Easy Agile Podcast Ep.18 Top qualities of an agile leader and team

"Thoroughly enjoyed my conversation with Jon, he shared some great perspectives on the impact of the Agile manifesto" - Amaar Iftikhar

Amaar Iftikhar, Product Manager at Easy Agile is joined by Jon Kern, Co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and a senior transformation consultant at Adaptavist.

Amaar and Jon took some time to speak about the Agile Manifesto. Covering everything from the early days, ideation, process, and first reactions, right through to what it means for the world of agile working today.

They touch on the ideal state of an agile team, and what the manifesto means for distributed, hybrid and co-located teams.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Transcript

Amaar Iftikhar:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Amaar Iftikhar. I'm a product manager here at Easy Agile. And before we begin, Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dharawal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. And extend that same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and First Nations peoples joining us today.

Today, we have on the podcast Jon Kern, who is the co-author of the Agile Manifesto for Software Development and an Agile consultant. If you're wondering, you're correct. I did mention the Agile Manifesto for Software Development. The Agile Manifesto. So Jon, welcome for being here and thank you for joining us.

Jon Kern:

Oh, my pleasure, Amaar. Thank you.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, very excited to have you on. Let's just get started with the absolute basic. Tell the audience about, what is the Agile manifesto?

Jon Kern:

Well, it's something that if you weren't around, and I know you're young, so you weren't around 21 years ago, I guess now, to maybe understand the landscape of what software development process and tooling and what most of us were facing back then, it might seem like a really obvious set of really simple values. Who could think that there's anything wrong with what we put into the manifesto? But back in the day, there were, what I practiced under as a... I'm an aerospace engineer, so I was in defense department work doing things like fighter simulation, F-14 flat spins and working with a centrifuge and cool stuff like that. And subject to a mill standard specification, which makes sense for probably weapons systems, and aircraft manufacturing, and all sorts of other things. But they had one, lo and behold, for software development. And so there was a very large, what I would call heavy handedness around software development process. We call it heavyweight process. Waterfall was the common term back then, and probably still used today.

And there were plenty of, I would say the marketing juggernaut of the day, IBM and Rational unified process, these large, very much like Safe. Where it's a really large body of work, awesome amount of information in it, but very heavy process even though everything would, say you tailor it, it could be whatever you wanted. I mapped my own lightweight process into REP for example. Sure. But the reality was we were facing kind of the marketplace leader being heavyweight process that was just soul crushing, and from my perspective, wasting taxpayers' money. That was kind of my angle was, well, I'm a taxpayer, I'm not going to just do this stupid process for process sake. That has to have some value, has to be pragmatic. So lo and behold, there were a handful of us, 17 that ended up there, but there are a handful of us that practiced more lightweight methods. So the manifesto was really an opportunity for coming together and discovering some of the, what you might think of as the commonality between many different lightweight practices. There was the XP contingent. I first learned about Scrum there, for example. Arie van Bennekum, a good friend, he taught us about DSDM. I don't even remember what it stands for anymore. It was a European thing.

Alistair and Jim Highsmith, they had, I forget, like crystal methodologies. So there was a fair amount of other processes that did not have the marketing arm that erupted, or didn't have the mill standard. So it was really all about what could we find amongst ourselves that was some sort of common theme about all these lightweight processes. So it was all about discovering that, really.

Amaar Iftikhar:

You all get together, the principles kind of come to fruition, and let's fast forward a little bit. What was the initial reaction to the original manifesto?

Jon Kern:

Yeah, it was even kind of funny that the four values, the four bullets is as simple as it was. The principles came a bit later. I want to say we collaborated over awards wiki, but the original... If you go to Agile uprising, you can see I uploaded some artifacts, because apparently I'm a pack rat. And I had the original documents that Alistair probably printed out, because he was the one... He and Jim lived there near Salt Lake City. So it was like, "Hey, let's come here." And we like to go skiing, so let's do it here. So he arranged the room and everything. And so there's some funny artifacts that you can find. And the way that it actually came about was an initial introduction of each of us about our methods. And really I think a key, we left our egos at the door. I mean I was a younger one. Uncle Bob, some of these, he was at Luminar, I know I have magazines still in the barn that he was either the editor of, or authors of for people who don't remember what magazines are. Small little booklets that came out. So Uncle Bob was like, Ooh, wow, this is pretty cool.

And I wasn't shy because I had a lot of experience with heavyweight methods. So I really wanted to weigh in on... Because I had published my own lightweight method a few years earlier. So I had a lot of opinions on how to avoid the challenges of big heavyweight process. So the culmination as we were going out the door and after we had come up with the four values was I think Ward said, "Sir, want me to put this on the web?" And again, this is 2001 so dot com and the web's still kind of new so to speak. And we're all like, yeah, sure, why not? What the hell, can't hurt. We got something, might as well publish it. I don't think to a person, anybody said, "Oh yeah, this is going to set the world on fire because we're so awesome." And we were going to anoint the world with all of this wonderful wisdom. So I don't think anybody was thinking that that much would happen.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah. So what were you thinking at that time? So how would the principles that you had come up with together, was that maybe just for the team to take away? Everyone who was there? What was the plan at that time?

