Easy Agile Podcast Ep.22 The Scaled Agile Framework

"Lieschen's wealth of experience is absolutely incredible! Not only did she provide invaluable advice, but I thoroughly enjoyed our conversation."

In this episode Caitlin Mackie is joined by Lieschen Gargano Sr, Release Train Engineer at Scaled Agile. They delve into the role of the Release Train Engineer, sharing tips and tricks, FLOW activities, lessons learned and how to get started in the role. With SAFe Summit 2023 just around the corner, Lieschen also takes some time to talk about what she’s most excited about for the event and shared some advice for first time attendees.

If Lieschen's expertise and passion have piqued your interest, be sure to explore the Scaled Agile RTE course. It provides comprehensive training, equipping you with the necessary skills and knowledge to excel as an RTE.

Scaled Agile RTE course

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript:

Caitlin Mackie:

Hi there. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Caitlin, your host for today's episode. At Easy Agile we specialize in developing apps for Atlassian Jira that help your team move from simply doing agile to truly being agile. Our apps have gained recognition and trust from over 160,000 users across top companies worldwide. With our products, teams can transform their flat Jira backlogs into something visually meaningful and easy to understand. Whether it's sprint planning, retrospectives, or PI planning, our apps are designed to foster seamless team alignment.

Before we begin the episode, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment towards reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander and First Nations people joining us today. Let's jump into today's episode. So today I'm joined by Lieschen Gargano, a senior release train engineer at Scaled Agile. Lieschen is a highly experienced professional when it comes to change management, system design and stakeholder engagement, and has a passion for developing teams and connecting strategy to execution. Lieschen welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast.

Lieschen Gargano:

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Caitlin Mackie:

So Lieschen, you are a release train engineer. For our listeners, can you explain a little bit about the role? For anyone that's not familiar, how would you describe a Release Train Engineer?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I think one of the easiest ways for people to think of a Release Train Engineer is kind of like a coach or scrum master for the art, for the Agile release train. A servant leader facilitating all of those art events, facilitating the processes and process improvements. And really measured in value delivery, and using flow metrics to measure those improvements and support of the arts.

Caitlin Mackie:

So you mentioned flow metrics there. I've heard a lot about this recently and optimizing flow. What are some of those flow activities that a RT is responsible for?

Lieschen Gargano:

I like to look at feature flow and cycle time. So really looking like are we bringing all of our features in progress at once or are we managing our WIP, not just at the team level but at the art level. Are we taking the whole PI to get a feature through the system, or are we able to finish something before we start the next thing? So I look at that a lot and also just are we making and meeting commitments. Those PI objectives that we set, are we in that 80-100% range? A lot of people want full credit, extra credit and to be in the 120, but for us, predictability really means you tried really hard and you stretched, but you also still made and met commitments. So I look at that really closely too.

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. You mentioned just then quite a lot of different responsibilities that a RTE has. Do you think that there is one in particular that you really need to get right from the start?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, as an RTE, I think the biggest thing is building the relationships and intention. As a servant leader, we really are there to help make the art better, to make being on the art enjoyable and productive and flow. So building that trust and those relationships as a servant leader is the first thing. If you get that wrong, no one will help you do the rest.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah-

Lieschen Gargano:

And you need a lot of help. You're not doing anything alone as an RTE.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes. Yeah, for sure. I can definitely imagine that. Let's go a little bit deeper on that servant leadership that you just mentioned. Can you share your approach and what servant leadership means to you?

Lieschen Gargano:

Servant leadership to me is helping people understand the direction, communicating early and often so that they know where you're going. And then not just saying, "how can I help you get there? What can I do?" But saying, "how can we go together?" A lot of coaching and understanding the problem to solve and connecting it to how it benefits the people. Just like we ask them to connect their work to how it benefits the customer. As the RT, they're my customer. How does what I'm asking you to change benefit you? Not changing is always easier than changing even if we don't like our current state. So why is it worth it?

Caitlin Mackie:

I love that. Yeah, always asking the why and being really clear on it. Yeah, I think that's great. I've done some LinkedIn digging of your profile, as you do, had a little bit of a stalk and noticed that you hosted a webinar recently on tips and tricks and lessons learned as an RTE. Can we start with maybe some tips and tricks? What can you share?

Lieschen Gargano:

The first thing I will say is lean on the Scrum master team, and if you're lucky enough to have an Agile coach or another RTE, lean on that team. Your lean Agile Center of Excellence, those people have the expertise. They're also building the relationships. They're there to help you. Don't try to just prove yourself or go it alone, it's not possible. That team is your team for success. So 100% go to them. They're a wealth of knowledge, a wealth of relationships, and the best support.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I know it's so important to have that support network around you. You just mentioned the Agile Center of Excellence. Maybe for some of our listeners aren't familiar, could you explain what that is?

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah, so the Lean Agile Center of Excellence can look a few different ways depending on your organization. At our organization, it is the coach, release managers, RTEs and Scrum masters or team coaches. And some larger organizations than ours might have that hub and spoke model of a centralized change leader. And then RTEs and Scrum masters that are in different arts and around the org. And some even have separate laces in different parts of the organization if it's really big. But really they are that community of practice that holds your lean Agile practices and the standards of those practices and talks to each other and debates and evolves them to make sure that it's consistent throughout the org. That the org is getting consistent coaching, consistent guidance, and they're not being told five different things about how to transform. Because again, change and being lean is so hard. If you add too many voices into that coaching, it gets really overwhelming for folks.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yes, 100%. And an Agile transformation is already overwhelming as it is, so you can imagine that laid on top. I suppose speaking, if we explore a little bit around those on an agile transformation journey, at what point would you say it's important that that lean Agile Center of Excellence is formed?

Lieschen Gargano:

Oh, I think it should be in place pretty quick. I mean, we talk about training your leaders, training your experts and then doing safer teams and launching trains. You need that Center of Excellence there from the start so that they can go out to the rest of the org that they can do all that training and they can be there to support people through title changes, role changes. Launching an art can feel very scary to folks. If you don't have that in place beforehand, you're going to have a lot to reel in after the fact.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, I really like that. It's almost having this really solid foundation and unified voice to sort of go forward and support the rest of the org.

Lieschen Gargano:

And it's so great to have consultants support, to have partners come in and help you and to have the right tools, but they need the help of people inside. They need that lean Agile Center of Excellence of employees inside the company to help you be successful. As an RTE, you need your team. Anybody, any tool, any people trying to do a change, a transformation are going to need that Center of Excellence because all those parts, that's what makes the whole.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So you mentioned as an RTE, a big tip or trick is to rely on that lean Agile Center of Excellence. What do you think has been your biggest lesson learned as an RT?

Lieschen Gargano:

There are a few things that have been particularly difficult for me. One of them is that I don't like to say no and not in that I take on too much or whatever, but more in that if someone has passion for something, I want them to be able to take it on. I want them to be able to move forward with it. And there are times where we really have to say it's too much change. It's too much for this group to manage. In particular, the Scrum Masters and RTEs people come to us for a lot of things and they need that consistency from us, and they need predictability in a change to feel like we know where they're going and if we introduce too many things or if we try to hold too many things at once, it's easy for us to forget about it later or drop something else. So learning when and how to say no, again not necessarily in that capacity way, but just in the width of change, if that makes sense.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. I think that what you just said there, learning how and when to say no. I think that's not even exclusive to the RTE role as well. I think that's an amazing piece of advice for anyone listening and to share across our audiences, because I know it's definitely something I struggle with as well. So that's my takeaway from this is to, okay, I'm going to constantly imagine like 'no Lieschen told me to when and how to say no', and just focus on that. So yeah, I think that's a great piece of advice. What was your journey like to an RTE? I know we caught up last week and I got a little sneak preview into this, and I know it wasn't straightforward, so if you can share a little bit about that, that would be great.

Lieschen Gargano:

Yeah. I actually started in conflict resolution. I worked in public private reconciliation doing a lot of natural resources facilitation, so hundreds of people, governments, companies, private landowners, residents, trying to bring all those people together to get to consensus or at least to build relationships that allow them to move forward. So really strong foundation and facilitation in particular, and just day-to-day conflict. When we say conflict, we get so worried, 'oh, I don't do conflict', well conflict's everything all the time. It's all the disagreements we need to succeed in life. So that gave me a great foundation when I became a scrum master, and I did that for a few years working with development teams. One of my favorite teams was our infrastructure team, 10 foot pole because no one wanted to touch their work or the 10 foot pole, and I learned so much there and eventually became a coach and started doing more strategic planning and coaching parts of the organization that weren't used to being on arts. Marketing and other groups, which helped me transition to Scaled Agile, where I started working with our CMO and as he grew the marketing team, helping coach that marketing group into an agile way of working, a safe way of working, before actually becoming a product owner, because I loved organizing around value, and I loved those different topics that we were working on internally.

