Easy Agile Podcast Ep.5 Andrew Malak, Chief Product Officer at Spaceship

TL;DR

Jeff Gothelf, renowned author of "Lean UX" and "Who Does What By How Much," discusses the evolution from output-based work to outcome-focused goal setting with OKRs. Key insights: Teams need to shift from "we're building a thing" to defining success as "who does what by how much" – meaningful changes in human behaviour that drive business results; the biggest barrier to agile ways of working is that people get paid to ship features, not deliver value; leaders should change their questions from "what are you building?" to "what are you learning?"; psychological safety is critical – teams need to feel safe admitting when something isn't working; start small by simply asking "what will people be doing differently when we ship this?"; rename teams around outcomes (mobile revenue team) rather than outputs (iPhone app team); proactive transparency through weekly three-bullet-point updates builds trust with leadership. Bottom line: OKRs, when done right, are the "Trojan horse" that enables all other agile practices to succeed.

Introduction

For years, agile practitioners have championed better ways of working – Lean UX, design thinking, continuous discovery, customer centricity. Yet despite widespread adoption of these practices, many teams still struggle with the same fundamental problem: they're rewarded for shipping features, not delivering value.

In this episode, our CEO Mat Lawrence sits down with Jeff Gothelf to explore how this misalignment of incentives undermines even the best agile practices, and why customer-centric OKRs might be the missing piece that makes everything else click into place.

Jeff Gothelf is a renowned author, speaker, and consultant whose work has shaped how product teams approach collaboration and customer-centricity. Along with co-author Josh Seiden, Jeff wrote "Lean UX," which revolutionised how designers work in agile environments. Their follow-up book, "Sense and Respond," helped leaders understand how to manage in software-based businesses. Their latest book, "Who Does What By How Much," tackles the thorniest problem yet: how to align incentives and goals with customer outcomes.

This conversation traces Jeff's journey from helping designers work better in agile teams, to helping leaders create the conditions for success, to finally addressing the root cause – the goals and incentives that determine what gets celebrated, rewarded, and promoted in organisations. It's a masterclass in shifting from output thinking to outcome thinking, with practical advice for both team members and leaders navigating this transformation.

About Our Guest

Jeff Gothelf is an author, speaker, and organisational consultant who has spent over 15 years helping companies build better products through collaboration, learning, and customer-centricity. His work focuses on the intersection of agile software development, user experience design, and modern management practices.

Jeff is best known as the co-author (with Josh Seiden) of three influential books that have shaped modern product development practices. "Lean UX" (now in its third edition) began as a guide for designers working in agile environments but has evolved into a comprehensive framework for cross-functional collaboration and risk mitigation in product development. The book's core principle – moving from deliverables to outcomes – has influenced how thousands of teams approach their work.

Following "Lean UX," Jeff and Josh wrote "Sense and Respond," a book aimed at leaders and aspiring leaders. It makes the case that the overwhelming majority of businesses today are software businesses, and that managing software-based businesses requires fundamentally different approaches to team structure, management, and leadership. The book provides a roadmap for creating organisations where teams can actually practise the collaborative, customer-centric approaches described in "Lean UX."

Jeff's latest book, "Who Does What By How Much," represents the natural evolution of this work. After years of helping teams work better and leaders manage differently, Jeff and Josh identified that the real barrier to change was incentives and goals. Teams kept saying, "That's great, Jeff, but I get paid to ship features." This book tackles that problem head-on, showing how to use objectives and key results (OKRs) to create customer-centric goals that align with – rather than undermine – modern ways of working.

Beyond his books, Jeff has also authored "Forever Employable" and "Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking," and he regularly speaks at conferences and consults with organisations on product strategy, team effectiveness, and organisational transformation. His approach is characteristically practical and rooted in real-world experience, making complex concepts accessible through clear frameworks and relatable examples.

Jeff's work continues to evolve as he helps organisations navigate the challenges of building products that customers actually want and need, whilst creating work environments where teams can thrive.

Transcript

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Why Write Another Book? The Journey from Lean UX to OKRs

Mat Lawrence: Well, Jeff, welcome. I'm Mat Lawrence for our audience. I'm COO at Easy Agile, and today I'm talking with Jeff Gothelf, who is the renowned author, speaker, and consultant. You've written a good few books, Jeff. I've been looking through the list – Lean versus Agile versus Design Thinking, Forever Employable, and co-authored a few. The latest one being "Who Does What By How Much," and I was just telling Jeff in the intro here how you've managed to get across a lot of the things that I care about when trying to build teams and get them to understand OKRs. I've already given it to a few people and I'm definitely going to be giving it around. So, Jeff, welcome.

Jeff Gothelf: Thank you so much, Mat. That's very kind of you on all of that stuff. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

Mat: I'd love to cover a little bit around the book and the concept you're trying to get across. So I suppose the first question I have is what problem are you hoping to solve with the book? Why did you write it?

Jeff: It's really interesting. I wrote a blog post about this a while back because somebody challenged me on LinkedIn – and I appreciate a good challenge. They said, "How can you write about all this stuff? There's no way you know enough about each one of these topics to write a book. You're spreading yourself way too thin."

I thought that was a really interesting challenge. No one had ever asked that question, and it got me thinking. The answer that I came up with is that this book, "Who Does What By How Much," and it's a conversation about customer-centric objectives and key results, is the natural evolution of the work that Josh Seiden and I have been doing together for more than 15 years.

"We started with Lean UX, and Lean UX was a solution for designers helping them work more effectively in agile software development environments. The response to that book was, 'That's great, Jeff and Josh. We'd love to work this way. My company won't let me work this way.'"

So we wrote "Sense and Respond," which was a book for leaders and aspiring leaders to inspire them to manage differently, to recognise that the overwhelming majority of businesses today are software businesses, and that managing software-based businesses is different.

As we began to work with that material and talk about that, we kept bumping up against the same ceiling, and that ceiling was incentives and goals. No matter how hard we tried to convince people to be customer-centric, to learn continuously, to improve continuously, to work in short cycles, they said, "That's great, Jeff. But I get paid to ship features."

The goal, the measure of success, was shipped – preferably on time and on budget. That's what got celebrated and rewarded, incentivised and promoted. It was in the job descriptions and all that stuff. So it felt like we were really fighting a losing battle.

Objectives and key results has been gaining momentum for the last decade or so. To us, that felt like the perfect Trojan horse – and I know Trojan horse has a negative connotation, but I don't think of it in this case as a negative thing. It was the perfect way to have a conversation about goals in a customer-centric fashion that, if applied in the way that we describe in the book, would enable everything else that we've done to happen more easily.

"What Will People Be Doing Differently?" – The Question That Changes Everything

Mat: I love the evolution of it, Jeff. I've been working in tech now for about 15 years. Prior to that, I used to work in the arts and special effects, which in itself is a very agile industry where you're constantly building prototypes and figuring out what things need to do before they go on stage or be filmed.

When I entered into the tech world as an inexperienced founder and product developer, I was designing to solve problems, and I found the teams I was working with responded really well to that. "What are we trying to do? What are we trying to get here?" They used to give me feedback all the time on whether I was helping them see far enough ahead with the value we're actually trying to deliver.

When I joined Atlassian in 2014, when we were introducing OKRs there, I think we were facing a problem that you described really well in the book, which is around people focusing on shipping their to-do list. They have a backlog that is predefined, full of great ideas, and they really want to get it out the door. Trying to change that conversation to be around "how do we know if this is any good?" – the answer was we just don't know.

I'd love to touch on how have you guided teams to move from that more traditional output-based metrics and shipping into that outcome approach? Maybe you could give an example of where that shift has led to some significant success.

Jeff: Sure. The title of the book is "Who Does What By How Much?" Overwhelmingly, the teams that we've worked on and with over the years have focused on delivering output, making stuff. The question that we tried to get them to understand is: if you do a great job – let's say when – when you do a great job with this feature, how will you know? What will people be doing differently?

That's the question that starts the mindset shift from outputs to outcomes. Outcomes, the way that we describe them, is a meaningful change in human behaviour that drives business results. The human that we're talking about is the human that consumes the thing that you create.

"The question is how will you know you delivered value to that human? Traditionally, it's been like, 'Well, we made the thing for them. There it is.' We made the Sharpie. Terrific. Did anybody need a Sharpie? Anybody looking for a Sharpie? How do we know? What are people doing now that the Sharpie is out there?"

The mindset shift starts with that question. Even in an organisation that just doesn't get this yet, it's a really safe question. I think it's a safe question to say, "Okay, we're gonna build the thing. What do we expect people to be doing differently once we ship this thing?" And when I say people, let's get specific about who. Which people? Who?

This is the evolution of the book title and how we teach this stuff. So what would people be doing differently before we start? Which people? Who? Okay, it's accountants in large accounting firms. Great. When we ship this new system to them, what are they gonna be doing differently than they're doing today? Well, they'll be entering their data more successfully and finishing their work in half the time.

Terrific. What are they doing? Who does what? And how much of that do we need to see to tell us that this was actually valuable? Well, today they're seeing at least a 30% error rate in data entry. Okay, great. What's meaningful? What's a meaningful improvement? If we cut that in half, that's a meaningful improvement. By how much?

All of a sudden, we've constructed the success criteria that has moved the team away from "we're building a thing" to "accountants in large accounting firms reduce their data entry errors by 50%." Who does what by how much. That begins the mindset shift in that conversation in a safe way because we're not saying let's set new goals, let's rewrite our incentives. We're just saying, "Look, I'm just asking a question."

Then once we start to build stuff, and especially once we start to ship stuff, you remember that conversation we had three months ago? We talked about who does what by how much. Is it happening? Do we know? Can we find out? And if it isn't, let's figure it out.

The Non-Profit That Changed Their Approach - From One Million Buses to Ten Iterations

Jeff: I'll give you an example. There was an organisation I worked with – I really loved working with them. They were a non-profit organisation that was looking to address major diseases in the developing world. They had three or four very specific diseases that they were targeting in very specific locations around the world, and I was thrilled to be working with them and helping them.