Jon Kern:

I think it was a common practice. Like I said, there were other groups that would often meet and have little consortiums or little gatherings and then publish something. So I think it was just, oh yeah, that's a normal thing to do is you spent some time together and you wrote things down, you might as well publish it. So I think it wasn't any deeper than that other than Bob, I think Bob might say that he wanted to come up with some kind of a manifesto of sorts or some kind of a document because that's I think what those sort of... I was never at one of those gatherings, but you know, you could see that they did publish things. I have a feeling it was just something as innocent as, well we talked, wrote some things down, might as well share it.

And then the principles, there were a lot of different practices in the room. So some of what I would say the beauty of even the values page is the humility at the top is it's still active voice. We are uncovering not, hey all peasants, we figured it all out. No, we're still uncovering it. And the other thing is by doing it, because I'm still an active coder. And plus we value this more on the left, more than on the right. Some people might say it's a little ambiguous or a little fuzzy, but that's also a sign of humility and that it's not A or B. And it really is fuzzy, and you need to understand your context enough to apply these things. So from a defense department contracting point of view, certainly three of the four bullets were really important to me because I learned... Sure, we did defense department contracting. But it's way more important to develop a rapport with the customer than it is... Because by the time you get to the contract you've already lost, which goes along with developing a rapport with the customer, the individual.

And one of Peter Codes, when we worked with customers and whatnot, one of our mantras was frequent tangible working results, AKA working software. You can draw a lot and you can do use cases for nine months, but if you don't have anything running, it's pretty, I would guess risky that you don't have anything, no working software yet. So it really was I think an opportunity to share the fact that some people thought two weeks and other people thought a month. Even some of the print principles had a pretty good wide ranging flexibility so to speak. That I think is really important to note.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And it makes sense. Did you or anyone else in the room at that time ever imagine what the impact downstream would be of the work that was being done there?

Jon Kern:

Not that I'm aware of. I certainly did not. I remember a couple times in my career walking in and seeing some diagrams when I worked with the company Together Soft, and we'd build some cool stuff and I'd see people having some of the... Oh yeah, there's a diagram I remember making on their wall. That's kind of cool. But nothing near how humbling and sort of satisfying it is. Especially I would say when I'm in India or Columbia or Greece, it almost seems maybe they're more willing to be emotional about it. But people are, it's almost like they were freed by this document. And in some sense this is a really, really tiny saying it with the most humility possible. A little bit like the Declaration of Independence, and the fact that a handful of people... And the constitution of the United States. A handful of people met in a moment of time, never to be repeated again and created something that was dropped on the world so to speak, that unleashed, unleashed a tremendous amount of individual freedom and confidence to do things. And I think in a very small, similar fashion, that's what the manifesto did.

Amaar Iftikhar:

As you mentioned, there was a point in time when the manifesto was developed and that was almost over 20 years ago. So now the way of working, and the world of working has drastically changed. So what are your thoughts on that? Do you see another version coming? Do you think there are certain updates that need to be made? Do you think it's kind of a timeless document? I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Jon Kern:

Yeah, that's a good question. I personally think it's timeless and I welcome other people to create different documents. And they have. Alistair has The Heart of Agile, Josh Kerievsky's got Modern Agile.

There's a few variations of a theme and different things to reflect upon, which I think is great. Because I do believe, unlike the US Constitution, which built in a mechanism to amend itself, we didn't need that. And I believe it captured the essence of how humans work together to produce something of value. Mostly software, because that's what we came to practice from, is the software experience. But it doesn't take a lot of imagination to replace the word software with product or something like that and still apply much of the values that are there with very, very minor maybe adjustments because frequent tangible working results.

There might have to be models, because you're not going to build a skyscraper and tear it down and say, "Oh, that wasn't quite right," and build it again. But nonetheless, there are variations of how you can show some frequent results. So I think by and large it's timeless. And I would challenge anybody. What's wrong with it? Point out something that's somehow not true 20 years later. And I think that's the genius behind it was we stumbled on... And probably because most of us were object modelers, that's one of the things we're really good at, is distilling the essence of a system into the most critical pieces. That's kind of what modeling is all about. And so I think somehow innately, we got down to the core bits that make up what it is to produce software with people, process and tools. And we wrote it down. That's why I think it's timeless.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, no absolutely. I think that was a really good explanation about why it's timeless. I think one of the principles that comes to mind in a kind of modern hybrid or flexible working arrangement is one of the principles talks about the importance of face to face conversations. And in a world now where a lot of conversations aren't happening physically face to face, they might be happening on Zoom. Do you think that still applies?

Jon Kern:

Yeah, I think what we're finding out with... Remote was literally remote, so to speak, back 20 years ago. I was working with a team of developers in Russia and we had established enough trust and physical... I would travel there every month. So kind of established enough of a team, and enough trust in the communication that we could do ultimately some asynchronous work because different time zones. And me being in the east coast. 7:00 AM in the US was maybe 3:00 PM in Russia if I recall. St. Petersburg. So we were able to overcome the distance, but it's hard to beat real life. And I would often sometimes even spar a little bit with Ron Jeffries that on the one hand you could say the best that you can do is in person. But on the other hand, I could argue a little bit of some of the remoteness makes things... You have to be a little more verbose, possibly a little more precise, but also a little more verbose. A little more relaxed with... You might take a couple of passes to get something just because, I mean there are two time zones passing in the night. But that was based off of some often initial face to face meetings, and then you could go remote and still be successful and highly effective.

