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

"I really enjoyed my conversation with Andrew Malak. We talk integrating agile techniques and tips on how to achieve a culture of accountability"

Andrew is a firm believer that the customer trusts your business by joining, and you have an obligation to repay that trust by helping them achieve their outcomes.

Enjoy the episode!

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Transcript

Teagan Harbridge:

Welcome to another episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Teagan, head of product here at Easy Agile. And we've got a really exciting guest on the show today, Andrew Malak from Spaceship. He's the chief product officer. Andrew is a true believer in creating products and experiences that solve customer problems. He believes that the customer trusts your business by joining, and you have an obligation to repay that trust by helping them achieve their outcomes. In his current role, Andrew aims to help people take control of their wealth from a young age, educating good money habits and helping people invest where the world is going. Andrew is a family man who loves his time with his wife and children. And believe it or not, he uses agile techniques in his personal and professional life. Andrew is an economics geek. He plays and coaches soccer, football. He's a big Liverpool supporter, loves to travel, loves amazing architecture, and loves working with children.

Teagan Harbridge:

There were so many takeaways from my chat with Andrew that I really struggled to pair it down to three. But if you say tuned, here are some of the things that you're going to learn from our chat with Andrew. Why we should stop using the term agile transformation and start calling it an agile evolution. Why it's important to be open-minded to our own limitations so to break the old mindset of protecting original scope. And tips on how to achieve a culture of accountability. So I hope you enjoy. Andrew, can you tell me a little bit about Spaceship?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, fantastic. Well, thank you very much for, first of all, having me, Teagan. Spaceship is a business that's on a journey to make good money habits and investing accessible to all people. So what we look for is trends to do with industries or companies who are building the future of both industry or economies. We invest in them for the longterm, we break down barriers of entry for people, we give them a fee-free product under $5,000, no minimum investments. It's really easy to sign up. You simply download an app and you sign up and make one product selection decision, and you're done. You can start investing on autopilot. We allow you to also invest your superannuation in a not too dissimilar way.

Teagan Harbridge:

So tell me a little bit about who your target customer is, then. Because it seems like you're trying to make something quite complicated accessible for maybe first time investors.

Andrew Malak:

Well, you're absolutely right. There's a niche segment of people out there at the moment, millennials or even gen Zs, that we just don't think have been well serviced by the incumbents. And what we're trying to do is resonate with these young people as much as possible. We're trying to reduce industry jargon and really make things simple to them, because investing doesn't have to be complex. It's really about a lot of discipline around, if I can manage my personal P&L, or money in, money out, then I can create a cash buffer that can go into my assets column on my balance sheet. That's really what we're trying to do. And that kind of language, if we can get it right, can really simplify things that have typically been in the hands of financial advisors and accountants and give it back to everyday Australians who are starting out in their investment journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, awesome. And you've been on quite a journey before landing in the FinTech space as the Spaceship CPO. So can you tell me and our audience a little bit about what that journey has looked like?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, where do I start? If you asked a graduate Andrew Malak what he'd be doing now, I don't think I would've been speaking about this because at that point in time in my career I didn't know this space would actually be around, if that makes sense. So I'll go back to my younger years, and I always thought I was going to be an architect. I had this fascination with bridges and I wanted to design things and see them come to life. And let's just say that I do that in different ways right now, but I started out working in CommSec on the trading floor. I moved on to work as a business analyst, and that's where I started my critical thinking into how businesses work and how things can be made more efficient.

Andrew Malak:

I dabbled in teaching for a little bit, I taught high school economics and religion for a little bit. And then I eventually landed in a product role at St. George Bank prior to the merger with Westpac. At that point in time, the light bulb really came on. I realized, "Hey, I like creating things. I like to change things. I don't like to just do things," if that makes sense. And that wondering mind that doesn't like the conform was finally let loose, if that makes sense. And I haven't stopped enjoying it. I loved my time at Westpac, made lots of friends, worked on really cool, successful projects, and implemented lots of things that had great results. Worked on lots of things that have failed miserably and learnt a lot out of that. And when the opportunity at Spaceship started to surface late last year, it was just too good an opportunity to not really come in and have a go. So yeah, it's been quite the journey.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. And I love a good failure story. And you said you've had lots. Can you think, just off the top of your head, what one of those big failures has been?

Andrew Malak:

Where do I start? I think our first attempt at taking a digital experience to allow customers to acquire a product online was quite a failure that taught us a lot. We basically took the systems that our back office staff used and just made it available to customers. And the real good learning out of that is there was a lot of traffic and a lot of demand, but not enough completion ever. And the best learning that came out of that... This is back in 2006, so internet speeds were just starting to pick up. Broadband was starting to go mainstream and customers' trust around doing more transactions that used personally identifiable data was starting to normalize at that point in time. Up until then, people quite reserved thinking, "I'm going to lose my personal data," et cetera. So when we decided to do that, we saw that there was a lot of demand but we quickly came to the realization that we used to train staff for four to six weeks on how to use the systems before they knew how to service customers using them.

Andrew Malak:

But then we've deployed it into production for customers to self-service and realized quite quickly that the experience for customers had to be much more guided than the experience for a staff member. This is where the evolution of usability or design thinking started to come in. We started thinking of, "Well, how do we make these things so easy that a first-time user can go end to end and not encounter friction?" And this is where our understanding of design principles, customer testing using verbatim and anguage that can resonate with a first-time user becomes critical to the execution. It's not just good systems but it's good user experience sitting on top of systems.

Andrew Malak:

That's probably the one that resonates with me the most because I've held that to a very high regard throughout my whole career. Now everything I do I think of, "Where's the friction? How do we make sure there's no friction? What's the customer going to feel throughout this experience? How are we creating unnecessary anxiety in that experience for the customer, and how do we move that away? How do we become more transparent but still be simple?" And yeah, that's probably the one that resonates the most.

Teagan Harbridge:

Seems like a tremendous learning opportunity early enough in that project and something that's stuck with you since, so great learning opportunity.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely.

