Author: agile-to-agility

Roman Pichler

Speaker: Roman Pichler 00:15

Thank you for your questions and thank you for the votes. It seems the top two ones are, what is the best way to define what is a product? And how can you teach the organization, what is a product. And then based on your experience, what are the main challenges product owners have when it comes to stakeholder collaboration and how to solve them? How about if we start with the very first question what a product is? To me, that seems pretty fundamental. I mean, I have to say, I’ve got a product and a product management bias. But even if you don’t work primarily with product people, like I do, if you apply a framework like Scrum, there’s a product backlog. There’s a product increments, and most recently, there’s even a product goal. And of course, there’s a product owner. So, there’s a lot of product. So, it’s worthwhile to reflect on what is a product? How can we define a product? So, let’s start there. And can I share my screen?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 01:21

You should be able to.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 01:23

Cool, So, hopefully you can see a screen that isn’t too exciting yet. And now a slide that says, AMA, Agile Maine, now product, and I thought I’ll just use my iPad here to visualize some of the ideas that I may be mentioning. So, it’s a little bit more interesting and maybe it’s slightly easier to understand what I’m what I’m trying to communicate. So, what is a product, I like to think of a product as a…, so different people have different definitions of what a product is. But it seems to me that… [I’ll share mine.] So, for me a product is. We have a product here, a product is an asset. And in the context of digital products or software, that will be essentially a piece of code plus, possibly additional artifacts. So, we have an asset. And for these assets to qualify as a product, there has to be a group of beneficiaries. So, it has to be a group of users, or possibly customers. Users are the people who use the product and customers are the people who pay for the product in one way or another.

So, I’m using Microsoft Office PowerPoint here, I’m the user of the product and my business has licensed or subscribed to Microsoft Office. So, my business will be the customer, right? So I’ve got users and customers, and the product has to do a specific job for those individuals, it has to address a specific need, or it has to solve or address a problem or create a specific benefit, or in a another way to put this as it has to allow the users in this case the customers to achieve a specific goal. So there has to be a real reason for people to engage with the product to use the product and to pay for the product. So there has to be a need here. Then you could say that the value that the product creates towards those individuals, towards these users and customers. So, if I wanted to, say create a new Healthy Eating product, then I’d have to think about who would benefit from such a product. And I might decide, I’ll go for people like myself, middle aged men, who may not always have super healthy eating habits, should maybe start to consider changing their eating habits in order to avoid the risk of developing type two diabetes, and that could be the benefit. So, the benefit of using the product might be to reduce the risk of developing type two diabetes, again, it’s very important to be clear on who would use the product, particularly who would use the product and then why would people want to use it? What is the specific value that the product creates for those individuals? But that’s not enough, there has to be something else. For an asset to qualify as a product, it has to also create value towards the business.

And this is meant to be some form of building here. The business or the company, maybe I should have drawn a group of people because really, businesses and companies are a collection of people, of individuals, right? So here, we also need to ensure that the product creates a specific value towards the business. And that might be, for instance, to open up a new revenue stream or to achieve a certain amount or generate a certain amount of revenue within a certain timeframe. Well, you could think about other benefits, such as achieving a profit target, probably for more established older product, or reducing cost, increasing productivity, developing the brand, or helping market and selling other product. So that’ll then depend on what kind of product it is, is it a product that directly generates revenue, then you typically have things like revenue or monthly recurring revenue and profit as key, business goals. So that’s what I should write here… On the right-hand side business goals.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 05:53

How much do you see… and this is just to build off on the value, what I see is, a lot of times I talked to product owners, and they don’t even know what value is, they don’t know how to define it, they don’t know how to explain it. A lot of times they say, return on investment. So, could you maybe just quickly elaborate on how to help product owners define value for a product? Because I see a lot of product owners and even companies struggling to explain that.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 06:21

Yeah, sure. So, the value should really answer the why question, why is it worthwhile for people to use the product or pay for the product in one way or another? What’s in it for those individuals? And why would your business, why would the company invest in the product? Is it to generate revenue? Is it to support another product or service? Or is it to maybe reduce cost as in the case of a traditional IT product or traditional IT app? And so, the formula that I like to suggest to define what a product is, is the product has to do a good job for the users and possibly the customers, and it has to generate some tangible business value. Now, if you’re interested in some form of the tool, to capture those key pieces of information, you can take a look at my… if I can only find it. Hopefully, it’s not going to take too long, at my product vision board. I don’t know if anybody of you has worked with it. I’ve written too many book posts, I think. Oh, come on. Yeah, this one will do. So, okay, that’s a sampled one. So here you go. So, you can use this little structure here, it’s just one way to capture the needs and the business goals. And, you have the vision at the top, which is the positive change that the production created a purpose of a product. And then you have the target group, those are the beneficiaries, the customers and users the needs, again, focusing on the main problem, or the main benefit, or the main job, the primary job that the production do for the users.

And then the product itself, and it’s a key feature that make it stand out, make it special in one way or another. And then the business goals. So that can be a helpful template, a helpful structure to clarify your thoughts and describe the product and describe the beneficiaries and the value it creates. And the trick here is the key point is really to be specific. And if I say, well, my healthy eating product should help people eat more healthily, which is like, well, I’ve just restated the vision. That’s not specific enough, it has to be so specific that I can test, that I can find out if that benefit is truly desirable or if that problem really is significant enough so that people do want to have it addressed. Similarly, with the business goals, they have to be specific as well.

It can be nice to try and make them measurable, but at least they have to be specific. And so, in addition to being able to validate my ideas, I’m also in a position to choose the right metrics or KPIs key performance indicators, and measure how much value my product creates. But again, for me, it really starts with saying, who are the beneficiaries, the users and customers? What Problem does my product solve for those individuals? Which benefit does it create? What is the value? What are the benefits that my product offers to the business? Yeah. It’s a worthwhile exercise, particularly as products change over the life products grow, if they’re successful. And then sometimes what happens is that they grow so big that it’s time to break them up.

Think of those of you who are OS Mac users, Apple users, Apple… fairly recently, I think that was 2019 Finally, unbundled the iTunes app that had grown so much over the years from essentially the ability to purchase digital music online and then download it onto an iPod to all sorts of things, managing videos and reading Apple books and administering your iPhone, and it’s just grew so big. And then finally Apple spun off three or divided it into three new products. I think TV, podcasts and music. So, in that case, you have a product that has changed, that has been split into three, and sometimes companies do unbundle knot… so I’ll leave it there.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:39

Yeah, no, I think it’s great. And Roman, you and I talked about timeboxing these, and it’s been roughly about 10 minutes. So, do you want me just to remind you, or probably I don’t want to rush through these, but…

Speaker: Roman Pichler 10:50

Cool. So, I hope that was useful. Now, the next question, I think was about, oh! I’m looking at the wrong screen. The next question was about main challenges product owners have when it comes to stakeholder collaboration, and how can you solve them? So I think in an Agile context, we’d really like to encourage stakeholders, and by stakeholders… my understanding of stakeholders is that these will be people from within the business, so, for commercial revenue generating product, a stakeholder might be somebody from marketing, it might be a sales rep, it might be somebody from supports, possibly operations, or maybe finance depending on the type of product that we have. So obviously, in an Agile context, we’d like to encourage close collaboration.