So I think it's important that teams don't just say that they can still do everything. And zoom is way better than 20 years ago, admittedly. Zoom gets, at least you can see a face. But nothing replaces the human contact. And I think also for wellbeing, I think human contact is important. So I would still say that the interaction aspect in the manifesto is still best served with a healthy dose of in-person. And that's kind of the key about most things in Agile. It's to me it's about pragmatism, and not just being dogmatic but rather, what might work better for us? And even experimenting with try something a little bit and see how that works. So even how you treat the manifesto, you should treat it in an Agile manner so to speak.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, no absolutely. That's a great point. On that note, as an Agile consultant or the Agile guy, what have you seen are the best practices or what works, what doesn't work for distributed teams?

Jon Kern:

Well I think the things that are most challenging that I've run across big companies and even smaller ones is that... I don't know if it's natural, God forbid if it's natural, but tendencies that I've seen in some companies to set up silos where you're the quality control, you're the UX, you're the front end, you're the back end, makes my headwater explode. Because that's building in a lag and building in communication roadblocks and building in cooperation which is handed offs from silo to silo, versus collaboration. So I've seen more of that. And I get it, you might want to have a specialty, but customer doesn't care. Customer wants something out the door. If I showed up and I'm going to pull a feature off the stack, what do you mean I can only do part of it? I don't get that. And yeah, I know I'm not an expert in everything but we probably have an expert that we can figure out what the pattern is. So I find that sort of trend, I don't know if it's a trend, but I find that's a step backwards in my opinion. And it's better to try to be more cross-functional, collaborative, everybody trying to work to get the feature out the door, not just trying to do your little part.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, a hundred percent. I think knocking on silos is a big part of being agile, or even being digital for that matter. And often the remedies for it too are there at hand, but it's a lot harder to actually be practical with it, to actually implement it in an organization, a living, breathing business where there's real people and there's dynamics to deal with, and there's policies and processes to follow. So I guess as generic as you can be, what is your thought as an Agile consultant to a business that's kind of facing that issue?

Jon Kern:

One of the things that... Adaptive is what my colleague John Turley has really opened my eyes to. I tend to call it the secret sauce, or the missing piece to my practice. And it has to do with individual's mindset and what we call vertical development. So it might sound like weird wishy-washy fluffy stuff, but it's actually super critical. And I've always said people, process, and tools for, I want to say since late nineties probably, I mean a long time. And the first I've been able to realize why sometimes I would have just spectacular super high performing teams and other times it'd be just really, really well performing but not always that spark and sometimes kind of like, eh, that was a little meh. And a lot of it comes down to where people lie on in terms of how they make their meaning and what their motivational orientation is, command and control versus autonomy.

So what we do is we've learned that we can help people first off recognize this exists, and help people with what we call developmental practices. Something that, even the phrase, you probably heard it, like safe experiments. Failure, or trying something and failing. Well if you chop someone's head off for it, guess what? They're just going to probably stay pretty still and only do what they're told, not try to... I have a super high dose of autonomy in me, so I've long lived by the, better to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and always felt as long as I'm trying to do the right thing to succeed and do the best for the company, they probably won't fire me if I make a mistake. But not everybody has that amount of freedom in the way they work. So you have to help establish that as management, and that's a big thing that we work with, with teams.

And then we also start with the class. If you've ever watched office space, and if you haven't you should, but the, what is it that you do here? So there's a great, the consultants Bob and Bob coming in, the efficiency consultants, "So Amaar, what is it that you do here?" But literally that's something, whether we're helping teams build a new product, is okay, what's the purpose? What's the business purpose of this product? What is it that you do here? What do you want to do with this product? What value does it provide? Same thing with anything you're working with as a team. And that's why whether it's software, producing some feature that has an outcome that provides value to the customer, or some product. But the point is if you don't understand that, now it's making, the team is going to have a real hard time being able to make decisions which are helping us move forward.

So if you help everybody understand what it is we're here to do, and then try to get the folks that might reflect all the different silos if you're siloed, but all the different elements. How do we go from an idea to cash, so to speak, or idea to value in the customer's hand? And have a good look at that. Because there are so many things that just sort of... Technical data often creeps into software code bases. And the same thing, we sort of say the organizational debt, the same thing can happen. Your process debt. You can just end up with, all right, we want the development team to go faster, John and company, can you come in and help coach us? We want to go agile. Sure, okay yeah. All right. We roll up our sleeves, we look around and after an initial kind of value stream look, like, wait I'm sorry but there's a little tiny wedge, it's about 15%, that's the development. And then you spent the 85% thinking about it.

Let's pretend we could double the speed of development. Which was initially the... Yeah, we need the developers to code faster or something. That's a classic. And no you don't, you need to stop doing all this bullshit up front that's just crazy ass big waterfall project-y stuff with multiple sign-offs. And matter of fact, one of the sign-offs, oh my gosh it only meets once a week, and then if you have a typo in it, you get rejected. You don't come back for another... Are you insane? You spent eight months deciding to do eight weeks worth of work. Sorry, it's not the eight weeks. So things like that, what I recommend anybody self inspect is try to... If you're worried about your team, how you can do better is just start trying to write down what does your process step look like and what is a typical time frame?

How much time are you putting value into the... Because a lot of times people batch things up in sprints. That's a batch, why are you putting things in a batch? Or they have giant issues. Well that's the big batch. So there's lots of often low hanging fruit. But to your point, it's often encrusted in, this is the way we work and nobody feels the ability to change or even to stop and look to see how are we working. So I think that's where we usually start is let's see how you actually work today. And then while we're doing that you can spill your guts, you can tell us all the things that hurt and that are painful and then we'll try to design a better way that we can move towards, in terms of working more effectively. Because our goal is to help teams be able to develop ways to do more meaningful and joyous work, really. Because it's a lot of fun when it's clicking and when you're on a good team and you're putting smiles on the customers' faces, it's hard to almost stay away from work because it's so much fun. But if it's not that, if it's drudgery and you're just a cog in the machine and stuff takes months to get out the door, it's a job. It's not that much fun.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah. A lot of the points that you mentioned there strongly resonated with me, and the common pain points. It sounds like you've kind of seen it all. And by the way if you haven't seen office space, definitely need to watch it. It's a really good one. You've mentioned now a lot about of the element of the challenges that a distributed team faces. Now I want to flip it over and ask you what does the perfect distributed team look like today that lives and breathes agile values?

Jon Kern:

Yeah. I don't know if you can ever have such a thing, a perfect of any kind of team. So I would say harking back to the types of distributed teams that I've worked with, and this goes back to the late nineties. So I've been doing this for a long, long time. Only really done remote, whether it was with developers in Russia or down in North Carolina, or places like that. And I think that the secret was having a combination of in-person... If you want to go somewhere as a group, there are things you can do to break the ice, to establish some, what you might call team building type activities.

And not just, hey let's go do a high ropes course and be scared out of our wits together. But rather also things that are regarding why are we here, what are we trying to achieve? And let's talk about whether it's the product we're trying to build, and take that as an opportunity to coalesce around something and get enough meat on the bone, enough skeletons of what it might look like. Because there's good ways to start up and have a good foundation. And that's part of what I've been practicing for decades. If you get things set up properly with understanding that just enough requirements, understanding... And I do a lot of domain modeling with UML and things like that, just understanding what the problem domain is that we're trying to solve to achieve the goals we're looking for, have a sense of the architecture that we want. So all those things are collaborative efforts.

And so if you have enough of a starting point where you've worked together, you come in and, let's say you even had to go rent someplace, because nobody lived near office, so you all flew somewhere. I mean that's money well spent in my opinion. Because that starts the foundation. If you've broken bread so to speak, or drank some beers, or coded together and did stuff, and then you go back to your remote offices to take the next steps and then realize when you might need to meet again. So that's really important to understand that the value of establishing those relationships early on so that you can talk bluntly. And I have some good folks that I run a production app for firefighters since like 2006.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, very cool.

Jon Kern:

And that friend that I've worked with, we are so tight that we can... It makes our conversations, we don't have to beat around the bush, we don't have to worry about offending any, we just, boom, cut to the chase. Because we know we're not calling each other's kids ugly. We're just trying to get something done fast.

And building that kind of rapport takes time and effort and working together. And that's what I think a good successful distributed team, you need to come together every so often and build those relationships and know when you might need to come together again if something is a problem. But that I think is a key to success is it shortens the time. Because you may have heard of things like the group forms, if this is performance on the Y axis they form and they're at some performance level, then they need to storm before they get back to normal, and before they start high performing. So it's this form, storm. You get worse when you're storming. And storming means really understanding where we're at. When we argue about, I don't think that should be inheritance, Amaar. And then you're like, "Oh bull crap, it really..."

And again, we're not personal, but we're learning each other's sort of perspectives and we're learning how to have respectful debates and have some arguments, so to speak, to get to the better place. And I've worked in some companies that are afraid to storm, and it feels like you're never high performing.

Everyone's too polite. It's like, come on. And I love when I worked with my Russian colleagues. They didn't give a crap if I was one of the founders. And I'm glad, because I don't want any privilege, I don't want anything like that. No let's duke it out. May the best ideas win. That's where you want to get to. And if you can't get there because you don't have enough of a relationship, and you tend not to say the things that needed to be said because you're being polite, well it's going to take you really long to succeed. And that's a lot of money, and that's a lot of success, and people might leave.

So I think the important thing is if you're remote, that's okay, but sheer remote is a real challenge. And you have to somehow figure out, if you can't get together to learn how to form and storm, and build those bonds face to face, then you need to figure out how to do it over Zoom. Because you need to do it, because if you don't, if you never have words, then trust me, you're still not high performing.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, I kind of feel like being fully remote now is being offered as almost a competitive advantage to candidates in the marketplace now, because it's a fight for talent. But if I'm understanding correctly, what you are saying is that in-person element is so important to truly be high performing and those ideas kind of contradict each other, I feel.