And one of the people I work with at Scale Agile said, "well, help us develop the product then for everybody else". So I did that for a little while, which gave me so much power in that learning how to say no and prioritize and coaching people to decisions is one thing, but as the product owner, I had to practice being where the buck stopped. There are five right decisions, just make one so that people are unblocked, and that prepared me really well for transitioning into RT.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You have such a wealth of experience there across so many different roles, and you can really see that each of those key roles have taught you something valuable that you can take into this RTE role. So I think that's amazing. It's so cool to see that even though it's not this straightforward linear journey, there's all these parts that there's traits within each that ladder up to helping you succeed as an RT. So I think that's really cool.

Lieschen Gargano:

And I know people are afraid to make some of those lateral moves sometimes, but the skills that you can build might just be that thing that gets you other open doors that you didn't even think about.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. I absolutely love that. Yeah, just embrace every opportunity for what it may be, what it may not be. You don't know until you give it a shot. So I think, yeah, I love that. I think that's really great advice. So everything we've spoken about in regards to being a Release Train Engineer may have really hit the spot for some of our listeners. How does someone get there? Were there certifications, courses? What's the process that way?

Lieschen Gargano:

Another thing I probably did backwards. I started with a scrum master cert and then actually ended up getting a SPC certification through Scaled Agile when I was a coach. Because I was a coach before I was an RTE, and I learned about so many other parts of the business that way. But then to become an actual RTE, taking the safe RTE course, but then actually there's a community of RTEs... Which we didn't really talk about this, but being an RTE is a lonely thing. I said earlier, if you're lucky to have another RTE, this is a lonely role. You're really kind of on your own. So not just getting that cert, but being part of that community and being able to send people messages and ask them crazy questions was part of my certification process, but also just community building to where I could feel like I had the connections and competence. So yeah, I found all of them similar to holding each of the roles, also getting that certification, just another tool in the tool belt.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, for sure. I don't want to touch on something you said there about an RTE being sometimes quite a lonely role. What do you think makes it lonely?

Lieschen Gargano:

It's a role that a lot of people have strong opinions about what they need and what success looks like based on where they are in the organization. And there are usually few of you, and even if you're in a large organization with many, you're with your art, you're very focused on your section, and so having all of those pulls and expectations and not having anyone who understands what that feels like just makes it kind of lonely. Now that we have two RTEs and a coach at Scaled Agile, it makes a big difference for me because they are right there in it with me and it's very helpful.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. You can see in that scenario why that community of RTEs is like you said, so important to lean on them as well. Yeah.

Lieschen Gargano:

I find even just connecting to RT's outside our organization too. I grabbed beers with one a couple weeks ago. Those little things, even if you can find that person, meet them at a summit, meet them out in the wild, find them on LinkedIn and just say, "Hey, we live in the same area. We have the same role". It can go a long way because it may seem weird to reach out like that, but they probably are looking for that connection too.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thank you so much for sharing. And for any of our listeners, I might pop some links to any certifications and some scout Agile courses. I'll pop that in our episode notes, so feel free to check those out. You mentioned about connecting with other RTs and meeting at summits, which is a really nice segue to the next part of our conversation. Just around the corner is the 2023 Safe Summit and we're heading to Nashville Music City. What can we expect from Safe Summit? What are you looking forward to?

Lieschen Gargano:

Well, what I'm most looking forward to is that I am putting together an RTE breakfast. So all RTEs are welcome, or even if you're a solution train engineer or you do the role of an RTE with a different title. I'm really excited to meet with those folks over breakfast and just chat it out. And my goal with that really is to have people to connect with so that as we go through the rest of the summit, listening to the talks that we have people enroll, that we can check back in with over drinks and stuff on the later days and say, 'oh, what do you think? How might that work?' So that's what I'm most looking forward to.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing.

Lieschen Gargano:

But obviously there are going to be some great talks and the product labs are always really fun. We get to play with the product together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, cool. Tell me a little bit about the product labs, what's involved in that?

Lieschen Gargano:

The product team puts it together and they have computers set up and you can bring your own and they talk through some of the new releases or things they're working on and help you log into it and use it in your context, but also try to get some feedback on how it works or how you might use it in your organization. So it's a nice two-way street. It's sort of, 'I need this, how might I do it?' And then them saying, 'well, why don't you try and let me see how it works and how we should change it based on how you interact with it'. So it's just really fun. It feels really practical because it's so hands on.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, amazing. I love that. I'm definitely going to have to try and come along and suss that out. It sounds really great. Where do you hope or where do you think we'll see a lot of conversations focused at this year's Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

At Safe Summit I think the conversations will be really focused on just the day-to-day of Safe. We have new topics that come up. We obviously have new ideas that are going to be presented. But every time I go to one of these, it really is the connecting one-on-one to say, here's where I'm stuck, here's what I'm trying to learn. So we'll hear a lot about Flow, we'll hear about Team Topologies, but we'll also hear those 'I'm just getting started and we're stuck, we have change fatigue. We don't know if our arts are set up correctly'. A lot of those classic conversations that are just really impactful and why people come together.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I love that. Creating these spaces for people to bond over shared experiences and problems they're facing or wins they're seeing and sharing them. I think that's where these events are amazing for creating that kind of environment. Lieschen, this is my very first Safe Summit. I haven't been to one before and I'm really excited. What advice would you have for first time attendees, returning attendees, what's the way to get the most out of Safe Summit?

Lieschen Gargano:

If you're attending with other people from your organization, the best thing is to split up so you can cover more ground and then come back together and share. The second advice is find people with a similar role as you, because again, you can do that same thing with those folks and split up and then meet up again and try to talk about it in your context. It's great to do that at the parties too, because we throw great parties, but that's the best because no matter what room you end up in, what talk you end up at, you're going to get a great nugget. But where it really sinks in for me is talking with someone else about what I heard and then thinking about, 'okay what does that mean?', when I go home.

Caitlin Mackie:

Amazing, great advice Lieschen. If anyone listening happens to also be attending Safe Summit and they see Lieschen on the floor or myself, make sure you say hello, and if you've got any questions for Lieschen about the podcast episode, I'm sure she'll be more than happy to answer and engage in a great conversation. And anyone looking to get advice around the RTE role, make sure you find her and have a chat. Lieschen I'm really excited to meet in person. We've done this podcast with yourself in the States, myself in Australia, so I'm excited to connect over in your world. And yeah, really thank you so much for your time. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I know, I sure did.

Lieschen Gargano:

I did. Thank you.

Caitlin Mackie:

Thanks, Lieschen.

What a great conversation this was with Chris Stone, The Virtual Agile Coach!

Chris shared some insights into the importance of sharing and de-stigmatising failures, looking after your own mental health, and why work shouldn't be stale.

Some other areas we discussed were, why you should spend time in self reflection - consider a solospective? and asking "how did that feel?" when working as a team.

"I really enjoyed our chat. Plenty to ponder over the silly season, and set yourself up with a fresh perspective for 2021. Enjoy and Merry Christmas!"

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Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. It's Sean Blake here, your host today, and we're joined by Chris stone. Chris is going to be a really interesting guest. I really enjoyed recording this episode. Chris is the Virtual Agile Coach. He's an agility lead. People First champion blogger, speaker and trainer, who always seeks to gamify content and create immersive Agile experiences. An Agile convert all the way from back in 2012, Chris has since sought to broaden his experiences, escape his echo chamber and to fearlessly challenge dysfunction and ask the difficult questions. My key takeaways from this episode were; it's okay to share your failures, the importance of recognizing our mental health, why it's important that work doesn't become stale, how to de-stigmatize failure, the importance of selfreflection and holding many self retrospectives, and the origins of the word deadline. You'll be really interested to find out where that word came from and why it's a little bit troubling. So here we go. We're about to jump in. Here's the episode with Chris stone on the Easy Agile Podcast. Chris, thanks so much for joining us and spending some time with us.

Chris Stone:

Hey there Sean, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Sean Blake:

I have to mention you've got a really funky Christmas sweater on today. And for those people listening on the audio, they might have to jump over to YouTube just for a section to check out this sweater. Can you tell us a bit about where that came from?