They managed everything with a task list. They were like, "We're gonna create this campaign and we're gonna put it on buses in China." And I was like, "Okay. How do you know that? So what? If the campaign works, what will people be doing differently?"

"Well, they'll scan the QR code that's on the bus."

"Okay, alright. And then what?"

"They'll sign up for an appointment to get a cardiovascular check."

"And then what?"

"For those who need actual care, they'll sign up for care."

"All of a sudden, we've taken 'put an ad campaign on a bus' to 'who does what by how much.' When we started to think about it that way, they fundamentally were rethinking the level of effort."

Because you might imagine, it was going to be one million buses and hope that it works. Instead, they decided, "Hey, we're gonna do 100 of these in one locality, and we're gonna give it a week, and we're gonna not only see what happens, but find out if people saw the ad, if it speaks to them, if they understood what it said. Then based on that learning, we're gonna iterate on the campaign."

So instead of getting one giant shot at this advertising campaign to drive people to take better care of themselves, now they're gonna get ten iterations. I think that was massively impactful in helping that organisation do better work and help more people.

Mat: I love how you're bringing that back to the experimental and iterative approach that people so often want but really struggle to get to. I've seen so many occasions where OKRs end up describing something that takes three, four, five months to build and ship, and they're only trying to measure the big outcome at the end, whereas what you're talking about there is breaking it down, making it far more iterative and experimental.

Jeff: Reducing your risk. Imagine this organisation had, let's say, £100,000 for this campaign. Traditionally, they would spend that whole hundred grand and hope. The reality is there's no need to do that. They could spend 10 and learn and do a better job with the next 10 and a better job with the next 10, and if they've de-risked it enough, take the last 50 and dump it on the thing that you've actually validated.

It's a de-risking strategy as well. You're increasing the value you're delivering and reducing the risk of spending money on stuff that isn't gonna work. Feels like a no-brainer, doesn't it?

The Reverse Five Whys - Asking "So What?" to Find Your Outcome

Mat: You make it sound like everyone should be doing it, which I agree with. There was something that you did in the middle of that conversation which I really like, and it's kind of like the opposite of the five whys. You know, where you see the problem and you ask why, why, why and you go back to the root cause. Whereas you took that in the other direction there.

Jeff: Right. We were moving forward in time for the desired outcome.

Mat: Yeah, exactly. You said, "Okay, you want to put this thing on a bus. So what?" And you took that three or four steps forward to get to that ultimate outcome. I love that, and that's probably a tactical, practical approach that our audience can take.

I think some of the stuff that I've struggled with over the years is getting teams who are new to OKRs to understand how to move from writing their to-do list, writing their backlog, turning that into their key results, and actually getting it into the outcome base. I think that's one of the things that a lot of teams find hardest to grasp.

Jeff: And as I kicked off with, if your entire career you've been rewarded for shipping and producing and ticking off a to-do list, then it's really hard to break away from that without some form of leadership buy-in. That's coming back to that incentives and performance management criteria side of things. That's really hard because that's what people optimise for.

We can preach outcome-based work until we're blue in the face, as they say in America at least. But if you're paid to ship product, you're gonna optimise in most cases for what gets you paid. That's an important component of this that I think gets ignored a lot.

Two Audiences, Two Approaches - What Should Teams and Leaders Do Differently?

Mat: Let's talk practically around this. We're probably going to have different people listening to this. We could probably give two bits of advice. One is somebody who's in a team and they really want to try this, or maybe they've been trying this and struggling because the incentives don't match. The other group may be someone who's in leadership who is trying to change their organisation to move into this more outcome-based approach. What advice would you give to each of those people?

Jeff: Great question. Let's start with the folks trying to make this happen initially. In my opinion, one of the easiest ways to move this conversation forward in your organisation is to ask that question I mentioned: What will people be doing differently when we ship this?

Have that conversation. Position it any way you'd like, word it any way you'd like. But ultimately, you're not challenging the work. You're not saying "I'm not gonna do the work." You're not pushing back yet.

"All you're saying is, 'Look, we're gonna build this thing, and we're gonna do a great job. What do we hope people will do with this once we have it out there? What are we trying to see? Are we trying to see them increase average order value? Do we want them to abandon their shopping carts less? Are we trying to get them to sign up for a medical check-up at least once a year?'"

That starts it. That starts getting people to think about more than just "I am making a thing."

Mat: If you took that to leadership and said, "Yeah, we're gonna get this stuff out the door, but I want to check with you that you're happy that this is the outcome we're trying to get to, that this is the result if we get it right."

Jeff: I think that's great, and I think that you should come back to them after you ship and say, "Look, remember we met three, six, nine months ago and I said we're building this and we're hoping people will do this? Well, we built it as designed, on time, on budget, and so far we're not seeing the results that we anticipated. We talked to some customers, and here's why we think that is. What we'd like to do next..."

To me, that should be a safe conversation inside your organisation.

Mat: I can imagine people listening to this and getting some cold sweats at the concept of going to someone and saying, "I did everything that you expected from me, but it wasn't good enough."

Jeff: It's not that. What tends to happen in these situations is a lot of upfront planning and commitments, and then we execute. Regardless of all the work that people have done to convince people that there are better ways of working, that's generally speaking how people are doing work still. We did the thing, and guess what? It didn't work. It didn't work as we had hoped. It's not because we built it poorly. It works as designed. We did usability testing on it. People can use it, they can get through the workflow.

What we think is it's not solving a meaningful problem, or we decided to put it somewhere in the workflow that didn't make sense, or whatever the case is. I understand it's not a risk-free conversation. I'm not encouraging people to do things that are career-limiting per se, but at some point we've got to talk about this kind of stuff. Otherwise, we're just a factory. I don't think anybody wants to work in a factory.

It's Not About the Quality of Your Code, It's About Learning

Mat: I couldn't agree more, and I think that the heart of what I spend a lot of my time doing is helping people understand how to get the benefits out of being agile, that agility piece. What we've been discussing there is that key part of learning. You can plan and you can build, you can have alignment on those things, you can improve how you're building all the time and reach quality standards and pass usability testing. But ultimately, if you don't learn, you're never gonna get the insight that you need to adapt what you do next.

"Where a lot of people fall down with agility is they go through all of the motions up to that point, and then through fear, self-preservation, or they've just not seen anybody else around them do it before, they hesitate to say, 'This thing that we've all invested all this time and effort into isn't working as expected.' It does take some courage to do that."

Jeff: It does. I agree. But it's an evidence-based conversation. It's not "we did a crap job." We didn't. It's bug-free, it's high performance, it's scalable, it's usable. But you can build products like that – there are infinite stories of products that were amazingly executed that didn't meet a need, didn't solve a problem.

Mat: Yeah, I built one of those and had to close a business for it, so I know that all too well. If there's a lesson I learned through the years of doing that, which you touched on earlier, it's around by focusing on the outcomes that you want to see, those behaviours you want to change, and bringing the work down, de-scoping the work to start to experiment and iterate, you de-risk all of that. You'll learn a lot earlier whether you're on the right track or not rather than getting that big bang at the end.

Jeff: Yeah. Again, you're reducing the risk of building something that people don't want. Let's just use round numbers because they're easy. If you have a million-pound budget to build something – a new product, a new feature, a new service – and you spend 100 of that million and find out that this isn't the right thing to make, it's not a real problem, for whatever reason, you've just saved the company £900,000.

They should hoist you up on their shoulders and sing your praises, parade you around the halls. That's how it should be. You're a hero, and now we can take that £900 and do something that actually will deliver value with it.

If You're a Leader: Stop Asking "When Will It Be Ready?" and Start Asking "What Are You Learning?"

Mat: The second half of that question was around if you're a senior leader in an organisation and you want to move to an outcome-based approach, maybe you start with celebrating the people who are trying to do that and positively reinforcing it in that way. But what advice would you give that person?

Jeff: Absolutely. Celebrate anybody – literally hoist them up on your shoulders and parade them around the halls and say, "Look, this team tried this, figured out it wasn't going to work, and pivoted, and saved the company a million pounds." That should be a regular conversation and a regular thing that the company celebrates.

What's interesting is that you can find yourself on a team with resistant leadership, and you can also find yourself in leadership with resistant teams. And for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that they've never actually been allowed to work this way and don't believe you that you're gonna let them work this way.

"Without getting caught up in too much process or training or dogma, I think as a leader you start to soften the conversations around this stuff by changing the questions that you ask."

Normally, it's like, "Hey, what are you guys working on? When will it be ready? How much is it gonna cost me? What do you predict the ROI is gonna be?" That's a typical line of questioning for a product team.

Conversely, you can say, "Hey, folks. What are you learning this week? This sprint? This quarter? What did you learn?" You might get a bunch of blank stares initially. They'll say, "What do you mean, what did we learn? We're building what you told us to build."

"Okay, well, cool. Next quarter when we meet, I'd love for you folks – I'm gonna ask you this question again. What did you learn this quarter about the product, about the customer, about the value of the thing that we're delivering? If you don't know how to answer those questions, I can help. I can get training for you. I can get some folks who've done this in other parts of the company to show you how they're doing this work."

To me, you're not enforcing. One of the issues of organisations just mashing process on top of organisations is folks don't understand why. Why are we doing this, and how is this supposed to make anything better? One of the ways to ease folks into a different way of working is to change your expectations of them and make that clear to them.

Instead of saying "What are you building? When will it be ready? What's the ROI?" say "What are you learning? Are we doing the right thing? How will we know?" And then if they don't know how to get the answers to that, don't make them feel stupid. Say, "Look, I'm gonna help you with that. I'll show you how the other teams are doing it. I'll get you some training. We'll work on this."

That's super powerful because you're changing the expectations that you have for your team, and you're making it explicit to them.

