Easy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile
"We spoke in detail about scaling agile, being a SAFe fellow, discipline, the traits of effective leaders and how to trust your people."
Transcript
Nick Muldoon:
Good day, folks. Thanks for joining us for another Easy Agile Podcast. This morning, I'm joined by Em Campbell-Pretty of Pretty Agile. Em is one of 22 SAFe fellows globally and she's been doing agile transformations at scale for over a decade now. She's also the author of two books, The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck and Tribal Unity. So, all about culture and psychological safety here, and all about obviously scaling agile release trains, tips and tricks.
Nick Muldoon:
My key takeaways that I was really jazzed about, the traits of effective leaders for scaling agile transformations and being an effective organization, trust, as in trusting their people, an openness to learning and a willingness to learn, the ability to experiment and treat things as failures if they are failures, and discipline. Em and I talked a bit about discipline today as a trait of leaders. It's a really great episode and I took a lot from it, and you'll hear my takeaways at the end and what I need to go and learn after some time with Em this morning. So, let's get started. How many weeks a year are you typically on the road?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How many weeks a year am I typically on the road? A lot, most. It would be unusual for me to spend four weeks without going somewhere. That would be unusual. I don't travel every week, but I travel most weeks, and I travel in big blocks. Right? So, I'll go and do ... Like I said, just before the lockdown, we did three weeks in Auckland, so that was in February-March.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We went to Auckland, we had a client in Auckland, we just stayed there. So, three weeks in Auckland, came back here, and did not return to Auckland. Returned to support that client virtually over Teams and Zoom was how that one went. But yeah. Normally between running around Australia, Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Manila, the US, New Zealand, yeah, not home that often, normally. This has been truly bizarre.
Nick Muldoon:
So, this is a very unusual year for someone like yourself that's flying around visiting clients all over the world.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It's been a very strange year. It's an interesting difference on energy as well. Not flying all the time I think is good for my body. I feel the difference. I also feel the difference sitting in a chair all the time. So, I was traveling a lot, but I was on my feet most days when I was working. Now if I'm working, I'm sitting a lot.
Nick Muldoon:
You're sitting down. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that's interesting. But I don't miss the jet lag at all. I don't miss the amount of time the travel consumes at all. In fact, it's been nice. I've had a little bit of head space. I've probably blogged more this year than I have in a few years because I've just had some head space and being able to think. But I don't get to see the world either, and all my holidays got canceled. So, nevermind work. I had trips to Europe. Four weeks from now, I was supposed to be in Canada seeing polar bears.
Nick Muldoon:
Aw.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Tell me about it!
Nick Muldoon:
I would love to see polar bears. They look so cuddly on TV. I'm not sure that that would actually be the circumstance if I was to try to approach one and give one a cuddle.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. I don't think cuddling was involved. I was told I could bring a camera and a tripod, which means obviously I'm going to stand some distance away from this polar bear and take photos. But that will not be happening either. So, no holidays and no travel for work, and of course, being in Melbourne, not even any, let's just go to [crosstalk 00:04:15].
Nick Muldoon:
Coffee or anything like that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Just nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Nothing.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Nothing.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, because you've been on legit lockdown.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
So, tell me then about the shift over the last 10 or 15 years in these scaled, agile transformations. Obviously today, like you described with this client in Auckland, everything's got to be remote. Presumably, not as effective. But I'd love to get a sense of what the evolution is from the transformations 10 years ago, banking, telcos, that sort of environment to the clients that you're working with today. Describe what it was like 10 years ago.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 10 years ago, and it's so interesting to reflect on this now, I read Scaling Software Agility, which is a book that Dean published in 2007. Then I discovered that wasn't the latest book, so then I read Agile Software Requirements. This was 2011. I'm this crazy, angry business sponsor with this program of work I'd been sponsoring for five years that's never delivered anything, and in this cra-
Nick Muldoon:
You were the crazy, angry business sponsor?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I was the crazy [inaudible 00:05:26]. I was very angry. You would be angry too if you were me. I refer to it now as the money fire. So, basically, here's my job. Right? Go to the CFO, ask for money. Give the money to IT. IT lights a match, sets it on fire. Comes back, asks me for money. I get to go back to the CFO and say I need more money. Five years. Five years. That's all I did. Ask for money and try to explain where the other money went.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Anyway, in the strangest restructure ever, I end up the technology GM for the same group I had been the business sponsor of for the past five years. Apparently, they couldn't find anybody appropriately qualified. So, you can do it, Em. Sure. So, I'm a bit of a geek, so I read books, and I'm reading these books by Leffingwell because I'd been doing some agile ... So, I'd been doing something I'd been calling agile. Let's just go with that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
It was interesting to me because I could see little rays of light. But it still wasn't really making anything happen, so hence the reading. These books talk about this agile release train [inaudible 00:06:46] that sounds cool. We should so do this thing. So, I set about launching this train at a Telstra in early 2012. It wasn't called SAFe, right? It was just the books and these things called an agile release train.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Now, to look back 10 years ago, it wasn't called SAFe. People weren't running around doing this. I was not actually really qualified for the job I was in. Well, I wasn't a technology leader by any stretch of the imagination, and I decide that I'm just going to launch an agile release train. So, there were rare and unusual beasts, and I'm not sure I really understood that when I went down the path of doing it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm big on the, I read it in a book, I read it in a blog, I heard it at a conference, I'll just try it. That's very much always been my mental model. So, I read it in a book and I just tried it. Then we discover that actually, literally nobody is doing this, so it becomes Australia's first agile release train and Australia's first SAFe implementation. Oh, boy, have I learned a lot since then.
Nick Muldoon:
Well, yeah. I was reflecting on that because I dug out The Art of Avoiding a Train Wreck, right? This is one of the ones that you signed for Tegan. But obviously, you've learned a ton since then because you've managed to put together a tome of tips and tricks and things to avoid as you are pursuing these transformations. As an industry, though, well, as an industry, I guess this spans many industries, but as a practice these days, are we actually getting better at these transformations? Are there companies out there today, Em, that are still taking piles of money and setting it on fire?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think I meet people every day who hear my story and go, "Oh, my god. You used to work here?" So, I think there's still many, many organizations that have an experience that is like the experience I had back in 2010 and what have you. So, it seems to be something that really resonates with people. I guess so many of the businesses we go into now either are not agile at all or, I guess like my world was, doing something they call agile. What we find is the something that they call agile, I wouldn't say it's not agile. But it leaves a lot to be desired.
Nick Muldoon:
They're on a journey, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess so because they end up having a conversation with us. So, they understand that what they're doing is not enough. They understand that what they're doing isn't getting them the results that they want. I don't know that they understand why. It's interesting to me sometimes that they look to SAFe because you asked me about how's the client base changed? One of the things that's really interesting in Australia is we get far more of the small to medium sized companies now than the big ones.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, they're companies that consider themselves agile. But what we're calling them, the startups that are no longer startups, right? These are organizations that they're generally old 10, 20 year old startups and they're scaling and they see their problem as a scaling problem. So, that's what leads them to a conversation around the scaled agile framework.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
When we look at them through a SAFe lens, we go, "Gee, you're tiny. But okay. I can see that you can have an agile release train and it won't do you any harm. In fact, it would probably help you a lot in terms of mid-range planning," because mid-range planning just seems to be nonexistent for a lot of these organizations. Prioritization. A lot of these small organizations, very knee-jerky in terms of how they prioritize, bouncing from one thing to the other.
Nick Muldoon:
Are they reacting to the market, or are they reacting to the leaders, maybe the lack of discipline in the leadership?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You know what? They would say they're reacting to the market. I would say they've got a discipline issue.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:11:23].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I read, obviously, big reader, last summer, obviously Australian summer, US winter, I read Melissa Perry's The Build Trap. Interesting book and your well respected thought leader in product management. Not a big fan of SAFe. Probably not a big fan of agile either was the takeaway I had from her book. But the thing that she does talk about that I really thought was valuable was the lunacy in chasing your competitors. So, building features because your competitors-
Nick Muldoon:
Your competitors [crosstalk 00:12:06].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... build them, or building features to land a contract or retain a customer. So, I thought she sees all of that as lunacy, and I tend to agree. So, that was my ... I think that's quite interesting. Her perspective is you don't know if the competitor's actually having any luck with that thing that they've built. So, if you build it because they built it, you don't know. You have no idea. So, don't just build it because they've built it. It might not be doing them any favors either.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Of course, once you start just doing random stuff for this big customer or this big client, you start to lose your way as an organization. People end up with completely different versions of their products, branches that they can't integrate anymore. It's interesting. So, when I look at that, I go, "I feel like there's a discipline issue in some of these organizations at the leadership level."
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What is it we're trying to do? What is our vision? What is our mission? What is our market? What are we doing to test and learn in that market, as opposed to just get a gun, let's do everything, grab everything? Oh, my goodness. They were doing that over there. Stop this, start this, stop this. Of course, if you're stopping and starting all the time, you're not delivering anything, and that seems to be something that we see a lot with these organizations. They're not delivering.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I'm not saying their delivery mechanism is perfect. There's challenges there too. But some part of the problem is the inability to stay a course. Pick a course and stay a course. I'm not saying don't pivot, because that's stupid too. But being more deliberate in your choices to pivot, perhaps. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you get a sense, Em, that there are leadership teams in various geographic regions that are more effective at this and more effective at that longterm planning and having that discipline and that methodical approach to delivery over an extended time period?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think regions and cultures and nationalities certainly play a role in the leadership, I don't know, persona, personality. I don't know that I could say when I've worked in this country or this part of the world that their leaders are better at forethought. I think some cultures lend themselves to lean and agile more than others. Hierarchical cultures are really, really challenging.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That can be both a geographic thing, but it can also just be an industry thing, right? So, government can be very hierarchical. The banks can be very hierarchical. Some of the Asian cultures are very hierarchical. But some companies are just very hierarchical as well. So, who owns the company, who leads the company, all of that can play a big role in what's acceptable because so much of success in this scaled agile journey comes down to a leadership that is willing to trust the teams, a leadership that is willing to learn, a leadership that's willing to experiment, and a leadership that's prepared to be disciplined.
Nick Muldoon:
So, leadership with trusting the teams, willing to learn, willing to experiment, and with discipline. They're those four things that you-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. I'll make a note of those, Em. I'll come back to those. Trust, learn, experiment, and discipline. I'm interested, I guess, this year being a very interesting, a very unique year for doing remote transformation work and coaching and consulting, 10 years ago, what was the percentage of remote team members distributed teams? Now, you've basically, I think the big banks in Australia aren't even going back to the office until 2021. Atlassian is not going back to the office until 2021. Twitter, Jack Dorsey, my old CEO, said, "Work from home forever," sort of thing. What's the takeaway for this year and what do you expect for 2021 and beyond?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, look. This year has been eyeopening, and look, some things are, as I would have anticipated, some things have been different. So, obviously, we're seeing entire organizations going online. We're seeing the teams are online, the PI planning's online, everything's online. That's actually in some ways opened up opportunity. So, where we've had clients who have had the most odd setups in terms of distribution, and you can make a train work where you've got teams across two locations. But we're big fans of the entire team is in Sydney or the entire team is in India. We don't have half the team in Sydney and half the team in India.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But organizations really struggle with that because perhaps all the testers are in India and then you want a tester on every team and now you've got a problem. How do you create a complete team and not cross the time zones? So, the opportunity becomes if I can find teams that are not physically co-located but time zone friendly, I have a little bit more option. So, I can have a train that operates between, I don't know, Sydney and India. Or I can find a four hour overlap in their day, and I can insist that that team works 100% online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, the big thing that we'd advise against is I don't want that team hybrid. Right? I don't want three people sitting in the office in Sydney and three people sitting in their homes in India. I want everybody online. I want an even playing field, and I think we can do that now in a way that is more acceptable than before. Because the same advice I was giving, gee, back when I wrote Tribal Unity, same advice. Right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, 2016, everybody, equal playing field. If you're going to be distributed, everyone has to be online, as opposed to some people online and some people in a room. So, that's a more acceptable answer now than it was prior to this year. So, that's good. I think that's good.
Nick Muldoon:
In 2021, then, Em, you mean this is just going to play forward. I guess there's going to be a reversion of some of these companies back to the office because they've got huge real estate and workplace infrastructure already.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. So, look. We're seeing clients closing offices the same way that you see some of the companies in the US doing that. We're also seeing parts of Australia and New Zealand with no particular COVID impact at this point actually going back into the office, and having created that example of teams that are crossing time zones, and then going back into the office and going back to that hybrid space. So, that's interesting and [crosstalk 00:20:08].
Nick Muldoon:
So, where you're back into that environment where you might have some people working together in an office that can get a cup of coffee together and then some that are stuck still at home. I guess there's not just even regional differences, right? If you've got a team member that's got a particular health situation, they're not going to feel comfortable necessarily coming back into the office, regardless of the situation, until there's a vaccine or something.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, yeah. Look, I think it's going to be interesting. I would strongly advocate that organizations have teams that are either in person teams or online teams, and the team just either operates 100% online or the team operates 100%-
Nick Muldoon:
In the office.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... in person and in the office, and if you have a train that has both in any train level ceremony, everybody goes to a desk and-
Nick Muldoon:
And do it online.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... a video camera and we do it that way. I think the thing that seems to be most sticky about the physical environment and SAFe is PI planning. Nobody needs to beat. Right? That was cool. Nobody needs to beat, no one's PI planning slipped, everybody just went. They were all online. So, we'll just PI plan online. It'll be fine. We saw people use whatever infrastructure they had available to them.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. [crosstalk 00:21:30].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I'm sure a number of people called you folks and said, "We need a tool." But some just went, "We have Google Suite, we have Microsoft whatever it is, we have this, we have that. We're just going to make it work," and no matter what they used, they made it work and they ran the events and their events were effective and they got the outcomes. The big thing that is missing is that energy. You can't get the energy of 100, 200 people in a room from an online event. But mechanically-
Nick Muldoon:
We can achieve it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... we can achieve it. So, we hear everybody wants to go back to PI planning in person because of the social, because of the energy, which I think is awesome. I absolutely think that is awesome, and I can see this world in which people do a lot more work from home, work remote, whatever that looks like, and then the PI planning events are the things that we do to bring ourselves together and reconnect on that eight, 10, 12 week basis. That's my feeling. Could be wrong.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I'll be really interested to see how it plays out, and I think we should return to this conversation in 12 months, Em.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm just thinking, what's going through my mind is one of our customers in New York, financial services company, and for one of their arts, it was 150,000 US exercised to bring their people together once a quarter.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Wow.
Nick Muldoon:
I'm now going, I'm like, "Okay, yes, they're doing it digitally now." That's fine. They're going to miss out on things. But if they lose the budget, do they have to fight to get the budget back? Or does the budget sit there? There's these other unknown ramifications of this shift over the course of 2020 that we're yet to see play out, I guess.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I think you're right, and I think it would be particularly interesting for the trains that have been launched remotely. So, if the train has been launched remotely, do you ev-
Nick Muldoon:
So, not existing trains that have been working together for six to 12, 18 months. But you want to get a brand new train started. Have you done that remotely this year with some of your clients?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, we're in the process of doing it now.
Nick Muldoon:
Cool. Tell me.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We had one, though, literally just before the lockdown. So, they did their first PI planning face to face and then immediately moved to remote working and, yeah, now working on remotely launching a train. For us, we have a playbook. It's a bunch of workshops. It's a bunch of classes. We just use online collaboration tools. We've found things that replicate the sort of tools that we would have in a physical room, and the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes, right? This has been the absolute highlight for me, the joy of being able to read people's Post-it notes.
Nick Muldoon:
No more hieroglyphics.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
What is that that you wrote, Sally? Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Everyone can say everything at once, right? So, you think about the classroom and the workshop where there's a group of people huddled around Post-its and a flip chart paper and they're still huddled in a way in their virtual huddle, but everybody can read, right? It's not that I'm not close enough, I can't read, I can't read your handwriting. There's this great equalizer is the online world. So, I think that's great. I think the challenge for the trains launched remotely is going to be do you ever get the face to face experience?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Because if I go back over the years, one of the things we know is your first PI planning event sets the standard. So, people get this imprint in their heads of what is possible. For example, if you skip something in your first PI planning event, you just decide to, I don't know, skip the confidence vote or something weird like that, you don't do the roam of the risks or you just skip something, you never do it because you're successful without it.
Nick Muldoon:
It never gets picked up. Yeah, okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You're successful without it. So, every compromise you make, and you make a series of compromises, and then you're successful despite those compromises, and that becomes a false positive feasibility. It tells you, yes, I was right. I was right.
Nick Muldoon:
I don't need to do that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I didn't need to do those things because I was awesomely successful and I didn't do these things. So, it's the learning [crosstalk 00:26:15]-
Nick Muldoon:
That's confirmation bias, is it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah, that's it. That's the one. Confirmation bias. That's exactly it. Yep. Yeah, and I think there's going to be a bunch of confirmation bias in these remotely launched trains, and unless they're inside organizations where there's enough knowledge of SAFe and the physical PI planning to know that there's going to be value in bringing them together, but I can see that being a real challenge. I think trains that are launched online may never go into a physical PI planning event because of that confirmation bias.
Nick Muldoon:
All right.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That makes me really sad.
Nick Muldoon:
I want to come back to something you said before about the leaders, and you mentioned the trust, the openness to learning and experimentation, and the discipline. I was going back over your SAFe Global 2018 talk about the seven traits of highly effective servant leaders.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep.
Nick Muldoon:
I guess I had some questions about this, and obviously, these are four of the traits. What are the other three traits that I'm missing? Then I've got a followup question about some of the actual things that you talked about that you picked up in your trip.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:27:29] one of those four on the list I had in 2018.