Chris Stone:

So this sweater was a gift. It's a Green Bay Packers, Chris, Ugly Christmas Jumpers, what they call it. And I'm a fan of the Green Bay Packers, I've been out there a few times to Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin. It's so cold out there in fact. When you're holding a beer and minus 13 degrees, the beer starts turning to slush just from being outside in the cold air. It's a great place, very friendly, and the jumper was just a gift one Christmas from someone.

Sean Blake:

Love it. There's nothing better than warm beer is there? Okay. So Chris, I first came across you because of the content that you put out on LinkedIn. And the way that you go about it, it's so much fun and so different to really anything else I've seen in the corporate space, in the enterprise space, in the Agile space even, why have you decided to go down this track of calling yourself the virtual Agile coach, building a personal brand and really putting yourself out there?

Chris Stone:

Well, for me, it was an interesting one because COVID, this year has forced a lot of people to convert to being virtual workers, remote workers, virtual coaches themselves. Now, what I realized this year is that, the aspiration for many is those co-located teams, it's always what people desired. They say, "Oh, you have to work harder, Katie, that's the best way." And I realized that in my whole Agile working life, I'd never really had that co-located team. There was always some element of distributed working and the past two years prior to where I'm currently, my current company, I was doing distributed scaled Agile with time zones, including Trinidad and Tobago, Alaska, Houston, the UK, India, and it was all remote.

Chris Stone:

And I thought, all right, this is an opportunity to recognize the fact that I was a virtual Agile coach already, but to share with others, my learnings, my experiences, the challenges I've faced, the failures I've had with the wider community so they can benefit from it because obviously, everyone, or more many have had to make that transition very quickly. And there's lots of learnings there that I'm sure people would benefit from. And this year in particular, I guess the honest answer, the reason for me being, I guess out there and working more on that side of things, being creative is because it's an outlet for my mental health.

Chris Stone:

I suffer from depression and one of my ways of coping with that is being creative and creating new content and sharing it. So I guess it's a reason of... it's linked to that also, but also the stories that people tell me afterwards, they motivate me to keep doing it. So when someone comes to me and says, "Hey, I did the Queen retrospective, the Queen Rock Band retrospective, and this program manager who never smiles connected to the content and admitted he liked Queen and smiled." And this was a first and when people come to me and say, "Hey, we did the Home Alone retrospective, the one of your Christmas themed ones and people loved it. It was great." It was the most engaging retrospective we've had so far because the problem is work can become stale if you let it be so.

Chris Stone:

Retrospectives can become this, what did we do last time? What are we going to do next time? What actions can we do? Et cetera, et cetera. And unless you refresh it and try new things, people will get bored and they'll disconnect and they'll disengage, and you're less likely to get a good outcome that way. So for me, there's no reason you can't make work a little bit fun, with a little bit of creativity and a little bit of energy and passionate about it.

Sean Blake:

I love that. And do you think a lot of people come to work even when they're working in Agile co-located teams and it's just not fun, I mean what do you think the key reasons are that work isn't fun?

Chris Stone:

I think because it can become stale. All right. So let's reflect on where we are today. Today, we're in a situation where we're not face-to-face with one another. We don't have time for those water cooler chats. We don't connect over a coffee or a lunch. We don't have a chat about idle banter and things of that on the way to a meeting room, we didn't have any of that. And that forces people to look at each other and see themselves as an avatar behind a screen, just a name. Often in particular, people aren't even on video camera.

Chris Stone:

It forces them to think of people as a name on a screen, rather than a beating heart on a laptop. And it can abstract people into just these entities, these names you talk to each day and day out, and that can force it to be this professional non-personal interaction. And I'm a firm believer that we need to change that. We need to make things more fun because it can, and in my experience, does result in much better outcomes. I'm very, very people first. We need to focus on people being people. People aren't resources. This is a common phrase I like to refer to you.

Sean Blake:

I love that, people aren't resources. You spoke a little bit about mental health and your struggle with depression. Something that I hear come up time and time again, is people that talk about imposter syndrome. And I wonder, firstly, if you think that might be exasperated through working remotely now. People are not so sure how they fit in, where their role is still the same role that it was 12 months ago. And do you have any tips for people when they're dealing with imposter syndrome, especially in a virtual environment?

Chris Stone:

Well, yeah I think this current environment, this virtual environment, the pandemic in particular, has led to a number of unhelpful behaviors. That there's a lot more challenges with people's mental health and negativity, and that can only lead to, I guess, less desire, less confidence in doing things, maybe doubting yourself. There's some great visuals I've shared on this recently, and it's all about reframing those imposter thoughts you have, the unhelpful thinking, that thing that goes through your mind that says, Oh, they're all going to think I'm a total fraud because maybe I don't have enough years of experience, or I should already know this. I must get more training. There's lots of “shoulding” and “musting” in that. There's lots of jumping to conclusions in this.

Chris Stone:

And a couple of ways of getting around that is, so if you're thinking of the scenario where I'm a fraud think, "Oh, well I'm doing my best, but I can't predict what they might think." When you're trying to think about the scenario of do I need to get more training? Well, understand and acknowledge the reality that you can't possibly know everything. You continue to learn every single day and that's great, but it's unrealistic to know it all. There's a great quote I often refer to and it's, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I believe it's a quote from Socrates.

Chris Stone:

And it's something that very much resonates with me. Over the years I've gone through this learning journey where, when I first finished university, for example, I thought I knew everything. I thought I've got it all. And I'd go out to clients and speak and I'm like, "Oh yeah, I know this. I've got this guys." And then the more involved I've become and the more deeper I've gone into the topic, the more I realized, actually there's so much that I don't know. And to me, true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing tells me there's so much out there that I must continuously learn, I must continuously seek to challenge myself each and every day.

Chris Stone:

Other people who approach me and say, "How do you, or you produce a lot of content. How would you put yourself out there?" And I say, "Well, I just do it." Let's de-stigmatize failure. If you put a post out there and it bombs, it doesn't matter, put another one out there. It's as simple as that, learn from failure, Chuck something out there, try it, if it doesn't work, try something else. We coach Agile teams to do this all the time, to experiment. Have a hypothesis to test against that. Verify the outcomes and do retrospectives. I do weekly solospectives. I reflect on my week, what works, what hasn't worked, what I'm going to try differently. And there's no reason you can't do that also.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So weekly solospectives. What does that look like? And how do you be honest with yourself about what's working, what's not working and areas for yourself to improve? How do you actually start to have that time for self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Unfortunately you got to make time for some reflection. One thing I've learned with mental health is you have to make time for your health before you have to make time for your illness or before you're forced to make time for your illness. And it can become all too easy in this busy working world to not make time for your health, to not make time and focus on you. So you do just have to carve out that time, whether that's blocking some time in the diary on a Friday afternoon, just to sit down and reflect, whether that's making time to go out for a walk, setting up a time on your Alexa to have a five minute stretching break, whatever it is, there's things you can do, and you have things you have to do to make time for yourself.

Chris Stone:

With regards to a solospective, the way I tend to do things is I tend to journal on a daily basis. That's almost like my own daily standard with myself, it's like, what have I observed? What have I... what challenges do I face in the past day? And then that sums up in the weekly solospective, which is basically a retro for one, where I reflect on, what did I try it? What do I want to achieve this week? What's gone well? What hasn't gone well. It's the same as a retrospective just one and allows me to aggregate my thoughts across the week, rather than them being single events. So that I'm focusing more on the trajectory as opposed to any single outlier. Does that make sense?

Sean Blake:

It does. It does. So you've got this trajectory with your career. You're checking in each week to see whether you're heading in the right direction. I assume that you set personal goals as well along the way. I also noticed that you have personal values that you've published and you've actually published those publicly for other people to look at and to see. How important are those personal values in informing your life and personal and career goals?

Chris Stone:

So I'd say that are hugely important, for me, what I thought was we see companies sharing their values all the time. You look on company websites and you can see their values quite prominently. And you could probably think do they often live up to their values? You have so many companies have customer centricity as their value, but how many of them actually focus on engaging with their customers regularly? How many have a metric where they track, how often they engage with customers? Most of them are focusing on velocity and lead time. So I always challenge, are you really customer centric or is that lip service? But moving aside, I digress. I thought companies have values, and obviously we do as well, but why don't we share them? So I created this visual, showing what mine were and challenged a few others to share it also. And I had some good feedback from others which was great.