Now, if that’s what we’d like to do, and then the question is, and I think for product owner, that is, okay. Yeah. We’d like to encourage close collaboration and the question is, how can we achieve this? And what can go wrong? And so, for me one of the key gradients in order to enable effective collaboration is to build trust. So, for me if I think of collaboration, I think about trust, if there is not sufficient trust, then it’s hard to collaborate, right? So if I don’t trust another person, if I don’t have faith in the other person, if I don’t believe that the other person watches out for me, or at least doesn’t want to cause me any harm or disadvantage, then it’s difficult to be open, it’s difficult to trust the other person, it’s difficult to speak my mind. And it’s difficult to… in a way, be willing to rely on the other person, open up to the individual. So, whenever you experience any collaboration issues, my first question would be, is there a trust issue? And if it is a trust issue… if there is some form of trust, that’s lacking? Then the follow up question will be, how can we build that trust, and so there a number of things you can do in order to build trust, [just looking for a nice color to use.] The first one is to get to know people. And I think that’s very worthwhile, particularly for product owners, who have just started to work with a group of stakeholders to get to know the individuals and make time for them. And we’re all influenced by our backgrounds, and by our personal situation, our family situation.

So, it’s interesting to learn about people find out about people because that sometimes explains a behavior that people that people show you. I remember being in a meeting a while back, and one of the attendees just was just going off on tangents all the time. And I thought it was extremely difficult meeting and I was getting increasingly impatient in a way, agitated and frustrated and didn’t quite know what to do. And only afterwards, I found out that the person was going through a particularly difficult stage in her divorce. And, that allowed me then to empathize with her and I felt a little bit guilty for having unkind thoughts about her being like, “oh, man, you know, just wish she shut up. Can we just get over things?”

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 14:50

It’s really about that empathy. We talk, especially in product ownership. I know you’ve talked about it. It’s empathizing and trying to look through other people’s eyes and see what’s going on versus just…

Speaker: Roman Pichler 15:02

Thank you. So, I think it’s easier to empathize with people, if we get to know people a little bit, it’s easier then to understand people, right. And in order to be able to empathize and get to know people, it’s good to listen, listen attentively and listen with an open mind. And even if a stakeholder makes a suggestion, or requests a feature piece of functionality, which we disagree with, then I think it’s still worthwhile listening attentively, or trying to listen attentively. And being open minded, at least initially not judging too quickly, because first of all, maybe the feature really is a good idea. And we’re just biased and think, oh, no, it can’t be. But after a little bit of consideration, we discover Yes, we should definitely take on board that feature and get it implemented as soon as we can. But even if that’s not the case, then by attentively listening to somebody, we show the person that we care, that we value the person’s perspective and contribution, and that builds trust. So those are…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:15

What about your tools, for instance, I’ve used the gold roadmap and other things that you do, to help in that collaboration. A lot of this is soft skills, I found a lot of times using some…, other tools, like story mapping, but some of your tools that you’ve shared with the community, those are really good to communicate and collaborate with the stakeholders. So, I don’t know if you want to highlight some of those and how you have used those to help with collaboration with the stakeholders.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 16:46

Thank you, thanks for suggesting that. So, I’m jotting down joint decision making and planning. I think that’s another great way to very practically collaborate with stakeholders and users, and the number of tools you can apply. I mean, it starts with coming up with a shared product, vision and strategy, so you can use the product vision board, structure that I showed you earlier, if you’d like to. And I’m a big fan of translating a higher-level vision into a more tangible product roadmap. And I like to work with outcome based or goal-oriented product roadmaps that contain product goals.

I think we’ve got a question about product goals and I’m not sure how high up it is here in this fight, how many votes it attracted. But the idea with a protocol is… well, at least that’s my interpretation, it’s a specific measurable benefit or outcome that product should create. And I like to suggest sort of in the next three months or so, and so having a shared vision, having a shared strategy, and having a product roadmap that describes how the product is likely to develop and grow. [Let me just quickly see if I can find a sample product roadmap so I can visualize what I’m talking about. Scroll down a little bit again.] So here is a template, again, one of those little templates that I’ve created over the years, that you might want to consider using. And as you can see, the goal is here in the middle. And that’s the desired outcome that should be achieved. And so, a great way to collaborate with the stakeholders is to agree on specific measurable benefits, product goals, outcomes that your product should create over the next 12 months.

And that can then really help align people, it can help people work together, you don’t want to be in a situation where the stakeholders go off and everybody does her or his own thing. They do their own thing. And then, the marketing strategy in the marketing collateral doesn’t fit and the sales collateral, and the sales strategy doesn’t fit and so forth. And the training material that was created for the service guys doesn’t fit because everybody was doing their own thing, right? So, we need integration, we need an alignment, but at the same time, we want to enable people to work autonomously, as product owners, we don’t have the time. And often we don’t have the expertise to essentially tell people what to do or babysit people. We’ve got a job to do ourselves. So, for me working with those types of goals, strikes the balance and it achieves that alignment and at the same time, the necessary level of autonomy. Yeah. So, having the…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 19:54

It’s also level I think, one of the things that I’ve seen in the feedback that I’ve gotten from stakeholders is that… especially with the roadmap, product roadmap is that it’s at the right level for the stakeholders, a lot of times, and it’s easy to communicate, and it’s easy for them to see as it evolves and changes. So…

Speaker: Roman Pichler 20:15

That’s great to hear, thank you for sharing. So, from the product backlog is just a little bit too detailed. And the rate of change can be too high for stakeholders to truly understanding and work with it. So that’s why I think it can be really helpful to complement it with a product roadmap. And I mean, if you want to work with product goals, and in the latest version of the Scrum Guide has introduced the concept of a product goals, then you can put your product goals on the product roadmap, and then just simply copy them into your backlog. So, I find that quite handy. So, workshops, joint decision making, planning, and I should maybe also say, review meetings. And that can be really powerful.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:03

How about we move? It’s been another 10 minutes. And I think it’ll be good to maybe shift to the third, that one had seven votes, unique quotes. And the question is, would you recommend breaking out Agile teams into support and new development?

Speaker: Roman Pichler 21:22

Generally speaking, no. Unless these teams are virtual teams, in the following sense. And there is a…, [I think I’ve got an article about this somewhere. So, I’ll see if I can find it quickly, because it has a picture that I’d like to show. We’ll see. Actually, that’s probably under a different category.]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:54

Maybe while you’re looking for that, in a lot of times what I’ve seen, it’s like creating a JV team, support team and new development, your varsity team, what we call it here. And there are some pros and are some challenges, but I agree with you, it’s much better if it’s jointed, so it looks like you have your stuff. So…

Speaker: Roman Pichler 22:19

That’s right. So, the drawback of working with as a separate in a way development team and support team is that… in my experience, it can create a two-class society in the sense that, nobody really wants to be on the support team and do the more difficult bug fixing, maintenance tasks. Everybody would like to be on the feature team, where you get to implement cool new functionality, and it’s exciting and interesting. And I’ve also experienced that the setup can lead people who develop new functionality to have a slightly sloppy approach when it comes software quality, because, they don’t have to fix the box, somebody else will sort out the issues. And that can then lead to software that isn’t as good as it could and should be. So the picture here suggests that, if you have a lot of technical debt, or you have a lot of bugs, you have a lot of maintenance work, then one way to deal with it, rather than having separate teams is that you still have one team or a number of teams who look after a product.