Nick Muldoon:
I'll quiz you on it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
How awkward. So, in 2018, the answer was people first, a respect for people, that sort of lens, lean thinking, manager, teacher, learner. So, we had that one. Yeah. Learner. [inaudible 00:28:00] crazy. What else did I have? [inaudible 00:28:10].
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. I wanted to talk about that one, actually. I made a note about that. What is that, and are there examples of that in the West?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
A lot of people talk about true north.
Nick Muldoon:
[inaudible 00:28:28]. True north.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. True north. The translation I got, which I got from Mr. [inaudible 00:28:39], who partnered with Katie Anderson for the lean study tour I did in, I don't know, '18, '17, '18, 2018, I think, so the translation he gave was direction and management sort of things. So, it's mission, right? It's strategic mission. It's that sort of thing.
Nick Muldoon:
So, just a sidebar here for anyone that hasn't seen Em's talk on this, there's a woman by the name of Katie Anderson. She runs an annual, I think, I guess not this year, but she runs an annual-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No, not this year. She did not go this year.
Nick Muldoon:
... not this year, runs an annual lean, Kanban, kaizen study tour to Japan and visits ... Who did you visit, Em? You visited with Katie. How many were in the crew that you went over there with?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I think it was a group of about 20 from memory. Katie lived in Japan for two years and then went back to the US. She lives in San Francisco, I think. While she was there, she really liked the idea of putting together these lean study tours. She was already a lean practitioner more in the healthcare side of things. So, she got the opportunity to ... We actually were on a test run tour.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, cool.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, this was her experiment. She had a relationship with Ohio State University and they brought some people to the table and she brought some people to the table and they made it happen. She also had an existing relationship with Mr. [inaudible 00:30:24], who was John [inaudible 00:30:26] first manager at Toyota. So, he's a 40 year Toyota veteran.
Nick Muldoon:
Veteran.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
He came with us for the week. So, we of course went to Toyota, but we went to a bunch of Toyota suppliers as well. Isuzu, [inaudible 00:30:43]. Then we also went to Japan Post, which was fascinating. We went to a city which name escapes me right now, but they called it 5S City because all the companies in that city practice the 5S, the manufacturing 5S.
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me about it. It's not coming to mind. I don't feel comfortable or familiar.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You don't feel good about 5S?
Nick Muldoon:
No.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. That's not good. So, how would I ... The 5S is five Japanese words, which I'm going to go ... Yeah. My Japanese, nothing. But it's about standardized work. So, for example, when you go into the 5S factories, you'll see the floors marked up where you need to stand to do a particular job.
Nick Muldoon:
[crosstalk 00:31:41] This is what Paul Aikas picked up for his-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, no.
Nick Muldoon:
I feel like I've seen Paul Aikas' videos of their manufacturing in the US that everything's marked up.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Probably. That would be my guess. We should ask Teddy.
Nick Muldoon:
We can ask Paul, and we can ask all these people. There's time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Okay.
Nick Muldoon:
So, that lean tour, the Japan study tour, that was a super effective and motivating thing for you?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. For me, it was very reinforcing. So, I had I guess my own lens on what lean leadership meant, and I found that particular tour to be very reinforcing around the value set that I believe is part of that. Katie [inaudible 00:32:43] created [inaudible 00:32:44] that is designed to show you that. So, she's often very clear that says this is not Japan, right? This is not a reorganization into Japan. This is not every leader in Japan.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
This is, I've hand picked a series of lean leaders to show you it being practiced. But it was certainly very reinforcing for me. So, very similar messages I picked up in terms of how I like to head, how I coach others to lead was built into the messages that she delivered. So, it was very cool. It was very cool. Some of those leaders, just so inspiring, particular kaizen. I think the thing that just really hits you in the face as you're talking to these folks is kaizen, this drive to get better.
Nick Muldoon:
All the time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
All the time. Absolutely. It's these folks looking for, they're looking for the one second, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
The one second improvements. There's a video that floats around. Have you seen the Formula 1 video-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... where they do, yeah, the changeover in 63 and it takes them over a minute and they do the changeover in 90-something in Melbourne and it takes them six seconds or whatever it is. It's like that, right? It's that how do I find one more second, half a second? They're just so driven. If I can remove a step that someone has to take, can I move something closer to somebody?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. There was some comment in the presentation that you gave. There was some comment about if I have to take another five steps, that's an extra 10 seconds. Then that's an extra 10 seconds every time I do this activity every day, and that all adds up. So, how do we shave these seconds off and be more effective and deliberate about how we do this?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That was just huge, right? I called it kaizen crazy in the presentation. I'm just so, so driven to improve, and just tiny, small improvements every day.
Nick Muldoon:
So, one of the other practices that I didn't grok out of that talk was about the Bus Stop. What was the Bus Stop about?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Was that in that talk? Really?
Nick Muldoon:
I'm forcing you to stretch your mind [crosstalk 00:34:57].
Em Campbell-Pretty:
You are. You are. You are. You are quite right. It really was [inaudible 00:35:01]. Okay. Oh, you're awful.
Nick Muldoon:
Yes.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yes. Yes, you are. Okay. So, effective leaders are human was the tagline on that one. It was really about leaders being down to Earth and being one with the teams. So, things I saw in Japan, this factory run by a woman, [inaudible 00:35:42], I think it was, so very unusual. Not a lot of women leaders in Japan. Her husband took her name because [inaudible 00:35:52]. It's a really interesting character.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But her company has a bunch of morning rituals. You always say good morning and thank you and how they talk every day and everybody talks and everyone interacts. Then one of the other places we went to, they all had their uniforms they wore in the factory. But everybody wore the uniform, right? The CEO, the office workers, and everybody wore the uniform. Everyone was one.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Then I was thinking about my experience leading teams, and a lifetime ago, I was working with a team that decided to enter a corporate competition. This competition was about showing your colors and showing the corporate values, which were things like better together and courage, and then [inaudible 00:36:49] a rainbow thing. So, this team decides what they're going to do, is it an address up in the rainbow colors, and they're going to be better together and show their courage and they're going to do the Macarena and they're going to video it and that's going to be how they're going to win this competition.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I did not participate in this Macarena because someone has to take photos and stuff, right? How else are they going to enter the competition? So, had to do my bit. Anyway, we also had this ritual, which was about teams bringing challenges to leadership to resolve, and they did at the end of every spring. So, they do this Macarena and they film it and they enter the competition and at the end of the spring, they bring their challenges to leadership.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Their challenge is Em did not do the Macarena. You are our leader, you did not do the Macarena. We are feeling very challenged by that, and we're bringing this to you to resolve. So, I went and spoke to the team that raised and said, "Look. I got to tell you. I don't know the Macarena. So, sorry." I still remember this so clearly. One of the guys said to me, "I read this blog about the importance of leaders being vulnerable." You know who wrote that blog post, don't you?
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, Em. Oh. You have it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, we negotiated. I said, "Look. I think I can manage the Bus Stop." For those not from Australia, we grow up doing this in high school dances. In my part of the world, anyway. So, I grabbed my leadership team and we did do the Bus Stop and it was part of proving that we too were the same as everybody else and doing our bit and responding to the team's feedback. So, yes. That is where the Bus Stop fits in. Thanks so much for that, Nick.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. No, I appreciate that. Now, I'm glad that I got that context. I try and do similar things. Typically, it's a karaoke or something, or that we haven't done that in a while. Yeah, okay. So, I guess the thrust of that talk was really about to leaders to serve, and it was all about being in service of. It sounds like what you took from the Japan study tour was these leaders there were very much in service of their people.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you see that as a trait that is prevalent in the best performing companies that you deal with, and how likely are they over a five, 10 year horizon, whatever that happens to be, to outperform their competitors or to be more successful in their market? Or I guess however they define success?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I certainly see a correlation between leaders that like to serve and/or choose to serve and success with scaled agile, and business, because I guess we have seen over, it's close to 10 years, is those who practice together, your framework with discipline get results, and they get significant results. They improve their ability to deliver products and services, their cost base goes down, their quality goes up, their people are happier, their attrition goes down. We see it every single time.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What we also see is when the leaders don't walk the talk, when the leaders are paying lip service to the transformation, it doesn't stick. They don't get the results. People don't find it a better place to work. People aren't bought into the change. So, there is definitely a correlation there. You can get pockets of wonderfulness inside an organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
We often observe that the organization that's transformation is as successful is the most bought in leader. Most senior bought in leader. So, if you're the leader of a train and you show the right behaviors, your train will be really great.
Nick Muldoon:
Successful.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
But that means nothing for the broader organization, solution train, the business unit, what have you. You see this thing that goes from the leader. If the leader's showing the right behaviors, you get within that space, you get the behaviors, you get the change, you get the results. But leaders who say one thing and do another, people don't buy it, right?
Nick Muldoon:
I guess this is true of any organizational change, isn't it?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
You hit the boundaries of your pocket, as you said, within the organization and then you meet the real world, the rest of the organization. People, maybe they don't have enough energy or they don't feel that they can influence and change that, and so they just live within their bubble because they don't feel that they can exert the pressure outside of that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Look. I've certainly, I've seen successful bubble influence organizations. Successful bubbles can become interesting. Chip and Dan Heath's book, which one was it, Switch.
Nick Muldoon:
Oh, yeah. Switch. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
[inaudible 00:42:02]. Shine a light on bright spot or something like that. So, bright spots inspire, and if you can create a bubble in an organization that outperforms the rest of the organization, or even if it performs better than it has previously, then everybody looks. Right? How did the organization that goes from poor delivery to great deliveries is what is going on here? That inspires others to get interested. One of the really interesting things we've seen in Australia, we can trace pretty much every SAFe implementation in Australia back to the one at Telstra.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, right. They all spun off from that, from the people that were part of it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Well, no. People who came and saw it. People who were inspired by it.
Nick Muldoon:
They're not necessarily directly involved in it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No. People came and got inspired by it, and then they went, did their thing, and then they inspired someone else. I haven't tried to do it recently, but there was a point in time we just could web together all of them because we could count them when we could see them. But we can web together most of them still. It says you saw someone who saw someone who saw someone who actually was someone who went to visit us at Telstra back in 2012, 2013 and got inspired.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, that bright spot can be really, really powerful, and that's what it takes, right? You get to add a little bit of noise, a little bit of difference, and people start to ask what's going on. I wouldn't say it's foolproof. I think it still requires, so someone's got to come, they've got to see, and then they've got to have the courage to do it for their part of the organization.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
That's the hard bit, right? I can come, I can see, I can get inspired. But am I prepared to put myself out there? There's a lot to be said for leaders who are prepared to take risks. That was one of the-
Nick Muldoon:
This was your lesson about the Bus Stop, right? You have to put yourself out there and be vulnerable.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. This was actually, I was thinking, was the thing I was talking about at last year's SAFe Summit was be safe or be SAFe.
Nick Muldoon:
Be safe or be SAFe. Tell me about that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, be safe, don't take a risk, or be SAFe, as in the scaled agile framework, and take that leap of faith. It comes back to, we started talking today about when I did this at Telstra, I didn't really understand that this wasn't a normal everyday, this is what everybody did sort of thing. It was a very new thing. So, I took a risk from a perspective that I was a business leader in a technology space and I really felt I had nothing to lose.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
So, I look back and that and go, "What on Earth possessed me?" And I go, "Well, I'm this business person leading this technology team. I wasn't supposed to succeed anyway."
Nick Muldoon:
Put it all on the line, right?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
I found out later they actually had a plan for when I did not succeed. I was supposed to fail.
Nick Muldoon:
Wait. How much waste is that? Why did they plan for something before it was ... Okay.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Organizational policies. What can I tell you? Anyway, I did not fail. I did succeed, and because I took some crazy, calculated risks, and I've seen it time and time again, right? So many of these leaders in these companies that make this change are taking a leap of faith. I'm always saying I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen. I don't know whether you're going to get 10% cost out or 50% cost out. I don't know if your people are going to be 10% happier or 50% happier. I don't know that.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
What I do know is if you listen to what we're telling you and you follow the guidance and you behave in line with those lean and agile values, you will get results. You'll get results every single time. But you've got to be brave enough to buy in and take it on holistically and not do this thing where you manage to customize your way out of actually doing the thing-
Nick Muldoon:
Doing anything.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
... that you wanted to do.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay. Em, this was awesome. Before we finish up, I want to take two minutes. You've mentioned books a lot today and you reminded me of this quote, Verne Harnish, "Those who read and don't are only marginally better off than those who can't." So, today so far, you've mentioned Chip and Dan Heath with Switch, you've mentioned the Leffingwell series from the late noughties. There might have been a few others. But tell me, what are you reading today? You've been in lockdown. What are the two or three top books that you've read since you've been in lockdown in Melbourne?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Oh, my goodness. It's very awkward. Every time someone asks me, "What did you just read?" I go, "I don't know."
Nick Muldoon:
I don't think I remember.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Can't remember. It's terrible. What am I reading? I need to open my Kindle. I don't know what I'm reading. Geoffrey Moore, Zone to Win.
Nick Muldoon:
Zone to Win.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Zone to Win. I think that's what it's called. It's a newer book. I know this year, because obviously, I've read The Build Trap this year-
Nick Muldoon:
Yep. Melissa Perry. You mentioned that one. Yeah.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yep. I've read the Project to Product, Mik Kersten.
Nick Muldoon:
What was that one, Project to Product?
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Yeah. Project to Product, Mik Kersten. One of the IT Revolution press books. So, released just over a year ago. Very tied up in the SAFe 5.0 [crosstalk 00:48:21]. The other book tied up in the SAFe 5.0 release is John Kotter's Accelerate. So, I picked that back up. I read it a number of years ago when it first came out. But I like to revisit stuff when SAFe puts it front and center. Seems to make some sense to do that at that point in time.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. It's interesting that, thinking about Verne Harnish, the scaling up framework, no relation to-
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No.
Nick Muldoon:
... scaled agile, for anyone that's not familiar. But so much of the scaling up framework about scaling businesses, they draw on so much content from existing offers, existing tomes, points of reference and experience, and it's super valuable, and I guess SAFe is no different, right? It draws on this wisdom of the collective wisdom.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
Absolutely. Absolutely. [inaudible 00:49:14] It was very fun to say in the early days, we stand on the shoulders of giants, a quote from somebody else whose name escapes me.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. Well, Em, look. I wanted to thank you so much for your time this morning. This has been fantastic.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries. It's great to catch up with you.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. I guess my takeaways from this, I like the be safe or be SAFe, like either be safe and don't take any risks, or be SAFe and actually put yourself out there and step into scaled agile. I definitely have to go and do a bit of research on the five S's as well and learn a bit more about that. But thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Em Campbell-Pretty:
No worries, Nick. Great to see you.
Related Episodes
- Podcast
Easy Agile Podcast Ep.23: How to navigate your cloud migration journey
"Having gone through a cloud migration at Splunk, Greg share's some insightful key learnings, challenges and opportunities" - Chloe Hall
Greg Warner has been involved with the Atlassian ecosystem since 2006 and is a frequent speaker at Atlassian events. Greg has worked as a senior consultant for a solution partner, supported Jira and Confluence at Amazon, and in his current role at Splunk, executed a cloud migration to Atlassian Enterprise Cloud for over 10,000 of his colleagues.
In this episode, Greg and Chloe discuss the cloud migration journey:
📌 The mental shift to cloud migration and how to think beyond the technical side
📌 How to navigate the journey without a roadmap to follow
📌 The four pillars to success for your cloud migration journey
📌 Finding the right time to migrate & thinking about future opportunities beyond your migration
📌 The unexpected value that can come from a cloud migration
+ more!
📲 Subscribe/Listen on your favourite podcasting app.
Thanks, Greg and Chloe!
Transcript
Chloe Hall:
Hey everyone and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. So I'm Chloe, Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile, and I'll be your host for today's episode. So before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which I am recording today, the Wodiwodi people of the Dharawal-speaking nation and pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging. We extend that same respect to all Aboriginal and to Australia Islander peoples who are tuning in today.
Chloe Hall:
So we have a very exciting guest on the podcast today. This guest has been involved with the Atlassian ecosystem since 2006 and is a frequent speaker at Atlassian events. He has worked as a senior consultant for a solution partner, supported Jira and Confluence at Amazon and at his current role at Splunk, executed a cloud migration to Atlassian Enterprise Cloud for over 10,000 colleagues. So welcome to the Easy Agile podcast, Greg Warner.
Chloe Hall:
How are you?
Greg Warner:
Good, and thank you for having me.
Chloe Hall:
No worries. It's great to have you here today.
Greg Warner:
This is one of my favorite topics. We talk about cloud migration and yeah, I hope I can explain why.
Chloe Hall:
Yes, that's exactly what we want for you because I remember when we met at Team 22, you were just so passionate about cloud migration and had so many insights to share and I was very intrigued as well.
Greg Warner:
To give it a bit background about myself.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah.
Greg Warner:
I haven't always been a cloud person. So you mentioned before about being involved since 2006. I was involved early days with when Jira had the several different flavors of standard and professional, when you'd order an enterprise license for Atlassian and they'd send you a shirt. That was one of the difference between one of the licenses. So based a lot in the server versions, over many years. I looked at the cloud as being the poorer cousin, if you like.
Greg Warner:
I'd been to several Atlassian summits and later Team events where there was always things of what was happening in cloud but not necessarily server. I participated in writing exam questions for Atlassian certification program for both server and DC. For me, in the last 18 months, two years now, to make this fundamental shift from being certainly a proponent of what we do doing on server in DC to now absolutely cloud first and that is the definite direction that we as a company have chosen and certainly why I'm so passionate about speaking to other enterprise customers about their cloud migration journey.