Navigating Conflicting Forces - Outcomes vs. Predictability

Mat: I've got this image in my head of people in a large organisation where they're on this journey that you've described with their team. Maybe they're a leader somewhere in the middle of the organisation, working with multiple teams, and they're starting to see some progress. The teams are on board, they trust that the questions you're asking are genuine and authentic, and they really want to understand the outcomes.

They're starting to come back with great questions themselves around who does what, what's the behaviour we're trying to change, how are we trying to change it, are we successfully doing that or not. Whilst that starts to get some traction and momentum, at the same time this leader's got other people in the organisation – maybe some more traditional executives who are getting investors on their boards asking for their KPIs to be met and the efficiency and the predictability they expect so they can forecast.

They have jobs to do themselves, and they seek some predictability. How do you help guide that person to navigate those two conflicting forces?

Jeff: It's hard. I've seen it multiple times. I think there are a couple of ways to navigate those political challenges in an organisation. One is you have to model the behaviour that you want to see both in your teams and in your colleagues as well.

Every interaction that you have with your peers at leadership level should contain these types of conversations around the customer, around learning, around value, around risk mitigation, and continuing to model the behaviour you want to see.

Someone says, "Well, we just have to build the iPhone app."

"Okay, great. But why? Why do we have to build the iPhone app?"

"Because we have to increase mobile revenue."

"Why? What is it today? What are we hoping to get?"

The Power of Renaming Teams

There's a super simple trick I wrote about probably a decade ago. If you're in a leadership position to get the organisation to start to think differently about how to do work, it's simply changing the names of the teams.

For example, let's say you and I work on the iPhone app team. What's our mission? Build an iPhone app. Exactly. So that's the iPhone app team, and that's the CRM team and that's the Android app team, whatever.

"What if we change the name of that team? Same team, same people. But it's the mobile revenue team. All of a sudden, the purpose of the team has fundamentally changed. It's no longer 'build iPhone app.' It's 'increase revenue through the mobile channel.'"

That might be an iPhone app, might be an Android app, might be a better website, might be a million different things. But from a leadership perspective, one of the things that you can influence is the name of these teams, and how you name them determines what work they do. That's really powerful.

Prove the Model

The other thing that you can do as a leader is prove the model. There's a lot of "my idea is better than your idea" type of conversations at work. Instead of saying, "I think we should work this way," say, "Look, I've got a pilot team in my group that's been doing this for the last three months. Here's what the team looks like. Here's the work that they're doing. Here's how they work. Here's what they're producing. Here's their happiness score. Here's their productivity. Here's their efficiency. Here's the impact of the work that they're doing with the customer."

If you've got one or two of those teams working that way, that's a compelling argument for saying, "Look, let's give it a shot." You've got the evidence that says this is a better way of working. Proving the model is always a good way to go.

Team Autonomy and Empowerment

Mat: One of the things that I'm picking up on in what you're saying leads to an outcome within teams that I've seen – around autonomy and empowerment within teams. Something I'm always trying to do in my role in organisations is make myself redundant. If the team don't need me anymore, I've done my job.

I'm at work where I've been very clear with the rest of the leadership team: I'm getting involved in way too many decisions, and I need to remove myself from those decisions because I'm slowing us down. If I have to have all of the context to be able to get involved with that and help move us forward, then we're gonna go slower than we should.

We're very quickly removing me from decisions, and it's been a great journey. Terrifying for me because I don't know as much about what's going on. But I'm seeing the teams themselves equipped with questions like "who does what by how much?" – that's one tool around the OKRs. Also equipped with other tools and ways of working, and usually it comes down to: are they asking the right questions? Are they applying the level of critical thinking to achieve those outcomes?

"Ultimately, if we can get teams to be more autonomous, leaders have a much better time of scaling themselves without burnout, without having to get really drawn in. When teams make decisions when you're not in the room that are fighting to achieve the outcome that you also want to achieve, that's when you really start to move quicker. That's when you start to really see the benefits of agility."

Have you got any thoughts on that that you'd like to share?

Jeff: It's a really tough sell. I see it all the time because I think that leaders have defined themselves – I don't want to speak in absolutes, so the majority of leaders have defined themselves in a way that says, "I tell people what to do." That's my job.

If you ask any kid – 10 years old, 12 years old, 9 years old – "What's a boss?" they'll say "A boss is someone who tells people what to do." I think we grow up with that, and I think leadership canon for the last hundred years has roughly said that, with the exception of the last 20 to 30 years where we've seen a lot of agile-themed, agility-themed leadership books and materials come out.

Still, I think the overwhelming majority of people believe that it's their job when they're in a leadership role to tell their teams what to do and to be keenly aware of every little detail. Because what if my boss comes to me and says, "Hey, what are your teams doing?" If the answer is "I don't know," that's probably a bad answer.

I agree with you. Day-to-day decision stuff – who better to make that decision than the teams doing the work day to day? They know far more about it than I do. They're with the work every day, they're with the customer every day, they're getting the feedback.

There's no reason for you to run these tiny things past the leader every day. It's exhausting for the leader, as you said, and the team knows more about it. Big strategic shifts, invalidated hypotheses, radical shifts in the market, new competitive threats – absolutely, let's talk about that.

The Two-Way Solution

I think there's a two-way solution here. Number one, leaders need to let go a little bit and understand that the most qualified people to make decisions about the day-to-day trivial stuff are the team doing the work.

David Marquet said this in "Turn the Ship Around." He ran the worst-performing nuclear submarine crew in the American Navy and turned it around to the best-performing crew. Basically, what he said was he pushed decision-making down as close to the work as possible. The only decision he kept for himself was whether or not to launch a nuclear missile, because people are gonna die and he didn't want that on anybody. That's his job as the leader.

Same thing here. You're gonna push decisions all the way down, and we've got to get folks to think about that.

Demand Proactive Transparency

To make that easier for people to swallow, people who are not used to this way of working, I think we have to demand greater proactive transparency from the teams.

Teams love to play the victim. "They don't let me work this way. My boss won't let me work this way. My boss doesn't get agility, doesn't get customer-centricity. She just comes down here and yells at us."

"What if on a weekly basis, without being asked for it, you sent your leader three bullet points in an email every week? Here's what we did this week. Here's what we learned. Here's what we're planning on doing next week."

If there's anything significant, you're gonna put that in there as well. But otherwise, just those three things. You're not even asking for a response. Weekly update, three bullet points, 15 minutes max of effort on your part.

In my opinion and in my experience, what happens is leaders chill out. Because all of a sudden they know what's going on. They see that you're doing work, that you're making objective decisions, and that you're taking the time to keep them informed. When their boss comes to them and says, "Hey, what are your teams doing?" they can just look at that email and be like, "This is what Mat's team is doing, this is what Jeff's team is doing."

To me, if there's a role here – and it's not an insignificant one – for the teams to play to improve their ways of working or to improve the comfort level that leaders have with new ways of working, this is it.

Mat: I have had the privilege of being someone on the recipient of those equivalent three-bullet-point emails running 12 different product teams, trying to understand what was going on. You're right – the stress levels go down when you understand proactively what's going on. It became the first thing I would do on a Monday morning knowing I had all that information.

It was something that teams were doing as part of their own weekly reviews as a team, and they just captured it and shared it. So there's no extra work for them. But it made this huge difference of suddenly I could understand where did I need to actually spend my time to help, rather than trying to chase and get information or get too close into managing people who didn't need it because they had it in hand.

I was able to prioritise and think, "Oh, that team looks like they're struggling, so we're gonna go and ask them some questions, see how I can remove some blockers for them."

Jeff: And if there is a blocker, add it in there. "We've been trying for three months to get access to customers. The sales team keeps blocking us. Can really use your help here."

The Shift from Being Rewarded for Knowing to Being Rewarded for Learning

Mat: There's a thing I've observed over the years – it takes a while to get there before you actually start getting rewarded for it in most organisations. In forward-thinking, very agile organisations, it starts a lot earlier, and I think that's something I'd like to try and shift left, try and get it earlier in people's careers.

It's this shift between: spend your entire career being rewarded for being knowledgeable, for being the expert, and knowing how to do something. You get promoted for that, you'll get a bonus for that, you'll get rewarded for it time after time. The more you learn, the more capable you become, the more experienced you are, you've got the answers for everything, you get promoted. You work your way up the career ladder.

Then you hit this tipping point where you hit a level where you realise there aren't many people around you at that point who are seeing the problems. Everyone's busy, everyone's focused on their thing. Then you realise that actually it's your job to call out that this thing isn't working. It becomes your responsibility to say, "There's a problem here we need to address as a company, as an organisation."

As an exec – Nick Muldoon is our CEO – we have an exec weekly, and the majority of that conversation is each of us saying what we don't understand, what we don't know, what we haven't figured out yet. We trust each other that all the rest of it's in hand and working beautifully. The things we really want to talk about is what don't we understand and what are we learning or what are we seeing that we need to try and figure out what to do with.

I see people struggle with that transition if they've not started it earlier in their career. Going back to the basics around sharing the learnings and are we actually achieving what we wanted to, are we seeing the behaviour shift, are we seeing it measured – if we're saying no, having the freedom to be able to call that out earlier, I think it makes that transition in life a lot more straightforward.

Jeff: Look, there's a level of seniority, and the subtheme here that we are dancing around but haven't yet named is psychological safety. It's this feeling that I'm comfortable calling things out that are against the grain, that contradict the plan, that are not working, and I keep seeing and nobody's addressing.

"I think there's a level of seniority that brings some psychological safety. But ultimately, organisational culture has to make it safe."

In other words, if leaders like you and your leadership team are consistently curious – "What do we not know? What are we not aware of? What's not working?" – your teams are going to feel comfortable calling those things out to you because you're asking those questions.

When they change the questions that they ask, it models psychological safety. It models the kinds of questions they want their teams to ask, and that's how change starts.