But then teams have volunteers and two or three people per sprint from each team volunteer, to do the maintenance work, to do to support work, to do the bug fixing work. And then in at the end of the sprint, new people volunteer. And so that way the majority of the people can focus on enhancing features or developing new features. And not disturbed by having to do support maintenance, bug fixing work. And so, you have dedicated people who can take this on, but you avoid the drawbacks that I mentioned earlier, the loss of kind of accountability for substandard software. And also, the being stuck on a team and doing work that I don’t really find particularly motivating and interesting. Yeah. So maybe something to consider.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:37

Great! I’m thinking about jumping one ahead, and then we’ll come back to the other one. This one comes up a lot. What’s the difference in Agile between a product owner and a product manager? Should always be one person. This question comes a lot in my classes, too. And I think it would be good if we could hear your opinion then this.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 25:01

Yeah, sure. So, when I started working in a way properly with Agile practices, the people who I was working with were product managers. And then when I introduced Scrum for the first time, again, the people who would act as product owners were mainly product managers. So, for me, I’ve always looked at a product owner in Scrum, the Scrum Product Owner is essentially, the Agile product manager. And I find it interesting that when you look at the scrum history, before Ken Schreiber, who mainly coined the Scrum terms, choice to term product owner, he actually used the term Product Manager for the role. Now, some people may say, Well, come on, why did he then change his mind, but I think one of the reasons for calling the Product Manager, Product owner is that, particularly in an Agile context where there is so much collaboration, but we value collaboration, we talked about collaboration earlier, right. And we’d like to encourage collaboration, we’d like to involve the stakeholders and the development team members in the decision-making process. So, we’ve got all these collaborations going on, where you we have to make sure that if people can’t agree, if people can’t reach consensus within a realistic timeframe, there’s a person who can make a decision and move the process forward and progress the product.

Now that person in Scrum is called the Product Owner. So maybe one way to continue the discussion is to look at this little picture here. So, what you see is a simplified version of my cones planning onions. So, I’ve simply distinguished between vision, strategy and tactics vision as the purpose of our product strategy is how do we get there. That’s the general path that we’ve chosen tactics, then are the specific steps along the path, you can think of the user stories and epics or the good stuff in the product backlog. Now, in Scrum, that’s my perspective, a Scrum Product Owner has full stack ownership, and should own the product in its entirety. For me, the Scrum Product Owner is very much an Agile product manager. However, other Agile frameworks have a different perspective on this. So, if you look at Safe, there’s also a product owner, but in Safe the product owner, and that’s my understanding of the role is mainly a tactical role. So, a Safe product owner would work with one or more development teams and take responsibility, take charge of part of the product backlog, I think in Safe it’s called a team backlog.

So, it’s more a tactical person, more of an inward focused person or role, I should say. It has partial ownership of the product. And then there is a Safe product manager who owns the strategic part and make strategic decisions and is more outward facing and understand the market and the market trends and measure the product performance using KPIs and review the strategy and maybe work with a product roadmap, if that is appropriate. So essentially, what the scaling framework has done in order to facilitate scaling is, it has taken the Scrum Product Owner role and split it into two roles. Now, that’s one way how you can scale and, certain circumstances that can make a lot of sense, particularly when your product has reached a certain stability and the strategy isn’t too volatile. So typically, that’s the case in maturity and decline if you’re familiar with the product lifecycle model. But what it has done is, it has created even more confusion in the community and generally, in businesses what it means to be a product owner.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:01

… authority level, for instance, what I see is… what you’ve shown here, Safe Product Manager, which again, I’m not a big fan of safe, but you also see an another is just named differently, like Chief Product Owner and then product proponent down below, but it really has to do with authority level, right?

Speaker: Roman Pichler 29:19

It has to do with the decision making. Maybe, some of you’ve seen this little diagram here that I created a while back. And so, the idea really is just to illustrate different types of ownership. So that’s why it’s called six types of owners or Scrum Product Owner owns the product. And then if a person looks after product capability and major features, say the ability to… you go to an online retailer’s website like Amazon, the ability to look for a product on the Amazon web page for me is a feature or component, somebody who looks after payment. The payment system, there will be a component owner. That’s at least the terms that I like to use. We have the Safe product owner who takes care of the tactical decisions for a given product. And then, we have two products here, they may use similar services.

So, we may want to take them out and encapsulate them, extract them into a platform. And then we have a platform owner in platform owners, like a Scrum Product Owner only looks after an internal technical product, right? Now we have a little portfolio and sometimes it makes sense then to have a product portfolio owner. And as we’ve just heard, all these owners, they have ownership, but to a different level. So, their level of decision-making authority in their responsibility and accountability will vary. So, product portfolio owners’ job is to maximize the value of a group of products. A good example of a product portfolio might be Microsoft Office, with PowerPoint, word and Excel is the traditional members, job of a Scrum Product owners to maximize the value of the product, job of a feature owner is to maximize the value of the feature, I think it’s just important to be clear on, if you have a product role, what is your responsibility? And what is your decision-making authority.

And I generally tend to recommend to my clients to either choose the term product owner or product manager, I find that it can create a lot of confusion and organization uses both uses both terms. I’ve worked with businesses where the product managers were desperate to become these hip, new, trendy Agile product owners, when I’ve worked with companies where the product owners, they couldn’t wait to become product managers and grow up and finally make important product decisions. And that was seen as a positive career move. So, it can create quite a lot of division. And in I think that’s not that’s not desirable. So, my suggestion, again, is use either product manager, product owner. And then maybe you have a feature manager or feature owner, for instance, if you want to follow my model here, when you can have senior and junior product people, senior and junior product owners or product managers. But again, I think that just limits the confusion, at least a certain extent.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 32:19

And someone’s like, depends on your organizational governance design structure. So that’s going to influence a lot. How about, let’s move on, we have about maybe 20 minutes left, just a little shy of that if we move to the next question, which I also think is something that’s pretty common, and I hear often, how can I get my team to write stories instead of relying on me or another person as their scribe?

Speaker: Roman Pichler 32:50

That’s a great question. And so, for me, the trick is a to a certain extent, empower your team to take that ownership into… [you won’t believe it, there’s another picture that I have that I’d like to show you quickly. Quick is relative, you here we go.] So, I sometimes find that product owners and product people think they have to feed their development teams with detailed user stories or requirements, essentially, forever. And while sometimes that’s true, when you work with a new development team, a team where people don’t have much knowledge about the market, the domain, the users, the product competitors, that will benefit from detailed requirements.