Jon Kern:

Yeah. And again, having been remote since the late nineties, I've been doing this a long time. And commuting to Russia is the longest commute I ever did, for three years. I mean that's a hell of a long flight to commute there over seven times, or whatever the hell it was. Anyway, I used to say that that being remote is not for everyone, because it really isn't. I mean you have to know how to work without anybody around, and work. I mean it has its own challenges. And yeah, it might be a perk, but I think what you need to do is look at potentially what the perks are and figure out too, can I fold them into... It doesn't have to be all or nothing. And I think that can be a easy mistake to make maybe is to, all right cool, we don't have to have office space. That's a lot of savings for the company. Yeah, but maybe that means you need to have some remote workspaces for occasional gatherings, or figure it out.

But yeah, I think even... And certain businesses might work differently. In the beginning of building a product, I want to have heavy collaboration and I want to get to a point where it's almost, I feel like the product goes like this where once you get things rolling and you kind of get up, get some momentum going, now the hardest thing to do is be in front of an agile team, whether they're in-person or remote. Once things are rolling and rocking and kicking and it's like everything's clicking, you can just bang out features left, like boom, boom, boom. Yeah, okay then we probably need to be...

Unless we've got ways that we're pairing or things like that. I will say when we're together, mobbing is easier. I'm sure there's ways to do it remote, but being in a room, I don't know, it's a lot easier than coordinating over Zoom. You just, hey there's this problem, let's all hang out here after standup because we're just going to mob on this. So it doesn't take a whole lot versus anything remote, there's a little extra, okay, we've got to coordinate, and even different times zones, gets even worse. So yeah, don't get carried away with remote being the end all be all. Because I have a feeling there's going to be a... I would wager there will be a backlash.

Amaar Iftikhar:

And I'll take that back coming from the Agile, the person who does this day to day who helps teams become agile, I'll definitely kind of take your word for it. Plus with my experience too, I've seen nothing really beats a good white-boarding session. That is really hard to replicate online. I mean we have these amazing tools, but nothing quite mimics the real life experience of just having a plain whiteboard and a marker in your hand. That communication is so powerful.

Jon Kern:

Great point. You're so, right, because I had just with the one company that I was with for five years, we were doing high level engineered to order pump manufacturing sales type tool for... So it was my favorite world because it blended my fluid dynamics as an aerospace engineer, plus my love for building SaaS products, and building new software and things like that. And even having a young, we would interview at Lehigh University and we'd have some young graduates that would be working with us, and being able to bring them into the fold, and there was a room behind where my treadmill was and we'd go in there, we'd have jam sessions on modeling and building out new features. And man, you're right. Just that visceral three dimensional experience. Yeah, Miro's great. Or any other kind of tool, but yeah, it's not the same. You're absolutely right. That's a great point. You're almost making me pine for the good old days. [inaudible 00:42:04]

Amaar Iftikhar:

I think the good old days very much still exist. I think even now, it's kind of been a refreshing time for me to be with Easy Agile. I've only been here for just under two months now. And there's a strong in-person dynamic. And again, it's optional, where if people are remote or they're hybrid or they need to commute once in a while, it's a very understanding environment. But once you're in the office or you're in person, you kind of feel the effect you were describing, you're motivated to deliver for the end customer. You just want to come back. It's an addictive feeling of, I want to be back in person and I want to collaborate in real time in person.

Jon Kern:

That's beautifully said, because that's... One of the companies that we're beginning to engage with in South Africa, they're at this very crossroad of struggling with, everybody's been remote, but boy, the couple times we were together, got so much done. And you're describing the flame of, the warmth of delivering and let the moths come to the flame. I mean nurture it and then fan the flames of the good and let people opt in and enjoy it. And still sometimes, yeah, I got to say home, I got the kids or the dog, that's okay too. But giving the option I think is where we're going to head. And I believe the companies that are able to build that hybrid culture of accepting both, and neither mandating one nor the other, but building such a high performing team that basically encourages people to opt into the things that make the most sense at that time. And I think that those companies will rule the day, so to speak.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah, absolutely. It's been so nice to chat with you John, and I've really enjoyed this. I want to leave the audience off with one piece of advice for distributed agile teams from you. We've talked a lot about the importance of in-person collaboration. We've talked about the principles of the agile manifesto. Now, what would the one piece of advice be when you're thinking of both? When you want the agile manifestos to be something that's living and breathing in distributed agile teams, what one piece of advice can you give businesses today right now who are going through the common struggles? What can you tell them as that last piece of advice?

Jon Kern:

Well, I think kind of a one phrase that I like to use to capture the manifesto is, "Mind the gap." In my sort of play on words, what I mean is the gap in time between taking an action and getting a response. Whether it's what do we do about the office, what do we do about remote, what do we do about this feature, what do we do about this line of code? The gap in time is, it's sort of a metaphor about being humble enough to treat things as a hypothesis. So don't be so damn sure of yourself one way or the other about the office or remote or distributed. But instead, treat things as a hypothesis. Be curious and experiment safely with different ways and see what works. And don't be afraid of change. It's not a life sentence to, you got to run your business or your project or your team one way for the rest of your life. No. Don't tell the boss, but work is subsidized learning. I never understood people who just keep doing the same thing because they weren't given permission. Just try it. So that's what my departing phrase would be regarding making those decisions. Mind the gap and really be humble about making assumptions, and test your hypotheses, and shorten the gap in time between taking actions and seeing a reaction.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I really wish we could let the tape roll and just keep talking about this for a couple more hours, but we'll end it right there on that really good piece of advice that you've left the audience off with. Jon, thank you again for being on the podcast. And we've really, really enjoyed hearing you and learning from your experiences.