Teagan Harbridge:

We've got a ton of customers who are at all stages of their agile transformations, and I know that this is something that you've had experience with if we go back to your St. George, Westpac days. Can you give our audience any tips or stories that you encountered when you were going through those agile transformations? What lessons can you share with our audience?

Andrew Malak:

Oh, I have lots of lessons to share, actually.

Teagan Harbridge:

This is what I love.

Andrew Malak:

Look, I like to position it more as agile evolution more than agile transformation because no matter what you try to do, you're not just going to drop waterfall and become agile next morning. Honestly, I've seen so many attempts and every single time I see that the graduality of the change is a better predictability of the final outcome that you're going to land. So ultimately the Holy Grail that everyone's aspiring to is that, as a leader, you can rock up to a team stand up unexpected and then, without being told who is in what role, who the product owner is, who the engineer is, who the QC is, who the designer is, it becomes hard for you as the leader to work out who's who because at that point in time the team is so well converged on customer outcomes that they will self-organize themselves around what each person needs to do.

Andrew Malak:

And most of the language being used is really around, what are we trying to define the customer? What's the best thing to do within the capacity that we have to deliver this feature to market as quickly as possible, capture value for the customer and the business as much as possible? This takes a long time to get to, where you can start normalizing to a standardized, common set of goals, common cadence, and common ways of working. And I think it's ultimately about how much empowerment you can give people and how much as a leader you can relegate yourself in the background to allow them to work it out themselves as long as you're coming in and nudging things along the way and helping people course correct along the way. So the good news is that I actually think at Spaceship, we're pretty close to getting there.

Andrew Malak:

We have been running scrum and we have been running sprints for a long time, but it has been largely ceremonials. But over the last quarter, we've done a really good job at embedding more cross-functional people into these teams. But the goal for us is that now we feel like our throughput has actually increased and that the constant flow of information between the teams is becoming more natural and there is actually less ambiguity between the teams around, "All right, we built it this way. The API is no longer consumable. It doesn't fit what we're trying to do from our front-end and there's less back and forth." So we can really see that the amount of friction between persons in the team is really starting to reduce dramatically and we're starting to see that throughput really increase. Having said that, the best way to go about an agile transformation is just get started.

Andrew Malak:

You can sit and plan out things and plan towards utopia as much as you want or you can actually just get going. So when I say by get going, I say you have to start by getting buy-in from all the leaders of the different cross-functional teams, because if you don't have that buy-in at the leadership level, it's just not going to work because there's going to be blockers, there's going to be escalations. And if all these things result in conversations around, "Should we keep doing this?" Or, "Hey, maybe this is not the right thing to do." That needs to be off the table really early on and it needs to be a total commitment at the leadership level that we're going to make this work and whatever we encounter we're just going to fix forward. Once you have that commitment at the leadership level, you need to very clearly define the values that the team is going to be handed to work with, because agile itself, it's not a process, it's a set of values that the team needs to just take and start working with.

Andrew Malak:

So we could go and rattle individuals and interactions over processes and tools or working software over comprehensive documentation. Well, give these to the team and they're going to say to you at day one, "We can't go to all of that straight away." So they might actually say that day one, "We're still going to need some documentation because we're not comfortable yet. We don't understand the language of the other people in the scrum team well enough to be able to go and actually code off the back of a conversation." But by the 10th sprint, the 20th sprint, that misunderstanding of what the product owner wants or what the designer is trying to achieve in an experience starts to become embedded in the mind of the engineer.

Andrew Malak:

The engineer understands the customer a lot more, and then you can make do with less process and less documentation and less negotiated outcomes and more commonality across the team. The other thing that then starts to kick in at that stage is that ability of the team to pivot in response to a change and not see that as a threat to what they're trying to achieve. The old ways of working was, define that scope, protect that scope, and not let things disturb that scope, whereas if you're halfway through a project and you get some really good information that tells you that maybe you are not on track to achieve a good outcome, you should be welcoming that. And the team itself in the beginning is going to find that an irritation, but over time they'll become more comfortable with pivoting off the back of new information.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah. It's a big mindset shift. I was just having a discussion today about, where does being agile and being reactive, where's that line in the middle. And when does taking information and pivoting because you think something will be better, when can we break that mindset of, "Oh, we're just being reactive?" No, we're being responsive.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, yeah. And look, I think the word reactive itself naturally has a negative connotation to it, but agility in mindset allows you to flip that on its head and say that no one can work things out in totality to 100% of what's possible, so being open-minded to our own limitations first and foremost allows us to acknowledge that when new information comes in, it is because we didn't think through the solution 100%, but let's also be okay with that because no one can. So I think it's flipping on its head and acknowledging it upfront and saying that this is going to happen, but when it comes we will assess the information we have with the capacity we have with how far progressive we are and make a decision that's right for us, for the customer, and for what's possible.

Andrew Malak:

So I take it as the more information you get along the way, the more reinforcement of, are you doing what's right or should you pivot and change at that point in time? The other thing that happens really early on is that if you as a leader can create a really clear vision around customer outcomes and establish your first cross-functional team and hand over that vision to the team, it becomes theirs. Don't hand over the backlog to the team. Don't give them a ready backlog, just give them the vision and then tell them, "You guys work out what your backlog looks like." When they come up with their own backlog, as long as you as a leader don't see that it's just a list of Hail Marys in it and there is a fair bit in there that is well spread out between hygiene things, strategic things, and a few moonshots and the balance is right, if the team has come up with their own backlog, the motivation they have to build their own ideas just goes through the roof.

