BUILD

SUCCEED

David: [00:00:00] Alright. Hi, Chris. How are ya? 

Chris Synan: I'm great, David. It's great to be here.

David: Yeah, thanks so much for joining us. been a little while since we caught up. So,how's the, uh, world of real estate tech been these days? 

Chris Synan: it's great. it's definitely an exciting,exciting field over the past couple of years. We've had some, really hot times in the industry and we've had some kind of cooling off. we're kind of looking at interest rates coming down to, to pick the pace of things back up again. in, in the tech world, things haven't slowed down at all. We've taken, all this time to continue to. Sharpen the saw with our processes, with our technologies and really working on making everything just continuing to make everything that we've got world class.

David: Awesome. Well, that's the fun thing about tech, right? No matter what's going on in the markets or anything else, the tech is always there riding along. So 

Chris Synan: something to do for sure.

David: yeah, absolutely. Let's take a step back you know, since we're just getting started here, take a moment. You want to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about, your career journey and how we got to talk today. 

Chris Synan: yeah, for sure. Thanks. yeah, I'm, my name's Chris Seinen. I am currently, vice president of [00:01:00] engineering, at Keller Williams Realty. I joined, just like actually a week before the COVID lockdown happened. So it's been an interesting, ride for me. In addition to that, I came in through the side door.

Gary Keller, who's the founder of Keller Williams, Gary's son, John Keller had started up an incubation, a technology incubator alongside of Keller Williams. It was called KWX and they hired me to run technology for KWX. And so I kind of had a unique. Vantage point on Keller Williams, from that, being off to the side, in the orbit of Keller Williams for a while.

And then through a series of events, we ended up getting rolled in. 

riverside_chris_& david _ oct 7, 2024 001_iaw_trailer recordi: to, 

Chris Synan: to KW. so, you know, before I go on, too much with that,I did want to touch on a couple other things. I wanted to give a bit of a background just on Keller Williams and what this company is and their tech journey, if that's all right, if I can 

David: yeah, absolutely. 

Chris Synan: cool. Thanks. so Keller Williams, Keller Williams is the largest real estate franchise in By agent count, [00:02:00] we have the most agents. it's, at current count, it's somewhere around 160, 000 agents worldwide. and basically what that means in the United States is that a Keller Williams agent is attached to about one fifth of the world's population.

of every residential transaction that happens. So every house that gets bought and sold, there's about a 20 percent chance that there's a KW agent involved either on the buyer side or on the seller side. So, you know, we've got just lots and lots of agents out there, just a very successful community of agents. and it was, so Keller Range has seen, A lot of growth since Gary started the company in 1983. Massive growth, for many, many years. And then several years ago, Gary wrote a book called Millionaire Real Estate Agent, what we call MREA. And MREA really catapulted the franchise.

people really loved this book because it really lays out there. This is exactly how you can become a millionaire through real estate. It's really step by step. [00:03:00] It's really prescriptive, you know, in, in how you do it. and so many people, you know, I, I'vebeen to these, these events. We have two big events a year and you go there. And people are really all in on Keller Williams because they got the book, they did what the book said, and now they've just built a really successful business. So it's, that it's just fantastic. It's just been a game changer, life changer for so many people.

Right.so then fast forward a little bit to about the 2017 timeframe, around this time, Gary said, look, we've given them this playbook. We've said, here's how. You can go and be massively successful with real estate. They didn't really have the tools to do it. I mean, there's tools out there, but the tools didn't really work the way that, you know, the MREA playbook said to do it.

And so Gary said, you know what, we're going to be a technology company. And they just, they said, this is what we're going to do. We're going to invest whatever it takes, massive amounts of money. and we're just going to build out these technologies. So [00:04:00] they set about to build. What's what we call command.

Command is our CRM for real estate agents. It takes you through the whole practice from lead generation, contacts,communicating with your, you know, with your, with your contacts. and then when you get into a transaction, it takes you all through that, the financials and everything else, right?

So it's kind of an end to end. Real estate practice software. And then in addition to that, we had the consumer facing experiences, such as K2B. com, which has, you can search for homes and you can favorite things. You can create, save searches and all this and mobile app,and things like that. Right.so it's great because they just went all in and they said, let's go do this. it's hard to really onboard a ton of engineers. To go and do a thing, in short order like this. and so, you know, the way that they grew was largely,by just getting contractors, just grabbing as many contracts as we can, throwing them at this work and, you know, the good news is [00:05:00] we did, the system got built, the bad news is it wasn't always built. Really optimally. So there was, a certain amount of tech debt and other things. So once we, got the platforms out there, there was still a lot of work to really get everything fully stabilized. and I guess that's where my journey started with Keller Williams because when I came in I was asked to take over. 