Jon Kern:

Oh, my pleasure. Any time. Happy to talk another couple hours, but maybe after some beers.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah.

Jon Kern:

Except it's your morning, my evening. I'm going to have to work on that.

Amaar Iftikhar:

Yeah.

Jon Kern:

My pleasure, Amaar.

In this episode, I was joined by Sherif Mansour - Distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian.

We spoke about styles of product management and the traits that make a great product manager. Before exploring the idea of a shared brain and the role of a product engineer.

Sherif has been in software development for over 15 years. During his time at Atlassian, he was responsible for Confluence, a popular content collaboration tool for teams.

Most recently, Sherif spends most of his days trying to solve problems across all of Atlassian’s cloud products. Sherif also played a key role in developing new products at Atlassian such as Stride, Team Calendars and Confluence Questions. Sherif thinks building simple products is hard and so is writing a simple, short bio.

Hope you enjoy the episode as much as I did. Thanks for a great conversation Sherif.

"It was great chat about Kate's experience working in an agile environment, and learning what artificial intelligence looks like at Optus"

Kate shares her experience of an agile transformation at Optus and the incredible impact it has had on the company. Delivering faster & enabling a sense of ownership & accountability amongst teams.

Kate also shares some great advice from embracing hybrid roles throughout her career, a gentle reminder to never put limits on yourself and adopting a “no risk no return” mentality.

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

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Transcript

Hayley Rodd:

Well, thank you for joining us here on the Easy Agile Podcast. Here in Wollongong things are a little different from when we last had a chat. We've since been put into lockdown as part of the Greater Sydney region, but I'm delighted to bring you this podcast from here in Wollongong. And also it maybe helps ease some of those lockdown blues that you might be suffering if you're in the same part of the world as I am today or if you're in another part of the world that is maybe in the same predicament that we find ourselves here in Wollongong in. So, I'd like to introduce myself. So my name is Hayley Rodd and I am the product marketing manager or one of the product marketing managers here at Easy Agile. And I have a great guest today, an old friend of mine but before we kick off with the podcast, I'd like to say any acknowledgement of country.

Hayley Rodd:

So here at Easy Agile, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we work and we live. We celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal people and their ongoing cultures and connections to the land and waters of New South Wales. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their contribution to the development of this tool. And now, to our guest, Kate Brodie. Kate is an old friend of mine from here in The Ngong or Wollongong if you're not from this region. And has been very successful in her pursuit of a career in technology. So a little bit about Kate. Katie is the director of digital AI and CCAI programs at Optus. Kate is now based in Sydney, Australia and is a leader in AI, digital and new emerging technology. Katie is responsible for Optus's AI, digital, portfolio and chapter working in an agile environment every day today.

Hayley Rodd:

Kate leads the development of new products to take to market and scale routines in an agile environment advocating for build, measure, learn culture. Most recently, Kate has been in charge of leading an enterprise first to market API consulting chatbox in Australia, compatible with Google Home. So obviously Kate is an extremely impressive person and I wanted to chat to her today about her career and also her role in the Agile team. But beyond that, I wanted to touch on women in technology and leadership, something that Kate has spoken about recently with Vogue Australia. So, thanks so much to Kate for joining us today. And I can't wait to share some of the advice from the lessons that Kate has learned through her career. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kate. It's really wonderful to see you. So could you tell me a bit about, I guess what your day-to-day looks like when you're at the office?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, thank you for having me. My day-to-day is quite varied. I would say that in my role, I'm very lucky to work with lots of different people, engineers, designers, business people, marketers and more recently a lot of different partners including Google. So, a lot of my day is working between different groups, strategically thinking about how we're going to continue to create a particular vision and future together for our customers. And then parts of it are related more to the technology and how we're ensuring that we've got our teams performing at a level that will allow us to meet those goals. And yeah, day-to-day, I'm talking to a lot of different.

Hayley Rodd:

So, when we were chatting just before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about your start in marketing and now you've moved over to technology, can you tell me a little bit about how you don't want people to feel pigeonholed, I guess in their careers or in their career path?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, absolutely. I really believe that anyone can get into anything if they put the effort behind it. And so I really think that no one should ever put limits on themselves. For me, it was partly because I was surrounded by really great people who supported me in trying lots of different things. And I think the way in which you build your confidence and start to move between different disciplines is by getting your hands dirty and just having a crack. So, I think it's important particularly and in this day and age for people to be open and not really put strong defined titles on themselves so that they do have a sense of freedom to kind of move around and try different roles because ultimately what is available today is probably going to look very different in 30 years time so... Yeah.

Hayley Rodd:

And do you still consider yourself a marketer or are you something, hybrid? What are you now?