And same thing is true when people haven’t worked with Agile practices. And people are more used to the traditional setting, where you use a well a traditional detailed requirements specification. So then people will ask for those detailed user stories, those detailed requirements, and initially that can make sense to create them. But if you do that, I’d suggest that you create them together. So, product backlog, refinement, product backlog work, should be a joint responsibility. So here on this diagram, it’s written between the product owner and the development team. And that you actively transfer knowledge from yourself as the product owner, you try to actively transfer knowledge into the development team, and try and educate people about the market, the domain, the users and customers and so forth. One way to do this is to take some of the people along when you carry out some form of user research. So, when you interview people when you observe people, when you talk to customers and users, be it current customers and users or prospective customers and users, another way to do this is to make sure that the development team members are present when a sprint review takes place.

So, they can directly hear, at least from selected users and customers, depending on the solution validation technique that you use, about how well the product works for them, and listen to the feedback. So, it’s about actively transferring that knowledge, which, in the short term may be more work. But in the long term, should enable the development team to become more self-sufficient, and take on the job of at least writing detail user stories. So not to just suggesting this, that as a product owner, as the person in charge of the product, you should not be involved in the product backlog work. But I don’t think that you necessarily have write every single, detailed user story and you don’t necessarily have to forever detail the user stories or create super detailed and specked out user stories. In fact, that was never the intention with user stories, the user, the intention with the user stories was that they would essentially capture the conversation or the essence of a conversation. So, it’s really about developing a shared understanding, it’s really about the communication piece.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:14

A lot of people, if we just go back a little bit, a lot of people, you mentioned customers and users. And a lot of times people don’t fully know the difference between customers and users. And I have my own way of explaining. But I’d be interested to see how do you typically explain what’s the difference between a customer and a user?

Speaker: Roman Pichler 36:34

So, I think I touched upon it. Earlier, when we talked about what is a product user is somebody who uses the product, employs it’s. I was using Microsoft Office just a minute ago, Microsoft PowerPoint, I’m the user and then customer is the person who pays for the product in one way or another. So, the example I gave earlier is that my business has subscribed to Microsoft Office. So, my business will be the customer. And sometimes customers have different perspectives and needs and ideas from users and vice versa.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:05

And sometimes one can become another, the example that I use if I’m buying a bike for my four-year-old son, who’s the customer, who’s the user? His son is the customer, I’m the user.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 37:21

Unless you decide to give it a go and you will see if it’s a..

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:24

Sorry, it’s the other way around, right? Yeah. So, my son is the user, I’m the customer but if I’m buying a bike for myself, I’m both customer and user and my wife is the stakeholder. So that’s another way you can look at how things… a user sometimes is both customer and user, and sometimes it’s different, so…

Speaker: Roman Pichler 37:51

So, try and really transfer that knowledge into the team and enable the team. And at the same time, I think you should also be able to expect that your team is willing to support you, and certainly support you in identifying and capturing user stories that should be a truly joined responsibility if and it should be truly, a form of teamwork. And if that’s not the case, then I would suggest that you talk about it in one of the upcoming retrospectives. And also, maybe secure the necessary support from your scrum master or Agile coach.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:30

So, here’s an idea Roman, I’ve done this in the past, but we have 10 minutes. And a lot of times people have these questions. So, if we limit it to 30 seconds, quick Roman’s responses to these Would you be open maybe instead of diving deeper into one just going broader? And answering some of these? So just pick and choose some of these questions in 30 seconds or less, just maybe give us some answers. But I think given that there were a lot of votes, at least those individuals that wanted to and this is probably one of the few opportunities that they will get a chance to get your opinion on it. Just give them a quick answer. Maybe you can for some of these.

Speaker: Roman Pichler 39:12

So, we’ve got a question around, Publications and organization are defined as products. Hopefully, that’s been addressed by the discussion we had earlier around, what is a product? If not, then the test for if something is a product is? First of all, it has to serve a specific group of people. So, you have to say, what is the value of create? What is the problem it solves? So, the benefit it creates? And who are those individuals? And at the same time, you have to say, Okay, what is the value that my product largely on its own independently creates for my business? If you can answer those questions, then most likely you have a product or the asset or in this case, the app is a product. So that’s something you may want to do and always look from the outside in avoids the mistake of saying, we have the systems in place, therefore, each system has to be a product and think about trying to look at your system landscape from a user perspective and see how users interact with the various assets and look at the user journeys in order to identify products. And then, what does a good product goal look like? How is it different than then a strategic intent? So, a product goal, again, I briefly touched upon it earlier, I would consider a good effective product goal to be specific and measurable. And a goal that describes the benefit or outcome. So, if I wanted to create a healthy eating product, then a good product goal for the very first release the MVP might be to help people become more aware of their eating habits, and at the same time, acquire an initial user base. So, something that you might be able to achieve, say in the next three months, sometimes that timeframe is too long, and then you maybe shoot for six weeks or eight weeks, sometimes three months is maybe too aggressive. And you need more timeframe of four to six months, but somewhere within that, that sort of scale… that’s usually an effective product goal. What’s next? Do you have any tips on how to add effective acceptance criteria during sprint planning? Yes, I have don’t do it. So separate product backlog work from the sprint planning.

So, make sure that you refine and work on your product backlog before you move into the sprint planning meeting. Otherwise, your sprint planning meeting becomes very strenuous, it’s likely to be overloaded, and the quality of the backlog work you do might be sub optimal, so make sure you invest in a product backlog refinement when doing the engine behind the scenes that drives the product, how to do it in smaller releasable chunks. Now, I’m not quite sure what the engine here is. But, I suspect it might be something like a platform, like a software platform that encapsulates shared services or shared components. If that’s what it is, then I would suggest you best start by addressing the needs of a small number of products. And by forming a team, or in closely involving the teams that build the software, that sits on top of the platform or the engine to make sure that the engine or platform really does a good job for those teams, because the users of that engine or that platform will be the development team members. And otherwise, you can pretty much… assuming that the engine or platform is managed as a product, you can pretty much use all standard product management techniques to do that. And there’s an article I wrote I think about a year ago about software platforms maybe refer to that and check it out.

And we are doing Agile so wrong. How do we get to convincing management to go the route of continuous discovery and building features that are of value rather than saying yes to every feature that our customer wants? Sometimes that has to do by actually moving away from a building, tailored, custom, bespoke products to well, essentially, commercial products. I’ve certainly seen companies struggle with that. So, if you currently earn your money by running, essentially projects and doing bespoke custom work for individual clients, then you’d really have to change the way the business is set up and operates. Otherwise, it might be an empowerment issue, establishing effective, empowered, qualified, knowledgeable, professional product people, product owners. And the thing that you can do to help with this is that you first of all, build trust with the stakeholders, as discussed earlier. And secondly, that you increase your expertise, the more expertise you have, the more likely people are to trust you and listen to you. Do you know any good practices, how project managers could cooperate with product owners? Well, so if we’re talking about Scrum Product owners, and if you’ve set up Scrum in the right way, and you’ve filled the Scrum roles with the right people, you don’t need project managers. And you may you may have noticed that certainly in Scrum, the term project isn’t really used. It’s all about product. It’s all about organizing around products, and it’s all about then developing and progressing and enhancing products. So, project managers typically face a choice, they can become team members, they can become Scrum Masters or product owners, but in all those cases, their role will change significantly. So, it’s something to be aware of, I think. Alternatively, if you currently have project managers who perform program management, some of those individuals might make good product portfolio managers, as I briefly showed in one of the one of the pictures I shared with you, then we have should every feature requests go through design sprints? No. So a design sprint, as the name says, that’s at least my understanding, is really there to figure out what is the right user experience design approach for… either brand new product or product that is being significantly enhanced or changed. So, it can be very useful then to spend a week and well going through that, design, Sprint, but certainly not for every single feature.

So that’d be really again, for brand new product, or for a major change when you take your product to a new market or market segment, for instance. And then the final one I can see here is having trouble getting value… Having trouble getting value info from the business making it difficult to prioritize using COD, are any of the matrix approaches valuable, or are they anti patterns. So I think whenever you are the product owner, you have to really understand the value that your product should create for the business, I wouldn’t expect that any of the business stakeholders have to tell you, it’s really something that you need to know and you have to take responsibility of the products, ability to create value towards the users and towards the business. And then you have to think about, how you can ensure that you maximize that value and that the desired value is created. Again, as I briefly hinted at earlier, the model that I like to use is by starting out with a product strategy, and then test out that strategy, validate that strategy translated into a product roadmap, and then derive a product backlog from that product roadmap via a product goal, or one of the product goals. That’s on the product roadmap. If that is useful to you, it’s probably something that you need to look into in a little bit more detail if you’re interested in possibly experiment with…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:16

Maybe one last question, Roman as we’re here. It’s the second one here, and I haven’t voted and I would vote for this one. I’m currently writing a book. Do you have any advice I should consider to get it done and published? I’m actually writing a book as well. So. I’m interested, as well in this question. So maybe you can just quickly for me, and this other person just answered that question. You’ve written three books for how many…So any advice for us inspiring writers?

Speaker: Roman Pichler 47:55

Well, I’d look at a book as a product, a product in its own right. So, be clear on who is the target audience? Who are the readers and be clear on why people would want to use the product and be clear on why you write that product? What is the benefit that you want to get out of that product? And depending on the benefit that you want to achieve by offering this product by writing this product, think about which route you want to go down, is it self-publication or working with an established publisher, if you’re a first time author, and you want to write a book to establish your name, or to grow your reputation, to grow your brand, it can be beneficial to work with an established publisher. Well, if that’s less the case, if you feel that won’t necessarily be very beneficial for you then go down the route of self-publication, it just means that you have a little bit more work because you’ll have to then take care of the… you’ll have to find development editors, if you need any, you have to hire copy editors, you have to work with designer artists for the cover, but also for any graphics that you use. And so, you have that production part that an established publisher would take her off.

And then what the final thing I’d say, again, that’s related to the value that your product to create and how big or focused the audience, the group of readers are likely to be. I have a preference to write and to read, I have to say fairly focused books. So, I mean, if you think about writing a book on agile, then I’d say, well, maybe there’s a specific topic within the big Agile realm that is interesting. Even if you say I’d like to write a book about product ownership, I’d say like, that’s still so big. Maybe write the book about, product backlog, or even specific product backlog management aspects. You could write a book on prioritization, and as always as any product development effort, it’s a balance between having a product that is too focused or your market is too small and it’s no longer attractive and appealing. And a book that is too big and a product that is too bloated and does too many things for too many people and then really doesn’t offer a compelling value proposition.

Gene Gendel

Transcript:

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:30

What do you think is one of the biggest, or maybe I misunderstood things about agile agility?

Speaker: Gene Gendel 00:40

I like analogies and some people say just cut to the point cut to the chase. I like you to run, just levered. I usually put this through for my own analogy, like tobacco and alcohol industries are tightly controlled in the United States and other places as well. You can’t just start making cigarettes, you cannot just make an alcohol and sell it. You have to have a license. If you break the law. There are some repercussions. Agile has become the mainstream, aftermarket, business making intrapreneurship for many. And then some people make this because they want to make a lot of quick money. Large consultancies reinvent the wheel, midsize consultancies trying to follow big ones and trying to stand the bandwagon. In fact, this is one of the biggest omissions and disservices to organizations, clients-organizations, but also our clients-organizations themselves, because it has become almost like a vicious cycle. People have lost the a lot. They lost the authenticity and the initial meaning of the word agile, its intentions. And I mean, today I’m shocked. I should be no longer be shocked. But I still get shocked when you talk to some people at some large organization, people that are in charge of Agile transformation adoption. Anything you asked him who wrote the scrum guide and they wouldn’t know and you ask them to name at least one agile manifesto co-signers and they wouldn’t know. And what they guided by are, like internal design playbooks, and prescriptive manuals and executable files, we talking about 1000s and 1000s of pages, Wiki pages, conference wiki, Box Notes, PowerPoints. So I think the biggest problem for me with Agile is that it has lost its initial authentic meaning. Like if you do a litmus test, and almost anyone’s meaning of the word agile with the word adaptive, or the synonymous word, it’s not going to match. So I think the biggest challenge for me is that it’s just so much stuff out there is no longer relevant.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 03:22

Yeah. How much do you think we as coaches and consultants, the community that we’re part of, how much have we contributed to that? Do we get the easy pass? Or are we a part of the problem as well?

Speaker: Gene Gendel 03:40

Well, I think we’re part of the problem as well, let me explain how, and I’m going to be totally agnostic. I mean, you and I, we are in a part of a probably much better, much more professional community than many others out there. But I’m just going to say I’m going to be very agnostic and generic. People that are in business of giving superficial one time fly by, one nightstand training with certification which has depreciated in value over the last few years dramatically. I don’t think they add much value with regards to educating masses, well, maybe so they add value because they hopefully and this is a big assumption, right? Those better ones, they deliver stuff and it’s authentic, original value. But there are so many second and third market delivery people that just snap certifications at deep discount, resell through less than appropriate and less than ethically appropriate second and third resellers. So, like I said, my initial statement was, it’s not a tobacco alcohol industry where you have to be very careful what you do. Everyone there either has a certification or accreditation or a license, or a badge. So for non-educated consumer. It’s so easy to get confused. I mean, there’s so many of them out there today, especially online, you know, 9.99, 39.99, you get a badge. Some companies sell badges, along with a false promise that because of this certification, someone’s going to get hired. We’ve seen this movie, right? Staffing firms and some less than reputable shops out there, they would essentially present a training or certification as the get your foot in the door green card to get hired. And then once you pay for the badge, they’re gone. I’ve heard these stories, these are unpleasant stories. And I feel sorry for the people that fell for this.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:10

Well, yeah, but like I recently wrote about this, I think I even shared with you about the desire, like I use this analogy between cooks and chefs and recipes. So there’s so much and I think you talked about it, and also in the context of Shu Hari, but like, there’s so many people that are looking for recipes, and not necessarily wanting to become a chef or not wanting to understand the patterns behind some of these frameworks. And what we get is that a lot of times people don’t have the ingredients that we promised in these frameworks, and they’re not able to put anything together. So it’s almost like a having recipe, without ingredients, or understanding how to put it together, so..

Speaker: Gene Gendel 06:55

And you’re right, and to my point, many companies are, you know, when you look at what an average company wants to do, they don’t really want to become a learning organization. They wants to become an organization that has executed best practices, according to some, prescriptive guide, the playbook that most likely has been syndicated. And created internally. Or probably just as bad if it came from some large consulting firm that essentially was sold it to them, you know, for $8,000, $9,000 a day. That’s a [inaudible] [07:41] service, right? And you know, but it’s a playbook. Take it, take the deck. It’s because it’s in the deck.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 07:50

And we’ve seen that you and I have worked with large organizations, publicly trade [07:55] organizations where one of the big companies comes in, and we’re sitting at that same table with those big companies. And what the internal leadership is buying is the confidence, right? They’re buying those playbooks, they’re selling these big consulting companies saying, here’s the playbook, or this is what we’re going to do. And how much does it have to do with the lack of leadership understanding organization, what they buying, and just buying the conference assuming that somebody can come in and fix that problem rather than them trying to fix their own problems.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 08:29

You’re right, I agree with you. It’s one of the biggest emissions I’ve seen. And the right also, I fully agree that because people that are decision makers are not the same people that understand the impact, we get these bad decisions. I’m assuming there is nothing more grotesque about this, when a large company hires a large consultancy, because they have a large batch. Because guess what, if they flunk, if they fall flat on their face this whole effort, the hiring company will say, Well, that’s the large consultancy’s fault. I mean, they must have known better. So I’m getting out of jail with a free card. I’m not responsible, and that’s at the time of the when forgive my French, something has defense, but when you’re in the initial state, of course, everything is hunky dory, and how could they be wrong? A billion-dollar company. Did you actually know that majority of their consultants are young, ambitious, well spoken, eloquent graduates from best universities in the world, but with zero or very minimal industry experience. And when you take that, in combination with a very smooth, very well polished PowerPoint deck, and a Valentino suit, now becomes a very big impact. It makes a big impact, it makes a great impression on the hiring company. It can be wrong.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 10:06

Yeah. They also like a lot of times, one of the things that they do bring those large consulting companies in, is either to help them be more efficient, right? Or either to save money. And the way that they define agility or business agility is obviously different than probably what we would define it. I’m interested to know, like, how do you define business agility?

Speaker: Gene Gendel 10:38

Well, funny you said that they think it’s they maybe going to be saving money. God knows you and I cost 1/3. Large consultancies charge simply because we don’t have a gazillion of people in our digital perfection department to work on desk and fine prints. Just value with almost no overhead, right? I mean, whatever our….. anyway.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:07

I’m not talking, like saving in that instance. It’s about saving the company money in efficiencies in other areas by actually doing Agile or adopting the agile practices or, as you know like installing agile.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 11:27

I’m with you. So the business agility to me is, first of all, I think business agility is a huge part of organizational agility. One thing I don’t support, and I don’t subscribe to is that when business agility, or agility in sales, or agility in other management, or agility in XYZ, Organizational Domain is viewed as a standalone, independent endeavor that can be literally treated by its own as a silo. And one of the reasons why I think this is happening is because, again, for the same reasons, for someone, hey, business agility is going to be a great momentum, let’s do stuff in there. I’ve met some great people in business agility, communities that really get it, they come from a standpoint of organizational ecosystemic agility, and perhaps they spend more time with business people, and users and customers, I get that. But for many people, it’s just a way to justify why they don’t want to focus on anything else. So I want to think of organizational systemic agility, with business being a part of it. So I think any organization, business could be marketing sales operation, right? Then there’s technology, there’s HR, there’s vendor management, there’s, side strategies, you name it. So I don’t consider these independent entities. I consider the as part of the much bigger ecosystem.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 13:24

Yeah, give an example. Like if you go back about a year ago, when the whole COVID crisis hit, and if you look at the food industry, especially the grocery store industry, right? I had couple of clients in that space, and they never saw themselves as IT companies, right. And then all of a sudden, when we had crisis, and people couldn’t go into the stores, they suffered, because they weren’t able to adjust, I had something told me mean somebody was, you would put in order, this is March 2020, you will put in an order, you wouldn’t get half of this stuff. When you go to the grocery store, they would come out and take your credit card, go back and run it at the cashier, come back, give you your card back. And then they will bring the groceries that they had for you. And I, first of all, don’t want to deal with that crap. So, I obviously went to a shop somewhere else where I usually don’t shop, but they had that infrastructure already in place. And from a business agility. There are companies that actually benefited from this whole crisis. And there are also companies that actually just expose themselves to how vulnerable they are. Just in how quickly they can respond.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 14:50

Yeah, look, so I was just talking someone else earlier today, as much as COVID has caused so much damage and devastation. And I mean, I got a very short end of the stick last year, and I’ll be pretty open about that. But for some people, and for some companies, it has been a rather more successful period maybe because the we’re in business of producing something that people need the most, somebody saved a ton because of not traveling and not commuting. Spearing on food. I mean, it’s almost they have to take the good with the bad. I mean, I speak from my own experience, and unfortunately, I didn’t get that luxury. I know some people that did I’m not jealous, I’m just stating what I know.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:48

Was it late last year, I think it was in December, you wrote agile lyrics home. And I’m just going to read here one part of it.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 16:04

Go ahead.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:05

So Agile is the way to advance for promotion don’t miss opportunities thrive with devotion. Scrum master is a merely a junior role. An enterprise coach is your ultimate goal. And by the

Speaker: Gene Gendel 16:23

And by the way, first of all, thank you for quoting this. People that will be, if they watch it. Hopefully they will understand there’s an irony in this right? people hopefully will [inaudible] [16:34], that very page with the lyrics. It’s got the actual guitar play from a good friend of colleague of mine, Aaron Perry, and I think she’s amazing singer and guitar player, so she put it in music.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 16:51

We’ll include the video down at the bottom in the description, and people can check it out. I watched it and it’s pretty good. But coming back to this topic, I mean, obviously the whole song resonated with me, but especially this part here, and coming back to our earlier discussion about just agile and certification business, a lot of people are just seeing this as an opportunity to switch careers or make more money. You know, Scrum Masters make anywhere from, you know, 100 plus K to 170. I’ve heard people make 170. So it’s a pretty good pay at least in the United States. So a lot of people want to become Scrum Masters not even knowing what it takes to be a good or really good scrum master. What are your thoughts on this and kind of as you were writing this poem, what was going through your head?