All the consumer facing experiences. And, when I got there and took a look at what we had,there was going to be a lot of work to do 

David: Well, yeah, it sounds so interesting. Cause obviously it's such a complicated business and you have so many customers, but you have the consumers and the agents, right? And I think That's, one of the interesting aspects of real estate is you have these complex systems like command and then the consumer side, and you've got to merge those things together.

And that tech has become so core to it. I would imagine it was a pretty big transition for them to moving as that tech got immersed into the world, right? Start. What do you say? 1983, they started the business. Is that right?

Chris Synan: that's right. Yeah. 

David: Yeah.

And so, I mean, what a wild shift to go through, right? and it [00:06:00] really, great for them to see the importance of technology and investing in those platforms. So yeah, what is the consumer app stack these days? you know, as you came in there. and you looked at that, you're, there's some technology debt, there's a few things going on there. What were some of the things you identified as you got into the. The consumer side of things.

Chris Synan: there were some things that were done well, and there were some things that, that really needed some work, right? One of the, one of the factors that kind of, you know, that brought me into that space was, I mentioned KWX and, the kind of the incubator accelerator off to the side, we were trying to do a lot of things, that really needed to live within KW consumer experiences, right?

So we were trying to build code and then we wanted to get it into, for example, a, the consumer, the KW Mobile App. and we were having a lot, a lot of trouble doing that. And the reason is because the code base was,it was pretty unwieldy. The word spaghetti has been used. but it was just, we were having a lot of problems I, I'd say both with quality of that code base. and then really [00:07:00] with, you know,extensibility was not modular at all. And, you know, when we tried to put new stuff into that code base, we were just having lots of, lots of problems, lots of scaling problems

David: These are legacy native apps. 

Chris Synan: this was, well no, these were actually, These were React, this was React Native.yeah,lots of performance issues, I think one metric that I recall is, I think 20 percent of our sessions on Android ended in crash. 20%. 

and also just the pace of delivery. was really bad. And I think that's, you know, that's just one of those symptoms as well. when the code is really unwieldy, when people don't really understand what it does, when it's hard to read and it's not well organized, it's hard to build a new thing. you can go build a new thing, something else broke, right?

And so you're always chasing, these problems. And that's something, that's definitely something that we're having.

David: Yeah, I think, you know, you're saying 20 percent crashes. That's a stat that I think people can really understand. They see that and they get it, [00:08:00] you know, there's metrics you can show crash reporting and generally speaking, your star, reviews in the app stores and stuff, but like that other part that you're identifying is the more insidious.

Like problem, right? Where all of a sudden you, you just, your business can't move fast enough. You can't ship fast enough. and I think that's way more costly than having three stars instead of five, in the grand scheme of things. cause how do you even fix it? How do you improve the experience?

If you're just kind of felt. You know, like hung up by what you've got. It's, it can be really difficult. 

Chris Synan: not only was it, just kind of slow, but it was even, you can't get here. You, sorry, you can't get there from here, right? It was, we want to put this in, we were being told, build another app. there's no way we're going to get this into that. And I looked at it and I said, what we're trying to do here is not that hard.

Right? I mean, we're not trying to really invent,we're not trying to break the laws of physics here. we're just, it's just an app. It just hits a database. It shows some things, right? and when I was put in charge of this,we took a really close look [00:09:00] at it. 

And, I wanted to work with the teams and I wanted to give people the opportunity to step up and say, okay,I'll take a look. I'll give it a shot. and we did this, a couple of different times is we took a team and said, Go spend the time, do what you gotta do, and figure out how we can untangle this app,and how we can make this thing work. that team ended up kinda throwing up their hands. You know, so at this point, I'm reaching out to,consulting partners, and I'm saying, listen guys, I need some serious expertise in React Native. I need some people that really, really understand this technology. And I said, I'm willing to pay.

I've got some money. You get me somebody that's, that's a,a committer on the project or something. I need serious expertise. I couldn't find anybody, you know, and so that's where I thought that we were really stuck. the teams were just basically saying, let's rewrite this thing. And I said, well, I mean, I kind of get that. But. You know, there's the old saying about doing the same thing over and expecting different results, right? I [00:10:00] said, how do I know that, because I think part of our problem is the technology, but that wasn't the only problem. I think we had problems with our processes. I think we had problems with just even our own, kind of culture. With respect to how we deliver software and in our commitment to testing, our commitment to quality, our commitment to automation, there's just a lot of areas that, that we really needed to kind of reconsider and reboot.

David: Yeah, it's so interesting because I think so many companies are in this situation, where, that you have the mobile boom, everybody needs a mobile app, but we all have limited resources and constraints. And, we're trying to move the best we can. And like I said, the higher subcontractors you start building up a team.