Building Psychological Safety - "If You Don't Know How, I'll Help You"

Mat: I couldn't agree more, Jeff. I think we've covered a lot of ground today, and psychological safety is one of those really hard intangible things for some people, particularly if they've never experienced it. We see it when we get new people joining our team. We're in a privileged environment where we have a lot of psychological safety.

When new people join from organisations that haven't had that, their behaviour is almost fighting against it. They hold on to their protected ways of working where they get a little bit territorial and they don't want to be vulnerable. It can take a good few months for people to settle in and relax into it.

There was a piece that I want to go back to, and maybe we wrap up on this. You talked earlier around a leader talking to their team and asking them questions to help them understand that it's okay to come back and say, "This thing that we've been developing, this product that we've been getting out the door, isn't having the desired impact." To look at it, question it, be curious, and come back to it.

The thing that you touched on there which I really love was that supportive nature of it. It's okay to do this, and if you don't know how to do it, I'll help you. If you were to give one last tip to our audience – how would you encourage people, leaders specifically, to move more into that space?

Jeff: I think it's a question of asking the right questions. I've been married a long time – half my life, it turns out. I did the maths the other day. If I've learned nothing in my 20-plus years of being married, I've learned that you don't start out immediately solving the problem. You listen and you ask questions. I've learned that. It took a long time.

I think that's our nature as leaders as well. The tendency is "let me solve that for you." Well, hang on. Before you jump to solutions, dig into the problem. What's the issue here? What's the problem? How can I best help you?

"Well, listen, we've set these customer-centric goals now. We've got great OKRs. Thanks for teaching us how to do that. Normally though, we're told what to do, and no one's telling us what to do now, and we don't know what to do. We have no idea how to figure that out. In the past, people have told us. Now I don't know what to do. Can you help us? How do we figure that out?"

To me, those are the kinds of answers you want to elicit from your teams. What's actually going on here?

This is where five whys comes in. "Well, you know, we keep hearing that we should be talking to customers. The reality is it's really difficult to get to our customers."

"Why is it difficult?"

"Well, because we're in a B2B space and we sell aeroplane engines."

"Okay, great. And why does that make it difficult to reach customers?"

"Well, because we have a sales team."

"Why does that make it difficult?"

"Well, because they guard their contacts and they don't want us messing with it."

"Okay, now I understand."

"I think if it's about asking the right questions as a leader, and then when you get to the root cause, you say, 'Well, listen, I can try to unblock it in this way. Do you think that would be helpful? Yes or no?' That becomes far more of a partnership than a hierarchical relationship."

Then you trust me to be honest with you about how well things are working and where things need help, and that's tremendous.

I run a very, very tiny business in the sense of number of people – it's three and a half people total. Even in a three-and-a-half-person business, people try to do good work and people don't want to bother you with what's going on. Sometimes people get overwhelmed, whether it's with work or personal stuff or a combination of the two, and then things start to slip.

The more you can foster that kind of transparency and trust, psychological safety, the less you find out that something is broken with the consequences of it being broken. You find out well in advance of anything actually happening.

Mat: I love that, Jeff. I think that's a great place to wrap up. I'm really grateful for your time, really enjoyed the conversation, and thank you for sharing your wisdom.

Jeff: My pleasure, Mat. Thanks so much for having me. This was fun.

---

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Thank you to Jeff Gothelf for joining us on this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. To learn more about Jeff's work and get your copy of "Who Does What By How Much," visit jeffgothelf.com. You can also find his other books, including "Lean UX" and "Sense and Respond," which provide the foundation for the customer-centric approach to OKRs discussed in this episode.

‍

Subscribe to the Easy Agile Podcast on your favourite platform, and join us for more conversations about agile, product development, and building better teams.

"From beer analogies, to scrum in restaurants and neurodiverse teams, it's always a pleasure chatting with Kit"

Kit talks to agile methodology beyond the usual use case, like working with geologists & restaurant owners to apply scrum.

Kit also highlights the need to focus on a bottom-up approach, providing a safe space for leaders to learn & ask questions, and whether neurodiverse teams are key to effectiveness.

This was a really interesting conversation!

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

Transcript

Nick Muldoon:

G'day folks. My name's Nick Muldoon. I'm the Co Founder and Co CEO of Easy Agile, and I'm delighted to be joined today by Kit Friend from Accenture. Kit is an agile coach at Accenture and he's also the Atlassian Practice Lead there. Kit, good morning.

Kit Friend:

Morning, Nick. Sadly only the Practice Lead for a bit of things, but I try my best. It's a pleasure to be with you, for the second time we've tried this week as well, in the lovely world of broadband dependent remote working and things. But here's hoping, eh?

Nick Muldoon:

It's beautiful, isn't it? Now, for those of you at home listening in just so you've got a bit of context, Kit is a father to two, he lives in London, and he's been at Accenture now for a little over 10 years, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, September, 2010. Fortunately I met my wife in pretty much the same summer, so I only have to remember one year, and I can remember one by the other. So it helps when I'm trying to remember dates, and sort things through because I'm not very good with my memory, to be honest with you.

Nick Muldoon:

Oh well. So for me, the reason to get you on today, I'm super excited to hear about the journey that you've been on in Accenture, and I guess the journey that you're on with your clients, and on these various engagements. Before we dive into that though, I wanted to know, can you just tell me what is one of your favorite bands from the '90s, from the early '90s?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, and I really enjoy that we had a delay between things, because it's like one of those questions, because I'm like, "Hmm." And I think I'm a victim of playlist culture, where it's like naming an entire band feels like a real commitment. It's all about tracks now with things, right? But I have narrowed it down to two for my favorite 90s band and I think I'm going to commit afterwards. So my undisputed favorite 90s track, Common People by Pulp, right? Hands down, yeah, it's right up there. For me, I studied at St Martins, the Art College, so for me Common People is the karaoke track of my university days with things there. So Common People by Pulp, favorite track.

Kit Friend:

For bands wise though, I was split between... Initially I went Britpop, I was like, "Cool, that feels like a happy place for me." Particularly at the moment in our weird dystopian society, I listen to Britpop and it's kind of happy. So Blur was right at the top for me for band commit of the 90s thing then. But then I remembered that Placebo is actually technically a 90s band, even though I did not listen to them as a 13 year old Kit and things. So I think Placebo edges it for me on favorite 90s band of things, just about. But I do have to admit, even though it's not my favorite 90s track, I do think Wonderwall is perhaps the best song ever written.

Nick Muldoon:

Oasis? Love it.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, for track wise. But for me particularly I was at Oktoberfest with some colleagues a couple of years ago and I don't think any other track could get 600 drunken Germans up on benches together with everyone else, all the way around from the world, with a rock polka band singing at the top of your voices at 11 o'clock at night or something. So yeah, that smorgasbord, but I'll commit to Placebo for favorite band in that weird caveated sentence.

Nick Muldoon:

I love it, thanks for that, Kit. And so it's interesting because you touched on then that you went to St Martins, which was an art college. So I'm interested to know, what did you study? What are your formal qualifications and then what led you into this world of Agile delivery and continuous improvement?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I mean to do the Twitter bio caveat that all the opinions are my own and not Accenture's before we go down the journey of things. Although it must be said I am trying to convert as many of my colleagues and clients to my way of thinking as possible. But so I studied St Martin or studied at St Martins College, so in the UK certainly, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but when you go and do an art and design degree they basically distrust your high school education. They're like, "Nah, everything you've done before is..."

Kit Friend:

So they make you take what's called, or they advise you to take what's called a foundation year where you try a bunch of stuff. So you come in thinking you're going to be a painter or a product designer or something, and they're like, "No, no, no. You haven't experienced the breadth of the creative industries and things." So I did one of those, which was amazing, and I came in thinking I was going to be a product designer. Ended up specializing in jewelry and silversmithing and things, so I made like... Yeah, sort of wearing long black trench coats and things, I was making gothy spiky armor and all sorts of things, and [inaudible 00:04:24] work with silver. So I do have a Professional Development Award in Welding from that year, so that was my first formal qualification on that. I'm a really bad welder though.

Kit Friend:

Then at the end of it I was like, "I don't really know what I want to do still." As you do as you go through university, so my formal degree title, adding to my trend of very long unpronounceable things, is, Ba Hons Art And Design And The Environment, Artifact Pathway, and what it was was... Your face is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, I'm trying to process that.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I think the course only existed for three years, it felt like a bit of an experiment, or it only existed in that format. So we had architecture students doing the first part of their architectural qualification, we had what were called spatial design students who were, I think, designing spaces. They weren't interior designers, they were a bit more engineery and then we had this weird pathway called Artifact, which was the rest of us and we weren't quite as strict as product designers, we weren't artists. We were making objects and experiences and things.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, it was a really interesting experience. I mean towards the end of it I began specializing more and more in designing ways for communities to come and build things and do stuff together, and it's a bit weird when you look backwards on things. You're like, "I can directly trace the path of the things I've done since to that sort of tendency [crosstalk 00:05:54] liking bringing people together."

Nick Muldoon:

So yeah, do you think that community building aspect was kind of a genesis for what you've been trying, the community around Agile transformation you've been developing over the past decade, or?

Kit Friend:

I don't know. It's easy to trace back to these things, isn't it? But I guess I've always-

Nick Muldoon:

You don't see it at the time.

Kit Friend:

... liked bringing people together to do things. No. It's a theory anyway, isn't it? An origin story theory as we go. So I did that and then I complained lots about my course, I was like, "This is rubbish. This is all really random and things." So I got elected as a Student Union Officer, so I don't know how it works in Australia but in the UK you can be elected as a full time student politician effectively, and you can do it... You take sabbatical either during your course or at the end of your course where it's not really a sabbatical. So I was the Student Union, served full time for two years after I finished my degree, which is a bizarre but educational experience.

Kit Friend:

Again, it's about organizing people, like helping fix problems and having to be very nimble with... You don't know what's happening the next week, you're going to protest against unfair pay or you're going to have someone who's got their degree in trouble because of their personal circumstances and things, so it's a really interesting mix. So yeah, that's where I started my journey into things.

Nick Muldoon:

So it's interesting for me, because you talk about this, the early piece of that is, "We don't trust anything that you've learnt prior to this and we're going to give you a bit of a smorgasbord and a taste of many different aspects." How does that relate to an Agile transformation? Because I feel like we went through a decade there where an Agile transformation was literally, "Here's Scrum, do two weeks Scrum, story point estimates, no rollover. If you rollover we slap you on the wrists."

Nick Muldoon:

There probably, 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of experimentation with different approaches to delivery. It was just, "We're going from this Waterfall approach to this Agile approach." Which back then was very commonly Scrum. Why don't we give people the smorgasbord and why don't we give them three month rotations where they can try a bit of Scrum and a bit of Kanban and different approaches?

Kit Friend:

Well, I guess it's practicality, isn't it? These things. It's a challenge, and it's a challenge, it works within a contained place. I teach a lot of our product container courses for our clients and we always use the David Marquet video of Greatness Summary. What's great about the David Marquet situation, he's got this Petri dish, right? Literally a submarine, aint no one interfering with his submarine crew. So he can do that, he can go, "Well, let's try this thing." I vastly oversimplify because it's an amazing story, right?

Kit Friend:

But you've got that space to do something and try something out, and actually when we do talk to clients and colleagues alike about Agile transformations, I think one of the things that I say consistently in terms of the role of leadership is they do need to create a safe space, a little place where they protect and they're like, "In this space we're doing Agile, we can experiment, we can do these things. Leave my guys alone. Trust me within that."

Kit Friend:

I think where I see Agile going well, it is where there is a bit of that safe space protected to do things. I've got colleagues who work in companies where they go like, "Okay, we're going to try now and all we're going to ask you to do is forecast your next week's volume of stories. Everything else is up to you, you can choose to apply Scrum, you can use Crystal, DSDM, whatever it is. All you have to do for us as a company is give us a high level view of these metrics or something." So there's flexibility. I think when I think about your journey as an Agilist and trying to do things though, people saying try a bit of everything, it's lovely advice but it's a bit difficult to actually do because it's like we still need to make things, we still need to do stuff practically.

Kit Friend:

So when I talk to people who are starting off their journey or both clients and colleagues who are wanting to move through things like that, like what do they do first, I still say Scrum is a really good place to start because I think there's that quote from somewhere, it's probably in the Scrum Guide, about, "It's simple to understand but complex to get right." And you would think with complex and chaotic situations, right? But I think that-

Nick Muldoon:

And the discipline required is-

Kit Friend:

Yeah, yeah. But discipline's a good thing, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). But not everyone has it.

Kit Friend:

No. But one of my colleagues, Nick Wheeler, he uses the phrase, "Too many beanbags, not enough work done to talk about Chaotic Agile." I think you've got to have that focus on getting things done, right? Value delivery has got to be there, as well as it being a pleasant working atmosphere and balance. So it's about somewhere between the two, and I like Scrum because it gives people something too... It's a framework, right? It gives people something to hang off to start their journey, otherwise I feel like you could spend months debating whether you have an Agile master and what do they do? Where do we go? Do we have a person who holds the vision and things?

Kit Friend:

I think when people are starting off I always say, like, "Why not try Scrum? Why not see? Try it for a couple of sprints and see what works for you and then see what comes out in the wash." I mean if they're in an area where there's some fundamental contradictions, like, "Yeah, I'm not going to force sprints on a call center, right? It doesn't make sense." I was talking to someone yesterday who works on a fraud team, and it's like I'm not going to ask her how much fraud is going to be committed in two weeks time, or as part of MPI, right? It's absurd.

Kit Friend:

So in those circumstances, yeah, you start with Kanban methods and processes and practices instead. But for people who are building products, building things, I think the Scrum is a pretty good fit at the beginning. So yeah, that's my answer, so both. Why not have both is the answer to that, I guess, on the way. Yeah. It'd be interesting to see what other frameworks rear their heads. I mean I found the other day a scaled Agile framework called Camelot that involved lots of castles and things in the YouTube video. I thought that was marvelous. But there's room for a lot of planning and thinking.

Nick Muldoon:

As soon as you saw Camelot, for some reason my mind goes to Monty Python. I don't know quite why. But what's this flavor of scaled Agile called Camelot? Can you tell me about it? Because I'm not familiar with it.

Kit Friend:

I've seen one YouTube video on it, Nick. For anyone Googling it, you can find it related to the X Scale Alliance. I think it's a picture of the Monty Python Camelot on the front page.

Nick Muldoon:

Is it actually?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure weird things. And you know what it's like with techy geeks, right? There's a lot of embedded Hitchhikers' Guide To The Galaxy and Monty Python references in component names and things. So I'd be unsurprised. What I like about something like the Camelot model, other than me thinking Monty Python and castles and things, is it does evoke something in people. I think when we're talking to people about Agile we do need to evoke a feeling with them. We need to get people going, "Oh yeah, I kind of get where you're going."

Kit Friend:

So I always like to do the cheesy uncapitalize the A, what does agile mean to you? Yeah, is it about being nimble? Is it about being flexible and that kind of thing?

Nick Muldoon:

I mean I'm conscious you've obviously done Lean Kanban in university, you've done Scrum Alliance Training and Certification, Prince2, Scaled Agile of course. Why do you do all these things? I mean is it curiosity? I mean is it there's an expectation from clients that you have these certifications? And would you go and get a certification in Camelot? Or even one that I was introduced to recently was Flight Level Agile, Flight Level Agility. Which is a different way of-

Kit Friend:

Ooh, another one?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, another one. A different way of describing. Actually I remember, bit of a sidebar sorry, but Craig Smith from... who was at the time I believe was working at Suncorp, an Australian bank. He did 46 Agile methods in 40 minutes or something like that, and he spent a minute and he introduced people to all of these different approaches.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, and methods versus frameworks and things is a fun one to draw the lines between. I mean I've been surprised actually how few times I've been asked for certifications around things. It's changing a bit more, and I've seen definitely more enthusiasm from our clients, and in fact I'm seeing new people within Accenture which is really nice, to require and encourage certification. I don't think it's necessary that the safe course then guarantees that you're going to scale Agile successfully, right? But it's a good way of demarking whether people have done their homework and have put some effort into [crosstalk 00:14:50] knowledge.

Nick Muldoon:

And they got the foundational baseline stuff.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Now in terms of your question around Brett, so my view is that if we try and attach the word coach to ourselves... I think I've seen country by country different trends, so when I look at my colleagues in the States there's a bit more codifying on the term Agile Coach. There's an attachment to ICA Agile and Lisa Adkins work and all sorts of different things over there which is good. Certainly in the UK and Europe, I see it as a lot more varied at the moment and it's a term that's attached to a lot of people.

Kit Friend:

If you look at people, just anyone on LinkedIn with a CV title or little bio title Agile Coach, you can see a big variety of people who've been doing different Agile frameworks for like 20 years doing things, and you can see someone who's been a Scrum Master for three months and then switched jobs, and they'll have like Agile Enterprise Coach as their title. And you're like, "Hmm, how many people have you ever done Scrum with? And have you done anything but Scrum?" And my view is if 40-

Nick Muldoon:

But I mean Enterprise Agile Coach because I've done Scrum with my team of six people in a-

Kit Friend:

In an Enterprise, right?

Nick Muldoon:

In Enterprise.

Kit Friend:

But my feeling is if all you can do to a team that you're coaching is offer one way of thinking and one approach to doing stuff, how are you coaching them then? There's no breadth to what you're able to offer. But if all you've experienced is Scrum and then you get landed with a team doing fraud investigation, how are you going to guide them on a path which doesn't include sprints and those things? I mean you might do, because you're going to take things from Scrum that become sensible, but you need that spectrum.

Nick Muldoon:

Give us a sense, Kit, what is the most quirky, or unusual perhaps is a better way to frame it, what is the most unusual team that you have introduced to Agile practices and Lean principles?

Kit Friend:

So I've got to embarrass my colleague Giles, because mine is not the most interesting. So Giles was looking at introducing Scrum to geologists for site surveying and things, which I love as an example to talk about because it's so-

Nick Muldoon:

Wow. Yeah.

Kit Friend:

When you unpack it's so interesting to think about what that would mean, and I need to catch up with him to see how far through they got actually applying it. But because it's like, "Why would you do that?" And then it's like, "Ooh, actually, they probably have a really big area to survey. Wouldn't it better to introduce some feedback loops and look at how you slice down that problem to get some value and learning delivery out of things?"

Nick Muldoon:

That's interesting.

Kit Friend:

So I really, really like that. Yeah. Then I always reference when we're teaching, there's a restaurant called Ricardo's in London that I have to make sure it's not gone out of business. I think it's still in business, but-

Nick Muldoon:

Well, I thought it-

Kit Friend:

Well, COVID, right? I think he's their owner, Ricardo. At least he's the person that's inspired their name. He applied Scrum and it's beautiful, looking at the exercises they went through when they put it in place. And on his website, which I'll ping you the URL for the show notes, but they do this cross functional teaming thing where they got all the staff at the restaurant to look at the role types that they needed, and then their availability and things. They were like, "Only this one guy can do the bar. Maybe we should up skill some other people to be able to work on the bar?" And I love that thinking of applying those elements of stuff.

Kit Friend:

So back to your question though of where have I applied unusual things to my teams, I haven't done any really quirky ones, to be honest with you. I mean I think having a background in art and design I find it... When I talk about iteration and all those areas, my mind immediately goes back to projects where we made things and did stuff and have it there, and particularly when people get panicked in a business situation I think back to... I used to freelance doing special effects with my dad whilst I was at university, because it's a great way to make cash for things. My dad worked for the BBC and freelance. I think about that immediacy and panic when I'm talking about Kanban and handling ops and incidents and things, and I'm like, "You guys don't need to panic, it's not like you're on live TV." And they have a countdown of three, two, one, right?

Kit Friend:

No one has that in our business. We panic sometimes when something falls over, but there's never that second by second delay. So I think the quirkiest places that I've applied Agile thinking are probably before my career in technology. They were in that kind of place where we're making creative things and doing stuff, and it's there where you're like, "You would never do a 400 line requirements document for a piece of product design or jewelry, right?" You would produce something rough and see what people think about it, and build things in so there's a balance there.

Kit Friend:

I mean when you're launching live products though, you do some strange things, right? And you have some fun memories from that. So I remember when we launched YouView in the UK, which is a public credential because it was for Accenture. Fine. But during launch day a colleague of mine, Ed Dannon and me, we became shop display people for the day so we were at the top of John Lewis in Oxford Street in London demonstrating the product, and that was a part of our Agile working for that week because that's what they needed. That was how we delivered value was physically being the people going like, "Hello, Mrs Goggins. Would you like to try this YouView box at the top of things?" So I remember those days fondly.

Nick Muldoon:

And so was that capture on a backlog somewhere, or?

Kit Friend:

Do you know what? YouView is where I was introduced to my love of dura, so I suspect, yeah, I don't think we did formally add a backlog somewhere. It would've been nice too, wouldn't it? I'd like to claim that my entire Accenture career could be constructed out of Dura tickets if I piled them one on top of each other for 10 years. Certainly about a 60%-

Nick Muldoon:

How many Dura tickets do you reckon you've resolved over the years?

Kit Friend:

God. How many have I duplicated is probably the question, right? Which is like 8,000. There's always duplicate of things. It's got to be in the thousands, hasn't it?

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me, you've, okay, over thousands of duplicates resolved. But you've been doing this for a while in the Atlassian space, and obviously with the Agile transformations at scale. How have these engagements at scale evolved over the past seven or eight years? And what do they look like in 2021 with this completely remote mode of operation?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Starting at the end of that, I see light, I see goodness in things. But I guess similar to how you expressed 15 years ago, 10 years ago everyone was like, "Do Scrum and have some story points and things." I think during that period, if we go back like 10 years ago, so we're like the early 2010s or whatever we call the teens in the decades, I think we see a lot of people experimenting with early versions of SAFE. They'll do wheel reinvention and people simultaneously going, "Let's have a big meeting where everyone plans together. How do we normalize story points? You shouldn't, maybe we should. How do we do metrics there?" And that kind of stuff.

Kit Friend:

So I think certainly what I've seen is a lot of people trying out those things as we go through, and then trying to weave together concepts like design thinking and customer centricity, and there are all these bits of stuff which feel good, but they weren't very connected in any way that was repeatable or methodical or codified. Then what I quite enjoy, and linking back to your last question, is then the branching of the approaches to things. You've got SAFE, which is laudably to everyone who works on that, right? They try and write down everything.

Kit Friend:

I always say this to everyone, you're like, "Thank goodness someone decided to go on that website and make everything clickable and everything." Because when you do need to reference one of those elements, it's a godsend being able to go and go, "Yes, here is the page that talks about Lean budgets. I might not agree with everything on it, but it's a really good starting point. It's a really good point of reference to have."

Kit Friend:

Then you've got the others, and I do use SAFE at one end of detail, and even if you're doing SAFE correctly you don't do it by the book and copy and paste, right? And that kind of thing. But there is a lot of detail and a lot of options there. At the other end of the scale you've got things like Less, where it's intentionally about descaling and it intentionally focused on simplicity. Look at the front pages of the website, and on the SAFE website you've got everything. On the Less website it looks like we've done it on a whiteboard, right? And that's intentional, both of them are intentional at the end of the scale. Then we've got Scrum on the scale, which seems to be the new, rising, kind of darling of things at the moment, and that was the other thing. So what I see now-

Nick Muldoon:

And they all have a place, don't they?

Kit Friend:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting that there's a large enough audience and market for all of these to succeed, and there's a lot of overlap between them in the various ideals and practices that they suggest that you experiment with.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I mean what I've seen in the past few years is that I think people often get laudably enthusiastic about the scaling bit. So they take a look at a word like Lean Portfolio Management or a business problem they have of how can I capacity manage? And they go straight to the scaling frameworks without stopping at the teams on the way, and that's definitely a tendency I hear more and more from friends, colleagues, geeky friends, colleagues, clients, right? They don't make that initial investment in getting the teams going well, whether it's Scrum or whether they're running in anything else.

Nick Muldoon:

Sorry. But hang on, are you saying then, Kit, that people are actually coming into a scaled Agile transformation and they haven't got the team maturity? Sorry, forgive me, but I felt I guess my belief and my understanding was that these scaled Agile transformations, for the most part, are building on top of existing successful team transformations.

Kit Friend:

I think that is how it should work right. We should be going bottom up, or at least to a certain extent. In the SAFE implementation roadmap it talks about reaching a tipping point and having... I mean you can start with Waterfall and the SAFE implementation roadmap, but it talks about ad hoc Agile and those things there. I think when people in large businesses and organizations come with a problem though, they're coming with a big problem and they want to fix that, and yeah, it's a difficult message to land, the, "Hi, you've got one to two to five years worth of getting your teams working before you can deploy the fancy portfolio management Kanban and see a flow of things right." Because people are nice. Most people are nice, most people are enthusiastic, most people want to fix things, and so they want to fix that big scaley thing.

Kit Friend:

But it's difficult to land, the, "No, you've got to fix these things at the bottom." I was describing to a colleague, Lucy, last week, and I said, "If you want an answer a question of how do I capacity manage and how do I balance demand across a large organization, you should imagine each of your..." Let's pretend they're Scrum teams without debasing it for a moment. Let's pretend your Scrum team is like a bar with a row of different glassware on it, and each time box is a different sized pint glass or a schooner or whatever you have. Now, my capacity management for a single team is me with a big jug of beer and I've got all the work that I want to do in that beer. My whole backlog of things. My capacity management for a team is pouring it in and hopefully I guess it right. I probably don't and I spill some beer in the first ones as we go through. But over time I'm trying to guess how much beer I can pour into each time box of things and we go through.

Kit Friend:

Now, the only way that I can know how much I can fit in in the future is if I see what I've got in the past, like how it went and can I predict the size of the glass, and over time I can, and we stabilize. So everything's a pint glass after a while, after we've experimented with everything there. Now, if we don't have that ability to forecast and measure, get the actual data back via some tooling at a team level, how can we manage across multiple teams? Right? You can't. You can't have a big top down roadmap where you're like, "Yeah, we want to launch the easy Agile bank across all these areas and go into the teams." Unless you have that team level maths that you can rely on.

Kit Friend:

It doesn't matter whether that's story points or whether you're doing no estimates stuff and you're just measuring flow or you're using Monte Carlo, whatever it is. You need some mathematical way of helping people understand the flow of work and what's happening there, and ideally tying it back to value with some data. Workout whether is your easy Agile bank actually a good idea or should we pivot and do something else? Yeah, is it delivering the thing that customers want when we've given them easy Agile bank beta at the beginning of things.

Nick Muldoon:

How good do you think clients are these days? So here's the thing, I guess, you talk about early transformations and it was, "Hey, we're going to go Scrum." But now there's the design thinking, I mean there's devops, there's DevSecOps, there's so many different aspects now that people are exploring and they're exploring at the same time. How do you help the client navigate this? Because they get it from every different angle from different aspects of the business, and in fact it's just got to be overwhelming, quite frankly.

Kit Friend:

Well, it's overwhelming for us trying to help right, right? People like yourselves, I mean you're like, "How do we cope with this weird specific configuration that they want to feed into easy Agile programs?" So I think that the light at the end of the tunnel that I referenced before is I see a lot more people coming with an ask of helping them get the bottom up things right, so they understand there's a pincer. We can't ignore-

Nick Muldoon:

Get the foundation.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. But we can't ignore that there's the big business, right? There's the people expecting big things and they've drunk the Agile Kool-Aid, they've read the article and they want to be there. So there is that top down pressure, but I am seeing more and more asking for advice and help to do things at the bottom. On a couple of areas recently, my current theory of the day, and I have a favorite theory every six months or so so this won't be the same later in the year, but I really, really like training the product owners first to help with that transformation. My current theory is that it's because they're like the battering ram to help the business understand what's happening with these delivery teams, and build the bridge and link between things and form that.

Kit Friend:

Because if you don't have the product owners being the conduit and the voice of the business and the customer and the voice of the team back to the business in doing things, I think the rest of it falls down. So my theory at the moment is that if you start by training the product owners that's the best way to begin things and it helps with the scaling body scaling, the focus on the team level to help do things.

Kit Friend:

To be honest, even if they're not doing Scrum, I think that the role of a product owner, relatively close to what the Scrum guy says, if we take out the sprint references and things, I think that's a sensible thing to have in every cross functional Agile team, regardless of what you're doing. And it's a distinct personality type, right?

Kit Friend:

I often talk when people are doing our Agile Foundations course, where we're like, "Here's everything. Find your place." I think that most people, or certainly most people I train, fall quite clearly into a product owner or a Scrum Master style personality type. I'd say about 80% you can tell, like, "You're a producty person. You're a Scrum Mastery type person. Or if you're not doing Scrum, a coach, a facilitator, a team builder." Maybe about 20% can flit between the two, and they're special people. The Unicorns as we have in every industry and type, but most people fit into one of those. I think it's good to think about how those personality types work in your business.

Kit Friend:

The other thing I love about training the product owners first, it really unveils upon them that, let's say, we're now at... "Hi, Nick. Yesterday you were the business owner for this process and doing things. You're now a product owner, go. And you can only have till Monday." If we train you, you're like, "Oh my God, I didn't realize I was now accountable for the value of this whole team delivering. It's my problem to make sure they're delivering good things? I didn't know that." So if we do that training right at the beginning I think it sets a baseline of expectations of what we're asking of those people, and the responsibility that's placed on them. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

When you're doing this Agile Foundations course that you run for folks through, are you doing a DISK profile as part of that? Again to assess their personality type.