Speaker: Gene Gendel 17:57

Mixed feelings, sadness. So, some irony, I always like to turn everything I don’t like into a sarcastic joke. Just helps cope with it. And of course, and you probably have, since all my ridiculous graphics. You know, unlike other professional cartoonists, I try to pretend I am a cartoonist, but I try to put irony and dysfunction into graphics. So what went through my head at that time, so both you and I have and this is where you’re going to keep me honest and tell me if your journey was light. We went through a very long journey of gaining an accreditation by the organization that has been in business for many years, and maybe you know, agree or disagree about some of its history, but on the coaching front, it has been the most reputable organization out there. The coaching offshoot, the coaching leg of it, and both of us, you and I went through a very challenging, a very long journey of becoming certified enterprise coaches, literally was a journey. I mean, I kicked off my journey in 2010, I think and I fled mind back in a couple of months after that, pressure because of my own ignorance. I didn’t do it right, partially because of the process, which wasn’t ideal. And I said, no, screw it. I won’t come back to it until I have time because it was never the main goal for me. I wasn’t in pursuit of the batch. I did my work; I think I was adding lots of value I was learning. But long story short when I went through the process the second time around, it was a long journey, tons of learning along the way. And I bet you’ve done the same, it wasn’t an easy gift to you, right? And I also have mentored many people since then, people that were on the same journey. So I know people that really want to get this kind of accreditation, or this kind of credential. They invest a ton load of time and effort into it.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 20:22

And money, too. I mean, I remember like going to, and traveling to just meet some of these people to understand from their perspective, observe. So it was like a commitment, not just from that, but it was financial commitment too because they require you to put a lot of this into practice before what you’ve done and also to build relationships.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 20:49

Yeah, I’m totally with you on this. And so the sad part is this. It is me and you and a bunch of other people, a small fraction of people that really took it seriously. Today, and this is because of the supply and demand thing. And I wrote about this many times as well. Everyone, their mother, even enterprise coach. So you can always look them up graphics and even funny SQL I call it as when their HR database is being updated overnight with a SQL statement where you update values, senior project managers, senior Agile coach, junior project managers, Scrum Master, for crying out loud. If that’s what you do, then why would you expect your organization to change? So for many people, it’s a fast track. Just because there was a bandwagon moving at high speed. Agile, agile let’s jump in on the bandwagon. So it looks like my PMR responsibilities are winding down. Where is that next train that I need to jump on? Next agile release train to jump on right.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 21:59

What would you tell somebody that is serious. But their goal is not enterprise agile as you said here, it’s not the ultimate goal. But it’s the journey, they really do want to become a really good organizational and Agile Coach, what would you recommend somebody just starting out right now? Before what would you do? If you were starting, what would you do? Given what you know now.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 22:33

Look, today, there are more opportunities today to pursue the same journey you and I went through than there was 10 years ago, or even five years ago. So you know, we got mentoring programs, we got people like you and I that are out there to probably give some guidance and help. There is a will, there is a way. The challenged today. And by the way, tell me if you think otherwise, if you disagree, but even today, majority of companies do not have recognition for certified enterprise coach by scrum Alliance or certified team coach by Scrum as much as they should, because these are the best people out there. But because the word Agile has been grossly grotesquely diluted, it just rubs up the wrong way. You walk in the organization, anyone who has been at certain pay grade. So it’s like an if statement. If you’re on a certain pay grade, and if you want to do Agile, then you will be some sort of an enterprise person. If you want to do Agile, and if you are at the junior pay grade, then your options are a scrum master or some sort of ill-defined team level BA like product owner. Just because the pay grade isn’t there it doesn’t give you enough opportunity. So I would recommend people that are really genuine about this still pursue the right way. I mean, their ways to invest themselves. Education. Look, what we have today is so much more. There’s so much more richness now than we had back when we were doing this. So I think there’s a will, there’s a way the challenge with this is that the market has been grossly diluted. So just like I would recommend to individuals not to shy away from pursuing this as an opportunity. I would also recommend companies that hire be much more discriminative and more scrutinized. When it comes to picking their talent, their bringing on talent.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 25:04

So it’s both ends, organizations being able to kind of screen and hire better, but also for people that are interested pursuing that. Yeah, I agree. And one of the things that I say in knowledge value, which goes back to what you said about, there’s a lot more opportunities today, because there are more companies that are interested in pursuing these agile ways of working. The way I explain and I use another analogy, which is like, you know, I grew up in Sarajevo and 1984 Olympics were held in Sarajevo, so skiing is big there, and skiing in Sarajevo is different than in Maine, or New Hampshire, or Vermont, where my family or when we came to United States, we came to Maine and I continued skiing up there, but it’s totally different. You know, we joke around, it’s more like skating down the bunny hills. Because I see, there’s no really mountain, these are just large hills compared to what we see in Europe. And then when I move out here, West, it’s different type of terrain. So a lot of times SCRUM masters are like comfortable on their own mountain, in their own organization in their own team, they’re not willing to say, hey, I’m going to take a risk and go somewhere else and get some more experience, and then I want to go somewhere else, and get more experience. So it’s like, analogous to like having, skied in many different conditions in areas. So you can become a well-rounded skier. And I don’t see many people willing to take that risk, I used to take that risk. And I would, you know, obviously, it was easier when you’re younger, but I think that’s what shaped my journey and made it easier, not easier. But as far as learning faster, I was able, and willing to do that.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 26:58

So it’s funny, you say this, you see for people that are really into the role. So people that are into intrapreneurship, and discovery and learning, they welcome these challenges, and they welcome these opportunities to change organizations, maybe if it’s a large enough organization, as the first step would be to change different divisions or different organizational verticals, going from one to another, although someone could rightfully argue that, as long as you under the same logo, you’re pretty much in the same structure and culture, which is true, you still can improvise, but people that just want to get by and therefore ride, they really don’t see much value in learning. I call it fast trackers, because there’s fast, fast, fast, off the chain of command, those people will not be so much interested in pursuing opportunities elsewhere. So there will be just very “Suddenciary” [28:03] very localized. And, of course, they might say it will be very limited, very narrow. So I think this is a good indicator. I call these domesticated people institutionalized. Maybe it’s not a good way to.. I mean, I treat others the same exact way I want people to treat me. So if you’ve been with the same organization for 15-20 years and haven’t seen a daylight, then you can’t expect anything from that person, especially if that person didn’t get as much.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 28:50

Yeah, I mean, similar to both you and I immigrated to this country. And I think it’s similar like that, when you’re exposed to the completely different environment, the different culture, you kind of start seeing things from a different perspective, things that you saw, in your own bubble, now start looking a little bit differently than what they did when you were in that bubble.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 29:13

I agree. Very true. And I’ll go even as far as to say, you know, we don’t want to digress outside of the conversation into, you know, history or politics. Well, many people that I’ve met in my life during at least the last 20-30 years, some of them are very successful in their own ways. Just because they have become very successful in their own little, I’m sorry, in their own huge bubble. Yeah, their bubble is pretty big, but it’s still a bubble.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 29:50

What you’re saying it’s like it’s not necessarily the indicator of but usually might be helpful to change perspectives, I guess and look at things in a different [cross talk] [30:00]

Speaker: Gene Gendel 30:01

Exactly whether it’s history or politics or anything else, I think there’s a wisdom. Right? Depending where you sit, you send in your views, depending on where you sit. Right. So…

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 30:20

So you’ve been involved with the community so many different ways. And one of the things that I really enjoy is, especially in last year, what you’ve done with the New York, the less community in New York, and as far as I know, like, it’s the biggest less community out there and sports active, I think, you know, one of the nice things that I see is the caliber of speakers that you bring, and I was watching your interview with Dave Snowden. And yeah, and I invited Dave, he actually came to Agile Maine, I don’t know if it was the year that you came. But what kind of grabbed my attention? I think you asked, there was a question around, how’s a large-scale Scrum in relation to complex adaptive systems? And he said something along the lines is, less is not how you scale complex adaptive systems. And I understand it from and kind of agree with him in a way that depends what type of complex adaptive systems if you truly going from a complex adaptive system, I agree with him. And I don’t know what were your thoughts when he answered that question? What was going through your head and maybe reflectively looking at is, what are your thoughts on?