And,we had a chat with Sam Moore at Betterment and he described it as these like lava layers where you get these new people, there's like a new eruption of work. And this like layer gets bigger Built and Hardens on top of the old stuff and before you know it, you guys just got all these layers that you're trying to, but no one knows what's four layers down because that was a long time ago and it's like a lot of rock between you and there.

and so it's getting to that point of [00:11:00] right? What is it? The tech? is it the, is it react native? Is that the problem? probably not because there's other apps. hat very users that use reac and probably with some degree of architecture, is it the ti You know? And then you're ha this, how you were able to with your leadership of li a bunch of money on this al But how do you go about c team and a leadership gro generation, I think there w

Chris Synan: Yeah,that's definitely one of the, one of the biggest challenges with a huge transformation like this, right? 

and it really does depend a lot on, your leadership and the culture of the leadership and it depends on the level of trust in the organization. because it is a tough sell.

you're saying, look, we just spent a bunch of money to build this. We need to chuck it. Right.

not a great story. but if, I think if you really, take the emotion out of it and just say, look, Here's our [00:12:00] velocity. Here's the challenge that we have. And here's a hypothesis. The hypothesis is, if we go down a different path,we can achieve a lot different levels of success and we can achieve, you know, a much higher level of throughput, we can achieve much higher levels of quality. But it's not just You know, dump it and write a new front end.

there's much more to it. Right. So I think that's part of it too, is because we all, we all want to, we all want to create stuff and we all want to build stuff. That's new. I mean, I get that, but that's really not what this was about. This was about changing kind of everything we do, like really, this was a piece of that larger puzzle of just utter and complete transformation of the entire way that, that we operate.

David: Yeah. So not just tech, but culture and process and just even like how you think about technology within the organization. Do we just always go to contractors for every little thing, piecemeal, project by project? Or do we have a capability really, right? something [00:13:00] we believe in is an asset to the work. 

Chris Synan: that was, and that was definitely part of it too. As we said, listen, we have a different staffing strategy, right? Obviously, I'm not going to go replace, 200 contractors with 200 full timers, overnight, but here's a strategy that, you know, that we can start making progress. Kind of bring in house the really key critical roles, the thought leadership, the decision making, that expertise, and then we can continue to have that balance with FlexLabor. And I think that's worked really well, but again, that's just another piece of a really holistic strategy that says,we got here however we got here.

That's, no point in fingers, no blame, doesn't matter. Here we are, and here's the list of things that we really need to go and address and transform, and it's all the things, and so here's how we're going to do this, here's how we're going to do this, here's how we're going to do this, so, you know, really, really focused on, on Agile, brought in some serious Agile practitioners, transformed the way that we work, all this stuff too, [00:14:00] is,You know, anytime you bring in, anytime you introduce, significant change, there's a certain amount of,angst that kind of comes with that, right?

A certain amount of anxiety, a certain amount of resistance to change. and that's always got to be part of it too, is, how are we going to work with people to, to get them on board with what we're trying to do here?

David: Yeah, that's a huge one. Cultural side of it. You know, it's a massive. So,you mentioned React Native that you guys were using React Native and you were looking for help with React Native. I know you, from our work with Flutter. So I know ultimately that just fast forward to that one. That's where you ended up, but how did you, what was the process of evaluating like React Native, Flutter?

How did you end up with the choices that you made? 

Chris Synan: we're all technologists. We all have the things that we like and that we don't like, and I don't want to get into like a religious battle about

it. but it's going to be hard to not sort of, you know, convey my own stuff a little bit, because for me, I, I'm a leader of people, I'm a strategist and all these [00:15:00] things, but for me, a lot of this stuff is informed by me getting my hands dirty, me spending nights and weekends. beating this stuff up and finding out what I like and what I don't like. I'm not really a front end guy. I'm much more of a kind of a data guy, integration guy, you know, other, other things. Um,I never really learned any of the frameworks. I basically peaked at jQuery and never really got into, the views and the reacts and all these things.

Right.

part of it for me was I spent some time in the code base. I was utterly confused, for me, since I'm not a deep react or react native guy, I didn't want that to weigh too heavily. I also, I think the, one of the other things that's really important about,leadership is. One is surrounding yourself with people that are smarter than you, right? and two is knowing when to really lean on them and knowing when to, knowing when to just,lean very heavily on, on what their advice is, [00:16:00] right? And so my principal architect at the time says, Hey, you know, I've been looking at this and I've been playing around with some different stuff. You should look at Flutter. He said, you should just, you should take a look at it. And so I decided having no background in, in Dart or Flutter,you know, I just, one, one weekend I just popped open the computer and followed a couple of tutorials. And I said, here's what I want to do. We, so we have, you know, with home search,a map view is really, key part of home search.

You say, I want to look in this neighborhood. You get the map view, you see where the houses are. that sort of, digital experiences is really critical, right? And so I said, all right, I've got a Saturday morning all to myself. I'm going to see if I can implement that in Flutter. And so I just went, file new.