Kit Friend:

No, no. That would be really good. What a great suggestion. I can include that.

Nick Muldoon:

Well, I'm merely inquiring because I wonder. I'm just thinking about it now, I'm wondering, are there personality types that are more likely to be the product owner? Is a product owner more of a CS and is a... Yeah, I don't know.

Kit Friend:

I don't know. I mean it's one of those things, isn't it? I forget the number of personality types and roles I've been assigned in various bits of my career. I can't remember. Back when I was a Student Union Officer, I'll have to look up the name of it, but we had the ones where, "Are you a completer finisher or a shaper?" And all sorts of those things there, and then DISk was relatively popular. We've got a Gallup Strengths Test within the Accenture Performance Management Tool, which is actually really interesting.

Kit Friend:

The bit I like about the Accenture one is when you join a new team you can bunch yourself together in the tool and see what people's different strengths and personality traits are, so you can be like, "This team's very heavy on the woo. Or you're a team that's full of energy or ideas with things, and it's quite interesting too." I mean it's nice to see the strength, but it's also interesting to notice where you might have gaps and you're like, "I need to make sure that someone's keeping an eye on quality because we all get very excited and run fast."

Nick Muldoon:

Do you remember, this would have to be a decade ago now, I'm sure, but I think his name with Larry Macaroni or Larry Macayoni, and he was working for Rally Software at the time, and he did a very wide ranging study of the effectiveness of Agile teams? And I'm just thinking back on that now, because he was looking at things like defect rates, escaped bugs versus captured bugs and all sorts of other bits and pieces. But I don't think he touched on the personality traits of these teams and whether even Dave the Cofounder here at Easy Agile, my business partner, he was talking. He shared a blog article this morning about neurodiverse teams and I'm just trying to think, do we know is there a pattern of DISK profile distribution, neurodiversity distribution, that leads to a more effective team?

Kit Friend:

I don't know. I haven't read. Yeah, it's Larry Maccherone, but it's not spelt the way I suspected originally. I put in Macaroni, based on your pasta based pronunciation of things. So it looks like it's the quantifying the... What's it called? Quantifying the Impact of Agile on Teams, which is really interesting.

Nick Muldoon:

But I don't know if that sort of study has been done since he did it back then.

Kit Friend:

Particularly the personality types is interesting, and neurodiversity is another interesting element. So I've got dyslexia and dyscalculia, and one of the bits I've found-

Nick Muldoon:

What's dyscalculia?

Kit Friend:

Well, just like dyslexia, there's quite a spectrum covered by one term of these, so it's large. But effectively my particular diagnosis, I have problems processing sequences of numbers. So you can read me out a sequence of numbers and if it's exactly that, I can cope with it normally because I can do visual processing, because that's my creative industries background, it's what we do, right? We visually process. But I can't repeat them back to you backwards, I can't reprocess them as units of stuff with things. My wife says-

Nick Muldoon:

How did you even come across that?

Kit Friend:

So a retrospective again, so my sister was diagnosed with dyslexia at school, and she's got a more traditional dyslexic diagnosis. So when you hear dyslexia, people normally associate it with not being able to read and spelling and grammar and that kind of stuff. Dyslexia, as you might know from [inaudible 00:35:00] is actually... I'm waiting for them to split it, to be honest with you, because it's so broad. But my diagnosis of dyslexia is more about my short term memory processing, so it's the ability to process. I can read and write fine.

Kit Friend:

My sister got diagnosed at school, had blue glasses, all the conventional grammar and spelling related elements of dyslexia. My dad got diagnosed then in his mid 50s, I think at the time. So he started working at the University Arts London, my art college, my dad still runs the woodwork shop in central St Martins in their beautiful new campus in King's Cross in London. He got diagnosed with things, and I was like, "Hmm. I know it's hereditary, I should probably get checked." So I think I was 25 or 26, and one of the lovely bit... I mean there's many lovely bits about working at Accenture, but a large corporation has really, really good support networks and things.

Kit Friend:

So I pinged the right people around, and they were like, "Yes, of course we can support you getting an assessment. We'd love to make sure that you're able to function." So I got an assessment done and they were like, "Yeah, you're dyslexic and dyscalculic on this kind of area." But the more interesting thing was that they were like, "Here's the coping mechanisms that you've developed." And the coping mechanisms was a list of my career and choices and education. It was like, "You will choose things where you can do abstract thinking and drawing." It was really funny because I never felt like it blocked me at school, I quite enjoyed exams and things.

Kit Friend:

But I was terrible at revising, right? I can't go through notes and do things there. Looking at my diagnosis I was like, "It's because I don't process things that way." I have to process things visually, I have to draw, I have to chunk things. Now I look at the way that I work with Agile teams and I coach teams, and I create abstract references to things, right? I'm teaching product owner and Scrum Master courses on Mural where we move things around and create objects.

Nick Muldoon:

Or the example that you used before, Kit, with the beer glasses at the bar.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I can't deal with numbers in abstract, right? I have to deal with them in an analogy or I have to be able to visual them. I'm hopeless at coding, I can't store concepts like variables in my head. They just fall apart, it's like building with sand in front of me and it's all dry and crumbly. And I think in fact when I looked at that diagnosis and I was still, what? I'd be like three or four years into my career at Accenture. I looked at the way that I'd begun to get slowly addicted to tools like Atlassian and Dura, and I was like, "Ah, I'm compensating for the fact that I have basically no ability to memorize things in the short term." I'm helping visualize stuff in the way that I help teams and build tasks and things, in a way that means I'm outsourcing my short term memory to this lovely tool where we do things there.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. I've grown to love it, I think you have to work with it right. I speak to some of my colleagues, I teach at the moment with an Agile coach called Lucy Sudderby and another one called Charlotte Blake, and I'm like, "Thank you, guys, for compensating for my dyslexia. I appreciate that you kind of balance out my inability to memorize anything." Yeah, hopefully they feel they benefit from some of the quirky strengths of it when we go through, but it's a balancing act, right?

Nick Muldoon:

That's very cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Kit Friend:

No worries.

Nick Muldoon:

I'm just thinking about it now, as you mentioned coaching with Lucy and Charlotte, and going back to something that you said earlier, Kit, with respect to... I don't know if you said the leaders, but basically the folks at the top drinking the Kool-Aid. I'm interested to know, how do you create, going back to this other thought that you had, I'm trying to connect dots, going back to this other thought that you had right up at the top about the psychological safety, right? And that feeling safe. How do you provide a safe space for these leaders that could be CEOs of business units or execs, GMs, whatever they happen to be, provide a safe space for them to actually ask questions and do Q&A and learn without feeling?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Because we forget that they're people too, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah.

Kit Friend:

There's this idea that these leaders are somehow insurmountable, they have no fear. But we need to build a safe space for everyone around things, I think you're right. I think we get the same sort of question when people talk to me about how they can convert people to Agile or make the case for things in an organization but not sure about it. I think that the answer, relatively saying, in that we need to give them some data, some facts. So my view is that it's not good to come to people and talk about...

Kit Friend:

I somewhat cynically criticize when people talk about Agile ways of working, and they'll often abbreviate it to WAW or something as well. I think when we talk about agility too abstractedly, and I say the phrase wavy hands too much, but when we talk about it within specifics too much, it encourages a sense of anxiety and it's a nebulous, wishy washy kind of thing so I like to bring some data to people. My favorite ones to use, and I need to get updated stats, but the Sandish Chaos Reports are an amazing project management journal, where they talk about success and failure of Waterfall versus Agile projects.

Kit Friend:

Now, there's a bunch of questions it leads you to about how do they classify Agile and all sorts of things. But indisputably, what it tells you is that the traditional way of doing things that we are told is secure and safe, if I go to a procurement team or a finance team and I go, "I'd like to build this thing, guys." They're like, "Great, give me the milestones, give me the plan." And there's this inbuilt assumption that that's a safe and responsible and proven way to do things.

Kit Friend:

The Sandish Chaos Reports tell you it's a terrible way to do things, right? They're like, "Statistically, doesn't matter what you're building, what industry, what you're doing, it's a terrible idea to fix scope at the beginning, trust your plan and have a system which fails when you have any change." And when you unpack it, like when we talk about agility overall, what are we saying? We're saying it's not a good idea to begin something and for it only to be able to succeed within fairly tight boundaries, where no one changes their mind for the duration of the thing, everything goes exactly as you plan and when does that ever happen with technology? And the world doesn't change for the duration of your thing.

Kit Friend:

Most of the time when we're talking about these project things, like how long are they? Three months to three years is the window I usually give. Three months, I see rarely in any industry these days, right? These big efforts where people are trying to do these things at scale, you're talking multiyear. What are the chances that the scope can be frozen for that period? Pretty low, and also what's the chance that the people that you asked for the requirements at the beginning really knew them all? Everyone's normally really nice, they try their best.

Nick Muldoon:

The chance that the people you ask at the beginning are going to be there when you actually get to the next-

Kit Friend:

Yeah. There's a whole set of fundamental problems with that. So I like to bring that kind of data to our leaders when they're asking about the case for agility, so it's not about, "Do you want to sign up to use a framework?"

Nick Muldoon:

But let's say, Kit, that they've made the case for agility, they're there, they're doing it. What's the space that you provide for them? Do you have a CEO round table where they can go and they've got a shoulder to cry on and go, "This Agile transformation is going harder than I thought it was going to be"?

Kit Friend:

Agilists Anonymous, [crosstalk 00:42:19] company. Yeah. I think it is a good idea to pair them up, so I get a lot of requests at the moment for us to provide coaches directly to support leaders. I've also seen a trend in reverse mentoring, separately big companies. But that kind of idea of, okay, you've got these people who are really experienced, and their experience is relevant, right? We're not saying that the CEO's 30, 40, 50 year career in something is invalid now and we know better than them. But they're trying to match that up with these, not even emerging, right? Because the Agile Manifest is 20 years old now. But they're trying to match these up with these foreign, new practices and things they've got, and that requires a bit of hand holding. So yes, there's a personal angle there. I don't think necessarily a round table is the way to do it per se, but giving them someone that they can chat too and, yeah, an ability to relate and go like, "What is this thing?" And decode the jog, I think is really useful.