Andrew Malak:

And that's what you want to achieve. You want to achieve clarity that the work fits with the vision and the motivation that you get out of the backlog being created by the team itself gets you that throughput enhancement. The other thing that you're going to struggle with really early on is chunking things down to fitting within the sprint cadence. I think that's one that's often been my biggest challenge when moving towards agile practices early on. Typically in the first few sprints, you always have overruns and things don't complete in the sprint because we end up thinking we can do more than we can and it takes us a while to work out, in wrapping up something that becomes shippable in a sprint, you probably take a little bit less in that sprint because you've got to test it or you've got to do a release in that sprint, or you're going to do a PIR in that sprint, or you're going to do a lot of retros in that sprint. Start to sort of formulate what you're going to take through the next planning cycle.

Andrew Malak:

So you've got to budget to that capacity, and I'll find that teams underestimate the magnitude of that work. So be okay with that. Overruns in the first few sprints don't mean you've failed, it means you're learning how to plan better. And then make sure your retros and your pivot off the back of that into your next planning sessions is taking information that is now new to you, and making sure you're working with it. I think as the leader, though, you have to set the expectations that teams can make mistakes and that it's a safe environment.

Andrew Malak:

And I've seen many agile... I was about to use the word transformation, even though I've just said I don't believe in transformation. Any teams that are adopting agile principles expecting that in their first few sprints they don't have any hiccups, and that if throughput falls in the first few sprints, then there's a bit of a, "Oh, well you told me this thing was going to increase our throughput." Yeah, but not straight away. So I think just being realistic with yourself and what's possible, and that shift in itself, until it normalizes, takes a bit of getting used to. The teams need to know it's a safe environment, that if their productivity suffers, if they make mistakes or if they break things, it's going to be okay. We'll fix forward.

Andrew Malak:

But then also there comes a point in time where we have to be very clear about the culture of accountability around using that capacity really well. So what I've found, that the best use of that is the showcase. And what we've done at Spaceship, because we're trying to reduce the amount of ceremonies, we've combined both the planning playback in a sprint as well as the showcase into the same ceremony. So what we do is we play back what we built last session using a demonstration of working software and comparing the amount of work we've executed versus what was planned in the previous sprint. We're saying we've got 80%, 90% through the work and this is what it looks and feels like, and this is what we're deploying to the customer. Then we actually showcase what we plan to do in the next sprint.

Andrew Malak:

And that's part of the showcase, is our hand on heart commitment to, "This is what we as a team are committed to doing in the next sprint." And then that accountability to the organization becomes something that keeps us on track throughout the sprint. As distractors or things that are not committed in the sprint come our way, we quickly think about, all right, can we accommodate these things? Do they need to be done? Are they going to take us off track with what is planned? Are they important enough? Is it a major defect of production, and can customers no longer access our app? Well, drop what you're doing and attend to that. Otherwise, if it's not material, keep focused on the work that you've committed to in front of the organization.

Andrew Malak:

After this you're going to start to experience some growing pain, and the growing pain is good because it means that agile is working and more teams or more feature opportunities become possible for the business. There's going to be a lot more hype around moving to agile. Other teams are going to come across and say, "Oh, how do we piggyback off what you're doing?" Et cetera. This is good. This is good, but what it means now is that some new risks are going to actually start to be introduced. Working with common code, common dependencies, or even common people being needed to be doing multiple things just means that you now need more coordination. I'd say to anyone who reaches this point in time, this is where people feel compelled to start introducing some new roles, coordination roles. And I'd just say, be careful because that can start add to your overhead really quickly.

Andrew Malak:

I find the best way to ensure that teams continue to be in sync is with the right dialogue at the right level with the right rhythm. And this is where I think keeping it simple to just the scrum of scrums works really well. I like the scrum of scrums to be balanced between both product owner and tech lead from each team being present, and a cadence of one to two times per week works really well. And as long as the product owners across the teams and the tech leads across the teams know what the other teams are working on, know what could impact their own work from a release perspective or scheduling perspective or an environment perspective, I think that tends to work really well as well.

Teagan Harbridge:

Yeah, wow. Lots of nuggets in there and certainly things that resonate with our experience here at Easy Agile, being a small company that's grown really quickly. So I can definitely relate. We've had conversations about, do we introduce new roles into this company? We've introduced a new cadence of meeting rhythms only the last couple of months, so we're going through these things too.

Andrew Malak:

Absolutely. Absolutely. What have been your biggest learnings so far?

Teagan Harbridge:

I think that you cannot underestimate communication, and it really does come back to that cadence and that rhythm with the team. And we're experimenting at the moment with a daily huddle where we're talking about, how do we embed showcases more regularly in our cycles? We've got a big demo at the end of the cycle. How can we make that a more ingrained part of our culture? And it really does come back to that culture of accountability as well. So yep, it's all resonating.

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, you can go to whatever industry you want but the problems are usually similar. And the great thing is that having these conversations is very important to fast-tracking your way forward, because your problem is not unique to you. Someone else has seen it in someone else has figured out a way. And I think what I like about the FinTech industry is that we compete on products and services, but there's a lot to learn from each other. And even if you just go outside of FinTech, there's a lot to learn from other industries who have adopted agile practices.

Teagan Harbridge:

If we take a bit of a flip, we've gone from your professional career and your experience into a more personal level. You mentioned that you use agile techniques outside of work. So I'm not sure if many others are in the same boat, but can you elaborate on this? What does that mean? What does that look like?

Andrew Malak:

Okay, I hope you don't think I'm extremely weird. We actually have a family campaign. So I guess if I go back to how we've come to actually doing this. Becoming parents, we would look at our children and see so many things that we want them to be better at. And in trying to give them constant feedback, which felt like the feedback was so much that it's all being drowned out because there's so much of it. In fact, my oldest son actually gave me that feedback. He goes, "Dad, why don't we focus on one thing at a time?"

Andrew Malak:

And I was like, "Wow, okay." For a ten-year-old to tell me that, that was amazing. So we came to realize that we needed to narrow and focus on one improvement area at a time, and we don't move on to the next one until we've actually closed out the first one. For example, my oldest son, very clever boy. We're trying to focus with him on the discipline of process over just getting the answer right, because he is clever and nine times out of 10, ask him a question, he's got the answer and he just wants to say it.

Andrew Malak:

But we've started to try to break down the question and work more on the process with him so that in following the process, coupled with his natural ability, we will get more answers right more often. And that's what we're working through at the moment. So our family's scrum wall at the moment has a mix of things on it. Everyone has their own swim lane, and in each swim lane there are a few tasks, some related work or study, some relating to household chores, some related to health or exercise, and some related to acts of kindness. And what we aim to do is make sure that we're moving things across in all four categories every single day. So yeah, you can use agility wherever you'd like but I think that mindset in general, that if I wake up every day and do things that make me better than I was yesterday, then I'll get to keep moving forward in my personal life as well as my professional life.

Teagan Harbridge:

And do you have WIP limits?

Andrew Malak:

We don't at the moment, and we're not doing showcases at the moment. We'll see how we can introduce them in the future.

Teagan Harbridge:

And how was the introduction of a Kanban board at home? How was that received by the family? Have they enjoyed it, has there been any feedback?

Andrew Malak:

Well, it wasn't actually planned. It started by just sticking some Post-its up on the fridge to remind us of stuff. And then one day I said to my wife, "You know what? This reminds me of what we do at work. Why don't we formalize it?" She had a bit of a chuckle but then one day she came back and then she found it there. So yeah, it wasn't really planned.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. And you've already been super generous with your time so I'll close it out with one final question. What advice do you wish someone would have given you when you took the leap from product management into product leadership?

Andrew Malak:

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think first and foremost, that you've got to make sure that you drop your need for perfectionism, because first and foremost, you might have been the best product manager yourself. You might have been amazing. And I'm not saying I was, but if you were and you step up in leadership role, you're going to have people of different abilities working for you. And what you need to understand is that they're going to need some time learning their role and learning their trade. And just don't get in the way of them learn. So for example, you might see someone doing something that may not be the best or most optimal use of that capacity in that sprint. You might feel the urge to jump in and course correct. But if you let them go and just hear their feedback post the retro, they might've had that learning themselves, and a learning that they get for themselves rather than being told by their leader is going to be much more useful for them.

Andrew Malak:

You have to drop your need to make decisions and be in control because, again, the more you can relegate yourself to a servant leadership role and let the team make decisions, when they make decisions and now have to go back up that decision with execution, they're more likely to put their heart and soul into it. The more they feel like you are going to make the decisions, the less inclined they are to think through problems themselves, and then they'll keep bringing the problems back to you. So every time someone asks you a question that has a black and white answer, throw it back to them and ask them what they think, because that way you're coaching them to work it out themselves. And then the last thing that's really important is, I feel like it's really important to think through how your organization allows you to be different and take advantage of that differentiation.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, at Spaceship here, because we're small, we're not a large corporate, our customers are a little bit more forgiving. So you have a limited capacity to build experiences and you can't do all things at the same time. Understand that and take advantage of it, and get your team to also learn that. Because if you're trying to how the all edge cases, it will take a lot longer to get something to market and you might use a lot of the team's capacity to build edge cases. And you can't really afford that when you're in a start-up.

Andrew Malak:

So for example, we launched a new investment portfolio yesterday. We launched the Spaceship Earth portfolio, our first sustainable investment portfolio and it's a sign of more things to come hopefully in the sustainability space. But in launching that, we knew that we have a limitation in our experience or our product set today where each customer can only have one portfolio. We knew that existing customers would want to invest in sustainable investing, but our commitment to them is that it's in our backlog and it's actually the next feature that we're actually going to take to market.

Andrew Malak:

And in explaining that to our customers, they've been very understanding, that they know our throughput is limited but they also know that their voice is being heard and we are building the things that they're telling us about. So I would say that the best piece of advice to tell my young self is to make sure that you get the balance right between the voice of the customer. That's going to tell you all the hygiene things that your product lacks in terms of experience or gaps. And then get the balance between new strategic things that you can go after and new things that you can take to market, as well as a few Hail Marys every now and again. We call them moonshots. They may or may not work, but it's exciting, and if it works, can 10X your volume. And they are the things that are likely to go viral. So getting the balance right is very important.

Teagan Harbridge:

It's been wonderful, Andrew. I've definitely taken a lot away from our chat today, and I'm sure our audience will too. So thank you again so much for your time, and good luck.

Andrew Malak:

No Teagan, look, thank you very much. And it's been a pleasure speaking to yourself and Easy Agile, and I wish you guys all the best too.

Teagan Harbridge:

Awesome. Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Malak:

Have a good afternoon.

"Really enjoyed my conversation with William and Riz, I'm looking forward to implementing their recommendations with our team" - Angad Sethi

In this epsiode I spoke with William Rojas and Rizwan Hasan from Adaptavist about the ways we can enable high performing agile teams:

• The significance of team alignment
• When and where you should be using tools to assist with your team objectives
• Prioritizing what conversations you need to be apart of
• Advice for remote teams

Subscribe/Listen on your favorite podcasting app.

Thanks William & Rizwan!

Transcript

Angad Sethi:

Good afternoon/evening/morning everyone. How you guys going?

Rizwan Hasan:

Oh, good. Thanks Angad.

William Rojas:

Yeah. How are you?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, really good. Really, really stoked to be having a chat with you guys. Should we start by introducing ourselves? Riz, would you like to take it?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. My name's Riz Hasan, I'm based in Brussels, Belgium. Very newly based here, actually used to be based in New York, not too far from William. We usually used to work together on the same team. My role here at Adaptavist is I'm a team lead for our consulting group in EMEA. So in the European region and in the UK. So day to day for me is a lot of internal management, but also working with customers and my consultants on how our customers are scaling agile and helping them with tool problems, process problems, people problems, all the above.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. Sounds awesome.

