The Customer
Meet Johan Van Heerden
VP of Engineering at Nintex
Industry
Process and workflow
automation
Location
Washington,
USA
Use Case
Create more
efficient workflows to
reduce meeting time
We had one standing meeting, and now we’re able to completely do it asynchronously thanks to Fellow. We did it twice a week before, and within a month, we got to a position where we agreed that it could be done completely asynchronously using Fellow. It went from two times a week, to one hour a week, to half an hour a week. And eventually, half an hour disappeared as well.”
Nintex is a process management and automation software company that provides tools for managing, automating, and optimizing business processes and workflows. So, it’s no surprise that they’re constantly looking to make their own processes (and meetings) more efficient!
As the VP of Engineering at Nintex, Johan Van Heerden is responsible for delivering software that meets the customers’ needs – as fast as possible. Johan is also responsible for engineering integration of acquisitions at Nintex to stretch the company globally.
In order to achieve these ambitious goals, Johan and his team follow the 3 core values of Nintex:
Don’t wait.
Deliver on commitments.
Operate with respect and consideration.
In fact, with those 3 core values in mind, Johan saw an opportunity…
challenge
Johan’s challenge:
Lots of questions to ask, nowhere to keep them.
It’s no surprise that capturing important information is a necessary part a VP of Engineering’s job. Whether it’s meeting notes or to-dos, having a place to keep all of this information is essential.
Johan works with around 50 people per week, and before Fellow, Johan was using sticky notes to keep track of meeting notes for each touchpoint.
I have to ask many questions. And in the past, I had little sticky notes and every time I would think of a question to ask someone on my team, I would write it down on a sticky note. And then when I eventually met with them, I had to go and look for the sticky notes, or the colours that I assigned to them”.
You can imagine that with that many sticky notes, it can be hard to keep track of what was discussed.
Additionally, it can get tricky to stay on top of goals, professional development, and decisions made when that information is easily lost!
Clearly, Johan needed a better way to keep his team accountable and his meetings productive.
Solution
The solution: Having a central hub for meetings
With Fellow, Johan can keep meeting notes in one place, reflect on past decisions, and never forget what was discussed with his direct reports.
Fellow connects to your work calendar, which makes it easy for Johan to jump from meeting to meeting and add notes as important talking points pop into his head throughout the day.
With fellow, it’s really easy, right? I just go to the meeting that we’re going to have, then I add the talking points and add the notes. I don’t have to worry about not being prepared to go into the meeting because I add notes and everybody’s become so connected.”
This way, not only does Johan show up prepared for one-on-ones and team meetings, but his team has also developed great meeting habits to ensure everyone is responsible for contributing to the meeting agenda beforehand.
Sometimes, when I add these talking points in advance and somebody sees it pop up, they’ll add a comment, and I don’t even have to talk about it in the meeting anymore, because I now have a resolution for it. So, it just helps us be a lot more efficient.”
Johan and his teams now have a full history of past meeting notes and action items and decisions; plus, they are empowered to add their own talking points in advance to create more efficient and productive meetings.
90.28% of managers agree or strongly agree that with Fellow, meetings are more likely to have an agenda.
results
The results
According to Johan, Fellow makes team collaboration a lot more efficient, and gives leaders the ability to remove things that didn’t necessarily have to be discussed synchronously.
Additionally, Johan says that Fellow provides helpful meeting insights that decrease the number of touchpoints across many verticals, reducing his overall time spent in meetings by 50%.
That’s powerful for a VP of Engineering responsible for delivering quality software to customers as fast as possible.
Johan’s most significant benefit from using Fellow was the ability for multiple teams to come together and collaborate, regardless of time zones or overlapping schedules.
I think where I saw the most value was not necessarily with my direct reports, but with different teams like Product, UX, and Engineering coming together. I think that a lot of the value that I see is there because those people don’t operate in the same area on a day-to-day basis, and Fellow gives them the opportunity to manage that overlap.”