Kit Friend:

So data about success rates is important, right? But the other data that's really important I think to help provide that sense of safety is about value delivery, and this is where I think most people are still having trouble. We've just about got to the point where people can start to attach a concept of benefits and value at the start of things. Now, often that's still too big. We talk about the value of the entire project, can you assign a notion of value to every epic and story in your backlog or whatever units of stuff you're doing?" Probably not, right? Can you do it in a pound or dollar or euro or whatever your local currency is figure? Probably not. But can you even rank them one to 10? Maybe with things.

Kit Friend:

So I think the evolution of OKRs and KPIs coming in, and people starting to internalize that more, offers some hope. It's still relatively immature in most organizations and you're still kind of getting there. I feel like every sort of practice and things, it's probably going to have some misinterpretation, enthusiastic and well meaning interpretation, but you're going to get some people using it somehow to Waterfall things probably in some areas. But bringing that data that gives them some sort of feedback loop that makes sense to those people in those senior positions I think is really powerful. The opposite of this is where they expect to see RAG statuses and milestones and that's the only data they get from their teams, right?

Kit Friend:

I sat down with an executive of an organization a few years ago and I was like, "Please invest in your tooling. Please do it." And he's like, "Why would I need to? I have these slides where they tell me green and the dates are there." And I was like, "I love that you're trusting, and I like to trust." The trust in the teams was really, really good. But I knew the teams and I knew they didn't have any tools. It was project managers getting stressed and running around, and then I knew that all the RAG statuses were going to go, "Green, green, green, green. Red." It was the Watermelon Effect that was going to happen, right?

Kit Friend:

So when I see conversations like that happening, I want to empower them. I want to empower them with data and bring those things together. I think that data about why doing Agile is really important, the data about how it's really going on your teams, and the ability to make decisions based on it is really important. There's the Scrumming case study on the Saab Gripen is lovely because they, in one of the articulations, they do the sequence of morning standups and allegedly, according to the case study, I'm pretty sure it's true, they do 7:30 in the morning, which is insane. I don't know why they start at 7:30 in the morning in Sweden, but apparently they start at 7:30 in the morning. But they do a sequence of standups and the idea is by the end of the hour the cascade of standups means that any impediment can reach the executives within the hour and they can fix it.

Kit Friend:

That feeling of connection, that trust in teams and that show of progress, real working things being the way that we communicate that we're making progress, I think that's how we build some safety in and help our leaders do things. Not RAG statuses and milestones and Gantt Charts. They have to have that realness with things, hopefully.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting. It makes me think, we did a factory tour recently and it's a factory that makes air conditioning manifolds for commercial buildings, and they actually-

Kit Friend:

What? Why were you touring an air conditioning factory? Were you buying some air conditioning?

Nick Muldoon:

No, no, no. Lean principles, right? You want to see the application of the principle.

Kit Friend:

Wow, you're living it, you're living it. It's wonderful.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. So they do breakfast from 6:15 to 6:45 or 6:30, something like that, and then they get going. I think they do their standup at 7:45 after they're actually in the flow, they come together, "Okay, where are we at for today? What are we working on?" Then that rolls up to the ops team and then that rolls up to the leadership team, and then at the end of the day they do their closing huddle for the day, "Hey, have we got all of our tools? Are we back? What are we going on with tomorrow morning?" So it was like the start and the finish of the day and it's really interesting.

Nick Muldoon:

Just thinking about, we introduced an end of day huddle in COVID, when we were all on Zoom all the time, and I think it was very useful. But then of course as we get back into the office, it drops away. It's interesting how things evolved, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah. And you're the big Head Honcho, right, Nick? I have a worry niggle with end of day meetings, about whether they're for the team they're for people to feel they're across stuff, and I find it interesting because I'm having to take people through practicing for Scrum Master exams and things, lots at the moment, and I really like talking about how standups are for the team. They're for the developers, they're not for the product owner even, they're certainly not for the stakeholders. Now, I consistently see with a lot of these Agile ceremonies, I'm like, "Who's getting the benefit from that meeting? Is it someone getting a status check in or is the team getting it?"

Kit Friend:

And if the team enjoys it, if the team gets something from the end of day huddle and things, I'm cool with it. But sometimes I see things, and the two anti patterns I see with leaders joining, of any level, joining the meeting, so the first is that they use it as like their aeration platform. The team's ready to go with their standup and then the leader of whatever level pops in and he's like, "Team, I've got this update for you." And then it's like 10 minutes of their amazing update and mini vision for the day, and then at the end it's like people are going, "Yeah, now do your standup. Now do the Scrum kind of thing." And then the other thing is that where it becomes like a status check in for stuff, and I'm like, "It's not what it's for, guys. We should be focused on [crosstalk 00:48:57]-"

Nick Muldoon:

We do. So we can get done with 22 people in six to eight minutes.

Kit Friend:

That's slick.

Nick Muldoon:

It's taken time to get here, but what we actually started out asking for was one good thing, and that's typically a family, community thing, what are you going on with today, do you have any blockers? And it's interesting now that we're having this chat, Kit, I do not see blockers come up very often, so I wonder why that is.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, anyway. Hey, Kit, I'm conscious of time. I've got one last question for you.

Kit Friend:

Yeah, go for it.

Nick Muldoon:

What are you reading at the moment? What books are you reading or have read recently that you'd recommend for the audience to read?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, I'm between businessy books. I need to find a next one. One attribute, and it's probably not my dyslexia, I think it's just because I'm lazy, I'm really bad at reading business books, like serious books with things. So I rely on audiobooks lots to consume meaningful data. I really, really enjoyed listening to Lisa Adkins Coaching Agile Teams audiobook when she released it, because I knew I wasn't going to get through the book and so-

Nick Muldoon:

Did she narrate it?

Kit Friend:

Yeah, which is even better, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Cool, yeah.

Kit Friend:

So lovely to hear from the authors' voices when they're doing things. So I'd really recommend that, and then accompanying it after... I mean either way round, listen to the Women In Agile podcast series on coaching Agile teams, because they talk about each other and there's a whole episode on language, and she talks about how between writing the book and narrating the book, reading it, there was bits of language where she just cringed and she was like, "I can't believe I wrote that." And it really resonates it with me, thinking about my Agile journey and how I would cringe at what I did with teams five, six years ago. As we all do, right? You look back with hindsight.

Kit Friend:

So Coaching Agile Teams is really, really good, and I'd recommend. When [crosstalk 00:50:54]-

Nick Muldoon:

Isn't that beautiful, right? Because if you look back and you cringe, it shows that you've evolved and adapted and you've learned, and you've improved?

Kit Friend:

Oh yeah, if you look back and don't cringe, either you were perfect which is unlikely, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Unlikely. Unlikely.

Kit Friend:

[crosstalk 00:51:07] things, or you're oblivious which is more likely. I don't mean you personally, Nick. So Coaching Agile Teams is really good, I still recommend the Whole Time if people are trying to get their head round what it's like to work in Agile, what's there. I used to recommend The Phoenix Project, and then I really enjoyed The Unicorn Project more for filling in a team. Your talking about the air conditioning factory just reminded me because of all the Lean kind of things. I really like that, and I struggle when I explain to people because I'm like, "It's not dry, it's a novel about an Agile transformation, but it's not [crosstalk 00:51:42]

Nick Muldoon:

It's not. I love it. I get up and I read the newspaper, right?

Kit Friend:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

That's my thing in the morning, and I would never read a business book at night. But The Phoenix Project and The Unicorn Project, I've read them several times as bedtime books.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. To your kids, Nick? Do you sit there [crosstalk 00:52:01]

Nick Muldoon:

I will. I'll get there. I'm starting to teach them about Lean principles, build quality in. Yeah.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. If you haven't done it already, getting your kids to story point Lego is really amusing and I've enjoyed a lot. I know it's just like time gym, but I enjoy doing it with my son, Ethan, because you know how difficult it is to get adults to get relative sizing in units, and kids just get it. It's wonderful how they just don't get distracted by the fact that you've got an abstract unit, and they're like, "I get that idea." I got Ethan story pointing in five minutes, I've struggled to get some adults story pointing in like five days and they argue about, "Do you mean it's days, ideal days, hours?" Things.

Kit Friend:

So yeah, Unicorn Project I think are really good. I haven't actually read it all yet, but I do want to read and I recommend the whole time because of a really good podcast, 99 [inaudible 00:52:51] Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. So when we talk about being customer centric and about really knowing who we're providing our products for, I think there's a really powerful story around making sure we understand the data and when we're going through, and Invisible Women has some amazing, horrifying, but amazing stories and bits of data and narrative around it. So I think those would be my three at the moment, three's a good number to ask people to start with, isn't it?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay, cool. Kit, this has been wonderful. My takeaway is I've got to read The Invisible Woman, because I haven't heard that book.

Kit Friend:

Invisible Women, there's lots of them is the problem, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

Invisible Women, okay. Thank you. That's my takeaway that I've got to read. Kit, this has been beautiful, I really enjoyed our chat this morning.

Kit Friend:

It was a pleasure as well. Thank you so much for having me, Nick.

Nick Muldoon:

I hope you have a wonderful day, and I look forward to talking about this journey again. I want to come back and revisit this.

Kit Friend:

Yeah. Let's do a check in. We should do our DISK profiles for the next one maybe, and we can find out maybe I'm meant to be a product owner and you should be, I don't know, you'll be like test lead or something it'll say. I don't know. We'll find out.

Nick Muldoon:

It's beautiful. All right, thanks so much, Kit. Have a wonderful day.

Kit Friend:

And you. Bye now.

‍

"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.