And by the way, this is before chat GPT. So this is, you know, this is really,

David: You had to really 

Chris Synan: on old school, the stack overflows and the, you know, the Googles and stuff like this. and,and, I had something going in maybe four or five hours. that I really implemented that using our GraphQL, A.

P. I. I had a kind of a working thing. It wasn't beautiful, but [00:17:00] it was working. And I said, Ooh, okay. So I like this. And then I said, all right, but what about, some of these challenges that we have? Cause I think we really have challenges with automated tasks. and,and, things like that.

So I said, okay, this Flutter, you know, what, what does it have? What does it have for different kinds of tests, testing frameworks and things like that? and so I started looking around and I found some things and one kind of common thread as I'm looking at all these great, tools and different open source things in the Flutter community, I kept finding this common thread that kept pointing me back to very good ventures. And I said, Oh, this is interesting. I hadn't heard, I hadn't heard of, of VGB at that point. but it just kept popping up, in all this little research that I was doing. And I think, I think maybe what really, the sort of the light bulb moment there, you know, was I had so much to find someone that was just an authoritative expert.

And I think, you know, I think maybe what, what really, you know, the, the sort of the light bulb moment there, you know, was I had struggled so much to find someone that was just an authoritative expert. And React Native that could just say, look, I [00:18:00] understand this inside and out. This is not how you do it.

You do it this way. Right. Cause this was my concern. If I let the team go rebuild this, with React Native, but if we don't have that level of expertise, how do I know that we're going to get something that's really great, and I think when I started seeing very good ventures pop up everywhere, I said, maybe this is what I've been looking for.

Maybe this is the experts that can say, okay, well, if you're going to build a thing and you want it to be modular and you want it to be expansive, and here's your long range plans is this, and this, here's how you want to build that. and that's when I reached out and started talking to your team.

David: Awesome. I'm so happy that, that you found that stuff. we put that stuff out largely cause we, we believed in kind of working in the open, open source. And especially in those days, it was, we felt it was so important not to keep the learnings to ourselves because so many people were out there.

trying to figure this out and Flutter was new. And so I think that there's some risk in any new thing of people making those mistakes again. And we were very fortunate to have some really amazing people on our team who had some [00:19:00] really great experience working at a place like BMW and having like real big production apps and having pushed hard against a lot of large organizational scale problems.

And how do you make this tool work for you? I think, cause at the end of the day, like one of the things you're describing here is that. The tool matters like having a good hammer versus a crappy hammer matters if you're building a house, but at the end of the day, the best hammer in the world is not going to hammer the nail if you don't know how to swing it properly, And so I think that there's just some of that stuff around making sure that we're as a community and as, as engineers, right? Are we doing things that we feel like are scalable and we can believe it? And I also think one of the things that's key, right? Is it doesn't. If you're, there's a lot of different ways to build stuff.

And as long as you, how you're doing it is a good way. And it's scalable. The key is to stick with it, to have an opinion, And to believe in it and know, yeah, maybe there's some other way, but like this way works for us and it's good enough. You know what I mean? And we prove it again and again that it's going to be scalable.

and so I think that's been something that's been really cool. And even as Flutter's [00:20:00] grown, we've seen a little bit of regression for that, Right? Where there's more different ways, and people have a lot of opinions, and it's like, Hey, your mileage may vary, you pick the things that you want to do, but just stick with it, whatever it is, So that was our goal there, and I'm glad that, that was helpful to you guys. 

Chris Synan: Yeah, it was awesome. And you know, there was another element that I, I kind of found. 

bouncing around my head just in terms of decision making criteria. you know, at the time React Native had, a really, really big third party libraries, right? Tons and tons of different things to the point where it was almost too much, right?

there's almost too many ways to do a thing and it wasn't clear, like this is the good path because you could just go all over the place and end up with kind of a real hodgepodge, right? and so one of the things that, that I really started to like about Flutter and, working with Very Good Ventures was, it was like, there's some choices, but this is the one for you.

David: I mean, you know, to the point that you're just making, is it. Is it the, is it always going to be the best thing in the world for everybody? I don't know, but you [00:21:00] know what, put it in there. It serves the purpose. it's something you can build on. It's something that, that can, grow with you and your team and with the app and you don't get lost in analysis paralysis, Yeah. And there was just a lot of factors like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Was there,So this, you found us, you found some of those materials, and you had some documentation and some directions, and you experimented on the weekend, got that confidence in it. Were those all things that you then brought back to your team and the organization around getting that confidence internally?

to not repeat the past mistakes. I would imagine, your leadership probably was aware of a problem, but now I guess I've always been curious about how, as a leader within your organization, as a technical leader, how do you convince the rest of the organization that like, what we're going to do next is actually going to be better, cause there's a

lot of hesitation.

I think there's a, people have been burned in the past, right? You get the, like you said before, you get the same mistakes again. How did you, translate your learnings and your findings into like confidence building for your leadership and the rest of the team? 