Chris Stone:

But they hugely influence who I am and how I interact on a day-to-day basis. And I'll give you an example, one of my values is being open source always. And what that means is nothing I create, no content I create, nothing I produce would ever be behind a payroll. And that's me being community driven. That's me sharing what I've learned with others. And how that's come to fruition, how I've lived that is I've had lots of people come to me say, "Hey, we love the things you do. You gave me flying things. Would you mind, or would you like to collaborate and create this course that people would pay for?" So often I've said, "If it's free, yes. But if it's going to be monetized, then no."

Chris Stone:

And I've had multiple people reach out to me for that purpose. And I've had to decline respectfully and say, "Look, I think what you're doing is great. You've got a great app and I can see how having this Agile coaching gamification course on that would be of great value. But if it's behind the payroll, then I'm not interested because it's in direct conflict with my own values, and therefore, I wouldn't be interested in proceeding with it. But keep doing what you're doing, being people first, #people first." This is about me embodying the focus on people being beating hearts behind a laptop, rather than just this avatar on a screen. And I have this little... the audio listeners, won't be able to see this, but I'm holding up a baby Groot here. And he's like my people first totem.

Chris Stone:

And the reason for that is I have a group called the Guardians of Agility, and we are people first. That's our emblem. And these are my transformation champions in my current company. I like to have Guardians of Agility, and I've got this totem reminding me to be people first in every interaction I have. So when, for example, I hear the term resources and I'm saying, well... As soon as I hear it, it almost triggers me. I almost hear like, "Oh, what do they mean by that?" And I'll wait a little moment and I'll say, "Hey, can you tell me what you mean by that?" And you tease it out a little bit. And often they meant, "Oh, it's people, isn't it?" If you're talking about people, can we refer to them as people?

Chris Stone:

Because people aren't resources. They're not objects or things you mine out the ground. They're not pens, paper or desks. They're not chairs in an office. They are people. And every time you refer to them as a resource, you abstract them. You make it easier to dehumanize them and think of them as lesser, you make it easier to make those decisions like, oh, we can just get rid of those resources or we can just move that resource from here to there and to this team and that team, whether they want to or not. So I don't personally like the language.

Chris Stone:

And the problem is it goes all the way back to how it's trained. You go to university and you take a business degree and you learn about human resources. You take a course, Agile HR, Agile human resources, right, and it's so prevalent out there. And unless we challenge it, it won't change. So I will happily sit there and a meeting with a CTO and he'll start talking about resource and I'll say, "Hey, what do you mean by that?" And I'll challenge it and he'll go, "Yeah, I've done it again, have I not?" "Yes. Yes, you have." And it's gotten to the point now where I'll be on this big group call for example, and someone will say it, and I'll just start doing this on a screen waving, and they'll go, "Did it again, didn't I?" "Yes, you did."

Sean Blake:

So some of these habits are so ingrained from our past experiences our education, and when you're working with teams for the first time, who's never worked in Agile before, they're using phrases like resources, they're doing things that sometimes we call anti-patents, how do you start to even have that conversation and introduce them to some of these concepts that are totally foreign to people who've never thought the way that you or I might think about our teams and our work?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So I guess that the first response to that is with empathy. I'm not going to blame someone or make out that they're a bad person for using words that are ingrained, that are normal. And this is part of the problem that that term, resource is so ingrained in that working language nowadays, same as deadlines. Deadlines is so ingrained, even though deadlines came from a civil war scenario where it referred to, if you went past the line, you were shot. How did that land in the business language? I don't know. But resources, it's so ingrained, it's so entrenched into this language, so people do it without intending to. They often do it without meaning it in a negative way. And to be honest, the word itself isn't the issue, it's how people actually behave and how they treat people.

Chris Stone:

I said my first approach is empathy. Let's talk about this. Let's understand, "Hey, why did you use term?" "Oh, I use it to mean this." "Okay. Well." Yeah, and not to do it or call them out publicly or things like that. It's doing things with empathy. Now, I also often use obviously gamification and training approaches, and Agile games to introduce concepts. If someone's unfamiliar to a certain way of working, I'll often gamify. I'll create something, a virtual Agile game to demonstrate. The way I do say, is I'm always looking to help people understand how it feels, not just to talk theory. And I'll give you an example. I'm a big fan of a game called the Virtual Name Game. It's a game about multitasking and context switching.

Chris Stone:

And I always begin, I'll ask group of people, "Hey guys, can you multitask?" And often they go, "Yeah, we can do that." And there'll be those stereotypical things like, "Oh yeah, I'm a woman. I can do that." It happens. Trust me. But one of the first things I do, if I'm face-to-face with them, I'll say, "Hey, hold your hands out like this. And in your left hand..." And people on the audio can't see me, I'm holding out like my hands in front of me. In my left hand, we're going to play an endless game of rock, paper, scissors. And in my right hand, we're going to play a game of, we have a thumb war with each other. And you can try, you can challenge them, can they do those concurrently? No, they can't. They will fail because you just can't focus on both at the same time.

Chris Stone:

Now the Virtual Name Game, the way it works is you divide a group of people up into primarily customers and one developer. And I love to make the most senior person in the room, that developer. I want them to see how it feels to be constantly context switching. So if you were the developer, you're the senior person to review the hippo in this scenario, the highest paid person. I would say Sean, in this game, these customers, they are trying to get their name written first on this virtual whiteboard. And we're going to time how long it takes for you to write everyone's name in totality. The problem is that they're all going to shouting at you continuously, endlessly trying to get your attention. So it's going to be Sean, Sean, write my name, write my...

Chris Stone:

And it's just going to be wow, wow, wow, who do I focus on? You won't know. And this replicates a scenario that I'm sure many people have experienced. He who shouts loudest gets what they want. Prioritization is often done by he who's... or the person who shouts loudest not necessarily he. We then go into another rounds where you say, I'm this round, Sean, people are to be shouting their name at you. But in this round, you're going to pay a little bit attention to everyone. So the way you're going to do that is you're going to read the first letter of one person's name, then you move on to the first letter of the next person's name, and you're going to keep going around. The consequence of that is everyone gets a little bit of attention, but the result is it's really slow.

Chris Stone:

You're starting lots of things but not finishing them. And again, in each round, we're exploring how it feels. How did it feel to be in that round? Sean, you were being shouted at, how did that feel? Everyone else, you were shouting to get your attention. You had to shout louder than other people, how did that feel? And it's frustrating, it's demotivating, it's not enjoyable. In the final around, I would say, "Hey, Sean, in this round, I'm going to empower you to decide whose name you write first. And you can write the whole thing in order. And the guys actually they're going to help you this time, there are no shouts over each other, they are going to help you." And in this scenario, as I'm sure you can imagine, it feels far better. The result is people finish things, and you can measure the output, the number of brand names written on a timeframe.

Chris Stone:

It's a very quick and easy way of demonstrating how it feels to be constantly context switching and the damage you can have, if, for example, you've prioritized things into a sprint and you got lots of trying to reorder things and so on and so forth, and lots of pressure from external people that ideally should be shielded from influencing this and that, and how that feels and what the result is, because you may start something, get changed into something else. You got to take your mindset of this, back into something else, and then the person who picks up the original thing might not have even been the same person, they've got to learn that over again. There's just lots of waste and efficiency costs through that. And that's just an example of a game I use, to bring that sort of things to life.

Sean Blake:

That's great. That's fantastic. I love that. And I think we need to, at Easy Agile, start playing some of those games because there's a lot of lessons to be learned from going through those exercises. And then when you see it play out in real life, in the work that you're doing, it's easier to recognize it then. If you've done the training, you've done the exercise, that all seems like fun and games at the time, but when it actually rears its head in the work that you're doing, it's much easier to call it out and say, "Oh wait, we're doing that thing that we had fun playing, but now we realize it's occurring in real life and let's go a different direction." So I can see how that would be really powerful for teams to go through that so Chris [crosstalk 00:22:26].

Chris Stone:

I'd also add that every game that I do, I construct it using the four Cs approach. So I'm looking to connect people... firstly, connect people to each other, and then to the subject matter. So in this game is about multitasking. To contextualize why that matters, why does context switching and multitasking matter in the world of work? Because it causes inefficiencies, because it causes frustration, de-motivation, et cetera. Then we do some concrete practice. We play a game that emphasizes how it feels. And at the end we draw conclusions, and the idea is that with the conclusion side of things, it's almost like a retrospective on the game. We say, "Hey, what did we learn? What challenges we face? And what can we do differently in our working world?" And that hopefully leaves people with actionable takeaways. A lot of the content I share is aiming to leave it with actionable takeaways, not just talking about something, but reflecting on what you could do differently, what you could try, what experiment you might like to employ with your working life, your team that might help improve a situation you're facing.