William Rojas:

As for myself, William Rojas. I'm actually based out of a little suburban town called Trumble in Connecticut, which is about an hour plus northeast of New York, basically. And as Rez mentioned, yeah, we've worked for a number of years we've worked together, we were running a agile transformation and scaling adoption team for Adaptavist. My new role now is actually I took on a presales principle, basically a presale principle consultant these days. It's actually a new role within Adaptavist, and what we do is we have, actually all of us, I think most of us are all like ex-consultants that support the pre-sales process, and work in between the sales team, and the delivery team, and all the other teams that support our clients at Adaptavist.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome, awesome.

William Rojas:

I help find to solutions for clients and make the proposals and support them through, get them on through delivery.

Angad Sethi:

I'm Angad, I'm a software developer and I'm working on Easy Agile programs and Easy Agile roadmaps, two of the products we offer for the Atlassian marketplace. We're super excited to speak to you guys about how your teams are operating in, like what's a day to day. Riz, would you like to answer that?

Rizwan Hasan:

Sure. Yeah. So apart from like the internal management stuff, I think what's particular to this conversation is how we walk clients through how to navigate planning at scale, right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I'm working with a client right now who's based in the states, but they're acquiring other software companies left and right. Which I think is also a trend that's happening within this SaaS ecosystem. And when that happens, they're trying to bring all that work in together. So we're talking through ways of how to visualize all that in an easy way that isn't really too much upfront heavy with identifying requirements or understanding what systems we want to pull in, but more so what do you want to pull in? So really right now, in this phase of the data that I'm working with this client, it's really just those initial conversations about what are you planning? What are you doing? What's important to you? So it's a lot of these conversations about that.

Angad Sethi:

And so you mentioned it's a lot of internal management. Are some of your clients fellow workmates, or are they external clients?

Rizwan Hasan:

They're mostly internal because I manage a team, so I have different people who are working on different types of projects where they might be doing cloud migrations. They might be doing some scripting work. In terms of services, we cover everything within the Atlassian ecosystem, whether it be business related, process related, tool related. So it's a big mix of stuff at all times.

Angad Sethi:

Cool. And is it usually like you're speaking to all the team leads, and giving them advice on agile ceremonies, and pushing work through pipelines and stuff?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, actually, so a story of when I first moved to Brussels, because we've... So professional services started at Adaptavist in the UK, and this was maybe like seven-eight years ago, and it's expanded and myself and William were part of like the first group of consultants who were in North America. That expanded really quickly, and now that we're in EMEA, it's almost like a different entity. It's a different way of working, and a lot of leadership has moved over to North America, so there's new systems and processes and ceremonies and then all that's happening. But because of time zones there's a conflict.

So what I started to do when we got here was to reintroduce some of those habits and consistent conversations to have, to really be much more on a better planning cadence. So interacting with people who would be, say, bringing work to delivery in presale. So folks who are, who work similar to William's capacity over here in this region, and then also project managers who would be responsible for managing that work. Right? So on the equivalent of like a scrum master on an engagement or like an RTE on a big engagement. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yep. Yep. That's awesome. Just one thing I really liked was your terminology. You used conversations over ceremonies or speaks about the agile mindset in that sense, where you're not just pushing ceremonies on teams, where you actually embody being agile. Well, I'm assuming you are from your conversation, but I guess we'll unpack that. What about you, William? What's your [crosstalk 00:06:32]

William Rojas:

I was going to say, one of the things that's interesting challenge that we face, because Adaptavist has an entire branch that does product development and there are product developers, and product managers, and product marketing, and all sorts of things like that. And they set plans and they focus, deliver and so forth, as you would expect a normal product organization to do. On the consulting side, one of the things that's very interesting is that a lot of our, like we have to answer to two bosses, right? Like our clients come in and say, "Hey, we need this," and we have to support them. In the meantime, we have a lot of internal projects, internal procedures and processes and things that we want do as a company, as a practice, but at the same time, we still need to answer to our clients.

Angad Sethi:

I see.

William Rojas:

So that's actually one of the interesting challenges that from an agile perspective, we're constantly facing having to balance out between sometimes conflicting priorities. And that is definitely something that, and although consulting teams at different levels face this challenge. Right?

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So as Riz mentioned, we're constantly bringing in more work and like, "Okay, we need you to now adjust and re-plan to do something different, then manage." Yes. It's an ongoing problem that's just part of this part of this world kind of thing.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Okay. I see. And so if I heard that correctly, so it's, I guess you're constantly recommending agile processes, but you may not necessarily get to practice it?

William Rojas:

But more so we're both practicing for ourselves as well as trying to tell our clients to practice it or trying to adjust.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yeah.

William Rojas:

You know, a client comes in with needs and says, "Okay, now we have to re-plan or teach them how to do it, or re-accommodate their new emerging priorities as well." So we ultimately end up having to practice agile with and for our clients, as well as for ourselves. It's that constant rebalancing of having to weave in client needs into internal needs, and then the constant re-priority that may come as a result of that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And then we're constantly looking for like, how do we make this thing more efficient, more effective? How do we really be lean about how we do the work and so forth? That is definitely one thing that we practice. We try to practice that on a daily basis.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. And I guess that's a very, a tricky space to be... not a tricky space. It can be tricky, I guess, but adding to the trickiness is remote work. Do you guys have a lot of clients who have transitioned to remote work? And I don't know, has it, has it bought to light problems, which can be a good thing, or like what's your experience been?

William Rojas:

So that's interesting because so I've been doing consulting for over a couple decades, and traditionally, so I've done a lot of that, that travel warrior, every week you go travel to the client to do your work, you travel back and you do that again next week, and you do that month after month. In coming to Adaptavist, Adaptavist has historically always been a remote consulting company. So five years ago it was like, wow, we would go to clients saying like, "Okay, we need you to do this." And we're like, "Yeah, we can deliver that. And no, we don't need to, you know. We may come in and do a onsite visit to introduce ourselves, but we can deliver all this work remotely." So we've always had that history.

Angad Sethi:

Okay.