Chloe Hall:
Wow. So what do you think it was that you were like, okay, let's migrate to the cloud, as you were so involved in the server DC part of it? What was it that grabbed your attention?
Greg Warner:
I joined Splunk in 2019 and it wasn't all roses in regards to how we maintained Jira and Confluence. It wasn't uncommon to have outages that would last hours. For two systems that were just so critical to our business operations to have that, I was kind of dumbfounded but I thought, hey, I've been here before. I have seen this. And so it was a slow methodical approach to root cause our problems, get us to a version that was in long-term support, and then take a breather.
Greg Warner:
Once we got to that point where we didn't have outages, we kind of think of what the future would be. And for me, that future was exactly what I'd done before, what I'd done at Amazon, which is where we would move all of our on-prem infrastructure, Jira, Confluence, and Crowd to public cloud, whether it would be a AWS or GCP, something of that flavor. I'd done that before. I knew how we were going to do that to the extent that I'd even held meetings in my team about how we were going to stand up the infrastructure, what the design was going to be.
Greg Warner:
But there was probably one pivotal conversation that was with our CIO and it was in one of those, just passing by, and he's like, "Greg, I've seen the plans and the funding requests." He's like, "But have you considered Atlassian Cloud?" Now, the immediate personal reaction to me was like, we are not going to do that because I'd seen the iterations. I'd seen it over time. I'd worked for a solution partner. I'd worked with customers in cloud, never really thought we could be enterprise-ready. So my immediate reaction was not going to do that. I said, "I'm not going to answer that question right now." I said, "I don't know enough to give you an answer."
Greg Warner:
And I'm absolutely glad I did that because I would've put a foot in mu mouth had I given the immediate response that was... So yeah, I took that question, went and did some analysis, spoke to our technical account manager at the time, and really looked at what had been going on and where was cloud today? Where was it in its maturity? And the actual monumental thing for me was that I think it's actually ready. People make excuses for why they can't do it, but there are a bunch of reasons why you should. And if we look at us as a company, with our own products that we are moving our own customers to cloud, and we are using cloud services, like Google Workspace and Zoom and a variety of SaaS applications. What was so different about what we did in engineering that couldn't go to cloud? And that was like, okay, I think the CIO was actually asking me a much bigger question here.
Greg Warner:
So the result of that was yes, we decided that it was the right time for Splunk to move. And that is a monumental shift. And I know there's a lot of Jira admins out there that are like, if you do this, you're putting your own jobs at risk. The answer is no, you're not. And even within my team, when we had we'd discussed this, there was emotional connection to maintaining on-premise infrastructure and were we giving our own jobs away if we do this? There's all those... No.
Greg Warner:
And there have actually been two people in my team that got actually promoted through the work of our cloud migration that otherwise wouldn't have because they could demonstrate the skills. But that's kind of like the backstory about how we decided to go to cloud. And I think as we are thinking about it, there is a mental shift first. Before you even go down the technical path about how you would do it, change your own mind so that it's open so that you're ready for it as well.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, I love that. It's so good. And I think just the fact that you didn't respond to your CIO, did you say that?
Greg Warner:
Yep.
Chloe Hall:
That you didn't respond to your CIO straight away and you weren't like, "No, I don't want to do that." You actually stepped away, took that time to do your research, and think maybe cloud is the better option for Splunk, which is just so great and really created that mental shift in yourself. So when you say that your employees, like everyone kind of has that beef that, oh, we're going to lose our job if we move from on-prem to cloud and those employees ended up getting promoted. How did their roles change?
Greg Warner:
When we moved from on-prem to cloud, you no longer have to maintain the plumbing, right?
Chloe Hall:
Yeah.
Greg Warner:
You no longer have to maintain all the plumbing that's supporting Jira, Confluence, BitBucket, whatever is going to move. Now we thought that was the piece that's actually providing value to the organization. And it wasn't until we went to cloud, we actually realized it wasn't. Like what we can do now is different. And that's what my team has done. They've up-leveled.
Greg Warner:
So in the times since we moved from Jira, Confluence on-prem to cloud, we now get involved a lot more with the business analysis and understanding what our project teams want. So when someone from engineering is requesting something that has an integration or a workflow, we've got more time to spend on that than are we going to upgrade? Are we on the current feature release? Is there a bug we have to close? Log for J as a prime example where the extent of where we covered was logging a call with the Atlassian enterprise support and then telling us, "Yep, it's done."
Greg Warner:
Whereas other colleagues within the ecosystem that I spoke to spent a week dealing with that, right? Dealing with patching and upgrades. So the value for our team in the work we do has shifted up. We've also done Jira advanced roadmaps in that time. So we've been able to provide things we would've never got to because we're too busy to the plumbing, to the extent now that we have a very small footprint of on-prem that remains and that's primarily FedRAMP and IO5. It's not quite certified yet. It's going to get there. So we have a very small footprint and I'm the one who has to do the upgrades and now you look at it like, oh my god, that's going to be this couple-week tasks we going to do where I could do all this other better work that's waiting for us in cloud. You don't realize it until you have it removed how much you used to do.
Greg Warner:
And so we used to do two upgrades of Jira year and two upgrades of Confluence a year. We put that down to about a month's work of each. By the time you do all of your testing and you're staging and then do that. So you're really looking at four months of the year you were spending doing upgrades. We don't have that anymore. It's completely gone. And so now we make sure that we do things cloud first. We don't bring across behaviors that we were doing on-prem into cloud. So that's probably one thing we learned was that don't implement server DC in cloud.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, that's so great. It seems like it's opened up a lot more opportunity for you as well. So I think something that I kind of want to look into and understand a bit more is that people focus a lot on the technical aspect of the cloud migration. What other aspects do you think need to be considered?
Greg Warner:
Certainly people. I mentioned at the very front here the mental mindset and that really started with my team, to get their mind around how we're going to do this cloud migration. There isn't necessarily yet a roadmap that says these are all the steps need to take to get ready for your cloud migration. So we had to invent some of those and one of those two was, what did we want to get out of the cloud migration?
Greg Warner:
I speak to other Atlassian customers. You talk about they're running a project, the project is the cloud migration, the start and the end is the cloud migration day. No, completely wrong. The cloud migration actually has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What you're talking about here, about this first changes is in the beginning, and that should be we're moving to cloud because it should be fundamentally better than what we have today.
Greg Warner:
If it's not better, there's no value in doing the activity. So we started with a vision and that vision was that all of the core things had to work from day one and they had to work better. So create issue, edit issue, up to issue, that just needs to work. There should be no argument whether it does or does not. That needs to work and work better. Create a page, edit a page, share a page. That stuff needs to work in Confluence without any problems. We also need to make sure that there are people in the organization who this could be a fundamental change of how they work, depending on how much they work with Jira and Confluence. So appreciating that there is some change management and some communications that needs to be ready as you do your cloud migration to ensure that your vision is going to work, but also acknowledging you will break some things. You're not going to be able to do a cloud migration and shift you from A to B without nothing.
Greg Warner:
It will go wrong. So we were aware of that and for that, what I would always tell people was that we're really fixed on the vision of making it sure it's better than it was today, but flexible on the details, how we get there. We will probably find different ways as we go along because things will change. Cloud changes itself. You'll discover things you didn't know before. There was a Jira admin that made a decision 10 years ago, you now found that. So yeah, very, very fixed on that vision that day one that we had to have this unboxing experience that when people got to use Jira and Conference Cloud for the first time, they could see why we'd spent so much effort to make sure it was polished and things just worked. And as you went a bit further out, there might be things to do with apps that might not be quite the same.
Greg Warner:
That's okay. And then further out, things you just ultimately can't control. And for that, we had 76 integrations of teams that had written automations from all over the company. We're never going to get to find out what they do, but we knew that some of those would probably break. And so just dealing with some change control and allowing those people to know this is coming, what the rest endpoints will be, how to set up their API keys. We did a lot of that, but we did have one integration that broke and that integration broke because the entire team was on PTO or leave that week. We can't avoid that one. But it was good to see other teams actually jumped in because they'd been involved in updating theirs to go help fix that. So that was okay. We had one integration that we really gave the white glove support to and that was for... We have a Salesforce to Jira integration that's a revenue-generating integration.
Greg Warner:
We gave that a lot of attention to make sure that just worked. But the 76 others, we provided a runbook. The runbook was essentially teams, you do things like this. So they knew how to change and update to the new system. But yeah, certainly the beginning, middle and end. The beginning is all those shifts that you're going to have to change and probably some history about design decisions. The middle is in fact your cloud migration and the end, middle to the end is everything you do with it afterwards. So that's where the real value comes from in your cloud migration. It's once you're in, what can we do with it?
Greg Warner:
And we are towards the end of that now. There have been things that I couldn't have planned for that people have done. So we did your advanced roadmaps, saving the forest there, but also we're encouraging our staff to extend the platform. That used to be really difficult and we've worked with Atlassian to understand what should that look like? And we've settled on using it Atlassian Forge. And so now we have our first app this week, in UAT, in Atlassian Cloud to solve business problems that we have. That's a custom Atlassian Forge app. And we're encouraging our engineers to build those and so they can extend and get that real value through the cloud migration.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, wow. You've come so far and it's nice to hear that you're towards the end of it and all the opportunities are coming with it and you're seeing all the value. It's all paying off as well. I think I just want to go back to that moment where you talk about there isn't essentially a roadmap outlay. There isn't someone or something to follow where it says this is where you need to start. These are the steps to cloud migration. And I think a lot of people, that's what they fear. They're like, we're not sure exactly where to start. We're not sure what roadmap we'll follow. How do you navigate that in a way?
Greg Warner:
So I get back to that when I talked about the vision. We said we're fixing the vision flexible details. Early on when we signed for cloud migration, it was in the first week after we'd signed for it, that same CIO asked me, "Greg, what's our date? When are we moving? Because you've sold me that this is so much better. Where's the action? When are we get this?" And we took a good six weeks after we signed to actually understand the tooling that's available. So for Jira, there's really two options. There's the Jira site import and the Jira cloud migration assistant. And on Confluence side, there's one that's called the Confluence cloud migration assistant. Better kind of understand how those technologies work. And for a couple weeks there, my team actually considered if we did the migration ourself, we could probably save the company a bunch of money and we would own it.
Greg Warner:
We would know how this thing worked. We got about four weeks in and decided that was a terrible idea. Do not do that. Any enterprise customers I talk about that say we're going to do it ourselves, do not do that. Do not do that. And part of the reason is that there's really four pillars to success for your cloud migration. Jira migration, Confluence migration, apps, and users. And we did not know how to do apps and users and we probably could have gotten away with Confluence and Jira. But we said, look, this is something that we actually need to have a partner involved. And so we did ask for partners to provide their way of doing it, knowing what they knew about us. And we did provide as much detail as we can. We had two partners actually provided completely different methodologies how to get there.
Greg Warner:
So this is that flexible on the details, but we really had to make a decision on what worked for us. So when it really came down to Jira, would we do a big bang approach and just switch it over in the course of a weekend or did we want to do cohort by cohort over time? And we decided for us, because we are a 24/7 organization that's supporting our customers, doing the big bang switchover, that was the best way to do it. So that's one of the reasons we chose the partner we did. But that partner didn't necessarily have a roadmap of where they want to go. But we did then explain what we want to get out of this. That was the first thing, was about it needs to happen on a weekend. So that then filters down what your choices are. The ecosystem apps part is really important to make sure that one, there may have been apps installed in your system that have been there for 10 years and you're not sure why they're there anymore because it was four Jira admins ago.
Greg Warner:
Nobody knows what's there. But if they don't have a cloud migration pathway, you really should consider they're probably going to hit their end because there is no equivalent. So you can rule them out. Identify the ones that do have a business process with them. And for that, Salesforce for us, we had to find a cloud-first connect that would work. So that meant that we knew that was going forward. But really, I think the key thing that we invented that we didn't know about was that we created this thing called an App Burn Down. And that's where we looked at all the apps we had. We had about 40 apps. We said, okay, which ones are not going to go to cloud? Which ones don't have a migration pathway? Which ones are going to replace something else? And so we started to remove apps over the course of about three months.
Greg Warner:
So people would see that we're starting to get away from on-prem design decisions and old ways of doing things. But we also said, but once we get to cloud, this is the pathway out of it. So that we said, look, we're going to turn this app off but you're going to get this one instead, which is the cloud-first app. So people could see how we're going to make the jump over the river to get there. But it meant that we would, over time, identify apps that weren't used. If we turned them off and nothing happened, it's fine. But also we did come across some where they were critical to a business use. And so if we didn't have an answer for those yet, it gave us time to find one. And with your user base, typically it's your colleagues, that's going to be your most critical customers. They're going to ask, okay, you're turning it off. When do I get the functionality back?
Greg Warner:
And by doing that App Burn Down over time, that does buy you time to then have that answer. So it's a much easier conversation than I'm simply turning off functionality, I don't have an answer for you yet. There are things like that. It wasn't necessarily a roadmap, but working with a solution partner is absolutely the right way to go. Don't try and do it yourself. They also work with Atlassian and they have far better reach into getting some of these answers than you can possibly ever have. And I have on at least three different occasions where our solution partner did go and speak directly with an ecosystem partner to find out what's the path forward. How can we make this work? So it is good. The migration is really a three-way collaboration between yourself, your solution partner, and Atlassian. And you all have the same goals. You want to get to cloud and it does work really well.
Chloe Hall:
Wow. Yeah. So sounds like hope everyone got that advice. Definitely don't take this on your own. Reach out to solution partner. And I really like how you said you went to two different solution partners and you found out what their ideas were, which ways they wanted to take you, so you could kind of explore your options, work out what was the best route for Splunk. And it's worked very well for you as well. Having that support I think as well. Yeah. Sorry, you go.
Greg Warner:
The choice of the partner is really important and it's probably one of the earliest decisions that we made to get that one right. And I remember several times thinking about, have we got the right people on board? Did we speak to... And it was an interview process to the extent that when we had our final day after we'd been working with Atlassian and with our partner for six months, one month after our migration was completed and we're all done, we had one final Zoom call with all of us and took a photo and did that. But it kind of felt like a breakup, to be honest, because we'd been in each other's faces for six months and working. We're now all saying goodbye. We might not see each other. It was like the weirdest feeling. But it did work. And so yeah, it is a real fundamental choice.
Greg Warner:
Just take the time, make sure they understand what we want to do, make sure you understand how they're going to do it. But yeah, if we have done it ourselves, we would've got ourselves all caught up in knots, wouldn't have been a successful migration or so. I'm a technical guy. I want to solve it. I want to be like... But I think the actual right answer was no, you don't need to know how this works 100% because you're going to do this hopefully just once. And so focus on the real business value things about dealing with stakeholders and the change and making design decisions that are really important for you because you're going to own those probably the next decade rather than worrying about how do I get my data from A to Z?
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. It definitely would've felt like a breakup for you because you would've been working side by side for so long, dealing with so much. Are you still in contact with them or...
Greg Warner:
Yeah, we had this fundamental thing we always said is we're always, if there's a problem, we're always cautiously optimistic, we're going to solve it. We did engineering challenges that we went through, but I did say right early on is, the ecosystem is only big and we're all going to bump into each other at some point. So yeah, let's make sure that we're still friends at the end of this. And I didn't realize how important that was until later when I was in New York for Christmas and I arranged to meet the project manager that worked for us. She lives in New York, so how about I meet you so... So we met each other at the hotel and she's like, "I have never met a customer outside of work to do this." Yeah, I gave the story about it felt like a breakup, but she did say that at the beginning you said we'll be friends after.
Greg Warner:
Yeah it is because it can be really hard. I've been on the consultant side where you kind of have to have some hard conversations and sometimes... You want to make sure that everyone understands the problem. You're trying to make it better so that at the end of it, you can still be friends like that. That is the thing. There probably will be engagements later on that you might need them again. So you want to make sure that you have your choice of best in breed partner to choose from. You have those relationships. They understand what you want to choose. So yeah, it is really important to choose the right partner. Don't necessarily based on price but choose the partner that's going to work for you, understands what you're trying to get out of your cloud migration and they'll be there in the future when you need them for another cloud migration or a much more gnarly project. Try and be friends at the end of it.
Chloe Hall:
And definitely it's good that you have that friendship now because they have that understanding about your business and what you want and the value of it. So if you do need help again, it's a lot easier to bring them on board straight away. So now that you've performed a cloud migration and you're coming towards the end of it, do you look at the process any differently to when you were at the very beginning?
Greg Warner:
Yeah, I thought we were just executing a data migration just yeah, on-prem to cloud.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah.
Greg Warner:
Pretty straightforward, nothing big. I was pleasantly surprised as we're making some of these decisions as we went along, that it was more than that. There were business processes that we could improve. There was the beginning, the middle, and end. I didn't realize that until actually after the end. So when we did our cloud migration, it was actually the week before Thanksgiving in the US. It was November 19. And even that decision was made in just going for a walk at lunchtime. When should we really do this? And I kind of came down again, spoke to my project manager and said, "How about we do this in the cloud migration the week before Thanksgiving?" Because 50% of our workforce is located in the US and a large proportion of that will be on leave or PTO before.
Greg Warner:
So by doing it over a weekend before then we're ensuring that... Like when you open a new restaurant. You don't want to have all of your tables full on the first night. We knew that we were going to have everybody using Jira and Confluence day one after a migration because we're going to break some stuff. They actually turned out to be really exceptionally good idea. And I encouraged people to find... Look at your data and work out when is low time to do this? I've been involved in Jira and Confluence for a long time and just thought it's task tracker and it's a wiki. There's nothing there that I don't really know about. But one of the decisions we made was actually that when we completed the data migration and it was ready to go, I always said if we waited, do we get a better result? And the answer was no.
Greg Warner:
We should make this available to people now. And so we opened it up on a Sunday morning in the US, which was starting to be business hours in Australia. We started making teams aware that they can now go ahead and use Jira and Confluence. And it was the feedback that we immediately got from those teams that were starting to use Jira service management in cloud for the first time, about, "Wow, this is so much better than it was on-prem." And people said, "I can actually see the attention to detail you've made on fields and descriptions and the changes you've made." And it started to impact people's workday that this was better than it was. I didn't expect that to come back. And so I have a montage that we share with the team of all these Slack messages from people saying, "This is really good. This is much better than we had before."
Greg Warner:
What I didn't also realize is that when we moved from on-prem to cloud is the data that we had became more usable and accessible. Hadn't planned that. It seems obvious now, but when we put it in cloud and it has all the security controls around it and now no longer has the requirements of things like VPN to get access to it, people could build new things to use it to be able to interact with your issues, to interact with pages. And so we started with 76 integrations and over space of three months now we had this big jump in the first three months up to about a hundred something and now we're going to Forge And what it means is people who have had this need to be able to get to the data can now get to it. I didn't see that coming. I just thought we were just server cloud. But yeah, having a more accessible has led to improvements in the way that our teams are working but also how they use it in other applications that just simply wasn't available before.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. Wow. That's great. And it's good that you were able to receive that feedback straight away from the teams that you had in Australia. I think that's really good and it sounds like it's created such a good opportunity for you at Splunk as well now that you're on cloud.
Greg Warner:
Yeah, it's certainly a business leader that can propel you forward and I eagerly come in now and look at what are other teams going to do with it. And so when we had the first team that said they want to build a Forge app, I'm like, Sure. We should not discourage that at all. Extend the platform. That's why we spent the money and time to do it. What can you do with it now? And we did certainly make Atlassian aware on the product side, like how we're using it and where we'd like to see improvements. If you look at the server DC comparison, I used to be that person that would look at the new features in cloud and ask that question about, when is that new feature coming to on-prem? To going to being that customer who's now, I have that feature today, right? And I'm using it because we don't wait for it.
Greg Warner:
So you mentioned about things you didn't plan from the roadmap. There are design decisions that I talk to enterprise customers that I need to make aware of about. One of them is to do with release tracks. In enterprise cloud, you can choose to bunch up the change to cloud and then they get released periodically every two weeks, every month. When I looked at that, came back to one of our principles about don't implement server in cloud, why would we do that? Atlassian has far more data points on whether this works for customers at scale than we do. So why would we hold back functionality? So as a result we don't do release tracks. We let all of the new functionality get delivered to us as Atlassian sees fit. And the result of that is our own engineering staff, our own support staff who use Jira, get the notifications about new products and features and this is fantastic.
Greg Warner:
Again, why would we implement server, which is where you would bunch up all your changes and then go forward? The other thing too about our cloud migration journey is don't be blinked that you're just doing a cloud migration today and then the project ends. There are things you need to be thinking about as you go along, but what's the impact in the future? So for us, we have multiple sites. Enterprise customer have multiple sites. So there are design decisions that we've made so that we can, in the future, do cloud to cloud migration. You will move sites. Your organization could be bought or could be buying companies. So you do mergers and acquisitions. And so as part of that, we have some runbooks now that talk about using the cloud-to-cloud tooling so we can move a Jira project from a site here to a site there, how we'd move users here and users there.
Greg Warner:
And that actually came about through the assistance with our TAM, not focusing just always on the cloud migration date but also what's that look like six months later? What's it look 12 months later? So that you don't perform your cloud migration and then lock yourself in a corner that later on now I have to unwind something. I had the opportunity to fix it. So yeah, I do encourage migration customers to also think six months, 12 months beyond their cloud migration. But what could also happen and then speak to your solution partner about design decisions today that could affect you in the future.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah. So you definitely need to be thinking future-focus when you're doing this cloud migration. I know you've addressed a lot of the opportunities that came out of the cloud migration. Was there anything else that was an unexpected value that came from it that you wanted to share?
Greg Warner:
The other value is make it more accessible. We have seen people use it in different places that we hadn't thought about. So some of the things that we were doing before, we had to have a company-owned asset to get on the VPN and just things like that. That actually restricted people in where they could do work. Whereas now we've, as long as you've got a computer or mobile device connected to the Internet, absolutely you can use a mobile device support, you can get access to it. Approvals that used to be done on a computer are now done on a mobile device. Those things. But I think the integrations has been probably been the one thing I'm most... We're not the catalyst. We kind of pushed it along but seeing people get real use out of it and using the data for other purposes. We have seen people build some microservices that use the data from Jira that we couldn't do before. Again, you're just unlocking that potential by making it more usable and accessible.
Chloe Hall:
After going through the whole migration journey and, like you said, you're coming towards the end of it, what were the things that stood out to you that you're like, okay, they didn't go so well? Maybe if I was to do this again, how would I do this better next time?
Greg Warner:
So I get back to that day one unboxing experience. You know you want to give it that best experience. And we delivered that for people in Australia and APAC as we opened it and they got to use Jira for the first time and it worked fine. And that is mainly the result of a lot of emphasis on the Jira piece because we said, we know this is going to be hard. It's got workflows, issue schemes, notifications schemes. This is going to be hard.
Greg Warner:
So we started that one really early and then probably about 60% down through our migration journey, we started on Confluence. We thought how hard can Confluence be. It's a bunch of spaces and pages. It can't be that hard. We actually hit some migration challenges with the engineering tooling with Confluence, which meant that the Confluence UAT was delayed. The Jira UAT was fantastic. Ran for a month. We found some problems, got fixed, got answers. We were really confident that was going to be fine.
Greg Warner:
And then we hit this Confluence piece. We're like, wow, this is going to be a challenge. And there was at least one time I could think of. It was a Saturday morning at breakfast where our solution partner sent me a Slack message about, I think we've got a problem here with some tooling. What are we going to do? Towards the middle of the day, I was kind of scratching my head. This could be a real blocker. We actually worked with Atlassian, came up with the engineering solution, cleared that out. That was good to see, like in the space of 12 to 24 hours, there was a solution. But what it meant was that it delayed the Confluence UAT and it made a week. And there was something we found to do with the new Confluence editor and third-party apps right at the end of that week. And we had to really negotiate with our stakeholders to make this go ahead.
Greg Warner:
Because again, if we'd waited, we'd get a better result. No, we really should go. We know that there's this problem. It's not system-wide but it affects a small group people. So we did it. But for about a hundred people they have this really bad Confluence experience because of this thing. And so for me, I couldn't deliver on that thing I promised, which was a day one experience that was going to be better than what it had before.
Greg Warner:
Now we did work with Atlassian and app vendors to get some mitigation so it wasn't as bad on day five. It wasn't day one but it wasn't perfect. But I would certainly encourage people to make sure that you do treat Jira and Confluence with as much importance as each other. They do go together. When I did our cloud migration, we did it on a weekend and I remember coming back after dropping my kids at school on Tuesday and sitting in the car park. I was like, wow, we actually pulled that off.
Greg Warner:
If we'd propose to the company to move your company email system and your finance system on a weekend, the answer would be no because it's too big a hat. But what we'd said is we're going to move all of our Atlassian stack in a weekend, which really is two big systems, Jira and Confluence. So if I had the time again, we would've started Confluence much, much earlier and then we wouldn't have the need to rush it at the end. And that really did result in a bad day one experience for those people. We have worked with Atlassian since then. We're getting that resolved. We know other Atlassian guys have the same problem. I would start early and don't underestimate the complexity that could happen. There will be some things outside of your control.
Greg Warner:
I talk about this Confluence problem and the migration tooling, which is actually do at scale. Not every customer will see it. We saw it, I conducted customer interviews when we were doing our solution partner decision and the customer actually told me this. Like I should have started Confluence because we had this problem, we wasted some time, and we did it. I even have my notes. But it wasn't until later, same problem, you even had the answer and they told you and you still waited. So I'm spending a few minutes on this podcast talking about it because it happened to me. It's probably going to happen to the next person. So if I could do one thing and that is just encourage you to start it earlier. You're going to end up with a much, much better migration and hopefully can deliver on that day one experience that I couldn't do.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, no I'm so glad that you've shared that with the Easy Agile audience as well because now they know and hopefully the same mistake won't keep getting repeated. Well, Greg, my final question for you today, and I don't know if you want that to be your answer, but I think it's really good just for the audience, if there's one key takeaway that they can go away with them today from the podcast, what would be that one piece of advice for everyone listening to start their migration journey?
Greg Warner:
The first thing to do is to prioritize it. So if you're an Atlassian customer that's using on-prem Jira or Confluence and you don't have a timeline and you don't have a priority to your cloud migration, start there. Open up the task, which is start to investigate Atlassian Cloud and choose a date. Because yeah, there will come a situation down the track where you might be asked by your CIO and so it's better to have an answer prepared already. I would encourage people to start to look at it because it is the future. If you look across the industry, people are moving to SaaS. It's really a question. Do you want to maintain and be that customer wondering when that feature's coming to cloud or do you want to be that customer in cloud who has it today? We have seen a monumental shift to when we moved to cloud in functionality, availability, all the good things that cloud delivers. And it's one of the biggest promoter... The person that used to write exam questions for servers now saying go to cloud.
Greg Warner:
Absolutely. So when I've spoken to other enterprise customers, particularly at Team, I said like, when do you plan your cloud migration? I was like, wow, we're going to start it in three years. I'm like, three years? You need to go back to the office next week and start like 12 months because yeah you will... There is absolutely a competitive advantage to doing it. And it's not just me being now as biggest cloud opponents. We see it, we see it every day and for me, this is one of the most influential projects I've been involved in with Atlassian since 2006. This one here is going to have a long-lasting effect at Splunk for a long time and I'm happy to speak to yourself at Easy Agile and others about it and here at their cloud journey because I want to go to Team next year. I want to make sure we have these conversations in the whole way about, I got that one thing. It's either I started my Confluence migration earlier or I actually put in a timeline of when we should start our cloud migrations.
Chloe Hall:
Yeah, beautiful. That is some great advice to take away, Greg. And so honestly, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. You have provided some brilliant insights, takeaways, and also because there is no roadmap, I feel like your guidance is so good for those who are looking to start their cloud migration. Yeah. We really appreciate you sharing your knowledge.
Greg Warner:
All right. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for listening.
Chloe Hall:
No worries.
- Podcast
Easy Agile Podcast Ep.30 Aligned and thriving: The power of team alignment
"Every time I meet with Tony, I'm always amazed by his energy and authenticity. In this conversation, that really shone through."
In this episode Hayley Rodd - Head of Partnerships at Easy Agile, is joined by Tony Camacho - Technical Director Enterprise Agility at Adaptavist. They are delving into the highly discussed subject of team alignment, discussing what it means to have synchronized goals, cross-functional collaboration, and a shared agile mindset.
They also cover the fundamental building blocks to get right on your journey to team alignment, like the power of listening and embracing mistakes as learning opportunities, stressing the importance of following through on retrospective action items + so much more.
We hope you enjoy the episode!
Share your thoughts and questions on Twitter using the #easyagilepodcast and make sure to tag @EasyAgile.
Transcript:
Hayley Rodd:
Here at Easy Agile, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment to reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast and meet you today. The people of the Darova-speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres State Islander and First Nations people listening in today. Hi all and welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Hayley. Here's a little about us here at Easy Agile. So we make apps for Atlassian's Jira. Our applications are available on Atlassian's marketplace and are trusted by more than 160,000 users from leading companies worldwide. Our products help turn teams flat Jira backlog into something more visually meaningful and easy to understand.
From sprint planning, retrospectives and PI planning our ups are great for team alignment. Speaking of team alignment, this is what this episode is all about. Today I'm joined by Tony Camacho. Tony is the technical director of Enterprise Agility for Aligned Agility, which is part of the Adaptiveness group. I've met Tony a few times during my time here at Easy Agile and have learned that he's one of the most generous people along with being funny and a clever human being who is incredibly knowledgeable about Jira and a bunch of other agile related topics. It's really wonderful to have Tony on the podcast today.
Hey, everyone, we've got the wonderful Tony Camacho on the podcast today. This is our first time recording from our Easy Agile Sydney office, which is super cool. Tony, I'm not sure if you know, but Easy Agile is based out of a place called Wollongong, which is just south of Sydney. But we've got a Sydney office because we've hired a bunch of Sydney team members recently who wanted a place to come and hang out with each other. So we created this space, but it's 7:00 AM in the morning, so I'm all alone right now. That's how much I love you. So Tony, let's get started on the questions. Team alignment. What does it mean for a team to actually be aligned?
Tony Camacho:
So for us in an agile space that we're having, it's a collective understanding, a synchronization of your team members towards goals, principles, your practices that you're going in. Even more so I would even go down to the point of cadence, you would have those synchronizes. So it's a matter to be consistent with your agile principles and values, your mindset, your shared goals and vision, your synchronized work practices, DevOps, [inaudible 00:02:44], how we're going to put this out. Cross-functional collaboration between the teams, getting your tea shaped partners/teammates shining at that moment, learning from each other, roles, responsibilities things of that type. That's what it means to me. It really means.
It's all about human beings and at that point, having everybody aligning and working to our common goal, that objective that we want to do for the business partner. There's the gold that we're all after as a team. Does that make sense for you guys? We have the same objectives for this initiative and our practices. And finally for me, which I know this is not typically is we're coming to an agreement on the tools we're going to use and how we're going to use them and have a system source record where we know where we can get our troops, our dependencies, find out which teams do have capacity and move forward from there. That would be my overall definition of an agile team.
Hayley Rodd:
Wow.
Tony Camacho:
And teams.
Hayley Rodd:
You've had lots of experience over the years. I guess where my mind goes when you say all those really wonderful things about team alignment is that in my experience when team alignment is when people get it right, it's super great. When people get it wrong, it's really hard. And I actually think it's pretty hard to get team alignment right. You got to really work at it. What's your experience in that?
Tony Camacho:
To me it's like it can be a bad marriage or a great marriage, but it needs work. As we know, all relationships need work. We're human beings, we're not the same. Each one of us brings something to the table of value. So let me give you one example that I've lived with on a team. I'm an extrovert by nature, and I'm a developer, an engineer and typically that is not two skill sets that you hear together. So I've had to learn that when I'm working with my teammates that happen to be sometimes introverts slow down, listen, wait. They've also had to try to learn to respond faster because as an extrovert, if I ask you a question, all of a sudden I'm looking at you, I'm not getting a response, I'm thinking you're not understanding the question. I rephrase the question and now you're in a deficit to two questions.
And now I'm even worse because now I'm like, "Hayley isn't understanding me. What's happening here? Let me rephrase it again." And it can easily fall apart. What I have seen when teams aren't in alignment is that the team isn't a team any longer. It's miserable to go to the team. It's miserable to come into work, when the team is truly aligned, you're rocking and rolling. It's a feeling like you've never had. It's hard to explain to people that when you see the team, because you know it when it's working and you obviously know when it's not working, you're starting to miss deadlines. Integrations aren't happening on time. You don't have a single source of truth. You start having people explaining the same thing in two, three different matters, different priorities. We're not working from the same hymnal. The thing that I took from my... I'm an SPC, so as an instructor, the one thing I always try to explain to everybody, you may have the best of everything out there, but that's not necessarily mean it's going to work together.
So you have to have that type of understanding, how we're going to work together, what is our priorities, what's the tool sets we're going to have and what is our values as a human beings to this team if that... I'm hoping that helps describe some of the things that I've seen that have gone really bad. I have seen it at, I can share a customer that I have seen it gone, but we started off with good intentions. It's a financial institution in the United States and they were trying to make the jump to mobile applications. And at first we were on the same page as a team, but they decided that they didn't believe that cadence was required to be the same across the board. They didn't believe that we could use the same one tool set, we could use multiple different tool sets.
They had spreadsheets flowing all over the place. And what was happening was we lost trust. We were redoing work, there was ambiguity everywhere. We were misaligned and we started paying for it because our customers started complaining. They could see it in the quality of the work. One team had one schema, one background, one type of... You could see the difference when they integrated, it seemed like it was two applications being put out there mashed together. And when you're misaligned, that comes through very, very quickly in your work. There's a saying that we have here. There's a scrum master, I know her name was Sophia Chaley, one of the best I ever met. And what she will always tell people is what a team delivers is what the team is doing is learning. It's building knowledge, it's expressed as code. When we're misaligned, we're learning different things and we're expressing it differently in the code, if that makes sense.
Hayley Rodd:
Like thinking about the fundamental building blocks of team alignment, is there something that a team really needs to get right to be successful at alignment? And what is that in your mind?
Tony Camacho:
Oh, that is for sure. They had to get that right. First of all, the size of the team.
Hayley Rodd:
Yeah, okay.
Tony Camacho:
Human beings, and I'm not referring back... Going back to say for our scrum practices, I am a CSM. I do know they recommend 8 to 13 people. My best teams have been typically a little bit larger than that. But we had to have the same agreed to the size of the team where it didn't became, didn't become too large where we were over running each other and we weren't listening to each other. We had to understand our goals. We all had the same goals. We used to practice this by, when I worked at Microsoft, we used to have what we used to call our elevator speech. And we would stop somebody and I would go, we're working on this. Watch your elevator speech for this. And if your elevator speech wasn't... It wasn't meant that it had to be in sync with mines, but if I didn't understand it, we had a problem.
Or if it was a different goal where I'm looking at you going, but we're building a Volkswagen, but you're describing to me a Lamborghini, we have a problem. And those were the type of things that we also had to have to make sure that we had the right... Same practices and the tools. That's where I find Easy Agile exceeds. I mean it just exceeds, it meets above the market. It's transparent and it shows everything in front of you right there for me. So when we had the same tool and we were having the same cadence and we could see our dependencies and we could see what I had to deliver for somebody else or somebody had to deliver it for me, that was the types of things we had. We had to have respect. Somebody seems to always forget that we always had to have respect for each other.
We had to embrace the same values of collaboration, adaptability, transparency. The practices that we all know, but somehow we seem to forget when we get into a place where we are not aligned and if you respect my ideas and I respect yours and we're working together, we do not have to agree. But that respect will drive us a long way towards getting to that project vision that we want. And we're trying to meet the customer's needs. And those are the type of things that we needed. We needed leadership. Leadership, I can't say, and if you notice I'm not using the word management, leadership is where you're putting yourself out there in a situation where it can go bad for you as a person, as that leader, trying to make sure that we're making the right choices empowering the people and making them very clear what they can make decisions on and they can't. And it sounds so simple when I talk to you like this, but every time I've had to do some type of transformation, the baggage that sometimes we bring as human beings, the fears, the lack of trust that we have, that's where the scrum masters of product owners come in. And then you need something to make sure that you're having that vision to communicate that vision across. As I mentioned before, some of the tool sets that we have out there. Is that making sense for you at all?
Hayley Rodd:
Yeah, it really does. It's really resonating with me. I think when you talk about coming together as a team and putting together a set of values and a vision, it seems so much like a a "duh" moment. It's like, of course you would do that as a team, but I think at the end of the day as teams, we get in the daily business as usual and we think, I don't have time to get together as a team and set that vision because I've got to do X, Y, and Z, that's due next week. But I think it's one of those fundamental building blocks that really sets you up for success to do X, Y, Z quicker down the track. So that's what I've taken away from that.
Tony Camacho:
And I would agree with you. And you came up with a perfect example because a lot of people do that. I have ABC to do for next week, daily. I don't have time. And the problem is that if they would suddenly realize, and it does become apparent to your practices. So once you agree on your practices, your daily standups, if you're doing that, your retros at the end of your sprints and moving forward, once the person feels that they have that respect for you and they're not fearful, they can share that with you, "Hayley, I'm having a problem. I'm having way too much work. I don't know if I am going to be of value here. Or Do you really need me?" "Yes Tony, I do need you, we're going to discuss this and let's discuss your A, B, C and see how I can help you." And they suddenly realized they're not on an island alone. Developers by nature being introverted, we have to break that habit. We have to be able to share. And it's funny, I'm not saying share my lunch, fine, sure, let's share our lunch, but share the workload.
The one thing that I always try to mention to teams, and again that's... I'm sorry, but I do believe in Easy Agile, using this tool. That's where easy Agile also to me makes it apparent. A story belongs to a team, not to a person. And once you know that you suddenly realize, I'm not alone. I'm here working as part of a bigger thing. And most human beings want to be part of a bigger thing. You suddenly realize that it's almost like the baseball metaphor that I use for teams. And I know the market is not baseball, but I think it would apply for other sports, be cricket or sports like that. When I'm batting, it's me against everybody. When I'm on the field, it's us against... I prefer being with the us. And generally that's where things like that, let's do that.
Also, when you're working with more people as a team, there's things that happened there. You minimize the project risk, which I hate using the word project. It should be initiative. It's long living. You're usually a much more adaptable. I don't know all the answers. So when I worked with you, Hayley, and you showed with me some things there, you're one of the most humble people I've met, and I loved it. But when you walked through, you walked me through the tool, it became very apparent, you know it, you feel it, you love it, it's part of you. And that to me is invigorating. It's energy. Who wouldn't want to work with somebody like you? Why not? Let's do this. Right?
Hayley Rodd:
Thank you Tony. I guess one of the things that I wanted to touch on is when you're in a team and you're coming together as a team, you're working on something, how does an individual who seeks recognition for what they're doing, how do they get that? Or how do you leave that? How do you put that ego aside and say, "I'm doing something as a team to the better of the team?" Have you ever come across that or considered that? I'm interested in your thoughts.
Tony Camacho:
So the people that I felt that needed to have that typically how I... Yes, that's a great question because I'm thinking specifically. There was one, a scrum master that I thought that did it the most amazing way ever. Basically she would call out the ideas even if it wasn't that person's, yeah. I feel that Hayley is... You're not having a good day, Hayley. You're not having a good day. And I know you are not getting used to doing, working in the scrum team. It's new to you and everything else. And what she did typically was in front of everybody would be, and it wasn't even your idea sometimes. And she would just say, and Hayley came up with this wonderful idea that's going to save us something, move us forward. Hayley said this to me, it made us think as a team. And we went around it, we talked and we did it.
And that person always usually would be like, "Wow, I got credit for something. Good scrum-masters will see that. Or good product owners will point that out." The other way that I've done it was using something like Easy Agile. It's a great tool to use, believe it or not. I would back off, I'm a developer, but I also played the role of Scrum masters for years. I would step back and I would let one of my teammates run it, hear their voice, feel empowered. It's amazing when you can have people feel empowered because what you're all talking about, there really is about a lack of trust, a lack of psychological safety. And it's for us to be an aligned team, you have to have trust there and you have to break down the fear of judgment. So the other thing that one time happened with a scrum master that I thought was wonderful was is that again against Sophia Chaley, chief stood in front of her room when there was this a bad sprint.
The sprint didn't end well. And she stood up in front of everybody and she basically went, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. This was a learning sprint." She pulled up Easy Agile, she was using at a time, pulled it up, showed the things that didn't work out the way they thought they were going to work out. And she said, these are the actions we're going to take to improve this. And then when somebody who was in management, again not using the term leadership, now I'm using the term management on purpose, was looking to assign blame. Her response was, not screaming, not raising her voice. Her response was, if we need to get rid of somebody or blame somebody, blame me. But I'm here to solve the problem. Let's move forward.
Hayley Rodd:
Wow.
Tony Camacho:
She wouldn't tell. And that was to me was one of the most outstanding moments I've ever seen. And she was at that point actually using Easy Agile that wasn't a financial institution in the United States. I would let you know that teachers use it, figure it out. And she basically showed the board and just went through everything and did that. That was leadership. That was leadership. And generally your teams will follow leadership and they will suddenly step up and you'll see that that's what people who want to stand up. Now, not everybody wants to do that. Some people want to just be team members and that's okay. That is perfectly okay, but the thing that's not okay is that if they don't have trust, right? And to me, that's the biggest thing. When you have people who are resisting change or siloed in their world, they suddenly realize if you can get them to open up it's really, they're just telling you, I don't feel safe.
I've been doing this all my life. I'm great at it and now you're asking me to do this. And you need to somehow get them to get the feel that they are bringing something of value. They are helping you move forward. And you're meeting them halfway if you have to. But yeah, that's the biggest problem I've ever seen that we've always, it always comes down to the human being in that. The rest of it, you can always come, you can always change that. But there's some of the things that you also have to do. I think that some people run into Hayley that I think me and you live in our world as we're moving up is sometimes we are, there's an ambiguity of the things that we have to do. And I've seen you do that, people in our roles will have suddenly, even if it isn't part of our role, will take it on and we have to learn. That's it. But yes.
Hayley Rodd:
Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's so true that the [inaudible 00:19:23] the psychological safety needs to be there. And I think back to so many teams that I've been a part of that it isn't there. So you have to feel like you got to lay your mark or put your mark on something and show your value. Because if you're not showing your value, then you get questioned. And so I think that that's such a common thing that I see in teams and it actually creates, not a camaraderie, but a competition between teammates and it breeds the wrong environment. So it's just really interesting. One thing that I did want to touch on that you spoke a lot about a couple of questions ago was respect and making sure that teams have respect for each other. How does a team member show respect for their teammates? What are some really good examples of respect and how can we display it or embody it or enact on it as team members?
Tony Camacho:
So let me show you a lack of respect right now. Yeah. Hayley, we're talking about this.
Hayley Rodd:
Looking off camera, avoiding me. Yeah.
Tony Camacho:
One of the main things was to really to learn to listen. Sit down, believe it or not, I found the best thing is sometimes taking a deep breath, listening, not responding, recognizing what that person may be feeling and going through at that moment because it's hard what we do. It's half art and it's half science. Let them learn that making a mistake is not a failure, it's a learning moment. Have that discussion there. Take their concerns real. So it's funny because you just made me think of something. That's one thing where I could show respect to my teammates would be as a scrum master, if I was a scrum master, hold effective retros. Really listen to what they're saying in the retros, report back on the things that you said you're going to improve in the retros. So we said these are the three things we're going to improve on or these are things that are assigned to me.
Make it real. Make it a story. Show it on the board and say, "This is where we're going. This is what's happening. This is what I'm blocked by. Can somebody help me?" But I am working this for you. Get them, really be sincere. I don't mean buying pizza or bring a lot of scrum masters will bring pizza and donuts to the office. No, it's make their lives really better. Be that advocate up for them. And if you're a teammate, be an advocate for each other and be sincere. Have the bravery to stand up and say that's not a fair assessment. But the biggest thing is to really listen. Because a lot of times when somebody's saying something to me, I'll make it personal. Me, I have sometimes have, I know I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I cannot explain why. And just having you there, looking at me and talking and going through it, I suddenly realize it may have been something different and I want to hear your ideas.
But I would have to, if I wanted to show myself to help that teammate, I also got to make myself vulnerable. If you're coming to me, I should share, but I should active listen, right? And really I respect your different perspective. It's okay. We all have different perspectives. Problem I find is that in ourworld, that we're moving so fast sometimes we don't stop to listen. We lack patience. We're moving too fast. So I'll share one for you that I'll be sincere. I had something medically came up and I was being a little abrasive with the team. So finally I called a meeting with our team and they saw me cry. I was okay with it. I was like, "I had no reason to be like this. You guys were showing me love, you were showing me respect, you're backing me up, helping me with my work. And I was still being utterly terrible."
And it hurt me. It hurt that I was doing that, but I needed them to see me and I needed them to listen to me, give me that second to get it off my chest. And in the end I started crying. A 60-year-old man crying in a meeting going, "I shouldn't have done that to you. That was wrong." And it wasn't contrived. Some of the people there were 20 year old people on my team and they were in tears. And it was because they felt, they told me after this, they felt my pain that I was in, because I wanted to help. It's the most frustrating thing. To your point before, how do I feel? I wanted to help. I wanted to be there and I couldn't. Physically, I wasn't there. My mind was all over the place and I was being rude, being blunt, and I could use some other terms. Please don't. But that's really the main thing for me was it's really simple what we do. I just listen and just show respect for other people. And sometimes we forget.
Hayley Rodd:
I think that so many of the messages that you are talking about are not just for developer teams, they're for every team, every team in every walk of life. I think that they're just so fundamental to successful human relationships, whether it be personal or professional, I think so. I think there's just so many good messages. One thing that I wanted to touch on was that you're talking about active listening and when you think back on your career, and maybe this is totally off script, but when you think back on your career, how have you become a better active listener over the years? How have you improved that skill? As you said, you're an extrovert, you want to get in there, you want to fix the problem. How do you get better at that?
Tony Camacho:
I had some very, very smart people that put up with me, listened to me, and then had the courage to approach me after and teach me and teach me and didn't embarrass me in front of anybody. Did it in a manner that they said, "Do you think maybe this could have been better Tony?" As I said, I'm 61 and still I'm an extrovert and I still have high energy and I still make mistakes. As I tell everybody, every day I wake up, I make a mistake, I just got up. But I could have stayed in bed longer. But also the thing that I've learned, and it's just by the nature of getting older, it's not the age part of it. It was watching people come up trying to do the same thing I did that I failed at and I was an instructor for Microsoft for a long time.
And seeing how, because to me seeing how a person's minds works is amazing. So what happens is I'll just... You know what I tried that, it didn't work for me, but I will say after class with you to show it to me again because maybe you solved it. I'm not that arrogant. And the nature of our business is that I find this, that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. That was the biggest thing that opened my eyes. Now it's like, oh my Lord. You meet somebody like John Kern, you meet somebody like Sophia Chaley who come from different perspectives, brilliant people, and you suddenly see that they happen to do things slightly different and you just watch them and you're like, "Wow." And the thing that I love about our job, which I guess you must love, everywhere we go, every team we work with, it's different. It's different.
Everybody always asks me, how do you do that. And I'll tell them, "Look, I will share with you the ways I did it. I have a varied background. I've always been consulting." I've done the ATM space, I did for space enabled warfare, I've done for health industry, everyone's been different. Someone from government regulation, but most of the time different human beings. So I have a saying, I've earned every scar in my back, their minds. I've learned people, you have to give people the chance to have their scars. Yes, it may be pain, I'm not saying fail, I won't let them fail. But sometimes people want to do something. So that's the way I would do it. Let them do it. And I just watched and learned that what happened was as I went in and the more I learned and I suddenly realized how little I know, I was like, I started with FORTRAN, I used to work in the dead 28.
And then you start working your way up and you start realizing, "Wow, I don't know as much as I thought I know." And I had the luck of running into working at Microsoft and having the pleasure of meeting Bill Gates. Now, no matter what you say about Bill Gates, because a lot of people do say some crazy things and some of them may be true or may not. But the one thing you can't take away from him is you go into a room with him and you suddenly see how he puts all these ideas together and comes up with a bigger picture. You suddenly realize, "Wow, people tell me I'm really smart, not that smart." And then you learn, humility is a good thing.
Hayley Rodd:
Yeah, I think humility is just such an important asset to have and to try and grow on because leaving your ego at the door and being open to learn from other people and not think that everything is definitely a life lesson that sometimes you need to go through. And some people go through it and still don't take away the life lesson. So yeah, I think it's so interesting. I guess we don't have too much longer left, but I wanted to touch on thinking about it from an ROI perspective. How important is team alignment from a return on investment? What do you gain from a business perspective when you have an aligned team?
Tony Camacho:
So I'm going to use a term that I dislike and Hayley, you can smack me the next time we meet. But I'm trying to use it as, I don't because it's effective resource utilization, right? But I'm not referring to human beings to that point because it may be human beings. The problem is that's a large market. But as Agile people I won't refer to you as a resource, I refer to you as a fellow human being, you are a partner on my team. You're my teammate. You're not a piece of wood. But that is unfortunately a term that is used. And we will have effective utilization, we'll have common goals across our organization. If you're using any of the message less, bad, safe, pick it, you start focusing on your value streams. You should have improved product quality because we have the same cadence. We're putting things out there and we're having the same views there.
You'll have I think better customer satisfaction and loyalty. They start seeing your product quality going up, being consistent, look and feel and hopefully you are delivering what they want. When you have your teams aligned, you're much more adaptable. Hayley, your team's got capacity? I don't. We don't have capacity to do this. Do you have capacity? Yes I do. Or we find someone or we break it down together and we present an idea to our partners. That's the things I like and I think in the end you have reduced risks at that point.
Also, I think that the thing that they have in is that it's indirect, but nobody knows about. Nobody really talks about it is that if I was upper management C-suite, when we start doing this and we're having the teams aligned, first of all, your teams become safer, your teams feel more comfortable, they're working with the same people. They start becoming very effective and they start producing ideas. They're the knowledge workers. They know this better than anybody else and then they feel empowered to share ideas. The places that I thought that I had the best teams was once they asked... Well, and I got it, I don't know how, I was running a train and they asked to talk to the CTO and all they wanted to do was to talk to the CTO and make that person human. They asked her what she did in a previous job. Amazing. She worked as a factory worker and she also worked in construction. She used to drive, one of the things, nobody would've believed this. And what happened was they started sharing ideas with her and she embraced them. You know what that did to the team, the teams all, they were like, now that's out there, that's ours. Look at that. That was ours. I mean ownership, it's unbelievable.
And unfortunately we are working on a capitalist market, which is fine, that's who we are. I mean we're in IT, it's a return on investment. Return on investment in the end, you start seeing much more efficient use of your money, much more efficient use of your dollars. Also, I would also imagine for the people above who are in the C-suite, they suddenly realize that the organization is going in the same direction. I think psychologically they feel that we now I have this team behind me pushing towards the same goal where a lot of times, every time I do an agile transformation, the first thing we always hear is we know they're working. We don't know what they're working on. And that's where something like Easy Agile bridges that and then you can use that information to go further. And that's wonderful because then at that point, everybody's on the same page. So you're a team now all the way from top to bottom. As opposed to I'm going to my team at work and that's it. So it's just really about return on investment, making sure that we are hitting our customers with everything we got. And I don't mean in a bad way, but we're delivering for our customers with everything we got. It's now efficiency, right? And that's it. That's about it.
Hayley Rodd:
Yeah, that's so powerful. I think it sort of nicely ties everything together because we've talked about a lot of things in the last half hour or so. And I think that at the end of the day, if you can get team alignment, just as you said, there's this ROI that can really shine through and it's a powerful thing for the whole organization to get right and to see the fruits of that work. So one last thing. Can you share your perspective on PI planning? I know you just mentioned safe a little bit for being the initial launchpad for team alignment.
Tony Camacho:
I love it. You have everybody in the room, you get to meet the people, you start making those connections to people. You start seeing them as human beings, not as this email or this text that you're sending across that you're going through there. So could I share one real experience from that? That's a PI planning house.
Hayley Rodd:
Please
Tony Camacho:
Do. So when I was working at Microsoft, I work for product quality online, which I know right now, considering the problems Microsoft is having, you're pretty much going now, "You suck Tony."
Hayley Rodd:
Never.
Tony Camacho:
No, we had our people distributed all over the world. And what was happening was that when I would talk to my short teams, I would ask them, and I was being facetious at a point because I just couldn't get the true answer was I would ask him, can you build the Twin Towers by tomorrow? And the answer would inadvertently be yes. Next day would come. Obviously you can't do the twin towers overnight. Ask them again, will you get it by next week? The answer would be yes. And they were feel for all of that. So when we had the PI planning, we did.
Microsoft went, got a hotel room in Seattle, a hotel room, a hotel in Seattle, rang our offshore teams. And then when they got to see me in person, they suddenly realized that I wasn't telling them I need the twin towers by tomorrow. I really wanted them to tell me when they could get me the twin towers. And I would defend it because they saw me right there in PI planning, defending, saying, "No, this is not possible." And when they saw me doing that, suddenly it was like the sky's open, sun's came through and now I was getting true answers. And what happened was it gave him an opportunity. And I realized that guys, you keep hearing me as sermon. It's always about the human beings, it's about those connections. It's about seeing the people. It's hard. It's two days of a lot of work. But once you get that work done, you come out of there a line, sharp direction. We know what our north is, now, do we know exactly where our true north is? As an agile team, we shouldn't, right? We should be refining it as we get there.
Find out exactly. But we know more or less where the direction is. We more or less know we're all on the same page. We all know that what we have to deliver to make this work out what other people have to deliver for us or we have to deliver for other people. So we suddenly feel part of something bigger. Bigger, right? We are now talking to the, if you're a developer or an engineer, software engineer, you're starting to see the power brokers and why they're doing this. You get the chance to ask them questions. What more could you ask for, right? I finally get to see the people who are making the decisions and I can ask them why. And they can tell me what the business value is and I can make the argument to them that maybe I don't think that's as much business value or we need to fix these things first before we can get that right and move our way on. What more could I ask for? I have an opportunity to make my case and I get to see the other people I'm working with. It becomes, when you're dealing with 125 people and you're on a train, you will become family.
We spend more hours sometimes with these people than we do with our family members at times. And it also gives you a sense of... Besides trust, a sense of a safety. You know it's not just you, it's all of us. So the saying that usually I see that the better executive say, I heard that in one PI planning, you fail, I fail. I fail, you fail. My job is to keep you employed. Your job is to keep me employed and to keep this company together. It's synergy, right? So it's amazing.
Hayley Rodd:
Beautiful.
Tony Camacho:
Yeah, I know. I'm all about the human. Sorry.
Hayley Rodd:
No, I am right there with you. I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation. We've talked a lot over the little while and every time we meet, I'm flabbergasted by your energy and your authenticity. And I think that this conversation that really shown true, so thank you Tony for taking the time to be with us. I'm going to say goodbye to all our listeners. I'm going to say another big thank you to Tony. So Tony is part of aligned agility and that is part of The Adaptivist Group. And yeah, thanks Tony for being here with us and thank you for everyone who has tuned in and listened to this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. Thank you.
- Podcast
Easy Agile Podcast Ep.1 Dominic Price, Work Futurist at Atlassian
"I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Dominic Price from Atlassian. It was so enjoyable to reflect on my time working at Atlassian and to hear Dom's perspective on what makes a great team, how to build an authentic culture and prioritising the things that matter."
- Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO Easy Agile
Transcript:
Nick Muldoon:
What I was keen to touch on and what I was keen to explore, Dom, was really this evolution of thinking at Atlassian. I remember when we first crossed paths, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall it was like late 2014, I think.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it was.
Nick Muldoon:
Scrum Australia was on at the time, and you're at the George Street offices above Westpac there, wherever, and we had Slady in the room, there was yourself. I think Mairead might have been there, I'm not too sure.
Dom Price:
No, probably not. I think it was JML's engineering meeting, engineering relationship meeting.
Nick Muldoon:
Right.
Dom Price:
Involved in the
Nick Muldoon:
Hall of Justice, right? Not Hall of Justice.
Dom Price:
Not Hall of Justice. Avengers.
Nick Muldoon:
Avengers. When was the last time you were in Avengers?
Dom Price:
A long, long time ago. A long, long time ago.
Nick Muldoon:
You've been working from home full-time since March, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Although, actually for me I can work from anywhere for three and a half years.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, fair enough. Okay.
Dom Price:
The shift for me was missing the work element. I'm missing the in-person work element because being on the road a lot, having that one day or two days week in the office, there's connective tissue, I didn't realize how valuable that was. Going five days work from home is not a great mix to me.
Nick Muldoon:
No, not a great mix for me either, Mate. I was the one that was coming into the office during lockdown. I was like, "Oh." It was basically an extension of my house, I guess, because I was the only one that was coming in. But I could turn up the music and I could get some work done without-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. All right. Back in late 2014 when we first crossed paths, we're at JML's engineering meeting, and that was before JML had gone to Shopify.
Dom Price:
Yes.
Nick Muldoon:
We were talking about all things. I remember talking about OKRs, which was the Objective Key Result framework that we were using at Twitter that I think Atlassian was looking at for the first time.
Dom Price:
Yeah, we'd been flirting with for a while.
Nick Muldoon:
Flirting with for a while. What was Atlassian using at the time? What was VTFM?
Dom Price:
There was two things we had at the time. VTFM which was Vision, Focus Areas, Themes, and Measures, which was our way of communicating our strategy, our rolling problem strategy. But then off the back of that we had what I would call old school KPIs. Right? We'd pick goals, right, we'd pick ways of measuring those goals, but very KPI-focused and very red, amber, green scoring focused. When we were small, it worked okay. It didn't scale particularly well because it became punitive. If you were green and you hit your score, you got ignored because you were always meant to, and if you were amber or red and you missed by anything, you got punished. Right? It's like, "Please explain." You got the invite to the head master's office.
Dom Price:
We wanted a way of getting stretched into there and also be more outcome-focused, because I think when we scaled KPIs, we got very output-focused like, "What did you do this week? What's the thing that you shipped?" Actually, the thing that we forgot about, and I think it was by accident, it wasn't bad intent, but we forgot about what's the outcome or impact we're trying to have on the customer, because that happens after the event. OKRs were a way of putting stretch in there and building the idea of moonshots and big ambition. But then also, refocusing us on, what is the impact we're trying to have on the end customer, not just what's happening in the sausage factory?
Nick Muldoon:
With that end customer perspective though, did you get that with the VTFM?
Dom Price:
No. Actually, the first year we rolled that OKR, that was part of the problem. We had the VTFM because that stayed, right? That was like the sacred cow for the first year. That stayed, and we just had OKRs underneath. Yeah, and we're like, "Well-
Nick Muldoon:
So you're mixing them together.
Dom Price:
... which ones do we report? The measures in the VTFM because that's our Atlassian level plan, or the OKRs, which is the things we're actually doing and the impact that we're having. You're like, "Well, both," and you're like, "Well, they don't meet. There's no cascade up or down, left or right, that had them aligned properly." The year after we actually phrased ... we got rid of the VTFM, and we now have our rolling 12-month strategy phrased as OKRs.
Nick Muldoon:
Right. Okay. At that time, Dom, back in 2014, when you were flirting with OKRs, as you said, was the VTFM that you were working to replace, was that company, department, team, individual, or did it just stop at the team?
Dom Price:
Yeah. That's where it didn't really scale, right? The organizational one made sense, and again, when you're smaller, it's a lot easier to draw the linkage between your team or your department and the company one. As we scaled, what happened was we'd have a company level VTFM, and then each department would go and build its own. The weird thing is, and again, this works for a phase, and then you realize it doesn't, is we don't create value up and down the org. We create value across the organization, and so building these VTFMs in departments was honing our craft. But it was doing it at the detriment of how you work across teams.
Dom Price:
I think that it's one of those things that at the time, we didn't realize. If I had a crystal ball, it would have been great. But it seemed like the right thing to do. Engineering had a VTFM. So did Design, so did Product Management, and you're like, "You know we only ship one experience, right?" I don't care if engineering's perfect and design's not because that's letting the customer down because this one experience that we shipped. There was this whole sort of arbitration where we'd build them vertically, and then try and glue them together horizontally, but they'd all been built in isolation.
Dom Price:
Then When it comes to trade offs, and every business has trade offs, whether you admit it or not, when you're like the best laid plans literally stay on paper, right? That's where they exist, then reality kicks in one day after you've built the plan. When reality kicks in, what trade off are you going to make? Are you going to do the trade off that delights the customer, maybe compromises you? Right? then how do you do that internally? Are you going to help Design and Product Management and load balance that way, or say, "Well, yeah, I'm an engineer and we're fine. It's Design's fault. How we'd adapt everyone is Design's fault." We quickly realized that a vertical model brought about some unintended consequences and some odd behaviors that weren't really the kind of behaviors we wanted as Atlassian.
Nick Muldoon:
Back in that time, Dom, in 2014, 2015, did you have the triad then with the product design and later for each of those groups?
Dom Price:
In physical people, yes.
Nick Muldoon:
But in-
Dom Price:
... modeling, no.
Nick Muldoon:
No. Okay. How did that come to fruition, that triad where they were working as one in harmony to deliver that customer experience?
Dom Price:
I think essentially, it's one of those brilliant mistakes when you look back. We're really good at reflecting, and you do a few reflections, and you suddenly see the pattern, and you like, "Hey, our teams that are nailing it are the ones where we've got cognitive diversity and the balance of skillsets." Not where we got one expert or one amazing anything, but actually, you're like, "Yeah, actually -
Nick Muldoon:
If look at some of these patterns-
Dom Price:
Yeah. You're like, "Hey, I just saw that design." They get the product manager in a headlock and have a valid argument at a whiteboard. You're like, "I actually like that. That's what I like, the meeting where there's consensus and violent agreement." Maybe that's the wrong signal, right, that the right signal is this cognitive diversity, this respectful dissent. You see that, and we're like, "Hang on, we have the realization that engineers build great usable products, and product managers are thinking about the whole sort of usability and along with the designers. Viability, you're like, "Oh, we need all three. All three of those need to be apparent for a great experience." You're like, "Cool. Let's double down on that." Right?
Dom Price:
We started to hone in a lot more on how do we get the balance across those? How do we understand the different roles? Because we didn't want to become homogenous. You don't want those three roles to get on so well they all agree. You also don't want to violently disagree all the time, right? A little bit of disagreeing commits great. If they're always in disagreement, then that comes out in the product. How do you find the things that they stand for, and how they bring their true and best selves to each phase? Right? If you think about any given product or project, there are natural phases where their skillsets are more honed, right? In the phases for us, part of managing design is often a lot better with the ambiguous and a whole lot of stuff. When it comes to building, I'm probably going to listen to the engineer more, right?
Nick Muldoon:
And you're handing it over to delivery.
Dom Price:
Yeah. But then also, it's like, well, it's not the ... If you think about delivery time, I think we'd sometimes think of it as the relay race. I think that's incorrect, because everyone's still going to see the relay race. Once I've run my lap, I'm done, right? But in product development, it's not because when I hand over the baton, I still have a role. Even if it's in build phase, the product manager and the designer still have a massive role. It's just that they're co-pilots and the engineer's the pilot, right? You don't disappear, your role changes. I think that was one of the nuances that we got as we started to bring in the right skills, the right level of leadership, the right level of reflection to go, "How do we balance this across those phases, and how do we be explicit on what role we're playing in those different phases?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay, that's interesting. I'm going to want to come back to that when we turn our attention to the customers in the Agile transformation landscape more broadly. But one thing that has got me thinking about with respect to this balance is the fact that Atlassian had the discipline to hire for a triad, right? If I think about, I think this was around 2013 at Twitter, and in one of our groups, we had pick a number, but there would have been 200 people, and there would have been less than 10 product managers. I think we actually had a ratio of like 20. It was something silly like 26 engineers to a product manager. It wasn't even a design counterpart necessarily for each of the product managers. The balance was way off, and it wasn't very effective. Was there a time at Atlassian where there was this reflection? Because I'm just trying to think, in my time at Atlassian, I don't think we had maybe a great balance. I think there was a much heavier in engineering than there was in design and product.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it's one of those things that if it's not there, you don't miss it. Right? It's weird, right? It was a lot of it before my time, but when I listened to the story, it's like even design as a discipline when I started in 2013 was a very small discipline. I think even then, it was kind of like a hack to the notion where it was like, "Oh, yeah, we got some designers. They do the pixels, right? They make stuff look pretty." .
Nick Muldoon:
They do T-shirts and they do like .
Dom Price:
Who knows, right? But it makes us look pretty, right? They drink craft beer, and they sit on milk crates. We had this archetype of a designer, and then you like, "Oh, actually, once you start to understand user experience, the integration points, design languages, design standards, and the experience, once you get your first few designers who say, "Here's how our products fit together," and this is the experience from a customer lens, you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure I'm a fan of that." It wasn't badly designed, but nor was it particularly well-designed. Once you start to make some improvements, then you start to measure customer satisfaction, and you make that experience more seamless, you suddenly see the value.
Dom Price:
I think for Atlassian, I think we started as an engineering company. We added product management, and then begrudgingly added design. Interestingly, in my time there, the most recent thing we've added is research.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Okay.
Dom Price:
Fascinating evolution for us again to go, "What do you mean, research? I'm a product manager. I know everything about the industry in the section of the competition." They're like, "But do you know anything about the customer, and the job to be done at the top tasks, or how they experience, and thinking about things like accessibility, thinking about how our products integrate with other products, thinking about not just from a competitive landscape, but what's the actual job to be done, and what are the ways people are trying to do that, and the drop off points.
Dom Price:
Research has become a new muscle that we had the exact same experience with. First time you roll it out, people are like, "Oh, we don't need that. It's overkill." You're like, "I see, it's really quite good." Hard to integrate because you're giving me findings I wasn't expecting, and then there was a shift both for designers, but also for the product managers to go, "Oh, I can use a resource now because you're this independent group that can help me understand, not just my product and iterating on my products, but a level up, what's the thing that my products trying to do? Who am I competing with, and what does that experience look like end to end?" It's a completely different lens.
Nick Muldoon:
Basically what you're describing there, Dom, is you've still got the triad of the product design and leads. But now you've got this. It's a centralized kind of research team?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Do they drop in for particular projects in different areas?
Dom Price:
Yeah. If you think about it, if you strip it back to plain common sense, I think over time, we got really good at explore and build. But maybe we lost a little bit of the muscle around wonder. These researches are great. The blinkers are out and they wonder, right? I'm sure they physically do this as well, but mentally, they stroll, right? They go quite broad, and when they come back with their insights, you're like, "Wow, that's given me a really good broad perspective." I'll give you a quick example where we're working a lot, and we always are on accessibility. It's easy to look at your current products and start adding stuffing. Right? That's the logical way of doing it. Or you look at your competitor's products, and how do you become a pair or a peer? Easy.
Dom Price:
What our research team did was they actually got a whole lot of people with different sight and mobility issues, and said, "We're going to now get you to use our products and go through some key tasks." They're already using it, but it's like maybe they're on a screen reader, or maybe they can't use a mouse, they can only use keyboard shortcuts. You suddenly see the experience through their lens, and we record it, and it's tracking eye sight and line of sight using all the actions. You've got this level of detail there where you're like, "Well, I know we're trying to build empathy, but actually seeing that experience firsthand is completely different than trying to think about it."
Dom Price:
You just seeing it through the lens of this person. The research team did weeks and weeks and weeks of research with different users, different backgrounds, different disabilities, different products and different tasks to give all of our teams the sense of what is it like as the actual person. Here, you can actually walk in that person's shoes, or it feels like you are.
Nick Muldoon:
If you're a product manager and a designer, and you're ... Because it sounds to me, Dom, like that sort of investigation or exploration that you're describing there with respect to mobility-impaired or sight-impaired people, that's something that it might be hard for me to bring that into my OKRs for our product. For that triad, how do I have ... I'm trying to push forward and chase down monthly active users, or cross-flow, or whatever it happens to be, and that's much more long-running. It's like it's a long-running thread that's just going to stay open for 18 months while we think about this stuff and have these conversations. Does that research group, do they actually have their own OKRs, and are those OKRs annually?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Yes and no. We do mostly OKRs across design, research. We now have a ways of working team. They tend to be shared OKRs or more cross-functional, are cross-functional to shared. The cross-function as in we have the same objective, but different key results.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay.
Dom Price:
If you think about accessibility as an objective, the research team, their key result is about having the latest greatest research and insight so that we can learn and understand. You're like, "Cool, that's your task." Right? The design team, your OKR is to take that insight and turn it into some designs, usability, and then you can actually go along the value chain, and each different person in that value chain has a different OKR.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Still today though, there's no OKRs at an individual level, right? It's all team, group-based?
Dom Price:
We have odds and sods. I've dabbled with it a little bit. Sometimes I think I've always got individual OKRs. The question is whether I share them or not. I think if you think about the majority of knowledge workers, they will have individual goals, "I want to learn a new skill, I want to acquire a new "
Nick Muldoon:
Honing the craft.
Dom Price:
Yeah, right? Whether you write that down and it benefits you or not is not up for debate. When it came to writing them down in a collective, having a single storage of them, any kind of laddering, I think the cost of that is higher than the benefit. Right?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
We strayed away from saying everyone then must have individual OKRs, and then ladder, whatever, because it ends up getting very, very cumbersome, and actually very command and control. What we've done instead is really say to our leaders, and this is leadership by capability, not by title, but saying to our leaders, "This is part of a conversation you should be having on a regular basis with your people around growth, and how you're inspiring them, and how you're motivating them. How are they developing and evolving? What are the experiments they're running on themselves? Right? How are they with other people? What are their challenges, and how can you help them never get those challenges? What are their points of amplification that you should be calling out with them to turn the dial on that? Right? What are their superpowers that we should be really encompassing, right, and nailing?" That's part of a leadership conversation. Does that need to be written down and centralized? No. To me, it becomes a zero benefit to documenting that.
Nick Muldoon:
It's interesting hearing you describe that. That's very much learning and development-focus. If I think back to Andy Grove's High Output Management, my understanding of that at an individual ... of OKRs and an individual level was always with respect to your customers. What am I going to do for my customers? But you've actually framed it, what am I going to do for myself that's going to allow me to be in better service to my customers, maybe next financial year?
Dom Price:
Yeah. It's a secret. I'm guessing this is shared by Atlassian, but this is definitely my view of the world, and I've shared this with enough people now where they understand. You can't be a great teammate if you're not turning up your true best self. You got to take a step back. There's this whole weird narrative around the humility of being a teammate where you're like, "I'm a martyr, and I'll take one for the team." It's BS, because if you're not in the right zone for that team activity, you're not giving your best, right? You're actually the anchor that brings the team down. You step back from that and you say, "Well, how do you be the best?" Because not all work is teamwork. There's a lot of deep work and individual tasks and stuff that needs to be done. You're like, "Right, I need to be the best version of me. Well, what's that mean?"
Dom Price:
It means that before any meeting, I need to have done my tasks, or before any meeting, I need to have done my pre-meeting, right? If we're meeting as a team and we have this synchronous activity, what are the things I need to do to be best prepared for that synchronous activity to deliver the most value? How can I get the most out of that teamwork? How do I turn up and be present? How do I turn up with respectful dissent and challenge, right, and provocation? That requires me first to be an individual. Right? I think one of the dangers in a lot of work environments right now is people have lost the understanding of what it is to be an individual, what your key leadership style, your learning style, how do you turn up? Right? How do you critique? How do you take feedback? All these things that make you you, you need to know those and be aware of them before you can be great in a team environment.
Dom Price:
It's not just the tasks. You need to know you. If you're a great individual, and you've honed that, you can then be a great teammate, and if you're a great teammate, you can deliver great outcomes for your customers. Anything else is an accident, right? We've all been in accidental teams, which has delighting a customer, and we've sat there and gone, "Really not sure what I did to that guy. I'll take it. I'll take the pat on the back. I'll take the kudos, and the bottle of wine, and the congratulations. Not really sure I amplify that. I don't know. If you don't know, you probably didn't. Right? That's not humility. You're probably just a passenger. I think the danger in growth environments is there's lots of passengers who they're a passenger to lots of success, and after a while, they're like, "I'm amazing." You're like, "You're not. You've just been in the right place at the right time repeatedly."
Nick Muldoon:
I got to process that.
Dom Price:
Let me give you an example. Right? A couple years ago, I was in New York with a mate of mine, Sophie. She's unofficially mentored me and helped me a lot of the years, right? I'm talking to her about trying to scale me, and I was really angry about some stuff, and thankfully, it was late afternoon in New York. She bought me [inaudible 00:25:30]. We smashed a drink and we chatted away, and she's one of those people that just calls BS on you, right? I'm like, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge. She's like, "Oh, cool." She's English as well. She's like, "So I'm guessing you're just going to whinge about it and hope it goes away." I'm like, "All right, fair point. Little bit, my English came out. I actually hoped that maybe even if I did whinge long enough, it would actually disappear." She's like, "That never happens, does it? What are you going to do about it?"
Dom Price:
We chatted when she gave me this challenge, and she's like, "You're not evolving." She's like, "You're adding stuff in, but you're full." She's like, "Cognitively, Dom, you're full." My challenge was I was reading all these business books at the time, and I knew lots of stuff, but I didn't feel any smarter. I wasn't doing anything with it, and it's creating this frustration spiral. She gave me the exercise, and you've probably seen this, the four Ls. She got a bit of paper, and she's like, "All right, write the four Ls down. Reflect on you as a leader. This is selfishly purely about you as a leader. Last 90 days, what have you loved? What have you done personally?"
Dom Price:
I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no, no." She's like, "Not like, because we're not doing likes here, right? We're not being soft. Loved, and own it. Actually, superpower, do more of it." We did that, very uncomfortable few sips of wine. Then she's like, "What's your loathe and what's your longed for?" I had lots of long fors, long list of those, but no loathed. She's like, 'All right, here's the problem. The long for, you're sprinkling in in the 25th hour of every day. No wonder you're not doing well at it, because you never giving it the ... You're not giving yourself any space, or time, or freedom to actually experiment. You're not growing. You're not getting better. You're just adding stuff in." I'm like, "Fair point."
Dom Price:
We went through, found some loathe. She's like, "Right, you're going to remove those. Who are you going to tell those habits, or rituals, or whatever, who are you going to tell that you're removing those because they need to hold you accountable? Because they'll slip back in really easily." I found someone, pinged them. She's like, "Right, the longed." She's like, "I need to let you know that when you add them in, you're going to be crap at them." I was like, "I don't want to be rubbish at anything. I'm a leader. I need to be a superhero. I need a cape, and I need to fly in, and everything must be perfect first time." She's like, "No, the first time you added a longed for, the chances are you'll be rubbish at it. Find someone who has that muscle and let them help you practice it, and you'll get better at it over time."
Dom Price:
Then the fourth L was what have you learned? What experiment did you learn yourself last quarter? What did you learn about yourself?" She's like, "Right, go and tell as many people as you can. That'll build a place where you're learning and networking environment for you." I did it, and then I did it again 90 days later. There's a few times when the power of rationalization kicks in, and I just BSed myself because really easy to do. Then other times where I've got really deep and analyzed on it, and it's enabled me every 90 days to evolve, right? Now, the moral of the story, and this is where we tie individual to team, the number of leaders I know in big businesses driving transformations, but they're not changing themselves. What behavior are they rolling with? They're rolling with the behavior of, "I'm fine. You're not. You all need to change," which is-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, role modeling status quo.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. That's interesting. I've certainly heard of the love versus loathed exercise. I like that you, or that Sophie extended it to longed for and learned. I think that's really beautiful, and I'll take that. With the loathe in particular, were there things on that list that you had to delegate or you had to hire someone to do? Because there's things that I think about that I loathe with respect to the business, and typically, they're things about orchestrating, paying suppliers, or whatever it happens to be. How do I address that? I bring the bookkeeper into the business that-
Dom Price:
Yeah. The little game that we played is you're not allowed to outsource it until you drop it. Right? The idea is, you're going to find a way of dropping it first, because maybe it doesn't need to exist, right?
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
Because you've worked at big companies, and you walk around a big company, and you're like, "That person there, they only exist to do a task that someone probably could have automated or got rid of," but they didn't have the time. Also, they put a warm body in the way. Then you add another warm body, another warm body, and you suddenly realize you've got thousands of warm bodies keeping this deck of cards stacked together, and if one card falls, the entire thing comes tumbling down. I removed stuff that I was really uncomfortable removing stuff. I was like, "This is so important." It wasn't. My blinkers were just off, right? Then she's like, "We'll stop doing." She's like, "It's not life or death." She's like, "No, thanks, Dom. Well, you're not a surgeon, so stop doing something, and listen, and see what happens when you stop doing it." I'm like, "Oh, no, but these are really important. People will be angry. I'm a very important person." You remove something and no one bloody notices. You're like, "Why have I been doing this?"
Nick Muldoon:
Why was I doing it? Yeah.
Dom Price:
Yeah. Then I-
Nick Muldoon:
Can you-
Dom Price:
One of the big examples for me was meetings. This wasn't a delegate or [inaudible 00:30:24]. This was me just being a control freak, and turning up in meetings where I wanted to be there just in case. We looked at my condo, just a sea, I use Gmail, right, the sea of blue of all these meetings, double booked, triple booked. She's like, "Right." She's like, "Imagine you've got to set yourself a goal of getting rid of 15 hours." I'm like, "What? It'd be easy to create a time machine that adds 15 hours a week. I can't remove 15 hours of meetings. I'm a very, very important person." Then we played this game called Boomerang or Stick. I declined every single meeting, and I sent a note saying, "This is either a boomerang," in which case it comes back, or if it's a stick. When you throw a stick, it doesn't come back. The boomerangs, I want to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what my role is in the meeting, and what you're going to hold me accountable for.
Dom Price:
Two thirds of the meetings didn't come back. Right? The ones that did, I honestly admit to you, I was playing the exact wrong role in virtually all of them. It was funny because I get these emails back and they're like, so one of this meeting I was in, they were like, "Your role is the decision maker." In the next meeting I was like, "I need to apologize. I thought I was the protagonist." Every time they were suggesting something, I'm like, "Well, you could do that, or these three things." I was sending them into a complete spiral, and they were like, "You're a terrible decision maker." I'm like, "No, I'm a good decision maker when I know that's my job because this isn't your title. Your title stays-
Nick Muldoon:
Ah, Dom.
Dom Price:
... the same, right? Your title stays the same, but your role's different in every environment, every engagement, your role is different. We don't call it out, we just assume. Once we clarified those assumptions and realized I've got them all wrong, the meetings I was in, I was way more effective in. Two thirds of them didn't come back. Either the meeting [inaudible 00:32:09], or it didn't need me in that. If you think about it, and me and you know this, our most precious resources are time.
Nick Muldoon:
Time. Yeah.
Dom Price:
Why are we giving it away for free or for negative cost? Right? I'm like, "No, I'm growing all that stuff back."
Nick Muldoon:
Liz and I have been having this conversation for a while now about statistically speaking, I've probably got 50 years left on earth, based on how long a Caucasian Australian male lives. But I've probably only got 40 good, usable years left, because then you kind of like atrophy and all that.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. Liz and I have been going, "Well, if we've only got 40 summers left, what are we going to do with 40 summers?" It's a really good exercise to bring you think real quick, what do you want to be spending your time on?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Absolutely. It's the same thing. You can do that at a meta, macro level for life, and I think you can do it on a annual quarterly basis. With work, there's so many things that we just presume we need to do, and both the four Ls and just my attitude has enabled me to challenge those and go, "Well, I just say why an awful lot right now." So it's like, "I'd like you to come to this meeting." I'm like, "Oh, cool. Why?" They're like, "I don't know. I'd like you there." I'm like, "But why? Because if you can't explain to me what you want me to do, then you probably don't need me there."
Nick Muldoon:
Five whys, right? Five whys.
Dom Price:
But also the reason I'm often asking them why is I'm like, "You do know I'm a pain in the ass when I do come to the meeting, so just I want to double check to you, you really want me there. Because if you converged on an idea and you want to ship it, don't invite me. All right, I'm the wrong person." Just challenging on that and getting that time back, and then using it for things that are way more valuable. I rebalanced my portfolio just like a financial advisor or a market trader rebalances a financial portfolio every quarter, I did the same thing with me. If I don't, then what I'm saying is when I don't do that, I'm saying the version of me last quarter is more than good enough for them for next quarter. What I'm saying is-
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, which is never the case, is it?
Dom Price:
Yeah, I'm saying the world's not changed. The world stayed flat, right, and everything's going on a flat line. That's not the case. If I'm not evolving myself at the same pace as Atlassian or our customers, then I've become the anchor by default. I'm the anchor that slows us down.
Nick Muldoon:
Tell me, what portion of your time today are you spending with customers? Because I know over the years in our conversations, I think about a lunch we had at Pendolino, you, Dave, and I, probably two and a half, three years ago now, but we were talking a lot about Agile transformations at the large end of the spectrum. How much time are you spending with customers today, and what are those conversations like?
Dom Price:
Yeah. I'm probably over the 50, 60% mark right now, but mainly a rebalance again. When COVID hit, the conference scene disappeared, and so I'm like, "Cool, I get to reinvest that time. I could reinvest it internally at Atlassian, and I did do it where we're evolving our ways of working internally and driving some change there. I got involved in that, made sense. But I was like, "Hey, our customers are struggling." First of all, we need to understand how and why they're struggling, and then if we can help them, find a way of helping them. It's funny how the conversation really changed from quite tactical, yeah, 18-month plans and presumed levels of certainty, to going, "Hey, the world's changed. The table flip moments just happened. Our business model has been challenged, our employees are challenged. We're having these conversations about people, wellness, and actually, we've said for years we care about our people, but now we actually have to. What does that mean? All the leaders just trying to understand the shift from peacetime to wartime-
Nick Muldoon:
To wartime.
Dom Price:
... to time peacetime. I think that it's funny that the transition from peace to wartime, I think the shared burning platform, the shared sense of urgency, I think a lot of these transition, they're okay. I wouldn't say they're amazing, but they weren't awful given that mostly the Sydney in Australia haven't manage through wartime. Right? We've had an amazing economic success for a long time. The harder bit, the way more complex bit is going from war to new peace, because new doesn't look the same as old peace. Right? It's a very different mindset to go-
Nick Muldoon:
Who is-
Dom Price:
... about managing in wartime is I don't need approvals because it's a burning platform. We just drive change, just do it, just do it. New peace is different because we're like, "Well, how long's this going to last for? What are the principles I want to apply? How do I build almost from a blank piece of paper?" Very different mindset.
Nick Muldoon:
Was that Ben Horowitz with the hard thing about hard things where he talked about war versus peacetime leaders?
Dom Price:
I've read it in a few things. The most recent one I read-
Nick Muldoon:
Hear different places.
Dom Price:
... in was General Stanley McChrystal. He wrote Team of Teams.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay.
Dom Price:
He did one on demystifying leaders and how we've often put the wrong leaders on a pedestal, and there's some great leaders out there that just didn't get the credit because they were way more balanced. But yeah, there's a few different narratives out there on it.
Nick Muldoon:
With the latest that you're meeting with, I guess, well, one, are they using something like the four Ls that Sophie shared with you?
Dom Price:
Yeah, that's become a lot more popular, I mean, certainly with C-suite and the level down, even board members, actually. When I share that, there's this kind of moment of reflection of going, "Yeah." It's because I get them with the irony of going, "Question one, are you driving a transformation?" They're like, "Yes." You're like, "Cool. Are you transforming yourself?" "No." By the way, reading a Harvard Business Review article on Agile doesn't mean you're evolving yourself. That means you're educating yourself. That's subtly different. We've all read the article. It doesn't make you an expert, so sit yourself down. That is the first moment of getting them bought in.
Dom Price:
Then the second one is just saying to them, "Just be honest right now, what are the things you're struggling with?" For a lot of leaders, it's this desire that they get the need for empathy, vulnerability and authenticity, they get it because they've read it. They understand it, they comprehend it, they find it really hard to do. Right? A lot of them are leaving as a superhero leading through power and control. They've led through success, but they're not led through a downturn and a challenging time, and they're just questioning their own abilities. There's a lot of, I don't even want to call it imposter syndrome, I think there's a lot of people just saying, "I think my role as a leader's just changed, and I don't know that I understand the new version." That's quite demoralizing for a lot of people. It's quite challenging.
Dom Price:
The irony being is that the minute they look to that and talk about it, they've done the empathy, vulnerability, and authenticity. They've done the thing they're grasping for. But instead, they're trying to put this brave face on it. In a lot of organizations, I've seen a lot of ruinous empathy. A lot of people buffering from their team, like, "Nick, I don't want to tell you that bad things are happening in the company, because I don't want you ... I think you're already worried, because I won't tell you that," without realizing that you fill in the gaps, and you think way worse things than I could ever tell you. The information flow's changed, and then for a lot of leaders, the mistake I've seen on mass is they have confused communication and broadcast. Right? Communication is what I hear and how I feel when you speak. Broadcast is the thing that you said. Because of this virtual world, there's lots of loom, and zoom, and videos, and yeah, we're going to broadcast out.
Nick Muldoon:
Broadcast a lot. Yeah.
Dom Price:
But we're getting to listen for the response.
Nick Muldoon:
This has to be a very challenging time for a number of leaders today, but 2018 or 2008, there were a lot of leaders back then that probably, I presume, picked up a lot of scar tissue around GFC. How many of the leaders that you're chatting with today would have picked up scar tissue through the GFC, and they're still finding this kind of a feeling, at least, like it's uncharted territory?
Dom Price:
Well, and that's, I think, the byproduct. I was going to say problem. The byproduct of the Australian system is we've dodged the bullet in 2008. Economically, we did not get the same hit that the rest. The stock markets got a little hit, and a whole lot of other things took a little bit of a dip, but nowhere near that the size or magnitude of the rest of the world. Both through the mining boom, yeah, the banking sector, a whole of other tertiary markets around tourism doing well at that time, you're like it was a blip, but it wasn't a scar. I think that's where there's a lot of countries have got that recent experience to draw upon, like, "Here's how we do this. Right? Here's how we bunker down. Here's how we get more conservative. Here's the playbook for it." I think a lot of countries haven't got that playbook, so they're getting at it, right? They're doing it on the fly. I think there's that.
Dom Price:
But also I think this one's just different. The global financial crisis was a financial and market-caused issue, right? This is a health pandemic-caused market downturn. I don't think we've got a playbook for that, because we don't know the longevity of it. -
Nick Muldoon:
If you-
Dom Price:
Go on.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah. No, sorry, Dom, I was just going to ask, if you cast your mind back to GFC, were you anxious going through GFC? Have you been anxious this year?
Dom Price:
No. I wasn't anxious at all through GFC because it felt like ... I did a recession in the UK a long, long time ago, and so I've been through that downturn. I've worked in companies that had downturns, even if the general economy was fine, and industries that had shrunk, where at the end of each quarter you're like, "Right, we talk about the books. Who are we letting go? What projects are stopping?" It was always the taking away, not the adding. I've been through that. The thing that made me anxious about 2020 was, this is the first time I think we've had this level of uncertainty. It's funny because a lot of people talk about change fatigue. I actually think humans are quite good at change. I think we actually do that quite well. But uncertainty, we are terrible with.
Dom Price:
It's weird how when we get uncertainty, how different people respond in different ways. Some like to create a blanket of certainty and wrap it around them like, "Now, here's what I know, and this will come true." You're like, "Maybe [inaudible 00:42:16]." I like your blanket, it's comfortable. But it's not necessarily real, right? It's not going to shelter you from the things that we genuinely don't know about. This is where agility has become key, or nimbleness has become key because if I look at the leaders in the companies that are listening, they're actually attentive to their customers and listening, they're the ones that are evolving really quickly, because they've got ... not only have they got the nimbleness as the muscle, but they're listening to cause correct. The ones that have ... think they've rolled out agility in the last few years, but never added the customer bit, they've got small, fast, nimble teams just running around in circles.
Nick Muldoon:
They're not heading in a particular direction. Yeah.
Dom Price:
Yeah. They are clueless, right, because without that overarching like, "Why are we doing this? And that customer that we care for, we still care for, how's that customer's world changed? Right? Because if that customer has changed, how can we change with them?" A lot of companies haven't done that yet, and I think it's some are holding the breath and hoping for the best. Some are just too fixated on, "But we have a plan, and if we stick to that plan," I read a book somewhere that said, "If you stick to a plan, you'll be fine." You're like, yeah, the world just shifted around you. Your plan might not be as relevant.
Nick Muldoon:
It's making me think, Dom, about the Salesforce transformation, Agile transformation in 2006. That was one of the big bang, I think it was one of the early big bang Agile transformations that took place. I don't know if it was Parker Harris or how it actually played out, but the leaders of Salesforce basically said, "You're going to change to Agile. You're going to give this thing a go. Otherwise, all is lost." There's been other examples. I think shortly after, LinkedIn did their IPO. They pulled the end on call, they stopped everything to rework how they work. Is 2020 one of those years? Are the best companies going to take advantage of this as an opportunity to retool how they work? Then the other companies are just going to kind of atrophy and slowly decline over the next five?
Dom Price:
I think the best ones probably built some of the muscle already, the ones that are now reacting, right? I think if you are aware of the market, all COVID's done is put an accelerant on the stuff that was changing anyway. Right? Yes, it's not ideal, but it's stuff that was happening regardless, right? I think we really had five or 10 years to equip ourselves, and we got given three months instead. I think a whole lot of companies that saw those patterns emerging, changing people habits, technology, practices, ways of working, customer demand, experience demands, you put all those together, that's why Agile transformation has been a massive hit for the last three, four, five years, right? The ones that were prepared for that are awesome. The ones that responded quickly, that are like, "Brilliant, don't let a crisis go to waste. What can we do?" They'll do well. The ones that have dug their heels in and are being stubborn ,saying the world will return to normal and it's just a matter of time, they're the ones that I fear for, because that atrophy that may have been a slow decline, I think that becomes a cliff. Right? Because in a consumer-
Nick Muldoon:
Slow decline, and then they just fall off the edge at some point.
Dom Price:
consumer world, consumers spending goes down, sentiment goes down, and relevance suddenly becomes really important. Is your product relevant to your customers? The people that understand that, and then have agility in how they deliver it, that's a winning combination. I think the interesting, I was talking to a friend about this on the weekend because they were like, "What's the difference between the successful ones and the not successful ones?" It's hard to pinpoint a single reason. But the one that stands out for me is the Agile transformations that have been people-centric are the best. A whole load of them were tool-centric or process-centric. I will send all my people on a training course. I'm going to make you agile, I'm going to give you some agile tools. Go. You're like, "Did you change their mindset? Did you change their heart? Did you change the things that they're recognized for, their intrinsic motivations? Did you change those things?" Because if you didn't, their inner workings are still the same, right? You've just giving them some new terminology.
Nick Muldoon:
I think that's a really, really, really good point. I go back to if I cast my mind back to the first Agile conference that I went to over a decade ago, the conversation back then was very much around training the practices, teaching the practices to your people, and then it evolved into a tooling conversation. But again, teaching the practices and software are just tools, and it was probably 2013, 2014, I guess, when the modern Agile movement came out, and they were talking a lot about psychological safety. Go back to where we started the conversation, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Psychological safety, bring your whole self to work, and that will free you and enable you to do something tremendous for your customers. Give me a sense of the customer conversations that you've had throughout 2020. What percentage do you think have psychological safety, truly have that psychological safety?
Dom Price:
Yeah. I have to remind myself that psychological safety isn't an all or one, right? It's a sliding scale. I would say it's improved, where it's done with authenticity. The danger is, it becomes a topic where people are like, "I was working from home. There's an increased chance of stress, it's a whole of a change. Things are going wrong. Oh, I know what, let's just talk about psychological safety a lot." You're like-
Nick Muldoon:
That's not it.
Dom Price:
... "There's no correlation between talking about and doing." Right? It becomes the topic, right, the fashion, right? Just like wellness and mindfulness have become fashionable to talk about, doesn't mean we've got any better at it. And so that-
Nick Muldoon:
But isn't that the thing, Dom? Agile was the fashionable thing to talk about, and so we talked about it, but nothing really changed in a lot of these organizations.
Dom Price:
Yeah. It's not dissimilar with psychological safety. What has happened though is over time, the leaders that are truly authentic, vulnerable, build that environment where you can bring your best self, and they appreciate the respectful dissent, but they will still, at the right time, disagree and commit. They're like, "Nick, I heard your view. Thank you for sharing. Our only decision at this point, we're going down Path A. I know that you're in Path B. We're going down Path A. When we leave this room, we commit to A." I hear you. You want me when we're coming to A, and here's the signals we'll assess to make sure it's the right path. If it's not, we'll course-correct. Those people are thriving in this environment, and more people want to work with them. What this environment has done is it's shone a massive light on the difference between managers and leaders. Managers manage process and they like control. Right? Leaders are about influence and people.
Nick Muldoon:
Do you think, so the fact that people are working remote and working from home, that's made it easier to see who the leaders are.
Dom Price:
Yeah, it's shone a light on-
Nick Muldoon:
Because the managers are just trying to count time.
Dom Price:
Yeah, count time, but they're also thrashing around busy work, because they're like, "I'm the manager. I need to show that I'm doing something. I would manage tasks in and around the office, and what I meant some people to do. If we're autonomous, and they just do it, then what's my role?" You suddenly start seeing business. This noise comes out of them, which isn't, "Here's an outcome I achieved, or here's how the team's doing on team cohesion or bonding." They're not talking about about big meta level things. They're sharing these transactions with you, and you're like, "I assumed you're always doing the transactions. Now, you're showing me them all. It's a bit weird." Right? It's just a behavior, right? We must have a process for that. Well, what's the process? You're like, "Actually, what about the process of common sense?" Right?
Dom Price:
If you think about pre-COVID, most organizations that would allow people to work from home once or twice a week had a giant process and policy about how you apply to work from home that one day a week and everything, and then suddenly they're like, "Well, actually, we can do that. Everyone's going to go work from home." But now things have settled down a bit, the process police and the policy police are coming back again going, "But what about, what about? We pay Nick to do 40 hours a week, and what if he didn't do 40 hours?"
Nick Muldoon:
40 hours a week.
Dom Price:
Who cares? Nick delivered his outcomes and his customers are over the moon. As long as he's not doing 80 hours and he's not burning out, doesn't matter? Right? The idea of 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday as a construct is being challenged. The idea of you needing to sit at a physical desk for eight hours a day to do your work, when actually at least half of your tasks you can do asynchronously, that's been challenged. But for the managers who want manage process and control, they're like, "But if Nick can work from anywhere, and we trust him to do the right work, what do I do? I'm his manager. You're like, "You could inspire him. You could coach him, mentor him. You can lead him, you can help him grow, you can do a whole lot of stuff. Just don't manage his tasks for him. He's quite capable of managing a to-do list." It's challenging that construct again. For a lot of people, that's uncomfortable because that's a concept that we've just stuck with for years.
Nick Muldoon:
This is going to lead to a lot of change. I guess I've been thinking with respect to remote, Dom, I've been thinking much more about the mechanics of remote work and logistics around pay scales, and geographic location, and pay, and all this sort of stuff. But you're really opening my eyes to a whole different aspect. There are, in many large organizations, there are a lot of middle managers, and if these roles are no longer valuable, what do all these people do, and how do we help them find something that they love and that they long for? Because presumably they've not longing for-
Dom Price:
Yeah, that's the thing.
Nick Muldoon:
... task management.
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah. They're probably not deeply entrenched in that as being something they're passionate about, right? It's just like they found themselves in this role. This is the interesting thing. If you look at rescaling, I've been looking at rescaling for a few years as a trend, right? How do we look at the rate of change in both technology, people practice, whatever else? That means that we're all going to have to rescale, right? The idea of education being up until the age of 21, and then you're working 45 years doesn't exist, right? So lifelong learning. You look at that, and you go ... Amazon did a great example last year. Bezos and Amazon put aside a billion dollars to retrench a thousand people that they were going to dispose. Right?
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
From their warehouses, right?
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah. They're on automation to displace those people. What was came out recently and said, there's I think, it's like 1,500 people who will be displaced because they're going for fully autonomous distribution centers. They're looking to retrain those people and redeploy them elsewhere. You're like, "Cool, how are we doing that?" The reason I mentioned it is I think we assume it for low skilled, high volume tasks, because that's associate what we've associated with technology disruption in the past. But if you think about it, there was I think about a year and a half ago, McKinsey had a report called The Frozen Middle Layer. It was about how this frozen middle layer was going to thaw and be exposed, right, as these middle managers. There's thousands of them. That phrase, the middle layer, COVID just poured the icing on that. Right? [inaudible 00:53:26]. They're all going, "What? Me? No, no, I've only got 10 years left in my career. Let me sit here, manage a few tasks. I'll take inflationary pay rise every year. I won't cause any trouble." You're like, "I don't know. You can retrain here."
Dom Price:
These people haven't been engineered to think about retraining before. They've been engineered to think about comfort and conservatism and safety. I think we need to appreciate that they still have value in the workplace. I just don't think it's the old value. For them, the four Ls-
Nick Muldoon:
This is going to be a huge shock to this frozen middle layer, as McKinsey called it. I think about so we're Wollongong, Port Kembla. We're in a working class, steel town, and over the course of, pick a number, over the course of 25, 30 years, 20,000, 22,000 people have been let go from the steelworks and they're been told to retrain. I'm sure a portion of them do, but a lot of them that are older, like you're talking about someone that's in their 50s that's got 10 years on their career, right, they probably just took early retirement, and maybe they found something else to do in the community, whatever it happens to be. What are the structures that we provide for this huge crew of people to get them re-skilled in our businesses so that we don't lose the tacit knowledge and get on to the next thing? How's Atlassian thinking about this?
Dom Price:
It's also about front-loading it, right? We have to hold our head in shame as a general society, how light we leave it. When I hear stories about those steelworks closing down, and you're like, "Why are we surprised by that? Why are we surprised when Holden stopped developing cars in Australia? Really? But really, you're surprised?
Nick Muldoon:
We saw it coming.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
We propped up the car industry in Australia for 35 years.
Dom Price:
Yeah. You put tariffs on anyone importing to make your own industry look good, and then those tariffs go away, people are looking for cheaper. Unfortunately, we signed up for a global economy, right? It's a borderless business model that we're in, and whether you like that or not, it's what we signed up for. The reality is instead of reacting each time this happens when it's normally too late, how can we respond? How can we use these brilliant algorithms and data managing to go, "Here are world economic forum future skills, here are large employers, here are other skillsets about people." You try and give that out, and you're like, "These are the ones most at risk, and they're at risk over the next 18 months." Cool. Start retraining them now, but not when they're out of the job when they go, "Well, now, I'm out of my job. Now, what do we do?" You're like, "I don't know. Buddings? I don't know."
Dom Price:
We've got way more data and insights than we probably give ourselves credit for. I think one element is front-loading it, and the next one is saying, "How do we not recreate this problem again?" If you look in the US right now, the largest employer, not by company, but by job type is driver.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Yeah, by role. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Dom Price:
By role, right? So Uber driver, truck drivers, manual drivers, people behind the wheel driving a vehicle. Where's billions of dollars worth of investment going in, Google, Amazon and every other? Right? Autonomous vehicles. You're like, "Cool."
Nick Muldoon:
Autonomous vehicles. Get rid of all those people?
Dom Price:
If I-
Nick Muldoon:
What are we doing to reskill those people?
Dom Price:
Yeah. Or even better, what are we doing in our education system to say, "How do we help people coming through the education system be more resilient with their future skills? I don't like the idea of being able to future-proof people. I don't think we've got a crystal ball, so let's part that. But how do we make people more resilient in their skills, well, all the skills we think will be required? World Economic Forum do great research every few years and publish it, and then I look at the education system, and I'm like, "That was built in 1960. We're tuning kids out that if you talk to.
Nick Muldoon:
Hey, hey, hey, Dom, okay, okay. I'm getting anxious at the moment. Let's end on a high note. What are things that make you optimistic for the next decade? All right? In 10 years time, how old are you going to be in 10 years time? Like 45 or something?"
Dom Price:
52.
Nick Muldoon:
52?
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. Oh, yes.
Dom Price:
Getting old.
Nick Muldoon:
Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so when you're 52, what are you looking forward to over the next decade? What's exciting?
Dom Price:
There's a couple of things we need to realize, right? Very first thing we need to accept is our future is not predetermined, it's not written, and it's not waiting for us. Right? We design it and define it every single day with our actions and inactions. As soon as we have that acknowledgement, we don't sit here as a victim anymore and wait for it to happen to us. We go, "Oh, oh, yeah." Then like, "We have to decide on the future. No one else does. We collectively do." That's the first step. You're like, "Oh, I've got way more say in this than I ever realized." The second one is, we need to drop a whole load of stuff around productivity, and GDP, and all these things that we've been taught are great measures of success, and just be happy and content in life. If you've got four years left, I've probably got 30 something years left, I want to enjoy those 30 years. I have no vision of being buried in a gravestone somewhere with, "Dom was productive."
Nick Muldoon:
Dom, this is great. What we've got to do for society over the next 10 years is get society out of KPIs and into OKRs.
Dom Price:
Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
Right?
Dom Price:
And get a balance out of going, "How ... This is what I've learned from COVID, right? You know this, I did 100 flights last year. I did a few at the start of the year and trip to the UK in the middle of COVID. But I've not traveled since June. Now, admittedly, the whole work from home thing, I'm going insane a little bit, but the balance of life, like sleeping in my bed every night, hanging out with friends, meaningful connections, right, actual community. I've lived in the same apartment for three years, and it took COVID for me to meet any of my neighbors, and it took COVID for me to meet the lovely ladies in the coffee shop downstairs. I'm like, "I've lived above you for three years, and it's only now you've become a person." Right?
Dom Price:
There's so much community and society aspects we can get out of this. The blank piece of paper, if you imagine this as a disruption that's happened to us, and there's no choice, and we can fight against it, that the options we have to actually make life better afterwards. Whether it be four-day working week experiments, or actually working from anywhere means that a whole other disabled, or working parents can get access to the workforce. Funny, if you get more done. Unemployment in the disabled community is 50% above that of the able-bodied community, not because of any mental ability, just because it's hard for them to fit .
Nick Muldoon:
Logistically. Yeah.
Dom Price:
You've just changed that, right, with this crazy experiment called COVID. If we start to tap into these pockets of goodness, and actually, we sees this as an opportunity to innovate, right, and I hate the P word of pivot, but forget pivoting, to genuinely innovate, what might the world look like, and how can we lean into that? How do we get balance between profit, and planet, and people, and climate, and all those things? If we do that, we've got a chance to build this now and build a future we want that we're actually proud of. I think the time is now for us to all stand up because it's not going to happen to us ... Or it will happen to us. If we choose to do nothing, it'll happen to us. It doesn't need to. I'm really excited because I think we're going to make some fundamental changes and challenges to old ways of working and old ways of living, and we'll end up happier because of it.
Nick Muldoon:
Don, I'm super jazzed, man. Thank you. I really appreciate your time today. That's a great place to finish it up.
Dom Price:
I hope some of those things come true.
Nick Muldoon:
Okay. I hope some of those things come true, right? I feel like the things that are in our power, the things that we can directly affect, takeaways for me, I've got extending the love and loathe into the love, loathe, long for and learned. I think that's great. I also like the boomerang versus the stick with respect to your time and what's on the calendar, and just jettison the stuff that is, well, it's not helping you, or the teams, or anyone else. Yeah.
Dom Price:
You could do it like [inaudible 01:01:33]. If it ends up being important, you can add it back.
Nick Muldoon:
Sure.
Dom Price:
[inaudible 01:01:38].
Nick Muldoon:
The big takeaway from this conversation for me is that it's in our hands. The choice, we make the decisions. It's in our hands. I think about, was Mark Twain, whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.
Dom Price:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Muldoon:
You might as well think you can and get on with it.
Dom Price:
Yeah, yeah, give it a red-hot stab and see what happens.
Nick Muldoon:
All right, cool. Don, thanks so much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it.
Dom Price:
It was great chatting.