Kate Brodie:

I would say that I am a technologist. I think that it requires the ability to have a bit of a marketing brain because you need to know how you're going to apply it in order to make a real impact, whether that's for customers, employees or commercially. But definitely with a strong kind of technology digital focus now, I wouldn't say that I would be purely seen as a marketer these days, but definitely it's about having that broad skill set and I think marketing's critical to being able to create great products.

Hayley Rodd:

Perfect. So, when I think of AI, I think of self-driving cars, someone who is very new to the technology industry myself. Could you unpack, I guess what AI means for Optus?

Kate Brodie:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that what you've just said is shared by many. Artificial intelligence is just such a broad concept and it really is related to creating intelligent machines that can ultimately perform tasks or imitate behavior that we might consider human life. And so that can range from really narrow experiences like reading a brochure in a different language using AI to kind of rate it in the language that you can understand to kind of these macro experiences like you've just described with self-driving cars and completely changing the way that we travel. So, I think that AI is such a broad term where it will mean different things for different groups. At Optus, it's about creating lasting customer relationships with people and allowing them to connect with others. And so where we use AI in a variety of different places, it can be in our products themselves.

Kate Brodie:

So for instance, we just recently launched a really amazing product called Call Translate. And that's where in the call you can actually interact with people in different languages on that same phone call so breaking down those communication barriers that have existed before. So that's super exciting. And then there's other places where we're using it, for instance in our sales and service functions that we can more easily automate the simple tasks and give more time to our people to grow and create those types of relationships with our customers. So, we're using artificial intelligence in many different ways, but I think it's really exciting in everything that we do, it's more driven towards how can we create a better customer experience. It's not about the technology in of itself, which is what I really like about it.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Nice. And it sounds like that that call translation would just... Could have so many applications and have... I'm even just thinking about in this COVID circumstance we... You're trying to get a message across to people to stay home and all those sorts of things like... Wow. Okay.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And there are some beautiful stories of people who are not able to go home with their young kids, travel home to their countries where their families are. And so they can have the grandkids talking to the grandparents more easily as they are learning different languages. So, it's really cool.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. That's beautiful. So, in your title, there is, I, maybe assume it's an abbreviation, but it's somebody that says CCAI. Could you tell me what that is?

Kate Brodie:

CCAI stands for Contact Center Artificial Intelligence and it's actually a program of work that is used increasingly by different industries and refers to a particular product that Google is working with companies on. And so it's about re-imagining your contact center. So traditionally today banks, telecommunications companies, big organizations with lots of customers have a lot of customers that contact us regularly. And so this is a way of actually, how do we use AI to increasingly get to a point where you don't need to reach out to us but instead we're reaching out to you to better optimize your experiences with us. So, that's a little bit more of a program piece that's attached to my title at the moment.

Hayley Rodd:

Wonderful. So, prior to your current role, we're just going to get into the Agile space, which I know you seem extremely excited about at Optus and it's had some, I guess will be changes in the... Or it has some... Helped some massive changes at Optus. Before your current role what was your experience with that job?

Kate Brodie:

My current role and my experience with Agile has evolved. So, a couple of years ago, we rolled out Agile at a very large scale across our enterprise. So previously we had been using Agile in our IT teams for software development, but we actually started to roll out agile for product development. And I originally started as a product owner. So I was given a goal around creating a chatbot from scratch that would be supporting our teams. And with that, our Agile transformation involved breaking down the silos of divisions. So functional divisions. We started to merge into cross-functional squads and our squad was given the autonomy and the ownership to take on a particular initiative, and in my case, it was chatbot. And so I've actually experienced multiple roles within Agile including as a product owner and as a chapter lead, which was where I looked after a particular craft of people who run across multiple squads in Agile.

Kate Brodie:

And now more recently, I've got squads that are working within my area to produce these products and these outcomes for us. My experience with Agile has been brilliant. The amount of impact that it's had on our company is incredible. So, over the last couple of years, and this is pre COVID, we had a big target around moving towards a really digital led experience. And so we've seen our customers who used to choose digital around six...

Kate Brodie:

Around 65% of our customers would choose digital a couple of years ago and now it's more like 85%. So these big swings have come as a result of, I think, breaking down those silos and working in a more Agile way. Just on that I think what I like about Agile is that it's not about showcases and stand ups, it's actually about the culture that Agile allows for. So I think it allows for a lot more ideas and innovation because you have this mix of people who didn't traditionally sit with one another being together. And then also you can just deliver faster because you can cut through a lot of noise by working together. And the last piece I think is definitely that ownership and accountability for driving an outcome as opposed to delivering a piece of the puzzle, I think, yeah, Agile's been massive for us.

Hayley Rodd:

So, and you said that it was a big roll out across the organization. So does that mean that everyone within Optus works within an Agile framework or is there still sections that I guess don't employ Agile.

Kate Brodie:

There are areas of the business that aren't completely agile at this point in time. And I think they are areas of the business that makes sense. So sometimes in research and the like, you need to have a bit more freedom to sit back and ideate, although they would adopt principles of Agile so that they time box ideas and the like. From a delivery perspective, most of the organization has transformed into Agile delivery.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. So it sounds like your customers would be seeing a lot of value from the organization transforming to Agile. You said before that there was a lot of people in your life who allowed you to do things you felt confident in your ability because I guess they helped you get there. So, has there been a mentor that I guess you look back on in your career or even now that has had an impact on where you are?