Chris Synan: [00:22:00] yeah. that's a great question. It, it is, um.it's about managing and balancing risks, right? and there's a little bit of knowns and unknowns, right? we have this app, we know about how long it takes to do things. We know about what, what our measures of quality are for it. and it's not very good. And so there's risk there. There's risk in continuing down that path. and it's, it is kind of a known risk because I don't think magically it's going to organize itself and be, you know, in sort of all of a sudden have a great and really sound architecture. It's going to be what it is.

And we're going to keep, putting different, packing different layers around it. that's just covering up some of the core problems, right? And then you contrast that with this is a different kind of risk, but look at what we've done. we've, we did, and a couple of the other things that we did, I think you guys were kind enough to come in and do a couple of lunch and learns. give us a couple of kind of training sessions, even before we really kicked off,I challenged the [00:23:00] team, with doing a couple of little mini proof of concepts of their own, and, offered, some, some other different kinds of training as well. So there are a few different things that we were doing to start to bring up that confidence with the team. and then there was another element of it, which is that from a, Product and design perspective. We were also going through a big overhaul. So we were really trying to take it in this way. It was, you know, the timing, I think, was pretty good. It's because,business wasn't saying, Hey, what we have there is great.

Don't mess with it. They're actually saying we want to go this whole new direction. We want to do all this really ambitious stuff to and stylistically, And from a branding perspective, we want to go a whole new direction also. And that helped that, there was that appetite for change coming from that side as well. And I think I was able to tap into some of that and say, listen, here's what it's going to take to go back and, get this crufty thing to look and act and behave the way you want it to. And here's what it would take to just start with something [00:24:00] new. but part of it too was. I mean, I'm trying to explain. There were kind of a lot of elements to making this good case, right? Obviously.and I guess I can't underestimate or understate, how important leadership and, trust is in all that, right? and the culture that we have, you know, my, my boss, Chris Cox is just an unbelievable leader and, he just, he's a servant leader. he's absolutely trusts. the group that, he trusts me and he trusts all of his leaders and I think that's a big part of it as well. but we were able to go back and just say, look, here's what we've been able to do in a pretty short time. based on what you guys want to do and where you want to go with this product, I really think we're going to be faster. even abandoning this old platform and starting with almost nothing, we're going to be faster, but wait, there's more. We're not really starting with nothing because Very Good Ventures, one, they're going to come in and help us. And two, they have this entire, framework, Very Good Start. Is it, was it [00:25:00] Very Good Start?

David: Yep. Mm 

Chris Synan: I mean, yeah. you have this whole Very Good Start thing that basically gives us a lot of that sort of bootstrap stuff that we need for our app to really get us up and running. And so when we looked at the capabilities of Very Good Start and we said, Hey, It's going to give us all this stuff. That's going to leapfrog us, two or three months, maybe just in terms of stuff that we would have to go figure out how to build.

We're going to get all that stuff for free. So, you know, holistically, when you looked at all this stuff together, it started to get pretty compelling. and, there was one other element too, that, that kind of felt like a bit of a gamble at the time, but it just sounded so compelling that I had to try. And that is, it's kind of a given. That with Flutter, you're going to get iOS and you're going to get Android. but I think we were just really kind of intrigued by the possibility of getting web experiences too. And, so we made that part of the business case and we took that, that gamble a little bit. And it's been really [00:26:00] good for us. It's really worked out well. I mean, obviously, you know,there's some caveats on when you want to use it and when you don't want to use it, but for what we wanted to do, it's worked really well, and we've got, you know, experiences that are, in the I.

O. S. and in the Android, and they're on web, and it's the same code base. And that's cool.

David: Yeah, and that's the promise. That's the allure that I think a lot of these frameworks are promising, and I don't know that everybody gets there, and you guys are pretty early, I think, in the broader ecosystem of a company really investing heavily in that true multi platform, because I think Flutter early on called itself multi platformed as a way to distinguish from cross platform.

Cross platform, you get one code base, iOS and Android, That's a React Native or Xamarin type approach. multi platform, but it's hard because not that many people are launching desktop apps these days, Or some sort of embedded IOT experience or something. So the web has been this holy grail and it's been super cool to see you guys go down that path.

And, you know, something so critical is like mapping those map [00:27:00] pins and where those listings are. I mean, that's a critical part of the experience and, really streamline that developer process to get. One code base, and has it changed? Like, I have to feel like it's probably changed your ability to maintain that in terms of portability of engineers, because now you can just have a single engineer who can work on any of those platforms, right?

you don't have to just go talk to the web team, talk to the mobile team, get them to make sure they're doing the same thing. 

