like hey iterate your process but I guess that's where they're sort of looking at what would be the key tools to start with.

Start with Zoom and Slack if you can. You know, like those are the easy things that I feel like are lighter weight. That if it's part of just a normal interaction, even outside of a deal that can get up and running. I think the motion of how do we structure all our Slack channels and what's okay to communicate there versus what do I still email about, I think that's part of the motion that you'll learn as you use it. I'd say something like a confluence. Well, it doesn't even have to be confluence, but some form of open document collaboration. Whether it's G Suite, Google Docs, something that is online that you can use to start sharing your work with other teams that you don't have to go okay, and then you share the links out with them and be able to co author in real time. Just even understanding that rhythm is really powerful, then I think you could graduate to something more of a official system to track the work. Even if you kept it in the Google Doc or some other. Even if it was PowerPoint, that still would be okay as long as you're using the tools that you have to graduate how you communicate it out. Maybe now I share these things out in Slack channels instead of an email thread because the email thread only limits it to the people that you've sent it to and then no one else can jump into that conversation. I think that's a really powerful thing that starts just getting the gears turning. Oh, okay. Wow. This open thing is like pretty powerful.

From your experience, what's an ideal candidate for the M and A integration teams? What experience they have or the characteristics they bring with them.

They have to be pretty high. EQ is one. Just being able to read people, read a room, read a situation really well is one of the top things that I look for. Second, probably even as important is just having that, that cross functional mindset. Like someone that loves understanding how to connect the dots or seeing relationships or patterns or connections between things. Like, because M and A is so cross functional, I think the people that really thrive are the ones that can understand how the pieces fit and then just keep those gears turning. So definitely strong understanding of like relationships and how things fit together. And then someone that also has a consultative approach to things, ask good questions, good listener, knows when to give advice versus when to just help and support. So someone with that kind of like consultative mindset of I am here in service of you and to help make this successful. I'm not here in service for myself that's a very different thing too of like than just trying to get work done for the sake of it. So I think those are three of the top ones. I'm sure there's a lot more, but those are the first ones that just just come to mind.

All right, we're about to wrap it up here. I got one more for you. I'm going to wrap a few questions together. How do you manage the operating model and its complexity within their processes and tools? There's so many different stakeholders, so I'm curious how you manage all the different views and information.

I feel like that's a talk of its own. We could go the simple route of we track metrics and the financial data in this doc. In this tool we summarize it up. We present in the form of a report in this Confluence page. We might represent some of the milestones that we're reporting on, whether it's hitting a hiring target or having team grow to a certain size or deliver the product launch on this date in jira. So there is a way that we are doing the dance of the work is scattered across different places and the data scattered across different places. But together I think we've tried to create more of a single pane of glass of what is the operating model at a high level kind of executive summary view. What does that look like? And then using a lot of links and clicks and supporting data to be available underneath this layers of that.

Christina, thank you so much for your time today. I learned a lot and had a lot of fun.

Thanks. Me too. I learned a lot about myself and other speakers and always great to chat with you.

You hanging out for happy hour?

Yeah, I'm just gonna go get a drink now.

I know that's what I'm gonna do too.

Foreign.

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