Speaker: Gene Gendel 31:47

So first of all, I respect Dave, Dave’s view, and he’s a pretty well-known and very eloquent speaker, and he doesn’t sanitize. And that’s nothing else, even if I would disagree with him, I would still respect him for his candid blunt and sanitize views, and sanitize in the way that he doesn’t sugarcoat it. He doesn’t sugarcoat what he wants to say. I think he did make, if I recall correctly, he didn’t make some statements about less, I need to actually go back to that video on the replay what he said exactly. And I kind of knew that I wasn’t looking for him to give any blessing or pave the road for Less. In fact, I wasn’t even aware of his, you know, degree of understanding of what Less is, you know, that he probably have read plenty about Less. Given that there are free books and a very comprehensive website. So I wasn’t so much concerned about what he will or will not say about less. In fact, I wanted to complete, I know the “card blog, Sheila” [32:58] together. What really outweighed it, and that’s why I really wanted his perspective was his candid and an uncensored view on some of the challenges and dysfunctions that exist in the industry because of large consultancy business, and partnerships between large, very expensive consultancies on one hand, and very large, expensive, but makes you feel good, agile frameworks. And I’m not referring to Les and I will not even mentioned that other XYZE framework, because people will figure out what that is, I think those come as a horse and carriage. And he alluded to something so that was worth having him there, just that one few sentences, he had referred as essentially with you what he called an industrial model. When a consultancy gets overly big, a certain degree size wise, in order to feed itself. It needs to generate business. So if I’m a large consultancy, and you’re my client, I will not engage with you in a way that will produce short, incremental, meaningful, sustainable results. Because this sort of engagement does not justify the effort for me, because I need to feed my cohorts of workers that sit; the back office people, right. But if I were to engaging with you, I would dig in for a long time. I would pack and install something that is big, heavy, complex and of course not cheap, right. I would always considered that plus the tooling solutions. I actually referred to it as the triple taxation. If you’ve seen some of my other cartoon, [cross talk] [35:11] triple taxation, large consultancy, big scaling framework and monumental tool and solution. So it’s a triple tax donor organization and paid three times to live in a really big city, city state. [inaudible] [35:29]

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 35:31

Yeah, so that’s a really good point. And if you look back at, you know, transformations, and if you look at the data, like, you know, if you look at from your own personal experience, if you look at the data, at least when I do that, like 90 plus of these transformations doesn’t matter if it’s agile, whatever, fail. And nobody talks about that Agile is popular. And any of these, you know, Lean was popular. Any management that becomes mainstream is obviously popular. But why do you think, besides what you’ve said so far, that it’s such a high rate, and do you agree with it, do you think it’s that the in that 90s range? And

Speaker: Gene Gendel 36:16

What do you mean, failures?

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:18

Failures. Yeah, like, [cross talk] [36:19]

Speaker: Gene Gendel 36:20

Yeah, I totally agree that majority of these transformations are complete failure, I don’t have the numbers, I haven’t run the stats, but I can tell you majority of them are failing. But also, we have to understand is that very few companies will openly admit to the fact that they have failed, because it’s the status quo. Especially if this is a watch consultancy driven effort and multiple credibility are at stake, who’s going to have to say, we have screwed up. Companies that are smaller, I shouldn’t say smaller, because this is really not size specific. This is really based on the internal culture, which is secondary color to or structure. And very much, depends on the mindset of senior management. If they were in the experimental mode, if they really wanted to do deep and narrow, to try and see if it works, what fails, what succeed, what success, then they wouldn’t mind reporting back to the world that they have made some mistakes, and then they have learned from them. Of course, if they have engaged, not large consultancies that, send armies of people to them at a very high buck. But maybe smaller people like you and I, or some smaller boutique more focused organizations that help with agility. That would be much more comfortable to share back with the world that a some of the stuff we tried, fail, and some of it materialized. Look, it’s all about keeping your face, right, above water, your head above water, if you invested $85 million in the transformation. And three, four years down the road, you did the books, you realize, okay, that’s how much money we spent on this huge consulting firm. But what did we gain from it? And their answers, almost nothing or nothing? Then who’s ever want to go on the record and say, Oh, guys, you know, what, we lost 85 million dollars. Haven’t really gained anything back. And, we’re so brave, we’re going to share, share this with you.

Speaker: Miljan Bajic 38:53

Yeah, I mean, but what I’ve seen is like, this is when the management or leadership changes, right? Everybody gets couple years shot. You’re out. New guy comes in brings his own team. This is what I’ve seen in many instances where a senior leader is hired to drive the transformation. They have their own team, they have the previous consultants where they work with, they have a shot at it, if they don’t meet or the board or the senior leadership at that company is not happy with it, they bring somebody else and there is now a lot of that transparency. Sometimes you take two steps back one step forward, sometimes it’s the other way around. But as far as transparency, it’s not very clear to the employees and I think that’s why one of the things where people are so disengaged at work.

Speaker: Gene Gendel 39:48

If you lose, I always say there is only one thing like dating, right? I’m sure you and I have been there, right? There’s only one time we can make a first impression. Screw up once it’s going to be very hard for you to get back on track and prove otherwise. So when an organization makes a bad impression on its individuals, and therefore discourages the incentivizes its own people, then it’s going to be very difficult to gain back credibility and trust. And so people will just shy away, oh that’s another change management fad. And that’s another management, so or reorg, 101. And we know, once people hear reorg, people go oh shit. For you, my friend got it [40:48]. Someone’s going to be let go. The funny thing is in large scale Scrum, and I chose to stay away from one of the things that I tried to demote more than less, we actually stress very strongly the difference between job security and role security. We want people to be safe in their jobs, and be able to provide for themselves and their families. But it’s not the same as a role security. Because their role security problem is that with that, we have lots of local optimization around individual roles. So if we’re in business, you and I where there are no longer guess, operated lightbulbs out there in the street, then why do we need a role of someone who’s going to be lighting them up at night? We have electricity, so we can rely on automatic switches. So if we optimize for that role, we’re not going to be optimizing for the whole system, we’ll be paying 1000s of people for the role that is no longer needed. But these people, maybe they have some other skills, we can repurpose these good people. That’s the job security. So organizations need to understand that and if they treat Agile transformation, as a way to get rid of people. Well, I think it’s sad.