Sean Blake:

Okay. Yeah, that's really helpful. And you've spoken about this concept of Agile sins, and we know that a lot of companies have these values, they might've committed to an Agile transformation. They might've even gone and trained hundreds or thousands of people at accompany using similar tactics and coaching and educational experiences that you provide. But we still see sometimes things go terribly wrong. And I wonder, what's this concept of Agile sins that you talk about and how can we start to identify some of these sins that pop up in our day-to-day work with each other?

Chris Stone:

I guess, so the first thing I would emphasize about this is that using sin, it's a very dogmatic religious language and it's more being used satirically than with any real intent. So I just like to get that across. I'm not a dogmatic person, I don't believe there is any utopian solution. I certainly don't believe there's any one size fit to all situation for anyone. So the idea that there's really any actual sins is... yeah, take that with a pinch of salt. The reason the Agile sins came up is because I was part of... I'd done a podcast recently with a guy called Charles Lindsey, and he does this Agile confessional. And it's about one coach confessing to another, their mistakes, their sins, the things they've done wrong.

Chris Stone:

And I loved it because I'm all about de-stigmatizing failure. I'm all about sharing with one another, these war stories from one coach to another, because I've been a proponent of this in the past. I've shouted, "Hey there, I failed on this. I made this mistake. I learned from it." And I challenge others to do so as well and there's still this reluctance by many to share what went wrong. And it's because failure is this dirty word. It's got this stigma attached to it. No one wants to fail, leaders in particular. So the podcast was a great experience.

Chris Stone:

And it was interesting for me because that was the first time I'd given a confession, because I'll be honest with you, I'm someone who is used to taking confession myself. I go to this hockey festival every year and I got given years ago, this Archbishop outfit, and I kind of made that role my own way. I was drunk, and I said, "You're going to confess your sins to me." And if they haven't sinned enough, I tell them to go and do more. And I give them penicillin with alcohol shots and things like that. And I've actually baptized people in this paddling pool whilst drunk. Anyway, again, I digress, but I wasn't used to confessing myself, usually, I was taking confession, but I did so and it was a good experience to share some of my failures and my patterns was to create... and it was my own idea, to create my videos, seven videos of my seven Agile sins. And again, this was just me sharing my mistakes, what I've learned from that, with the intent of benefiting others to avoid those similar sins.

Sean Blake:

So you've spoken to a lot of other Agile coaches, you've heard about their failures, you confessed your own failures, is it possible for you to summarize down what are those ingredients that make someone a great coach?

Chris Stone: And that is a question, what makes someone a great coach? I think it's going to be entirely subjective, to be honest. And my personal view is that a great coach listens more than they speak. I guess that would be a huge starting point. When they listen more than they speak, because I've... and this is one of the things I've been guilty of in the past, is I've allowed my own biases to influence the team's direction. An approach I'd taken in the past was, "Hey, I'm working with this team and this has worked well in the past. We're going to do that." Rather than, "So guys, what have you done so far? What have you tried? What's worked well? What hasn't worked well? What can we create or what can we try next? That works for you guys. Let's have you make that decision and I'm here to guide you through that process to facilitate it, rather than to direct it myself."

Chris Stone:

Again, I find ... it's an approach that resonates more with people. They like feel that they own that decision as opposed to it being forced upon them. And there's far less, I guess, cognitive dissonance as a consequence. So listening more than speaking is a huge for me, a point an Agile coach should do. Another thing I think for me nowadays, is that there's too much copying and pasting. And what I mean by that is, the Spotify, the Spotify model came out years ago and everyone went, "Oh, this is amazing. We're going to adopt it. We're going to have tribes and chapters and guilds and squads, and it's going to work for us. That's that's our culture now."

Chris Stone:

I was like, "Well, let's just take a moment here. Spotify never intended for that to happen. They don't even follow that model themselves anymore. What you've done there is you've just tried to copy and paste another model." And people do it with SAFe as well. They just say, "Hey, we're going to take the whole SAFe framework and Chuck it into our system in this blueprint style cookie cutter." And the problem is that it doesn't take into account for me, the most important variable in any sort of transformation initiative, the people, what they want, and the culture there. So this is where another one of my values is, innovate, don't replicate. Work with people to experiment and find that Agile, what works for them rather than just copying and pasting things.

Chris Stone:

So tailor it to their needs rather than just coming in with some or seen dancing framework, and then the way I do it is I say, "Hey, well, SAFe is great. Well, it's got lots of values, and lots of great things about it. Lots of benefits to it, but maybe not all of it works for us. Let's borrow a few tenent of that." Same with LeSS, same with Scrum At Scale, same with Scrum, similar to Kanban. There's lots of little things you can borrow from various frameworks, but there's also lots of things you can inject yourself, lot's of things you can try that work for you guys, and ultimately come up with your own tailor-made solutions. So innovate, don't replicate would be another one for me.

Chris Stone:

Learning, learning fast and learning often, and living and breathing that yourself. Another mistake I and other coaches I think have made is not making time for your own personal development to allowing, day in, day out to just be busy, busy, busy, but at the same time you're going out there, coaching teams, "Hey, you've got to learn all the time. You got to try new things." But not making that time for yourself. So I always carve out time to do that, to attend conferences, to read books, to challenge myself and escape my echo chamber. Not just to speak to the same people I do all the time, but perhaps to go on a podcast with people I've never spoken to. To a different audience, maybe to connect with people that actually disagree with me, because I want that.

Chris Stone:

I don't want that homophilous thinking where everyone thinks exactly like I do, because then I don't get exposed to the perspectives that make me think differently. So I'm often doing that. How can I tend to conference that I know nothing about, maybe it's a project management focus one. Project management and waterfall isn't a dirty word either. There is no utopian system, project management and... sure traditional project management and waterfall has its benefits in certain environments. Environments with less footing, less flexible scope or less frequently changing requirements works very well.

Chris Stone:

I always say GDPR, which is an EU legislation around data protection, that was a two year thing in the making and everyone knew exactly what was happening and when they had to do it by. That was a great example of something that can be done very well with a waterfall style, because the requirements weren't changing. But if you are trying to develop something for a customer base that changes all the time, and you've got lots of new things and lots of competitors and things like that, then it varies, and probably the ability to iterate frequently and learn from it is going to be more beneficial and this is where Agile comes in. So I guess to sum up there, there's a few things, learning fast learning often. I can't even remember the ones I've mentioned now, I've gone off on many tangents and this is what I do.

Sean Blake:

I love it. It's great advice, Chris. It's really important and timely. And you mentioned, earlier on that the customer base that's always changing and we know that technology is always changing and things are only going to change more quickly, and disruptions are only going to be more severe going forward. Can you look into the future, or do you ever look into the future and say, what are those trends that are emerging in the Agile space or even in work places that are going to disrupt us in the way that we do our work? What does Agile look like in five or 10 years?

Chris Stone:

Now that again is a very big question. I can sit here and postulate and talk about what it might look like. I'm going to draw upon what I think is a great example of what will shape the next five or 10 years. In February, 2021, there's a festival called Agile 20 Reflect, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, and it's built as a festival, not conference, it's really important. So it's modeled on the Edinburgh festival and what it intends to be is a celebration of the past, the present and the future of Agile. Now what it is, it's a month long series of events on Agile, and anyone can create an event and speak and share, and it will create this huge community driven load of content that will be freely accessible and available.

Chris Stone:

Now, there are three of the original Agile manifestor signatories that are involved in this. Lisa Adkins is involved in this as is lots of big name speakers that are attached to this festival. And I myself, I'm running a series of retrospectives on the Agile manifesto. I've interviewed Arie van Bennekum, one of the original Agile manifesto signatories. They're going to be lots of events out there. And I think that festival will begin to shape in some way, what Agile might look like because there's lots of events, lots of speakers, lots of panel discussions that are coming up, coming together with lots of professionals out there, lots of practitioners out there that will begin to shape what that looks like. So whilst I could sit here and postulate on it, I'm not the expert to be honest, and there are far greater minds than I. And actually I'd rather leverage the power of the wider community and come into that than suggesting mine at this time.

Sean Blake:

Nice. I like it. And what you've done there, you've made it impossible for us to click this video and prove you wrong in the future when you predict something that doesn't end up happening. So that's very wise if you.

Chris Stone: Future proof myself.

Sean Blake: Exactly. Chris, I think we're coming almost to the end now, but I wanted to ask, given the quality of your Christmas sweater, do you have any tips for teams who are working over the holiday period, they're most likely burnt out after a really difficult 2020? What are some of the things you'd say to coaches on Agile teams as they come into this time where hopefully people are able to take some time off, spend some time with their family. Do you have any tips or recommendations for how people can look after their mental health look after their peers and spend that time in self-reflection?