William Rojas:

But nonetheless, when COVID hit and everybody went remote, we definitely experienced a whole new set of companies were now suddenly having to work remotely, and having to establish new processes and practices that basically forced them to be remote. And I think we've had the fortune of in a sense, having always been-

Angad Sethi:

Yep, remote start.

William Rojas:

... S8's.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

I know whenever we bring on people into the company, into consulting particular, that's one of the things we always point out. Remote work is not the same as being in the office. It has its ups and downs. But we've always had that benefit. I think we've been able to assist some of our clients, like, This is how this is how it's done, this is how we do it." So we've been able to teach by example type of thing for some of the clients.

Angad Sethi:

There you go.

William Rojas:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. That was actually going to be my next question is what's the working structure at Adaptavist and what sort of processes? I'm sure that it's a big company and therefore there'd be tools and processes particular to teams in themselves. Just from your experiences, what are some of the processes or tools you guys are using?

Rizwan Hasan:

So, in terms of planning and work management, because we started off as a remote first company, and since COVID, business is good. I'll be frank there, it's been good for us because we specialize in this market. We've had a huge hiring spurt in all these different areas, and one thing that I noticed internally, as well as problems that... I wouldn't say problems, but a trend that we're seeing with a lot of other clients is that because of this remote push, and the need for an enterprise to be able to give the teams the tools they need to do their work, there's a lot more flexibility in what they can use, which has pros and cons.

On the pro side, there's flexibility, the teams can work the way they want. On the con side, administration might be difficult, alignment might be difficult. So we're seeing a lot of that with customers and ours. So we're almost going on this journey with customers as we're scaling ourselves, and learning how to navigate this new reality of working in a hybrid environment.

William Rojas:

I think in terms of some of the tooling and so forth that we get to do. So we obviously internally we have, we're pretty, pretty much in Atlassian. Atlassian stack, that is very much how we work every day. All our work is using Atlassian tools. All our work is tracked, all our client work is tracked in JIRA, all our sales work, basically everything we do, we use JIRA and Confluence, we're really big on Confluence. We have a lot of customizations we've done to our instance over the years, things that we just have developed, and so that's internal.

I think the other aspect is often, depending on the client that comes to us and the type of work that we're doing for that client, then the types of tools that we use can pretty much run the full gamut. We have a lot of Atlassians, we do a lot of work in JIRA with our clients, like work in Confluence. Sometimes we're working on helping them scale, so we bring on some of the add-on to support some of the scaling practices within to support JIRA. We'll do a lot of JSM work. We do often DevOps work, and then we'll bring on a lot of the DevOps tool sets that you would expect to find, so things to support delivery pipelines.

So it really depends quite a bit on the client. We even do some agile transformation work. And then there, we do some a lot of custom build things, practices and so forth. And we bring in surveys and tools that we've been able to develop over the years to support that particularly. So a lot of the tools often are dictated by what the client and the specific engagement call for.

Angad Sethi:

In my personal experience recently with COVID, I find myself in a lot of meetings, we are experimenting with, with Async decision making. Have you experimented with Async decision making processes yet?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll start by saying I hate meetings. I think most meetings are a waste of time, and I tell my team this. And I'm like, "If we don't need to meet, like we're not going to meet."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

And I think that really comes. Yeah, awesome, for sure. Awesome.

Angad Sethi:

I love it.

Rizwan Hasan:

But it comes down to really is when you do meet, are you having the right conversation? And I think a key component being like an agile team, quote-unquote, is you have an understanding of what we all are doing collectively and what the priorities are. Which is tough to actually get. So when we talk about like asynchronous decision making, with a team that has some degree of understanding of what priorities are, what goals are, it gets easier. And you can have more low impact interactions with people.

So we use Slack a lot and we have a lot of internal bots on our Slack to be able to present information and collect feedback at asynchronous times, because there's voting features, there's places where you can comment. And I think when we talk about teams that are growing across the globe and also time zones and flexible working, that's a real thing now. There's a practical way of how to do that, that we're starting to dig into what does that look like?

Angad Sethi:

Do you find yourself in a million Slack groups?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yep.

Angad Sethi:

Yep. You do. Do you see any extra hurdles you've got to skip because of that? Because you maybe, do you find yourself hopping from conversation to conversation, whereas it would just be easier if everyone was in the same conversation? Does that happen a bit?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. Yeah. All the time.

Angad Sethi:

I hear you, yeah, there you go. Okay. Cool.

William Rojas:

But I would say we have a lot of impromptu. I think we do have a lot of impromptu meetings. And sometimes we may be in a Slack typing away. It says, you know what? [crosstalk 00:17:29]

Angad Sethi:

Just jump in a huddle.

William Rojas:

Into Zoom and then let's chat or Slack conversation, and then just face to face conversation, and then just address it then and there. But I think we have been looking at, it's almost like I think a balance between the time spent on the meeting, and the amount of people that need to be in the meeting, and the benefit and value that comes out of that meeting. And a daily meeting where work was people would pick up work or support from a sales perspective. And it was very, very much necessary as per part of the work coming into the consulting pipeline. But it felt very inefficient.

So that's one of the means, for example, we did away with, and it's now a completely asynchronous process, by which work comes in and it gets allocated, people pick it up, people support it, we deliver things, we track where things are and so forth. And we now use all of that is basically all done through Slack. So we did away with all the meetings around, "Hey, who can help with this?" But meantime, we have another meeting where we're trying to get people on projects. And that is very much a, we need to negotiate on that often. So that's a meeting that's still very much done.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

Everybody comes in, we all talk, we decide what we need to get done. People balance back and forth. So that trade off I think is really important to really understand what, there are meetings that are necessary, very valuable, and they should remain. And there's ones that really a Slack is a much better mechanism to be able to make those kind of decisions

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true. Yeah. And does it well, sorry, firstly, pardon the location change. I'm sitting right next to the router now, so hopefully the iPhone holds. What sort of a scale are we speaking about here in your Slack? The reason I ask is with larger organizations, it can be harder to scale. Therefore I'm just trying to get a gauge of what scale your Slack is at.