Kate Brodie:

I think that I've had a lot of different people who have been my mentor at different stages and who I would call upon now. So, I like to probably not have one mentor, but sort of look at the variety of people and their different skills and take a little bit of this, take a little bit of that, learn from this person on a particular area. There have definitely been some people who stand out. And so, early on one of the things that was really useful for me was being supported by a particular general manager who basically sort of pushed me into digital and technology and sort of, I was just very fortunate that he believed in me and said, "Now, you can run this area." I had never really been exposed to it. This is 10 years ago when digital was still sort of seen as more of a complimentary area as opposed to core, to a business.

Kate Brodie:

And by him supporting me in having a go at everything that's been... That's actually one of the most pivotal moments I would say in my career very early on that that's really led the way for me to increasingly get into the area that I'm in today. And along the way, obviously, there's been many people who have made a huge contribution to where I'm at and they're both in my career, but also outside. So, people that you play sport with people that you just have, that you share different stories with, I think that often you take a little bit from everyone and hopefully you give back something to those people too.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, I'm sure you do. So, is there any... Looking back on all those people that you've had throughout your life who have helped you get to where you are, is there a piece of advice that might have stuck with you that you could share with us?

Kate Brodie:

There's lots of different advice. I think one of them is, no risk no return. I really do think that you have to have a crack, you have to put yourself out there. The things that always been the most satisfying experiences have been by having a go at something that I hadn't done before. So I think no risk no return is something that I definitely subscribe to. And then in terms of some practical advice, particularly as a female, I think in your career, something called the assumptive close, which is a sales technique, around almost not asking if someone would like something but sort of implying that they would. I actually would say that I use that technique not to necessarily directly sell to someone, but in everything that I do and I would really encourage most people to use it. It was some early feedback in my career and it's been quite useful along the way.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:18:51] after working in real estate for a little while, I think a lot of real estate agents also assume the sale. So, and it just it... I think it can help with the confidence and going in there and I guess almost putting yourself in a position of power in the conversation when you assume you've got this in the bag. So yeah, it probably comes naturally to some people more than others, myself included, but I would struggle with that, but that's a really good piece of advice. So yeah, I'm sure that it will be helpful for a lot of people who are listening to the podcast now. So what about... What's your proudest moment as a leader there at Optus so far? I know that you're in Vogue recently. That's an amazing moment. And as a person who's known you for a really long time, that was a proud moment for me to see someone that I'd known do that, but for you, what's the proud moment?

Kate Brodie:

[inaudible 00:19:58] I think probably my proudest moment is when I've launched something large. So recently we launched a large piece of technology that will change the experience for our customers, but it wasn't as much the launch as it was looking around me and seeing the people that are there with me doing it. And there are quite a few amazing people that I get to work with. And having sort of started with a few of them in the early days, a few years ago, where we were sort of spitballing ideas and we had no products to now having large products that make a real impact to Australian consumers and to our business. It's those moments where it's actually the team around you that it... I'm most proud of. It's just the high engagement and the drive and the culture that we've created where people want to work in this area and we all enjoy creating these experiences together. So I think definitely I'm most proud of the team culture and environment that we've set.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Sounds amazing. We're lucky enough here at Easy Agile to have, I guess the same... A culture that you can be proud of as well, so, I can understand how it can be something that makes a huge impact every day. So, we're getting close to the end of our time together, but again, I guess I wanted to touch on a bit of gender diversity. So how does gender diversity benefit technology companies? What do you think?

Kate Brodie:

I think diversity in general is going to benefit any business and particularly technology businesses, because it's imperative that you have a representation of the population and the people that will use your technology and the experiences that you're trying to create. So I think that it's only by ensuring that we are tapping into the entire talent pool, that we can represent people and represent customers, but also we're going to get the best ideas. And so that's gender diversity but also culturally and in every sort of facet, the more that we can tap into the entire talent pool, the more we'll create better experiences, better technology, solve more of the world's problems and capture more opportunities.

Hayley Rodd:

Mm. Fantastic. And last question, what advice would you give a young woman hoping to enter the technology industry or a technology company?

Kate Brodie:

I would say go for it. I would say don't ever put limits on yourself and speak up, learn as much as you can and get your hands dirty because it's through that kind of confidence... Oh, sorry. It's through working with lots of different people and creating things with people from scratch that you'll gain your confidence as well. And always ask, don't sit there waiting for someone to sort of tap you on the shoulder, ask for that new opportunity, ask for the salary increase, ask, it won't hurt. I promise.

Hayley Rodd:

That's a good advice. What's the worst they could say?

Kate Brodie:

No, exactly.

Hayley Rodd:

No, yeah.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And that's why.

Hayley Rodd:

Or they might say yes. And then that's awesome too. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Kate, for your time. That was really wonderful. It was wonderful to catch up, but it was also wonderful to hear from someone who's so young in their career, has... But has also done so much and who has reached some amazing goals, has a team behind them. And I think that there's so many people who will watch this, myself included, who will learn a lot from you. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

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