Chris Synan: Yeah. That's exactly what it was before is kind of, Oh, well, you know, mobile's outpacing web, web's outpacing mobile you know, you're starting to get a different experience. so now we've got, we've got the one team that's producing all that stuff and it freed up other people to go do, other cool stuff. but it's been great. And I think in the beginning, I think we're all a little bit wary about it. And, now looking back, there's, there'll be a story and the first reaction from the team is, Oh, this is perfect for Flutter. We can build in Flutter. We can put it on the web.

We can put it, at one point it was, come on guys, try this. And now it's. That's where they want to go first.

David: Awesome. 

Chris Synan: been, it's been really cool.

David: and [00:28:00] that's what I was going to ask next is,when you pick some of these new choices, you make a big decision like this, a big transformation. There's a lot of promise. There's a lot of, selling points, marketing talk around all these great values you're going to get.

And so my question is, you know, now that you've got some time behind you and you brought the team along, what kind of improvements or outcomes have you seen as a result of this? did you, were you able to really convert over to the new thing where some of those old problems aren't recreated?

how are you guys doing now? 

Chris Synan: Yeah, I think we have. And I think the one that, that I just remain so proud of. and so proud of the team and so proud of the leaders for really sticking to this commitment is the level of test coverage that we have. that was one of those, Sort of reboot things that we really had to do.

It was, it's easy to get caught up with deadlines and just skimp on the tests. And it takes a lot of discipline to say you don't check that in unless there's, code coverage. And then I think there's also a little bit of a struggle there with, Meaningful tests and, not as meaningful tasks, right? [00:29:00] So we just decided that we're going to do this and we're going to commit to 100 percent test coverage. And that's just going to be, you know, part of our culture going forward. And we've maintained that and we've really been able to do that. So,right now we are I think we are four tests shy of 3, 500 tests for our app as of,as of the last sprint.

yeah, 3, 496, tests

and that's pretty great. You know, before we, it was, it was in really bad shape. here's the other thing that we've gotten. And again, this is, look, Flutter has been a really important part of this. There's been a lot more kind of larger transformations also that have supported this, our CICD practice,the level of automated tests, the way that we've got those wired in,really full on agile adoption, et cetera. But if I rewind to when we first got here. We were lucky to do one, maybe two releases in [00:30:00] a quarter, and they were ugly. They were ugly. it would take three weeks to get it out the door, and then it would take about another three weeks to stabilize the mess that we'd made in production. It was just so bad. And, you know, a big part of this transformation,now, We're in a much different story now. we release every single week. We do a release. We alternate. Currently, we're alternating web and mobile every other week, but we're so good at this. At this point, we could do whatever. In fact, we've got a so dialed in that we could do an individual feature change. a developer checks that in. A product manager clicks release in JIRA and it gets released.

David: Wow. 

Chris Synan: So we've just really, really transformed 

in so many ways. Yeah, it's just, it's

David: I mean, I, I think what you just described to someone who maybe hasn't been through the BuildTrain experience or that pain you were feeling of one, two, maybe three releases a quarter. And then all of a sudden you're able to whether you want to or not, the ability to [00:31:00] ship by the click of a button and the confidence in that you're going to be able to release that, that rapidly.

Is such a massive, shift. I think it's hard for people who haven't been through and seen that, it's hard to really, truly comprehend the impact that has on the business. Cause now you guys can, I would imagine like next week if somebody comes and they're like, Hey, I got an idea, right?

Or there's a thing we need to adjust or change or new thing we're trying to roll out. And you guys have the confidence now that you can do it, right? it's not going to be some, okay, hold on. Six months from now, maybe we'll get it out. Right. 

Chris Synan: Oh, yeah. I mean, our predictability now is like, we've really got it dialed in. we're doing like data science around our throughput and it's been fantastic. It's yeah,it's really pretty amazing. In fact, this one like just blew me away. we had this, you know, kind of a leadership meeting. and my counterparts in the business side basically came to us and said, we need you guys to slow down all the releases. And that just killed me. I'm like,

Wow.

that feels so good. That's

just, that's such an

David: Mission accomplished, man. [00:32:00] Congrats. 

Chris Synan: can do this. So fine. We've got feature flags.

We can do this, but wow. What a transformation,

David: Yeah. and think about how many businesses out there, probably where you guys were when you started, Where the technology isn't seen as this like growth platform. It's seen as this sort of difficult thing you have to manage, right? Like this, like difficult impediment to realizing your product vision.

Cause you got to document it. You got to get it into the developers. they got to wrangle a bunch of stuff and then you got to test it and you get it out there and it's always painful, right? And one thing I've always thought about relative to our industry. Is this thing like where it's just a common thing where people say I just always expect everything's going to take twice as long and cost twice as much.

And what a horrible, like reputation for our industry, but I think a lot of that's just because of the systems we built up, the technology debt you establish, and some of this stuff, like we're talking about some companies are enormous. They've got. 30, 40 years of technology they built or something.

