Easy Agile Podcast Ep.10 Kate Brodie, Director of Digital AI and CCAI Program at Optus

In this episode, I was joined by Leandro Barreto - Lead Software Engineer at Miro.

Leandro is responsible for helping engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, Leandro worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil as Head of Technical Sales.

In this episode, we spoke about;

• Ikigai - what is it and how do you achieve it?
• The benefits of OKRs
• How can we combine agile, Ikigai and OKRs?
• How Ikigai can help agile teams achieve great results and stay motivated

I hope you enjoy today's episode as much as I did recording it.

Transcript

Robert O’Farrell:

Welcome, everyone, to the Easy Agile Podcast. We have an episode today with Leandro Barreto who is a lead software engineer at Miro. I'm your host for today, Robert O'Farrel. I'm the Growth tech lead at Easy Agile. Before we kick off this podcast, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Duruwa-speaking country. We pay our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Islander, and First Nations people joining us today on the podcast.

Robert O’Farrell:

Leandro currently works as a lead software engineer at Miro where his responsibility is to help engineering and product teams to be more productive through metrics and KPIs with a focus on increasing their operational efficiency. Before moving to Europe, he worked for an Atlassian partner company in Brazil and acted as a head of technical sales with the mission to increase the service offers in Latin America. Welcome, Leandro. It's great to have you here today.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Thanks, Rob. Thanks also for the Easy Agile for the invite. It's a pleasure to be here today.

Robert O’Farrell:

Fantastic. You're here to talk about Ikigai, objectives and key results or OKRs in Agile, so let's kick it off. Ikigai, what is it? Can you give us a brief or a long explanation of what it is?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, of course, of course. So, Ikigai I use it to say is a philosophy of life that means like a reason for being or the meaning of life. So, the world Ikigai originates from a village in Southern Japan, where the average life expectancy of people is over 100 years old. So, Ikigai is basically divided in four components. The first, things you love. Second, something that you are good at, then something that pays you well. And finally, something that the worlds need. So, when you put it all together, then you have the Ikigai, but this is not easy. So, let me explain a little bit of each of these companies.

Leandro Barreto:

So, the first thing is something that you love, something that makes you be present, something that you must ask yourself what do you really enjoy in doing? What makes you happy? What holds your intention that makes you lose time and forget about time? So, for example, reading, dancing, singing, painting, learning, teaching, et cetera. So, maybe it's a little bit difficult to answer right now, but understanding and seeking what you love must is fundamental so that you can have a healthy balance between learning, putting it in practice, testing, failing, trying again, and keep the circle repeating itself.

Leandro Barreto:

So, an example that I can give you is, for example, I had a jujitsu teacher that no matter the day, he was always training. And one day, I remember I got my arm hurt. And in the next day, I had a message from him like 6:00 in the morning, he was asking if I was okay. And I was waking up and he was texting me like, "Hey, are you okay? Are you going to be able to train today?" And I was like, "Whoa, take it easy, man." This is very funny because our class is 6:00 p.m. And he was punctually at the tatami or dojo. I don't know the English word for that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, dojo. We have dojo. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Dojo. Awesome. Yeah. And he was always punctual. And after the classes, he always said that he wants to get home earlier after the classes because he has private classes. So, from morning to night, he always keeps training and you can see the passion in his eyes when he talks about jujitsu. "It's a passion for me". A little bit exaggerated.

Robert O’Farrell:

Something that definitely got him up in the morning and kept him going throughout the day to the late evening, by the sounds of it.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Yes. And then, you have the second component, which is something that you are good at. Something that you can always improve with yourself. So, for example, what you are really good at. It's quite hard to answer, but what the people say is that I'm do... something correct or what they say something positive that what I do. So, for example, I remember the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell that says that usually, you have to spend 10,000 hours in something practicing to be good at.

Leandro Barreto:

So, don't take it as an obstacle but as a motivation to keep going, and understand this part of what you are good at. It's a good way to improve. And the third part is what pays you well? So, money is what... Some people say that "Hey, money don't bring... It's not... how can I say that?

Robert O’Farrell:

Money doesn't bring happiness?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, exactly. But it puts a roof in your head. It makes you provide a good life for your family. It makes you travel. It makes you have a hobby. So, according to Maslow, for example, one of the bases of human beings is to start thinking about security. So, we have to have this security in order we can improve as a person. So, money helps you to achieve it. Yeah. So, find something that makes your life as comfortable as you desire to, as you wish to. So, otherwise, you'll always be looking for something that you never had. So, for example, time.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you will spend so much time thinking how can you have more money? And here's the glitch, you will never be paid because you will be stuck on your daily basis thinking on how to get money instead of how to improve your skills to get money. Right? And then, you have the what the world needs. So, here, the idea is to find a proposal for what do you do and what is value to the society, your proposal. And sometimes it's quite difficult to find precisely because of the plurality of positions and responsibilities that we have nowadays. And even more today with the full expansion of technology that every month we have new positions to be filled by companies that needs different type of skills, soft skills and hard skills.

Leandro Barreto:

And here, the keyword is to serve. So, I will give a personal example. For example, one of the things that I missed most when I was a young teenager was having someone who could help me to explore the technology so I can get a job. So, it was in the early 2000 and it was quite hard.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes, very much so.

Leandro Barreto:

The internet is starting, everything is new.

Robert O’Farrell:

People on dial-up, internet was slow.

Leandro Barreto:

Do you remember that sound like prshh?

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, yeah. It comes to me in my dreams I think. I heard it so many times in that era.

Leandro Barreto:

My family and my friends, they wasn't in the IT field. So, there is no one to help me that. So, I had to learn it by myself. Seems impossible. But it took me time to learn it and enter in a company with a good position let's say that gives me money and the possibility to learn much more faster. So, since 2013, I dedicate part of my time to teach young people, acting as a mentor to help them enter in this market so they can learn new skills. I can open paths for them, put in contact with the right people, people which is going to be important for them, and all aiming to accelerate their dev development and giving them the opportunity.

Leandro Barreto:

And this for me is very meaningful because I'm helping those who don't have any references also, and sometimes don't have a chance. And the more I serve them, the more I earn and I grow with them. So, I came across like when I was introduced to Ikigai for example, another personal example.

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry. