Easy Agile Podcast Ep.4 Em Campbell-Pretty, CEO & Managing Director at Pretty Agile

"It was great to chat with Alana and learn from her experience" - Sean Blake

In this episode, I was joined by Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day.

She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.

We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about:

• The importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities.
• Building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself.
• Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community.
• Servant leadership and being a generous leader.
• The importance of authenticity and direct communication.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did.

Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello, welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name's Sean Blake and I'll be your host today. Today, we have a really interesting guest and a fantastic episode ahead for you. Our guest today is Alana Mai Mitchell. Alana is a results coach, author, podcast host, and Senior Product Development Manager at one of Australia's largest banks where she works with Agile teams every day. She has over 13 years experience in digital financial services and coaching. She's spoken live on Channel 10 here in the Australian media and has had her mental health story featured in publications, like The Daily Mail and Mamma Mia. She's the author of a book, Being Brave, and she's the host of the Eastern Influenced Corporate Leader Podcast.

Sean Blake:

We covered a lot of ground in today's episode. We talked about communication styles. We talked about the importance of putting your hand up and telling your manager when you want to be challenged more and to be exposed to new opportunities. We talked about the importance of building trust with your team and disclosing some vulnerabilities about yourself. We covered Alana's mental health journey over the course of six years, and that journey continues today. What she's learned and what we can learn from her experience to better look after our teams and people in our community. We talked about going first in servant leadership and being a generous leader. The importance of authenticity and direct communication. I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. Let's get started. Alana, thanks so much for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast today. It's great to have you here.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Thanks so much, Sean.

Sean Blake:

Before we jump into our conversation, Alana, I'm just going to do an acknowledgement to country. We'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we're recording today, the Watiwati people of the Tharawal speaking nation, and pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging. We extend that same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples who are tuning in today.

Sean Blake:

Well, Alana, there's so much to talk about today. The background is, we used to be colleagues in the financial services industry. We bumped into each other again out of the blue at Agile Australia '21 Conference, just at the end of last year, which was a great conference. We thought we'd have you on the podcast because you've got so many different stories to tell, but I thought maybe we could start this episode by talking about your career journey and how working with Agile Teams has weaved into your career trajectory.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Yeah, sure. Agile really came into the forefront right back in 2013. I always remember my first Agile training. We had a team day, where I was working at the time. We had an external facilitator come in because the Agile framework was something totally new to financial services at that time. We played Lego. We had each of our wider team was divided into smaller teams, like scrum teams, all this new terminology. Then we were building island and we had an island each and the product owner was feeding user stories in from the customer. Partway through we were building, I think, a rocket launcher and then no, we didn't want to rocket launcher anymore.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

We wanted to tweak it. We had to adapt to things on the fly. I always remember that experience because it was so transformative, just having such a direct and collaborative way of working with people on a project. To this day, of all the Agile trainings and experiences that I've gone through, it's always the ones that are really interactive that I've remembered the most and gained the most and taught them, like learnt them myself as a participant and then taught them to other people as well.

Sean Blake:

Along the way, do you think, you've been through all these training sessions and you've been working with teams on the ground. What have you found from Agile, which is a big topic, but what have you found to be the most transformative and the most helpful from the way that these teams used to do things to the way that they do them now?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I would say communication. What I found was, because I had the contrast with both, I've worked in Water Force style projects and Agile projects as well. I think the biggest part is the amount of effort and rigor that we would go through reviewing requirements and have those be delivered into technology. Then it go quiet and you not hear from technology until they come back with something and they're like, "I've got a baby." You're like, "What kind?" The difference with Agile is that you are able to co-create them.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

You're creating with your customer or your end user, if you're working with an internal user, and then you are also working with technology and finding out what kind of constraints technology has or what kind of ideas they have as well. You have that ability to communicate with the dev. Sometimes your devs are on-shore, often cases they're offshore. We're all remote now, so it doesn't make as much difference as it did when we were in the office. You can really just pull away a lot of the process that gets in between people and have conversations. That's what I really think is the most transformative part.

Sean Blake:

Great. Yeah, so that communication. Do you feel like the communication throughout COVID and working remotely has been more challenging? Are you one of those people that find those face-to-face communication skills, you really prefer the face-to-face or has remote been okay for you? Because I know some people have struggled. Some people have found it easier to be on Zoom all the time.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Well, I mean, when I go in the office and we have that brief time where we were back in the office, I had a smile on my face the whole time. Because I just love seeing people and I'd go around and walk over to my team and say, "Hey, how are you going?" Just catch up with them. I think the one piece that's missing for me in the remote working whilst there's greater flexibility, you can do multiple things at the same time. You focus a lot of your work. You can get a lot more done quicker. I do find that informal relationship building, you need to actually schedule in time or pick up the phone out of the blue and connect with someone.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Whereas in the office, I would just find that because people were there and I don't know, you might be having lunch at the same time or going downstairs for something at the same time or even the corridor conversations that happen after the meeting where you can just chase someone or ask someone a question or they chase you and you just get things done. It's just different. I'd say it's more, the catch ups are more scheduled and formal, I find in a remote work setting.

Sean Blake:

I feel the same way. I feel the small talk and the talk about the weekend on Zoom is much harder for me and much more tiring to try and sustain that than in person. It becomes more naturally. I really have to make a big effort, especially on one-to-ones with people in the team when I'm trying to check in on their health and wellbeing and how they're going at work. I just find that much more exhausting than what I do in person. I think it's just those nonverbal communication skills and you can see people's body language easier when you're in the office.

Sean Blake:

Someone's slumped at their chair for six hours out of a seven-hour work day. Then you're like, "Oh, something's wrong." If you know that you've got to get on Zoom and try and pretend to be happy and that everything's okay, then you can fake it a little bit easier. Of course, there's loads of benefits to remote work, as you say. That human element personally, I find it's much more challenging to replicate using digital tools. Maybe there'll be more innovation that comes, but the time will tell on that.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Yeah. On that, I wanted to add some of my friends in the technology space. Talking about the metaverse and how at the moment you and I are having this conversation through screens. I'm in my space, in my house, and you can see my painting in the background and I can see that you've got a podcast set up. One of my friends was talking about how, he's an architect, and so he was thinking about how we create digital spaces. When we meet digitally, if we were meeting as our avatar, what kind of space would facilitate better conversation? That blew my mind when he was talking about that. I was like, "Oh, I hadn't even thought of that." Absolutely, you could meet in a virtual space because we're doing what we've got with the tools that we have today, but the tools can change.

Sean Blake:

I guess it's almost certain they will change. I can't see that Zoom will be the market leader forever. I'm sure there'll be things that come along very soon that will try and replicate some of those physical experiences that we miss so much of being in the office and having those social experiences together. Alana, I'm wondering about the teams that you work with now or in the past, those Agile teams, do you have any tips for people who are new to Agile teams or maybe they're coming in?

Sean Blake:

They want to improve their communication, whether they're remote or in office, and improve their organization's Agile maturity, but they're just finding it a bit of a struggle. Do you have any tips for people who are just, they're butting their heads up against the wall and they can't seem to make progress with some of those patterns and habits that you talked about, like taking requirements away and not knowing what's happening for so many months or years before you hear something back from technology? How do you actually start to influence that culture and behavior, if you're new to Agile?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I'm going to take a slightly different approach on that to answer your question. Because the thing that came to mind for me was when I in Outward Bound, which is a remote wilderness organization in 2012 in the US. I was instructing there. One of the frameworks that they use is William Glass' Choice Theory. Choice Theory talks about that we have five needs, and I'll put myself on the spot. Well, I'll mention some of them, because I can't remember all of them. There's like need for fun. Some people have a high fun need. Then there's like need for power, like feeling powerful. There's like, love and belonging, is another important need. There's two others, which I can't recall right now. I think when you are coming out of a situation, from a perspective, you've tried a couple of times when you're approaching it, and not getting anywhere, I would have a look at what needs am I, myself looking to get met out of this communication.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Then on the flip-side, what needs is my communication partner or the team that I'm working with? What is the most important need for them? As we were talking about remote working, like the fun need. People love to have fun and you can actually have fun at work. It doesn't need to be separate. Thinking about like, if you have a high fun need, and you also notice your team has that as well. How can you address that in your communication style or bring out some kind of activities that can bring that to life? I would always go back to what are my needs and what are the needs of other people that I'm working with? Because when you're working with different teams, they have different agendas, they have different goals. If you can figure out what you have in common, it's a lot easier to bring another team or people in those team on the journey, once you figured out what the common ground is.

Sean Blake:

That's great advice. Think about it from their point of view, rather than just what you need and your own agenda and try and adapt to your approach to them. That's really good. I saw this quote recently, Alana, which reminded me a little bit about your mental health journey, which we'll talk about more in a moment. The quote was about, when you're looking for a new role or a new job, you shouldn't just look for a great company to work for. You should look for a great manager to work for, because the influence and your experience as an employee, working for a manager, is often so much more important than and influential than just picking a great or a well-known company to work for. Have you found that to be true in your own career?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Oh, yeah. I have found that some really phenomenal leaders. In a previous organization that I was working in, I like to keep learning and growing all the time. In previous roles, sometimes I get bored. It happens. That's really valuable to organizations because I'm constantly looking at where to improve things. I had a time where my manager was focused on other things and learning and development wasn't as important. Then I had a lady named Christina come in and Christina was like fire. She was just, "This is what we got to do." Open to change, really clear communicator, she's from the US. She's really direct in a compassionate way and she's really progressive as well. I found because of her influence in the organization.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Also, through my willingness to put my hand up and say, "I'm willing to participate." Which is, for the people who are tuning in, it's not just about the leader creating the opportunities for you and saying, "Hey, present to this general manager forum or executive general manager forum." Or whatever it is. It's also about you saying, "Hey, I'm willing and I'd love to." And communicating what you are after. We met on that path and I had some of the most, stronger success working with Christina. I was fortunate at that the culture was also really great. The immediate team culture needed to shift as well, which is part of why Christina came on board, and the company culture is really good.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I would say on the point on like manager over culture is that when you are someone who is progressive and you're wanting to shape the culture for the better, you're going to find cultures that need a little attention or need a little work or things that aren't quite as performing as well as they are. With the sales perspective, opportunity plus. If you go to a culture and everything's amazing, you're sure you can make it a little bit more amazing. Really, when you have the support of your manager, who's, you see these initiatives and they're going to say, "Okay, go for it. I've got this GM forum coming up that you can present at, or let's find your sponsor. Let's find your mentor." That the two of you working as a team can be at the forefront of the new culture, which impacts the rest of the culture.

Sean Blake:

Interesting. I don't know if I've ever been in a culture that's perfect and overachieving and too good, but absolutely you can get too comfortable and complacent in roles and you can almost just be a little bit shy from putting your hand up for those opportunities. Do you think there's many cultures out there that are too good? How do you assess the quality of a culture before you accept the role and start working in that team?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Oh, good question. I always asked, what's the vision and how does it relate to this role? I want to hear it from the hiring manager before I join a company. What I'm looking for is I'm asking that question to multiple people. I'm looking for a congruence, about the hiring manager sees a similar story as to what their peer, who's maybe interviewing in the second interview or their leader in the third interview. I'm looking for those things to match up, because that's telling me there's consistency. It's just, I'm getting the same story. That they're also communicating well. That would be a sign to me. Yeah, that's about what I do.

Sean Blake:

That's good. Good tip. Alana, you have a quote on your website, which talks about your mental health journey. It says, "I have totally recovered from five mental health breakdowns across six years, where doctors once talk would me, I would be homeless." That sounds like a lot of hardship and a lot of sweat and tears and pain over many years. Do you want to walk us through a little bit of that journey and what you've learned about yourself through those experiences?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Oh, yeah. Thanks for pulling that out from the site, Sean. In 2013, I started to notice that things weren't right. I wasn't feeling myself. I sought help from a counselor, career counselor. Because I thought, "Is it my career?" I said, "Am I not in the right job?" I spoke to a psychiatrist and a psychologist and they did a little bit of an investigation, but no one really got to what was going on. Then I made some quick decisions in my career, which I look back on and I think, "Wow, I really was in the throes of it and not thinking clearly at all when I made those choices." I found myself, about November 2014, in between roles. As someone who was previously really ambitious, like high-achiever, chronic high-achiever without having a role and a career prospect at the moment back then was a big deal.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I had what was called a psychotic episode. Essentially, that was like me, believing deluded thoughts and not having a really strong grip on reality, having some story going on in my head that wasn't true at all. It ended up because I was taken by ambulance to hospital. Then still at that point, people didn't really know what was going on. I was a in mental health ward and came out from that, started on medication, which improved things. I thought, and this is part of why I had the multiple psychotic episodes, is that I thought that the stress of being in between jobs or stressful situations at work, I thought they were the triggers for the psychotic episodes.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I would take the medication for a while, get better temporarily, think everything was normal, stop the medication. Then six months later I would have another breakdown. Then that happened over six years and I realized towards the fifth and final, so that was when I was running a coaching business that had a few clients at the start and then we didn't have any clients at all. I essentially ran out of money and got into debt. Then when the doctor learned about my financial situation, he said, "You're going to be homeless." I was so offended. I was like, "How dare you." I was like, "No, I will not. I will not." I look back now and I'm so thankful for him sharing that with me, because he provided me with a choice. Something to push against and choose another way. He activated my will, from me going from being offended to being thankful, where I'm at today.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I charted my way out of that. Now, I have well-managed schizophrenia and I take medication. I'll be taking medication for the rest of my life. It's part of who I am. I don't experience like, some people have a lot of appreciation for, because I know that they're in their mental health journey. It's not all smooth sailing, even after they have an answer of a diagnosis. It still can be challenging in there's up days and down days. For me, I'm consistent. It's been now coming up to four years since the doctor and I had that conversation in the hospital. Life is just incredible since then.

Sean Blake:

That's great. I'm so happy to hear that. Thank you for sharing your story with our audience. I think it's really important, isn't it? To be vulnerable and to share the truth about things that have happened in the past. Do you think that there's something that we can learn? With the people that you work with now, do you have a clearer understanding or are you looking for signs of people in your life who might be struggling with some of the similar issues and what can we do as people in our own communities and working with teams to look out for each other and to better support each other with some of these mental health issues front of mind so that we can be more supportive?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I always listen for and check in with how the team is doing and it's not just, you ask how are you, and you're listening for more than what they say. If they say they're good, how are they saying it? We had that conversation before about the remote working and it's different. To come to the, are you okay, and we have the, are you okay days. Someone asked me in the office where we were actually working together. They're like, "Are you okay, Alana?" I couldn't answer her. It's not always as simple as getting a no, sometimes it's, you don't get a response. Then the alarm does go off. I really think taking in all the points of interaction that you have with someone and aligning to, is that consistent with how do they were, is there something different, check in with them, how is it going? If you're having a conversation, great. If they're sharing with you, even better.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

If they're not, you can always just check in with yourself and being like, "Is it something you need?" As to, why are they not sharing or is that something that's going on with them as well? The other piece I wanted to tie it, bring it back to the Agile leadership piece and from the conference that Agile Australia that we were at. I really see that building trust with teams is so key. We're in this remote working environment or hybrid working environment, depending on what office you're in. It really is important to build trust with your team. One of the quickest ways you can do that is by sharing vulnerably with what you have to share. I don't mean going for exposure and putting yourself in vulnerable situations where you are uncomfortable with what you share.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

It's disclosure, so it's something that you're 100% comfortable within yourself, and you've accepted it within yourself and you share that with your team in openness. When you do that, you see that your team also, they hear it and they mirror it as well. You go first and they share. The mental health example, I shared that on LinkedIn. I've shared it in situations with my team. Then I've been invited to talks and I've had people approach me. It really builds without having to go through a lot of, I ask this thing of this person, do they deliver it above and beyond expectations when I ask for it? How many times do you need to go through that process before you trust someone versus you, coming out and creating an environment of trust through of vulnerability? I do caveat that it's like not oversharing, it's sharing what you're comfortable with at that point in time, and that might change as you go on.

Sean Blake:

Interesting. Does this apply to leaders as well? I know that you've spoken about being a generous leader in the past, and that reminds me of servant leadership, which is another kind of Agile phrase that you hear come up quite a lot. This idea of going first, disclosing what you're comfortable with to your team, even as a leader, showing vulnerability is really important. I know in my experience, if you can share some of the honest and harsh realities of what it's like to be in your position, then your team are more empathetic with the challenges that you have.

Sean Blake:

Because a lot of people assume that when you are in a position of leadership and responsibility, then things are easier because you can just delegate or you've got budget to solve some of these problems, but it's not actually the reality of it. The reality of it is you struggle with things just like anyone else. By sharing and disclosing things with people at all levels of the organization, then that helps to build empathy and a bit more care and support no matter what level you're at. Are there other things or habits or qualities of a generous leader or a servant leader that you've seen or that you try and model or encourage?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

The big one that stands out for me is authenticity. Really knowing yourself, knowing what your leadership style is, knowing what your challenges are, what your strengths are, what you're working on and being authentic about that. When you feel something, sharing what you feel, not having to feel like you need to say it a different way or sugarcoat it, being able to speak your mind in a way that's direct and compassionate. We're not going for like arrogance, and we're not going for wishy washy. We're going for direct and compassionate, then share what's in your heart, so authenticity. Those are the leaders that you, I'm so glad you brought up empathy because when you're vulnerable, empathetic, and authentic, those are the leaders that really stand out for you and me.

Sean Blake:

That's great advice. Authenticity, direct communication, build empathy. All right, thanks for sharing that.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

You're welcome.

Sean Blake:

Alana, how did you decide that you wanted to write a book about some of your experiences and can you tell us about how your book, Being Brave, has changed your life and how you think about sharing your story?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I naturally have a lot of things going on. I love projects. I love it, that's why I'm in projects. Because I love setting a goal and reaching it. The company I was working at had done a number of workshops and I got to a point where I didn't have as many activities going on. I was like, "Oh, that's really interesting. I don't have as much stuff going on." This was just at the start of the pandemic in 2020. A friend, a really dear friend of mine said, "Try meditation. Try meditation daily." I meditated each day and I had been surrounded, my network is very much of a coaching network. I know a lot of coaches and they had written their own books as well. I was on the radar and I was meditating and I got the idea to write a personal memoir about my story.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

It's really interesting that even in through that process of doing a lot of personal development work and going through the process of writing the story, there were still some things in that, that I wasn't quite comfortable owning yet. It's been, since I wrote the book that I've accepted that. In a book, if people read it, I talk about psychotic episodes. I don't talk about schizophrenia because it was all later when I was asked to do a media thing about schizophrenia, that I was like, "Okay, yep. Time to own that." I feel like the book at a point in time had me accept all that had happened with unconditional love and then to still, modeling that piece of going for disclosure and not exposure. Still, I had my fragility on what I wasn't ready to disclose yet. Since then, that had progressed further.

Sean Blake:

That's awesome. That therapy you're sitting down to write the story actually helped flesh out the story itself and you came to terms with some of those things that happened. What has been the reception to the book?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

Most people, when they pick up the book, it's a short book, so some people even call it a booklet, because it's 11,000 words. It's short. They say, "Wow, I read that in an hour and a half, in one sitting. I couldn't put it down." someone had said, "It's the story of the famous rising from the ashes." They can take a lot of inspiration from it. The point of the book and a lot of what we're talking about vulnerability is going first as the leader. You set an example that others can follow in, so that will flow into their lives as well. The book is set out with a story and a few questions at the end that people can go through for their own insight.

Sean Blake:

Great, awesome. Alana, is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we start wrapping up the episode today?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

I did, because I know this is about Agile more so, and that's a really important topic to your audience. I did write and have a think about after that conference we went to, Agile Australia, about what is beyond the Spotify model? Because the Spotify model is very, word is spoken about it at the moment with the crews and the tribes and squads of course, and the chapter lead models and all that they have, which I'm sure everyone tuned in would be really familiar with. I started to think about, what are the things that are relevant beyond the Spotify model? What's next? If your organization is at a point where you've already at your job at some of that, and you're looking for what's next. I did write an article about that. It's on LinkedIn, and I'll give it to you. If you want to, you can put it in the show notes.

Sean Blake:

That's awesome. We will definitely do that. Where can people go to find out more about you? Where can they buy your book or visit your website?

Alana Mai Mitchell:

My site is www.alanamaimitchell.com. On there is more about my story. There's a few things about coaching, which may be relevant. I'm not coaching at the moment, I'm more focused on my career in financial services. Then the book is on Amazon and it's in English and also in Spanish. There's the audio book and also the print book and the eBook.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Well, Alana, thanks for disclosing what you've disclosed today and sharing your story with us. I've learned a lot about your experiences, and I've got a lot to think about, to reflect on, how to be a more generous leader. Thanks for spending time with us and being part of the Easy Agile Podcast.

Alana Mai Mitchell:

You're so welcome. Thanks for having me on the show, Sean.

Sean Blake:

Thanks, Alana.

"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.

‍

In this insightful episode, we dive deep into one of the most common frustrations in engineering and dev teams: retrospectives that fail to drive meaningful change. Join Jaclyn Smith, Senior Product Manager at Easy Agile, and Shane Raubenheimer, Agile Technical Consultant at Adaptavist, as they unpack why retrospectives often become checkbox exercises and share practical strategies for transforming them into powerful engines of continuous improvement.

Want to put these insights into practice? We hosted a live, hands-on retro action workshop to show you exactly how to transform your retrospectives with practical tools and techniques you can implement immediately.

Key topics covered:

• Common retrospective anti-patterns and why teams become disengaged
• The critical importance of treating action items as "first-class citizens"
• How to surface recurring themes and environmental issues beyond team control
• Practical strategies for breaking down overwhelming improvement initiatives
• The need for leadership buy-in and organizational support for retrospective outcomes
• Moving from "doing agile" to "being agile" through effective reflection and action

This conversation is packed with insights for making your retrospectives more impactful and driving real organizational change.

About our guests

Jaclyn Smith is a Senior Product Manager at Easy Agile, where she leads the Easy Agile TeamRhythm product that helps teams realize the full benefits of their practices. With over five years of experience as both an in-house and consulting agile coach, Jaclyn has worked across diverse industries helping teams improve their ways of working. At Easy Agile, she focuses on empowering teams to break down work effectively, estimate accurately, and most importantly, take meaningful action to continuously improve their delivery and collaboration.

Shane Raubenheimer is an Agile Technical Consultant at Adaptavist, a global family of companies that combines teamwork, technology, and processes to help businesses excel. Adaptavist specializes in agile consulting, helping organizations deliver customer value through agile health checks, coaching, assessments, and implementing agile at scale. Shane brings extensive experience working across multiple industries—from petrochemical to IT, digital television, and food industries—applying agile philosophy to solve complex organizational challenges. His expertise spans both the technical and cultural aspects of agile transformation.

Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic conversation flow.

Opening and introductions

Jaclyn Smith: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. Today I'm talking to Shane Raubenheimer, who's with us from Adaptavist. Today we're talking about why your retrospectives keep failing and how to finally fix them. Shane, you and I have spent a fair amount of time together exploring the topic of retros, haven't we? Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself first?

Shane Raubenheimer: Yeah, hello everyone. I'm Shane Raubenheimer from Adaptavist. I am an agile coach and technical consultant, and along with Jaclyn, we've had loads of conversations around why retros don't work and how they just become tick-box exercises. Hopefully we're going to demystify some of that today.

Jaclyn Smith: Excellent. What's your background, Shane? What kind of companies have you worked with?

Shane Raubenheimer: I've been privileged enough to work across multiple industries—everything from petrochemical to IT, to digital television, food industry. All different types of applied work, but with the agile philosophy.

Jaclyn Smith: Excellent, a big broad range. I should introduce myself as well. My name is Jaclyn. I am a Senior Product Manager here at Easy Agile, and I look after our Team Rhythm product, which helps teams realize the benefits of being agile. I stumbled there because our whole purpose at Easy Agile is to enable our customers to realize the benefits of being agile.

My product focuses on team and teamwork, and teamwork happens at every level as we know. So helping our customers break down work and estimate work, reflect—which is what we're talking about today—and most importantly, take action to improve their ways of working. I am an agile coach by trade as well as a product manager, and spent about five years in a heap of different industries, both as a consultant like you Shane, and as an in-house coach as well.

The core problem: When retrospectives become checkbox exercises

Jaclyn Smith: All right, let's jump in. My first question for you Shane—I hear a lot that teams get a bit bored with retros, or they face recurring issues in their retrospectives. Is that your experience? Tell me about what you've seen.

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. I think often what should be a positive rollup and action of a sequence of work turns out to normally become a checkbox exercise. There's a lot of latency in the things that get uncovered and discussed, and they just tend to perpetually roll over. It almost becomes a checkbox exercise from what I've seen, rather than the mechanism to actively change what is happening within the team—but more importantly, from influences outside the team.

I think that's where retros fail, because often the team does not have the capability to do any kind of upward or downstream problem solving. They tend to just mull about different ways to ease the issues within the team by pivoting the issues rather than solving them.

I think that's where retros fail, because often the team does not have the capability to do any kind of upward or downstream problem solving. They tend to just mull about different ways to ease the issues within the team by pivoting the issues rather than solving them.

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, I would agree. Something that I see regularly too is because they become that checkbox, teams get really bored of them. They do them because they're part of their sprint, part of their work, but they're not engaged in them anymore. It's just this thing that they have to do.

It also can promote a tendency to just look at what's recently happened and within their sphere of influence to solve. Whereas I think a lot of the issues that sometimes pop up are things that leadership need to help teams resolve, or they need help to solve. It can end up with them really focusing on "Oh well, there's this one bit in how we do our code reviews, we've got control over that, we'll try to fix that." Or as you say, the same recurring issues come up and they don't seem to get fixed—they're just the same complaints every time.

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. You find ways that you put a band-aid on them just so you can get through to the next phase. I think the problem with that is the impact that broader issues have on teams is never completely solvable within that space, and it's no one else's mandate necessarily to do it. When an issue is relatable to a team, exposing why it's not a team-specific issue and it's more environmental or potentially process-driven—that's the bit that I feel keeps getting missed.

When an issue is relatable to a team, exposing why it's not a team-specific issue and it's more environmental or potentially process-driven—that's the bit that I feel keeps getting missed.

The pressure problem and overwhelming solutions

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, I think so too. The other thing you just sparked for me—the recurring issue—I think that also happens when the team are under pressure and they don't feel like they have the time to solve the problems. They just need to get into the next sprint, they need to get the next bit of work done. Or maybe that thing that they need to solve is actually a larger thing—it's not something small that they can just change.

They need to rethink things like testing strategies. If that's not working for you, and it's not just about fixing a few flaky tests, but you need to re-look at how you're approaching testing—it seems overwhelming and a bit too big.

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. Often environmental issues are ignored in favor of what you've been mandated to do. You almost retrofit the thing as best you can because it's an environmental issue. But finding ways to expose that as a broader-based issue—I think that should be the only output, especially if it's environmental and not team-based.

The problem of forgotten action items

Jaclyn Smith: Something I've also seen recently is that teams will come up with great ideas of things that they could do. As I said before, sometimes they're under pressure and they don't feel they have the capacity to make those changes. Sometimes those actions get talked about, everyone thinks it's a wonderful idea, and then they just get forgotten about. Teams end up with this big long backlog of wonderful experiments and things that they could have tried that have just been out of sight, out of mind. Have you seen much of that yourself?

Shane Raubenheimer: Plenty. Yes, and often teams err on the side of what's expected of them rather than innovate or optimize. I think that's really where explaining the retrospective concept to people outside fully-stacked or insular teams is the point here. You need, very much like in change management, somebody outside the constructs of teams to almost champion that directive—the same way as you would do lobbying for money or transformation. It needs to be taken more seriously and incorporated into not just teams being mini-factories supporting a whole.

You transform at a company level, you change-manage at a company level. So you should action retrospective influences in the same way. Naturally you get team-level ones, and that's normally where retrospectives do go well because it's the art of the possible and what you're mandated to do. I think bridging the gap between what we can fix ourselves and who can help us expose it is a big thing.

I see so much great work going to waste because it simply isn't part of the day job, or should be but isn't.

You transform at a company level, you change-manage at a company level. So you should action retrospective influences in the same way.

Making action items first-class citizens

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, absolutely. I know particularly in the pre-Covid times when we were doing a lot of retros in person, or mostly in person with stickies on walls, I also found even if we took a snapshot of the action column, it would still end up on a Confluence board or something somewhere and get forgotten about. Then the next retro comes around and you sort of feel like you're starting fresh and just looking at the last sprint again. You're like, "Oh yeah, someone raised that last retro, but we still didn't do anything about that."

Shane Raubenheimer: I think Product Owners, Scrum Masters, or any versions of those kinds of roles need to treat environmental change or anti-pattern change as seriously as they treat grooming work—the actual work itself. Because it doesn't matter how good you are if the impediments that are outside of your control are not managed or treated with the same kind of importance as the actual work you're doing. That'll never change, it'll just perpetuate. Sooner or later you hit critical mass. There's no scenario where your predictability or velocity gets better if these things are inherent to an environment you can't control.

Product Owners, Scrum Masters, or any versions of those kinds of roles need to treat environmental change or anti-pattern change as seriously as they treat grooming work—the actual work itself.

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, that's true. We've talked about action items being first-class citizens and how we help teams do that for that exact reason. Because a retro is helpful to build relationships and empathy amongst the team for what's happening for each of them and feel a sense of community within their team. But the real change comes from these incremental changes that are made—the conversations that spark the important things to do to make those changes to improve how the team works.

That action component is really the critical part, or maybe one of two critical parts of a retro. I feel like sometimes it's the forgotten child of the retro. Everyone focuses a lot on engaging people in getting their ideas out, and there's not as much time spent on the action items and what's going to be done or changed as a result.

Beyond team-level retrospectives

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely, consistently. I think it's symptomatic potentially of how retros are perceived. They're perceived as an inward-facing, insular reevaluation of what a team is doing. But I've always thought, in the same way you have the concept of team of teams, or if you're in a scaled environment like PI planning, I feel retrospectives need the same treatment or need to be invited to the VIP section to become part of that.

Because retrospectives—yes, they're insular or introspective—but they need to be exposed at the same kind of level as things like managing your releases or training or QA, and they're not.

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, I think like a lot of things, they've fallen foul of the sometimes contentious "agile" word. People tend to think, "Oh retros, it's just one of those agile ceremonies or agile things that you do." The purpose of them can get really lost in that, and how useful they can be in creating change. At the end of the day, it's about improving the business outcomes. That's why all of these things are in place—you want to improve how well you work together so that you can get to the outcome quicker.

At the end of the day, it's about improving the business outcomes. That's why all of these things are in place—you want to improve how well you work together so that you can get to the outcome quicker.

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. Outcome being the operative word, not successfully deploying code or...

Jaclyn Smith: Or ticking the retro box, successfully having a retro.

Shane Raubenheimer: Yeah, exactly. Being doing agile instead of being agile, right?

Expanding the scope of retrospectives

Jaclyn Smith: One hundred percent. It also strikes me that there is still a tendency for retros to be only at a team level and only a reflection of the most recent period of time. So particularly if a team are doing Scrum or some version of Scrum with sprints, to look back over just the most recent period. I think sometimes the two things—the intent of a retro but also the prime directive of the retro—gets lost.

In terms of intent, you can run a retro about anything. Think about a post-mortem when you have an incident and everyone gets together to discuss what happened and how we prevent that in the future. I think people forget that you can have a retro and look at your system of work, and even hone in on something like "How are we estimating? Are we doing that well? Do we need to improve how we're doing that?" Take one portion of what you're working on and interrogate it.

You can run a retro about anything. I think people forget that you can have a retro and look at your system of work, and even hone in on something like "How are we estimating? Are we doing that well? Do we need to improve how we're doing that?" Take one portion of what you're working on and interrogate it.

Understanding anti-patterns

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. You just default to "what looks good, what can we change, what did we do, what should we stop or start doing?" That's great and all, but without some kind of trended analysis over a period of time, you might just be resurfacing issues that have been there all along. I think that's where the concept or the lack of understanding of anti-patterns comes in, because you're measuring something that's happened again rather than measuring or quantifying why is it happening at all.

I think that's the big mistake of retros—it's almost like an iterative band-aid.

I think that's the big mistake of retros—it's almost like an iterative band-aid.

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about some of the anti-patterns that you have seen or how they come into play.

Shane Raubenheimer: One of them we've just touched on—I think the buzzword for it is the cargo cult culture for agile. That's just cookie-cutting agile, doing agile because you have to instead of being agile. Literally making things like your stand-up or your review or even planning just becomes "okay, well we've got to do this, so we've ticked the box and we're following through."

Not understanding the boundaries of what your method is—whether you like playing "wagile" or whether you're waterfall sometimes, agile at other times, and you mistake that variability as your agility. But instead, you don't actually have an identity. You're course-correcting blindly based on what's proportionate to what kind of fire you've got in your way.

Another big anti-pattern is not understanding the concept of what a team culture means and why it's important to have a team goal or a working agreement for your team. Almost your internal contracting. We do it as employees, right?

I think a lot of other anti-patterns come in where something's exposed within a team process, and because it's not interrogated or cross-referenced across your broader base of teams, it's not even recognized as a symptom. It is just a static issue. For me, that's a real anti-pattern in a lot of ways—lack of directive around what to do with retrospectives externally as well as internally. That's simply not a thing.

A lot of other anti-patterns come in where something's exposed within a team process, and because it's not interrogated or cross-referenced across your broader base of teams, it's not even recognized as a symptom. It is just a static issue. For me, that's a real anti-pattern in a lot of ways—lack of directive around what to do with retrospectives externally as well as internally.

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, I think that's a good call-out for anyone watching or listening. If you're not familiar with anti-patterns, they're common but ineffective responses to recurring problems. They may seem helpful initially to solve an immediate problem, but they ultimately lead to negative outcomes.

Shane, what you just spoke about there with retrospectives—an example of that is that the team feel disengaged with retrospectives and they're not getting anything useful out of it, or change isn't resulting from the retrospectives. So the solution is to not hold them as frequently, or to stop doing them, or not do them at different levels or at different times. That's a really good example of an anti-pattern. It does appear to fix the problem, but longer term it causes more problems than it solves.

Another one that I see is with breaking down work. The idea that spending time together to understand and gain a shared understanding of the work and the outcome that you need takes a lot of time, and breaking down that work and getting aligned on how that work is going to break down on paper can look like quite an investment. But it's also saving time at the other end, reducing risk, reducing duplication and rework to get a better outcome quicker. You shift the time spent—development contracts because you've spent a little bit more time discovering and understanding what you're doing.

A common anti-pattern that I see there is "we spent way too long looking at this, so we're going to not do discovery in the same way anymore," or "one person's going to look at that and break it down."

The budget analogy

Shane Raubenheimer: I always liken it to your budget. The retrospective is always the nice shiny holiday—it's always the first to go.

I always liken it to your budget. The retrospective is always the nice shiny holiday—it's always the first to go.

Jaclyn Smith: It's the contractor.

Shane Raubenheimer: Yeah. It's almost like exposing stuff that everybody allegedly knows to each other is almost seen as counterintuitive because "we're just talking about stuff we all know." It often gets conflated into "okay, we'll just do that in planning." But the reality is the concept of planning and how you amend what you've done in the retrospective—that's a huge anti-pattern because flattening those structures from a ceremonies perspective is what teams tend to do because of your point of "well, we're running out of daylight for doing actual development."

But it's hitting your head against the wall repeatedly and hoping for a different outcome without actually implying a different outcome. Use a different wall even. I think it's because people are so disillusioned with retrospectives. I firmly believe it's not an internal issue. I believe if the voices are being heard at a budgeting level or at a management level, it will change the whole concept of the retrospective.

Solution 1: Getting leadership buy-in

Jaclyn Smith: I like it, and that's a good thread to move on to. So what do we do about it? How do we help change this? What are some of the practical tips that people can deploy?

Shane Raubenheimer: A big practical tip—and this is going to sound like an obvious one—is actual and sincere buy-in. What I mean by that is, as a shareholder, if I am basing your performance and your effectiveness on the quality and output of the work that you're promising me, then I should be taking the issues that you're having that are repeating more seriously.

Because if you're course-correcting for five, six, or seven sprints and you're still not getting this increasing, predictable velocity, and if it's not your team size or your attitude, it's got to be something else. I often relate that to it being environmental.

Buying into the outputs for change the same way as you would into keeping everyone honest, managing budgets, and chasing deadlines—it should all be part of the same thing. They should all be sitting at the VIP table, and I think that's a big one.

Buying into the outputs for change the same way as you would into keeping everyone honest, managing budgets, and chasing deadlines—it should all be part of the same thing. They should all be sitting at the VIP table.

Solution 2: Making patterns visible

Jaclyn Smith: I think so too. Something that occurs to me, and it goes back to what we were talking about right at the beginning, is sometimes identifying that there's a pattern there and that the same thing keeps coming up isn't actually visible, and that's part of the problem, right?

I know some things we've been doing in Easy Agile TeamRhythm around that recently, attempting to help teams with this. We've recently started surfacing all incomplete action items in retrospectives so people can see that big long list. Because they can convert their action items to Jira items or work items, they can also see where they've just been sitting and languishing in the backlog forever and a day and never been planned for anything to be done about them.

We've recently started surfacing all incomplete action items in retrospectives so people can see that big long list. Because they can convert their action items to Jira items or work items, they can also see where they've just been sitting and languishing in the backlog forever and a day and never been planned for anything to be done about them.

We've added a few features to sort and that kind of thing. Coming in the future—and we've been asked about this a lot—is "what about themes? What about things that are bubbling up?" So that's definitely on our radar that will be helpful.

I think that understanding that something has been raised—a problem getting support from another team, or with a broken tool or an outdated tool that needs to be replaced in the dev tooling or something like that—if that's been popping up time and time again and you don't know about it, then even as the leader of that team, you don't have the ammunition to then say "Look, this is how much it's slowed us down."

I think we live in such a data world now. If those actions are also where the evidence is that this is what needs to change and this is where the barriers are...

Solution 3: The power of trend analysis

Shane Raubenheimer: Certainly. I agree. Touching on the trend analytics approach—we do trend analysis on everything except what isn't happening or what is actually going wrong, because we just track the fallout of said lack of application. We don't actually trend or theme, to your point.

We do trend analysis on everything except what isn't happening or what is actually going wrong, because we just track the fallout of said lack of application.

We theme everything when we plan, yet somehow we don't categorize performance issues as an example. If everybody's having a performance issue, that's the theme. We almost need to categorize or expose themes that are outward-facing, not just inward-facing. Because it's well and good saying "well, our automated testing system doesn't work"—what does that mean? Why doesn't it work?

I think it should inspire external investigation. When you do a master data cleanup, you don't just say "well, most of it looks good, let's just put it all in the new space." You literally interrogate it at its most definitive and lowest level. So why not do the same with theming and trending environmental issues that you could actually investigate, and that could become a new initiative that would be driven by a new team that didn't even know it was a thing?

Jaclyn Smith: Yeah, and you're also gathering data at that point to evidence the problem rather than "oh, it's a pain point that keeps coming up." It is, but it gives you the opportunity to quantify that pain point a little bit as well. I think that is sometimes really hard to do when you're talking about developer experience or team member experience. Even outside of product engineering teams, there are things in the employee experience that affect the ability for that delivery—whatever you're delivering—to run smoothly. You want to make that as slick as possible, and that's how you get the faster outcomes.

Solution 4: The human factor

Shane Raubenheimer: Absolutely. You can never underestimate the human factor as well. If everything I'm doing and every member of my team is doing is to the best of not just their capability, but to the best of the ability in what they have available to them, you become jaded, you become frustrated. Because if you're hitting your head against the same issue regardless of how often you're pivoting, that can be very disillusioning, especially if it's not been taken as seriously as your work output.

If everything I'm doing and every member of my team is doing is to the best of not just their capability, but to the best of the ability in what they have available to them, you become jaded, you become frustrated.

We run a week late for a customer delivery or a customer project, and we start complaining about things like money, budget overspend, over-utilization. But identifying systematic or environmental issues that you can actually quantify should be treated in exactly the same way. I feel very strongly about this.

Solution 5: Breaking down overwhelming action items

Jaclyn Smith: We tend to nerd out about this stuff, Shane, and you're in good company. You've also reminded me—we've put together a bit of a workshop to help teams and people understand how to get the most out of their retrospectives, not just in terms of making them engaging, but fundamentally how to leverage actions to make them meaningful and impactful.

We've spoken a lot about the incremental change that is the critical factor when it is something that's within the team's control or closely to the team's control. That's how you get that expansion of impact—the slow incremental change. We've talked about sometimes those action items seem overwhelming and too big. What's your advice if that's the scenario for a team? What do you see happen and what can they do?

Shane Raubenheimer: I would suggest following the mantra of "if a story is too big, you don't understand enough about it yet, or it's not broken down far enough." Incremental change should be treated in exactly the same way. The "eat the elephant one bite at a time" analogy. If it's insurmountable, identify a portion of it that will make it a degree less insurmountable next time, and so on and so forth.

If we're iterating work delivery, problem-solving should be done in rapid iteration as well. That's my view.

Jaclyn Smith: I like it.

The "eat the elephant one bite at a time" analogy. If it's insurmountable, identify a portion of it that will make it a degree less insurmountable next time, and so on and so forth. If we're iterating work delivery, problem-solving should be done in rapid iteration as well.

Wrapping up: What's next?

Jaclyn Smith: I think we're almost wrapping up in terms of time. What can people expect from us if they join our webinar on July 10th, I believe it is, where we dive and nerd out even more about this topic, Shane?

Shane Raubenheimer: I think the benefit of the webinar is going to be a practical showing of what we're waxing lyrical about. It's easy to speak and evangelize, but I think from the webinar we'll show turning our concepts into actual actions that you can eyeball and see the results of.

With our approach that we took to our workshop, I think people will very quickly get the feeling of "this is dealing with cause and effect in a cause and effect way." So practical—to put that in one sentence, an active showing or demonstration of how to quantify and actually do what we've been waxing lyrical about.

the benefit of the webinar is going to be a practical showing of what we're waxing lyrical about. It's easy to speak and evangelize, but I think from the webinar we'll show turning our concepts into actual actions that you can eyeball and see the results of.

‍Jaclyn Smith: Excellent. That was a lovely summation, Shane. If anyone is interested in joining, we urge you to do so. You can hear us talking more about that but get some practical help as well. There is a link to the registration page in the description below.

I think that's about all we have time for today. But Shane, as always, it's been amazing and lovely to chat to you and hear your thoughts on a pocket of the agile world and helping teams.

Shane Raubenheimer: Yeah, it's always great engaging with you. I always enjoy our times together, and it's been my pleasure. I live for this kind of thing.

Jaclyn Smith: It's wonderful! Excellent. Well, I will see you on the 10th, and hopefully we'll see everyone else as well.

Shane Raubenheimer: Perfect. Yeah, looking forward to it.

Jaclyn Smith: Thanks.

Ready to end the frustration of ineffective retrospectives?

Jaclyn Smith and Shane Raubenheimer also hosted a live, hands-on webinar designed to turn retrospectives into powerful engines for continuous improvement.

In this highly interactive session, they talked about how teams can:

• Uncover why retrospectives get stuck in repetitive cycles
• Clearly capture and assign actionable insights
• Identify and avoid common retrospective pitfalls and anti-patterns
• Get hands-on experience with Easy Agile TeamRhythm to streamline retrospective actions
• Practical tools, techniques, and clear next steps to immediately enhance retrospectives and drive meaningful team improvements.

👉 Watch the recording here.