Chris Stone:

Sure. So a number of things that I definitely would recommend. I'm currently producing and sharing this Agile advent calendar. And the idea is that every day you get a new bite-size piece of Agile knowledge or a template or something working in zany or a video, whatever it may be. There's lots of little things getting in there. And there's been retro templates, Christmas and festive themes. So there's a Home Alone one, a Diehard one, an elf movie one, there's all sorts. Perhaps try one of those as a fun immersive way with your team to just reflect on the recent times as a squad and perhaps come up with some things in the next year.

Chris Stone:

And there's for example, the Diehard one, it's based on the quotes from the movie Diehard so it's what you'd be doing in there, celebrate your... to send them to your team. Or there's one in there about, if this is how you celebrate Christmas, I can't wait for new year. And that question was saying, what do we want to try next year? Like this year has been great, what do we want to try differently next year? So there's opportunities through those templates to reflect in a fun way so give one of those a go. I shared some Christmas eve festive Zoom backgrounds, or Team backgrounds, give those a go and make a bit fun, make it a bit immersive. There's Christmas or festive icebreakers that you can use. What I tend to do is any meeting I facilitate, the first five minutes is just unadulterated chat about non-work things, and I often use icebreakers to do so. And whether that's a question, like if you could have the legs of any animal, what would you have and why, Sean, what would that be?

Sean Blake:

Probably a giraffe, because just thought the height advantage, it's got to be something that's useful in everyday life.

Chris Stone: Hard to take you on the ground maybe.

Sean Blake:

Yes. Yes, you would definitely need that. Although, I don't think I would fit in the lift on the way to work, so that would be a problem.

Chris Stone:

Yeah. That's just how I start. But yeah, that's just a question, because it's interesting to see what could people come up with, but there's some festive ones too, what's your favorite Christmas flick? What would put you on the naughty list this year? Yeah, does your family have any weird or quirky Christmas traditions? Because I love hearing about this. Everyone's got their own little thing, whether it's we have one Christmas present on Christmas Eve or every Christmas day we get a pizza together. There's some really random ones that come out. I love hearing about those and making time for that person interaction, but in a festive way can help as well.

Chris Stone:

And then on the mental health side of things, I very much subscribed to the Pomodoro effect from a productivity side of things. So I will use that. I'll set myself a timer, I'll focus without distractions, do something. And then in that five minute break, I'll just get up and move away from my desk and stretch and get a coffee or whatever it may be. But then I'll also block out time, and I know some companies in this remote working world at the moment are saying, "Hey, every one to 2:00 PM is blocked out time for you guys to go and have a walk." Some companies are doing that. I always make time to get out and away from my desk because that... and a little bit more productive and it breaks up my day a little bit. So I definitely recommend that. Getting some fresh air can do wonders for your mental health.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Well, Chris, I've learnt so much from this episode and I really appreciate you spending some time with us today. We've talked about a lot of things from around the importance of sharing your failures, the importance of looking after your mental health, checking in on yourself and your own development, but also how you tracking, how you feeling. I love that quote that you shared from, we think it Socrates, that true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. I think that's really important, every day is starting from day one, isn't it? De-stigmatizing failure. The origins of the word deadline. I did not know that. That's really interesting. And just asking that simple question, how did that feel? How did that feel working in this way? People were screaming your name, walk up work, when work's too busy, how does that feel? And is that a healthy feeling that everyone should have? So that's really important questions for me to reflect on and I know our audience will really appreciate those questions as well. So thanks so much Chris, for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast.

Chris Stone:

Not a problem. Thank you for listening and a Merry Christmas, everyone.

Sean Blake:

Merry Christmas.

"I really enjoyed my conversation with Andrew Malak. We talk integrating agile techniques and tips on how to achieve a culture of accountability"

Andrew is a firm believer that the customer trusts your business by joining, and you have an obligation to repay that trust by helping them achieve their outcomes.

Enjoy the episode!

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Transcript

Teagan Harbridge:

Welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Teagan, head of product here at Easy Agile. And we've got a really exciting guest on the show today, Andrew Malak from Spaceship. He's the chief product officer. Andrew is a true believer in creating products and experiences that solve customer problems. He believes that the customer trusts your business by joining, and you have an obligation to repay that trust by helping them achieve their outcomes. In his current role, Andrew aims to help people take control of their wealth from a young age, educating good money habits and helping people invest where the world is going. Andrew is a family man who loves his time with his wife and children. And believe it or not, he uses agile techniques in his personal and professional life. Andrew is an economics geek. He plays and coaches soccer, football. He's a big Liverpool supporter, loves to travel, loves amazing architecture, and loves working with children.

Teagan Harbridge:

There were so many takeaways from my chat with Andrew that I really struggled to pair it down to three. But if you say tuned, here are some of the things that you're going to learn from our chat with Andrew. Why we should stop using the term agile transformation and start calling it an agile evolution. Why it's important to be open-minded to our own limitations so to break the old mindset of protecting original scope. And tips on how to achieve a culture of accountability. So I hope you enjoy. Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about Spaceship?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for, first of all, having me, Teagan. Spaceship is a business that's on a journey to make good money habits and investing accessible to all people. So what we look for is trends to do with industries or companies who are building the future of both industry or economies. We invest in them for the longterm, we break down barriers of entry for people, we give them a fee-free product under $5,000, no minimum investments. It's really easy to sign up. You simply download an app and you sign up and make one product selection decision, and you're done. You can start investing on autopilot. We allow you to also invest your superannuation in a not too dissimilar way.

Teagan Harbridge:

So tell me a little bit about who your target customer is, then. Because it seems like you're trying to make something quite complicated accessible for maybe first time investors.

Andrew Malak:

Well, you're absolutely right. There's a niche segment of people out there at the moment, millennials or even gen Zs, that we just don't think have been well serviced by the incumbents. And what we're trying to do is resonate with these young people as much as possible. We're trying to reduce industry jargon and really make things simple to them, because investing doesn't have to be complex. It's really about a lot of discipline around, if I can manage my personal P&L, or money in, money out, then I can create a cash buffer that can go into my assets column on my balance sheet. That's really what we're trying to do. And that kind of language, if we can get it right, can really simplify things that have typically been in the hands of financial advisors and accountants and give it back to everyday Australians who are starting out in their investment journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, awesome. And you've been on quite a journey before landing in the FinTech space as the Spaceship CPO. So can you tell me and our audience a little bit about what that journey has looked like?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, where do I start? If you asked a graduate Andrew Malak what he'd be doing now, I don't think I would've been speaking about this because at that point in time in my career I didn't know this space would actually be around, if that makes sense. So I'll go back to my younger years, and I always thought I was going to be an architect. I had this fascination with bridges and I wanted to design things and see them come to life. And let's just say that I do that in different ways right now, but I started out working in CommSec on the trading floor. I moved on to work as a business analyst, and that's where I started my critical thinking into how businesses work and how things can be made more efficient.

Andrew Malak:

I dabbled in teaching for a little bit, I taught high school economics and religion for a little bit. And then I eventually landed in a product role at St. George Bank prior to the merger with Westpac. At that point in time, the light bulb really came on. I realized, "Hey, I like creating things. I like to change things. I don't like to just do things," if that makes sense. And that wondering mind that doesn't like the conform was finally let loose, if that makes sense. And I haven't stopped enjoying it. I loved my time at Westpac, made lots of friends, worked on really cool, successful projects, and implemented lots of things that had great results. Worked on lots of things that have failed miserably and learnt a lot out of that. And when the opportunity at Spaceship started to surface late last year, it was just too good an opportunity to not really come in and have a go. So yeah, it's been quite the journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. And I love a good failure story. And you said you've had lots. Can you think, just off the top of your head, what one of those big failures has been?

Andrew Malak:

Where do I start? I think our first attempt at taking a digital experience to allow customers to acquire a product online was quite a failure that taught us a lot. We basically took the systems that our back office staff used and just made it available to customers. And the real good learning out of that is there was a lot of traffic and a lot of demand, but not enough completion ever. And the best learning that came out of that... This is back in 2006, so internet speeds were just starting to pick up. Broadband was starting to go mainstream and customers' trust around doing more transactions that used personally identifiable data was starting to normalize at that point in time. Up until then, people quite reserved thinking, "I'm going to lose my personal data," et cetera. So when we decided to do that, we saw that there was a lot of demand but we quickly came to the realization that we used to train staff for four to six weeks on how to use the systems before they knew how to service customers using them.