Rizwan Hasan:

So we just hit, we are just over the 500 mark, that'd be in terms of employees. With basically our general, which seems to be, I think, I don't want to say universal, but the standard across any organization that has Slack general as the best indicator of how many people you have logged on. So we're just about the 500 mark, which I would say is probably around mid-size, but it's definitely getting to the point where we're starting to see, it's almost a little bit too much in order to disseminate information, find their information, etc.

We're actually partners with Slack also. So we work with them pretty closely on some opportunities. [crosstalk 00:20:39] Yeah, exactly. And we're starting to talk with customers also about the same problem, about how much is too much, and when do you start to form communities around people that are delivering the same type of value. So those conversations are more aligned and there's not just a whole lot of chatter and people get confused, like when they read Slack and like, "Oh, is this the priority now? Or am I supposed to be doing this or change in process?" That communication is harder now, I think, really. And this is where a lot of folks, I think, who are moving to this remote environment are struggling with, is that alignment communication.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Very true.

William Rojas:

And it is, I would say fairly organic, like our channel proliferation. We do have, I would think even for company of our size, we're pretty loose about how channels get proliferated, who gets to create them, what they're for and so forth. But then it gives the flexibility of based upon your interests or the context of what you need to communicate on, then you can either join a channel that supports it or create a channel if necessary to support it. So it is, in that sense, pretty organic. But it is true that there are hundreds, if not thousands of Slack channels that we have, and so kind of staying like which one should you be on, is definitely one of our biggest challenges.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Well, that just blows my mind just because like 500 people on a Slack. Our whole company is 35 people and I'm pulling my hair out being in too many Slacks. So well A, that blows my mind.

William Rojas:

It does allow us, for example, to have client specific Slack channels. So anybody, if you need to talk about, if you're working on a particular account, you're working for a client, then there's a channel for that. And if you're working on another client, there's another channel. The thing I find helpful about it is that it gives you that context of if I want to communicate with so and so, if I communicate with Riz on a particular account, I will go to the account channel. If I want to talk to Riz one-on-one, I go to a one-on-one chat.

Angad Sethi:

I see, yep, the flexibility.

William Rojas:

So we do have that benefit of where to put the information. But it does mean that I have probably over a hundred channels in my roster of things that I follow, and I'm always behind.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Well, yeah. So the next level of it is, then you begin to prioritize which channels should I really be notified about, and which ones are most important. I want to track those. And I try to keep that list to a minimum in terms of unread messages, and the stuff that I try to get to, and I'm bored and I have nothing else to do so, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

I've been leaving a lot of channels too. I've been just really cutting the cord with some channels. You know, I had some motivation to really help out here, but I just can't and it's just too much noise. And just got to cut the cord and be like, if it's empty, there's no conversation happening or if it's slow, then move on.

Angad Sethi:

Yep.

William Rojas:

We also have the ability to, you can get added back in. So sometimes you leave and then somebody will put you back in, like, "I need you to talk about this." But it is pretty organic. I know we do leave it up to the individual to decide how best to manage that.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

We had a instance today, actually, where there was an old, it was basically a sales opportunity, a customer who had reached out to us for a certain ask, and we hadn't heard from them for months, like eight-nine months. And someone posted, someone who I'm pretty close with on our sales team posted, "Hey, this is kicking back up again, but I don't have the capacity." And I just left immediately as I saw that message. I was like, "I can't help out. Sorry."

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. The old so-and-so has left the group is a bit of a stab in the heart, but yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

We will get over it. Just coming back to a point you mentioned, Riz, you said you used the words, alignment and communication. Both of you when consulting with clients, are those the two main themes you guys like to base your recommendations around?

Rizwan Hasan:

I'll give you a very consulting answer and say it depends.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

But when we engage with a customer, one of the toughest parts of our job is understanding if there is even alignment in the group of people that we're talking to as well, because at the scale of projects that sometimes we work with, we have like 20 to 25 people on a call. And of all of those people, they may have different motivations or objectives of what they're wanting with their engagement with us. So I would say, that's primarily what's driving what we're trying to find out, what we're trying to do with them is get some alignment between the group and ourselves, and communicating that is not always easy.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

Let's say, adding on what Riz, that also depends quite a bit on the specific engagement with that client. So in particular, if the engagement, because if an engagement is like, "Get me onto the cloud." Okay. You know, come in. Often there's much better alignment for something like that. If the engagements are more about, "Hey, help us scale agile, help us get better at how we deliver." Then the need for alignment, the need to make sure that we're all communicating correctly, we all understand, we all come to the meeting with the same objectives and so forth, is so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

So in those kind of engagements, we're constantly realigning. Because it's not even like we had the alignment. It's like yeah. Okay. We have it, next week it's gone. We got to go back and get it again. So that keeping, making sure that everybody's marching towards the same set of objectives, defining what those objectives are, letting them evolve as appropriate and so forth, all that becomes so much more critical.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

And that's where the tools, that's where things like JIRA and then again, like how do we scale? How do we show what everybody's doing? And so forth, that's where it becomes that much more important. And in those kind of engagements, the tooling becomes essential. Not that the tooling's going to answer it, but the tooling becomes a way by which it helps us communicate, yeah. This is what we all agree we're going to do. Okay. The tool says so because that's the decision we've made.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

It's really interesting that you say cloud migration, William, like when you say, "Okay, I'm moving to cloud, we know what the alignment is," but even then, I'm finding is that, especially within the Atlassian ecosystem, because that's what we're exposed to all the time, but when we're moving data from a completely old infrastructure to something brand new, it's not going to be the same. And you have folks who are thinking that, "Oh, we're just going to be taking all this stuff from here and putting it over there." But what usually doesn't come along with it is that you're going to have to also change the way you work slightly. There's going to be changes that you're not accounting for.