And I get it. It's complicated, but when you get to that clear air where someone can have an idea and the business believes [00:33:00] in the team to execute quickly, that's a massive competitive advantage compared to other companies that maybe don't have that 

Chris Synan: Yeah. it. is. It is. And you know, David, looking back on it, 

I think there's just some, there's just some important elements of that because I think there, it really does depend on a certain kind of culture. Right?for example, the ability to have a difficult conversation,listen, just saying go faster. It's not really very helpful, right? what I'm saying is. Sometimes to go faster, you have to start by going slower. You have to start by discipline. You have to put in this investment. I actually have to work less on the shiny features and a little more on getting our act together, right? And so there is a large amount of trust involved in that.

For me to go back to my business partners and say, Listen to me, I know that you want all these things, but I need you to trust me. If you give us some time and let us go clean our house, then we can come back and then we're going to be ready to rock and roll. Then we're going to be moving fast, right? and so having [00:34:00] that level of trust is really critical because if you don't have that, I don't think we could have done this transformation with this team if I didn't have that level of trust and didn't have that level of partnership that says, You know, trust me, this is going to look kind of scary for a minute as we just rip this thing apart. It's going to look scary, but you got to trust me on the other side. You're going to go, wow, that was worth it, right?

David: And to stick 

Chris Synan: know that. And I think that, not every place that I've ever worked, not every culture that I've been in, would, would necessarily have been one where that could work.

I'd love to say, Hey, parachute me in anywhere and I can work magic. I don't know. I mean, I think that, that really, that sort of culture and that level of trust with the leadership team is so critical. It's such a critical piece. And then, you know, I think the extension of that is you have to cascade that down among the team as well, right? Cause I think what the teams get locked into is this is the way we do it. And I've managed to keep this job for a while. So just [00:35:00] let me, continue to do this and you really have to, you have to help them break out of that, that shell and just break out of that, very sort of fixed mentality. And so we kept challenging the team and saying, Guys, are you happy with this? Or do you think we could do better? And they would say, yeah, we could do better. Because the teams know. They know. Every day, they fight against some dumb thing and they go, I wish that was better. And so I said, make the list. And I've got your back. We're gonna go figure these things out. We're gonna line them up. And we're going to knock them down and we're going to go figure this stuff out. But it was just an extension of that same, trust, right? It's basically an extension of that says, you guys, I'm going to give you the runway.

I'm going to give you the air cover to go figure this stuff out and to go solve these things. Okay? And eventually they come around and they say, okay, I'm in, let's go do this. And that was a big part of that whole mindset shift that had to happen with the team to get everybody [00:36:00] to do this.

David: That's amazing. questions. Are you hiring? I would imagine there's probably a lot of engineers who would be listening to this and be like, wow, how do I get. How do I become part of that culture? And cause we talk about technology so much and the choices, and even before when we were talking about, Oh, react native or flutter native.

And I think so many people get caught up in that flame war of the actual tools. And the reality of it is that. Tools. They matter, of course, but not really because what matters is these sort of softer things you're describing that leadership culture, right? that trust in you and the ability to stick with it.

When you make that choice, they, the other thing I could say, Oh, okay, I'm going to trust you, but only for one month after one month, if it's not working out, I'm going to pull the plug on this. And then that could be really damaging too, right? Yep. And then how you even approach this, like in our conversations, this obviously isn't the first time we've talked.

And one of the things I always thought was just really cool about how you guys approach this was really embracing this as okay, we're going to make a product change, some design changes, some overall things we're trying to do differently with the product [00:37:00] itself. We're going to make these technology changes, but along the way, this is a very unique opportunity for us to reset our culture and to establish a way of behaving, working, supporting each other and collaborating and that trust that.

Really takes that leadership culture all the way through the team. And it sounds like, that's really changed how you guys operate and has just created so much trust and confidence, not just with the leadership, but like in the whole team. Which is just an incredible outcome. 

Chris Synan: Yeah, it has. And it's also, it's one of the, one of the real joys of leadership is.you believe in people and you tell them, I believe in you. I think you're a superstar. I want to give you everything you need. I mean, my job is to get out of your way, remove roadblocks and just have your back.

Right. And to see people rise to that challenge and people that in the beginning were, maybe a little, suspicious or they weren't really on board, they weren't really engaged, whatever, whatever the case. And then to look, throughout this journey,and just to see the way that the team has [00:38:00] believed in them and that the way that they've come back around and found their role and found their niche and then are really showing up as leaders. And it's just been, it's just been such just such an amazing thing. yeah, the technology we've built is awesome. But to really see people develop as professionals and to. take that chance and put themselves out there and just try to, speak up and try to have more, you know, impact and more influence and, just get more done. And it's just been, it's just been great. It's just fantastic.