Andrew Malak:

But then we've deployed it into production for customers to self-service and realized quite quickly that the experience for customers had to be much more guided than the experience for a staff member. This is where the evolution of usability or design thinking started to come in. We started thinking of, "Well, how do we make these things so easy that a first-time user can go end to end and not encounter friction?" And this is where our understanding of design principles, customer testing using verbatim and anguage that can resonate with a first-time user becomes critical to the execution. It's not just good systems but it's good user experience sitting on top of systems.

Andrew Malak:

That's probably the one that resonates with me the most because I've held that to a very high regard throughout my whole career. Now everything I do I think of, "Where's the friction? How do we make sure there's no friction? What's the customer going to feel throughout this experience? How are we creating unnecessary anxiety in that experience for the customer, and how do we move that away? How do we become more transparent but still be simple?" And yeah, that's probably the one that resonates the most.

Teagan Harbridge:

Seems like a tremendous learning opportunity early enough in that project and something that's stuck with you since, so great learning opportunity.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely.

Teagan Harbridge:

We've got a ton of customers who are at all stages of their agile transformations, and I know that this is something that you've had experience with if we go back to your St. George, Westpac days. Can you give our audience any tips or stories that you encountered when you were going through those agile transformations? What lessons can you share with our audience?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, I have lots of lessons to share, actually.

Teagan Harbridge:

This is what I love.

Andrew Malak:

Look, I like to position it more as agile evolution more than agile transformation because no matter what you try to do, you're not just going to drop waterfall and become agile next morning. Honestly, I've seen so many attempts and every single time I see that the graduality of the change is a better predictability of the final outcome that you're going to land. So ultimately the Holy Grail that everyone's aspiring to is that, as a leader, you can rock up to a team stand up unexpected and then, without being told who is in what role, who the product owner is, who the engineer is, who the QC is, who the designer is, it becomes hard for you as the leader to work out who's who because at that point in time the team is so well converged on customer outcomes that they will self-organize themselves around what each person needs to do.

Andrew Malak:

And most of the language being used is really around, what are we trying to define the customer? What's the best thing to do within the capacity that we have to deliver this feature to market as quickly as possible, capture value for the customer and the business as much as possible? This takes a long time to get to, where you can start normalizing to a standardized, common set of goals, common cadence, and common ways of working. And I think it's ultimately about how much empowerment you can give people and how much as a leader you can relegate yourself in the background to allow them to work it out themselves as long as you're coming in and nudging things along the way and helping people course correct along the way. So the good news is that I actually think at Spaceship, we're pretty close to getting there.

Andrew Malak:

We have been running scrum and we have been running sprints for a long time, but it has been largely ceremonials. But over the last quarter, we've done a really good job at embedding more cross-functional people into these teams. But the goal for us is that now we feel like our throughput has actually increased and that the constant flow of information between the teams is becoming more natural and there is actually less ambiguity between the teams around, "All right, we built it this way. The API is no longer consumable. It doesn't fit what we're trying to do from our front-end and there's less back and forth." So we can really see that the amount of friction between persons in the team is really starting to reduce dramatically and we're starting to see that throughput really increase. Having said that, the best way to go about an agile transformation is just get started.

Andrew Malak:

You can sit and plan out things and plan towards utopia as much as you want or you can actually just get going. So when I say by get going, I say you have to start by getting buy-in from all the leaders of the different cross-functional teams, because if you don't have that buy-in at the leadership level, it's just not going to work because there's going to be blockers, there's going to be escalations. And if all these things result in conversations around, "Should we keep doing this?" Or, "Hey, maybe this is not the right thing to do." That needs to be off the table really early on and it needs to be a total commitment at the leadership level that we're going to make this work and whatever we encounter we're just going to fix forward. Once you have that commitment at the leadership level, you need to very clearly define the values that the team is going to be handed to work with, because agile itself, it's not a process, it's a set of values that the team needs to just take and start working with.

Andrew Malak:

So we could go and rattle individuals and interactions over processes and tools or working software over comprehensive documentation. Well, give these to the team and they're going to say to you at day one, "We can't go to all of that straight away." So they might actually say that day one, "We're still going to need some documentation because we're not comfortable yet. We don't understand the language of the other people in the scrum team well enough to be able to go and actually code off the back of a conversation." But by the 10th sprint, the 20th sprint, that misunderstanding of what the product owner wants or what the designer is trying to achieve in an experience starts to become embedded in the mind of the engineer.

Andrew Malak:

The engineer understands the customer a lot more, and then you can make do with less process and less documentation and less negotiated outcomes and more commonality across the team. The other thing that then starts to kick in at that stage is that ability of the team to pivot in response to a change and not see that as a threat to what they're trying to achieve. The old ways of working was, define that scope, protect that scope, and not let things disturb that scope, whereas if you're halfway through a project and you get some really good information that tells you that maybe you are not on track to achieve a good outcome, you should be welcoming that. And the team itself in the beginning is going to find that an irritation, but over time they'll become more comfortable with pivoting off the back of new information.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah. It's a big mindset shift. I was just having a discussion today about, where does being agile and being reactive, where's that line in the middle. And when does taking information and pivoting because you think something will be better, when can we break that mindset of, "Oh, we're just being reactive?" No, we're being responsive.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, yeah. And look, I think the word reactive itself naturally has a negative connotation to it, but agility in mindset allows you to flip that on its head and say that no one can work things out in totality to 100% of what's possible, so being open-minded to our own limitations first and foremost allows us to acknowledge that when new information comes in, it is because we didn't think through the solution 100%, but let's also be okay with that because no one can. So I think it's flipping on its head and acknowledging it upfront and saying that this is going to happen, but when it comes we will assess the information we have with the capacity we have with how far progressive we are and make a decision that's right for us, for the customer, and for what's possible.

Andrew Malak:

So I take it as the more information you get along the way, the more reinforcement of, are you doing what's right or should you pivot and change at that point in time? The other thing that happens really early on is that if you as a leader can create a really clear vision around customer outcomes and establish your first cross-functional team and hand over that vision to the team, it becomes theirs. Don't hand over the backlog to the team. Don't give them a ready backlog, just give them the vision and then tell them, "You guys work out what your backlog looks like." When they come up with their own backlog, as long as you as a leader don't see that it's just a list of Hail Marys in it and there is a fair bit in there that is well spread out between hygiene things, strategic things, and a few moonshots and the balance is right, if the team has come up with their own backlog, the motivation they have to build their own ideas just goes through the roof.

Andrew Malak:

And that's what you want to achieve. You want to achieve clarity that the work fits with the vision and the motivation that you get out of the backlog being created by the team itself gets you that throughput enhancement. The other thing that you're going to struggle with really early on is chunking things down to fitting within the sprint cadence. I think that's one that's often been my biggest challenge when moving towards agile practices early on. Typically in the first few sprints, you always have overruns and things don't complete in the sprint because we end up thinking we can do more than we can and it takes us a while to work out, in wrapping up something that becomes shippable in a sprint, you probably take a little bit less in that sprint because you've got to test it or you've got to do a release in that sprint, or you're going to do a PIR in that sprint, or you're going to do a lot of retros in that sprint. Start to sort of formulate what you're going to take through the next planning cycle.

Andrew Malak:

So you've got to budget to that capacity, and I'll find that teams underestimate the magnitude of that work. So be okay with that. Overruns in the first few sprints don't mean you've failed, it means you're learning how to plan better. And then make sure your retros and your pivot off the back of that into your next planning sessions is taking information that is now new to you, and making sure you're working with it. I think as the leader, though, you have to set the expectations that teams can make mistakes and that it's a safe environment.

Andrew Malak:

And I've seen many agile... I was about to use the word transformation, even though I've just said I don't believe in transformation. Any teams that are adopting agile principles expecting that in their first few sprints they don't have any hiccups, and that if throughput falls in the first few sprints, then there's a bit of a, "Oh, well you told me this thing was going to increase our throughput." Yeah, but not straight away. So I think just being realistic with yourself and what's possible, and that shift in itself, until it normalizes, takes a bit of getting used to. The teams need to know it's a safe environment, that if their productivity suffers, if they make mistakes or if they break things, it's going to be okay. We'll fix forward.