And that's where the alignment conversation really is important because we work with small companies who understand, okay, moving to the cloud will be completely different. We also work with legacy organizations like financial institutions that have a lot of red tape, and process, and security concerns, and getting that alignment and understanding with them first of what this means to move to a completely different way of working, is also part of that conversation. So it's a constant push and pull with that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, yeah. It's really heartwarming to hear the two of you deal with the JCMA, which is the geo cloud migration system.

Rizwan Hasan:

Quite a bit, yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome, because yeah, that's something we are working on currently as well. So I'll end with a super hard question and I'll challenge you guys to not use the word depends in there. And the question is the number one piece of advice for remote teams practicing agile. Start with you, Riz.

Rizwan Hasan:

Get to know each other.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, okay.

Rizwan Hasan:

Keep it personal. I think one of the hardest things about this new reality is making that connection with someone, and when you have that, that builds trust, and when you have trust, everything's a lot easier. So I'd say that. People really aren't... The enemy. That's not the right word, but work shouldn't be a conflict. It should be more of like a negotiation, and if you trust each other, it's a lot easier to do that.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

So yeah.

Angad Sethi:

That's awesome.

William Rojas:

It really is.

Angad Sethi:

I'm going to definitely take that back with me.

William Rojas:

Yeah. And just if I could quickly add to that. That's like looking for ways how to replace the standing around by the, having a cup of coffee. How do you replace that in a remote setting?

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

William Rojas:

How do you still have that personal interaction that maybe there's an electronic medium in between, but there's still sort of that personal setting. I think that's one of the things you're looking for. Because yeah, it is very much about trust. And I think to that, I would also add, back to the alignment. Right? Because in some ways that strong interaction helps build and maintain the alignment, because often it's not so much that you get alignment is that you stay aligned.

So it is this constant, and having those interactions, having that trust and so forth, is what in a sense allows us to stay aligned. Because we know each other, we know how to help each other, we support each other, so we stay in alignment. So the trust and so forth are a good way to help build and maintain the alignment itself that you're looking for. That's absolutely. In remote world, you don't have the benefit of seeing each other, the whiteboard, all those things are not the same.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. Getting cup a coffee, yep.

William Rojas:

But we still need to stay in sync with what needs to get done. That's so important.

Angad Sethi:

Very true. And so would you guys want to drop any names of tools you're using to facilitate that trust between team members in a remote setting?

William Rojas:

So I would say, like I mentioned from my role, one of the things that we do is in the presales area, we support some of our larger accounts, almost as more of like a solution account manager, per se. So we come in and help make sure that the client is getting the solution that is meant to be delivered. So we work with the delivery teams, we work with the client, we sit in between.

There's one large client that we've been working on for years now, and we basically, to the point that they're moving towards some flavor of safe. That I wouldn't call it fully safe, but they do have a lot of safe practices, but they do PI planning, and so we come in and join the PI planning. That's actually one of the, like I said, how do you stay alive?

Angad Sethi:

That circle. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:33:15]

William Rojas:

You pull up your program definition, you look at what features you want to deliver in the PI, who's going to deliver that feature in the PI, and then in your readout, go back to the tool and say, "Look, this is what we've agreed to." Others can ask questions and so forth, and constantly going back to... For example, just last week, we're doing now sprint planning and saying, "Actually, okay, this feature's going to drag on another sprint. Let me go back and readjust in," this client is using the Easy Agile programs. The original plan of saying this features not going to be, not two sprints, but the three sprints instead, for example.

So that habit of getting into using the tool to communicate what we decided and what we just had to make changes to. So it becomes this, a communication vehicle, it's really important. Yeah, they use programs, they use the roadmap piece of programs to help them do their PI planning, and stay in sync with what it is that ultimately gets communicated out at the end of PI. And then during the sprints of the PI itself, and it's very helpful for them. Again, there's I think they have seven trainings, and they all use that to help stay in sync, stay aligned.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome. Awesome.

William Rojas:

One other quick thing I'll say is, I think there will be, some of where we've gone will now become status quo, become permanent. So I think that this has been as shift across the market, across the industry, across company, how people work. So the idea of remote work, the idea of using tooling to really establish communication, and help facilitate communication, all that, while it's been around, I think the big difference is now everybody, like you have no choice. Everybody has to do it.

Angad Sethi:

Has to. Yeah.

William Rojas:

And I think we've definitely seen a big shift across the entire industry because of that. That will now solidify and let's see what the next level brings. But I definitely think that we've reached a new stage of maturity and so forth pretty much globally, which is pretty cool.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah, it is. Thank you guys. I won't keep you too long. I think, has the sun set there, Riz? I can see the reflection going dark.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah. It is getting there. Yeah, for sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Yeah. I won't hold you guys for too long.

Rizwan Hasan:

All good.

Angad Sethi:

But thank you so much for the conversation. I honestly, I took a lot away from that. And yeah, I hope I can add you guys to my LinkedIn. I would love to be in touch still.

William Rojas:

Definitely.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure.

Angad Sethi:

Yeah. Trying to establish a point of contact, not to add to one of your Slack channels, but yeah. Just so that we can be in conversation regarding the product and improving it.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, sure. And we have a partner management channel. I know we've been talking to Haley a little bit.

Angad Sethi:

Awesome.

Rizwan Hasan:

She was reaching out, that's about some other stuff.

Angad Sethi:

Beautiful.

Rizwan Hasan:

Yeah, happy to. We engage with your product and it's in our white papers too, and we're going to put out another white paper this year where we're going to talk about Easy Agile too. So yeah. We'll stay in touch.

Angad Sethi:

Cool.

William Rojas:

I just gave you, so my LinkedIn is under a different, my LinkedIn is not with my work email. Because that way I can keep the same account place to place.

Angad Sethi:

Sounds good.

William Rojas:

Yeah. You can look me up on LinkedIn with that.

Angad Sethi:

Wicked awesome. Thanks guys.

William Rojas:

Awesome. All right.

Angad Sethi:

Have a good day.

"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.