David: So to, to cut, thank you, Chris has been so amazing and you're such an inspiring guy and great story here and it's such an amazing outcome and like, just kudos to you and to Keller Williams for having the confidence and leadership to To do that and to make that change, not only for the product, but like for the people, like you're saying, it sounds like you've made an incredible team where people are empowered and feeling good now that you're in this moment.

Right. And you have had some of these changes and transformations, like, what does the future look like for you guys? Like, how has it cleared [00:39:00] the skies for you as you look ahead? And fundamentally, how do you think it's changed sort of the confidence of the business or what the future holds? 

Chris Synan: so I think,you know, we've got kind of various pieces of technology in the organization and, Partly because consumer was a little bit insular, right? and also because it was, it's not the largest, code base or platform that we have, there's much bigger, there's much bigger platforms. but I think one of the things that's afforded us a little bit is that flexibility to, to get creative and try new things. and so one of the things, almost like an incubate, an incubator of sorts within the larger organization, right? And so there's other things that we've said, let's try this or let's, let's take this different approach. And where we've had success with that, we now have other areas within the organization that are looking over going, Hey, that looks pretty cool. what you guys doing over there? Right. And so I think that's the phase we're in right now. And that's not to say we're the smartest people in the world.

And we invent everything. That's not what I'm saying. I mean, we've certainly [00:40:00] leveraged a lot of great stuff from the other teams and that's how a good culture works. but we did sort of,in a few cases, just throw out the old and adopt a new thing. and in some cases, that's starting to catch on.

So that's part of the process, that we're doing right now. and then just, as the market continues to kind ofevolve and interesting things are happening there, I think where a couple of years ago, the business would have all this really, entrepreneurial, really innovative ideas.

And we were saying, hang on. We gotta, we gotta do some cleanup here. Now we're saying, bring it like we're ready. Bring it on. that's really sort of the turning point that we've had recently. and that's exciting because I want to move that fast. I want to go do all these amazing things. And it's, you know, it's frustrating when you're just kind of cleaning your house and trying to get all ready. But I mean, now we're ready, now we're, opening the doors. We're open for business. Let's go. let's make this happen.

David: That's amazing. And that's what every tech leader wants. Cause you want. You want more, right? You want more budget, more [00:41:00] teammates, more opportunities, and that comes from when the business has confidence that you're going to be able to deliver the bold ambitions and the fast moving ideas that come with it.

So that's amazing. let's wrap it up. one sort of final question maybe is, as you think about, where you were a couple of years ago, or earlier in your career, or if there's some other company out there who's maybe finding themselves in a similar position, right? Where you got tech debt, you shipped slowly. there's a lot of frustration maybe by the business leadership. what advice would you give to them in terms of how to get started on something like this? Like how to get from that zero to one, get out of the inertia that maybe is holding you back and take a leap. 

Chris Synan: Yeah. that's, that's a big question. and, I think I have to come back to, you know, trust. I think that, that trust is such a big part of it. becauseI think,I think you, you have to get a very clear picture of where you're at, right? there's no software out there that doesn't have bugs, right? All the software has some issues, right? [00:42:00] So what are your sort of business challenges? is it just that things are slow? is it that the quality is poor? I think you really have to get that assessment of what's working, what's not. and the team culture and the communications, there's so much, we didn't even really touch on this, but there's so much that we've done. Also, just around communications, around transparency, around kind of interdepartmental, dependencies, and how you communicate those, and how you plan for those, there's just, there's a lot of things,there's a lot of things to it, but I think, So much really has to start from the leadership team. And so the commitment to excellence really has to start there.

and really the willingness to take a chance, the willingness to do a scary thing. I mean, you know, you're not going to get the amazing things in life by just playing it safe all the time. sometimes you have to be willing to say, listen, this is, you know, I'm talking about doing a kind of scary thing here, but if we do it right, and here's why I think we can do it right, we're going to leapfrog. [00:43:00] And we're going to be way, way, way, way ahead, but it does take a lot of trust. It takes a lot of clear communication. It takes a lot of demonstration that you've done the diligence, that you've got a plan and that this is something that's going to work. It's not a crazy long shot. It's a very, very well considered.

David: Wow. Well said. Well, thank you very much, Chris. incredible story. you're an incredible guy and I appreciate you spending some time with us to tell the story,and tell about Keller Williams. is there any place people could go to learn more? Just kw. com or where else should they go to learn more about your team? 

Chris Synan: Yeah, KW. com. Go check us out. It's,we've got the two letter domain, which is pretty cool these days. Two letter. com domain. but yeah, there's information there about,about our development team, about our technology. we've got,dev hub portal where innovators can come in and hook into our systems and do all sorts of really awesome, innovative things.

So definitely come check us out. KW. com.

David: Awesome. thanks again. Appreciate 

Chris Synan: Yeah. My pleasure. Dave is really great. [00:44:00] Talk to you. I appreciate the opportunity