Andrew Malak:

But then also there comes a point in time where we have to be very clear about the culture of accountability around using that capacity really well. So what I've found, that the best use of that is the showcase. And what we've done at Spaceship, because we're trying to reduce the amount of ceremonies, we've combined both the planning playback in a sprint as well as the showcase into the same ceremony. So what we do is we play back what we built last session using a demonstration of working software and comparing the amount of work we've executed versus what was planned in the previous sprint. We're saying we've got 80%, 90% through the work and this is what it looks and feels like, and this is what we're deploying to the customer. Then we actually showcase what we plan to do in the next sprint.

Andrew Malak:

And that's part of the showcase, is our hand on heart commitment to, "This is what we as a team are committed to doing in the next sprint." And then that accountability to the organization becomes something that keeps us on track throughout the sprint. As distractors or things that are not committed in the sprint come our way, we quickly think about, all right, can we accommodate these things? Do they need to be done? Are they going to take us off track with what is planned? Are they important enough? Is it a major defect of production, and can customers no longer access our app? Well, drop what you're doing and attend to that. Otherwise, if it's not material, keep focused on the work that you've committed to in front of the organization.

Andrew Malak:

After this you're going to start to experience some growing pain, and the growing pain is good because it means that agile is working and more teams or more feature opportunities become possible for the business. There's going to be a lot more hype around moving to agile. Other teams are going to come across and say, "Oh, how do we piggyback off what you're doing?" Et cetera. This is good. This is good, but what it means now is that some new risks are going to actually start to be introduced. Working with common code, common dependencies, or even common people being needed to be doing multiple things just means that you now need more coordination. I'd say to anyone who reaches this point in time, this is where people feel compelled to start introducing some new roles, coordination roles. And I'd just say, be careful because that can start add to your overhead really quickly.

Andrew Malak:

I find the best way to ensure that teams continue to be in sync is with the right dialogue at the right level with the right rhythm. And this is where I think keeping it simple to just the scrum of scrums works really well. I like the scrum of scrums to be balanced between both product owner and tech lead from each team being present, and a cadence of one to two times per week works really well. And as long as the product owners across the teams and the tech leads across the teams know what the other teams are working on, know what could impact their own work from a release perspective or scheduling perspective or an environment perspective, I think that tends to work really well as well.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. Lots of nuggets in there and certainly things that resonate with our experience here at Easy Agile, being a small company that's grown really quickly. So I can definitely relate. We've had conversations about, do we introduce new roles into this company? We've introduced a new cadence of meeting rhythms only the last couple of months, so we're going through these things too.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely. Absolutely. What have been your biggest learnings so far?

Teagan Harbridge:

I think that you cannot underestimate communication, and it really does come back to that cadence and that rhythm with the team. And we're experimenting at the moment with a daily huddle where we're talking about, how do we embed showcases more regularly in our cycles? We've got a big demo at the end of the cycle. How can we make that a more ingrained part of our culture? And it really does come back to that culture of accountability as well. So yep, it's all resonating.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, you can go to whatever industry you want but the problems are usually similar. And the great thing is that having these conversations is very important to fast-tracking your way forward, because your problem is not unique to you. Someone else has seen it in someone else has figured out a way. And I think what I like about the FinTech industry is that we compete on products and services, but there's a lot to learn from each other. And even if you just go outside of FinTech, there's a lot to learn from other industries who have adopted agile practices.

Teagan Harbridge:

If we take a bit of a flip, we've gone from your professional career and your experience into a more personal level. You mentioned that you use agile techniques outside of work. So I'm not sure if many others are in the same boat, but can you elaborate on this? What does that mean? What does that look like?

Andrew Malak:

Okay, I hope you don't think I'm extremely weird. We actually have a family campaign. So I guess if I go back to how we've come to actually doing this. Becoming parents, we would look at our children and see so many things that we want them to be better at. And in trying to give them constant feedback, which felt like the feedback was so much that it's all being drowned out because there's so much of it. In fact, my oldest son actually gave me that feedback. He goes, "Dad, why don't we focus on one thing at a time?"

Andrew Malak:

And I was like, "Wow, okay." For a ten-year-old to tell me that, that was amazing. So we came to realize that we needed to narrow and focus on one improvement area at a time, and we don't move on to the next one until we've actually closed out the first one. For example, my oldest son, very clever boy. We're trying to focus with him on the discipline of process over just getting the answer right, because he is clever and nine times out of 10, ask him a question, he's got the answer and he just wants to say it.

Andrew Malak:

But we've started to try to break down the question and work more on the process with him so that in following the process, coupled with his natural ability, we will get more answers right more often. And that's what we're working through at the moment. So our family's scrum wall at the moment has a mix of things on it. Everyone has their own swim lane, and in each swim lane there are a few tasks, some related work or study, some relating to household chores, some related to health or exercise, and some related to acts of kindness. And what we aim to do is make sure that we're moving things across in all four categories every single day. So yeah, you can use agility wherever you'd like but I think that mindset in general, that if I wake up every day and do things that make me better than I was yesterday, then I'll get to keep moving forward in my personal life as well as my professional life.

Teagan Harbridge:

And do you have WIP limits?

Andrew Malak:

We don't at the moment, and we're not doing showcases at the moment. We'll see how we can introduce them in the future.

Teagan Harbridge:

And how was the introduction of a Kanban board at home? How was that received by the family? Have they enjoyed it, has there been any feedback?

Andrew Malak:

Well, it wasn't actually planned. It started by just sticking some Post-its up on the fridge to remind us of stuff. And then one day I said to my wife, "You know what? This reminds me of what we do at work. Why don't we formalize it?" She had a bit of a chuckle but then one day she came back and then she found it there. So yeah, it wasn't really planned.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. And you've already been super generous with your time so I'll close it out with one final question. What advice do you wish someone would have given you when you took the leap from product management into product leadership?

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think first and foremost, that you've got to make sure that you drop your need for perfectionism, because first and foremost, you might have been the best product manager yourself. You might have been amazing. And I'm not saying I was, but if you were and you step up in leadership role, you're going to have people of different abilities working for you. And what you need to understand is that they're going to need some time learning their role and learning their trade. And just don't get in the way of them learn. So for example, you might see someone doing something that may not be the best or most optimal use of that capacity in that sprint. You might feel the urge to jump in and course correct. But if you let them go and just hear their feedback post the retro, they might've had that learning themselves, and a learning that they get for themselves rather than being told by their leader is going to be much more useful for them.

Andrew Malak:

You have to drop your need to make decisions and be in control because, again, the more you can relegate yourself to a servant leadership role and let the team make decisions, when they make decisions and now have to go back up that decision with execution, they're more likely to put their heart and soul into it. The more they feel like you are going to make the decisions, the less inclined they are to think through problems themselves, and then they'll keep bringing the problems back to you. So every time someone asks you a question that has a black and white answer, throw it back to them and ask them what they think, because that way you're coaching them to work it out themselves. And then the last thing that's really important is, I feel like it's really important to think through how your organization allows you to be different and take advantage of that differentiation.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, at Spaceship here, because we're small, we're not a large corporate, our customers are a little bit more forgiving. So you have a limited capacity to build experiences and you can't do all things at the same time. Understand that and take advantage of it, and get your team to also learn that. Because if you're trying to how the all edge cases, it will take a lot longer to get something to market and you might use a lot of the team's capacity to build edge cases. And you can't really afford that when you're in a start-up.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, we launched a new investment portfolio yesterday. We launched the Spaceship Earth portfolio, our first sustainable investment portfolio and it's a sign of more things to come hopefully in the sustainability space. But in launching that, we knew that we have a limitation in our experience or our product set today where each customer can only have one portfolio. We knew that existing customers would want to invest in sustainable investing, but our commitment to them is that it's in our backlog and it's actually the next feature that we're actually going to take to market.

Andrew Malak:

And in explaining that to our customers, they've been very understanding, that they know our throughput is limited but they also know that their voice is being heard and we are building the things that they're telling us about. So I would say that the best piece of advice to tell my young self is to make sure that you get the balance right between the voice of the customer. That's going to tell you all the hygiene things that your product lacks in terms of experience or gaps. And then get the balance between new strategic things that you can go after and new things that you can take to market, as well as a few Hail Marys every now and again. We call them moonshots. They may or may not work, but it's exciting, and if it works, can 10X your volume. And they are the things that are likely to go viral. So getting the balance right is very important.

Teagan Harbridge:

It's been wonderful, Andrew. I've definitely taken a lot away from our chat today, and I'm sure our audience will too. So thank you again so much for your time, and good luck.

Andrew Malak:

No Teagan, look, thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure speaking to yourself and Easy Agile, and I wish you guys all the best too.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Malak:

Have a good afternoon.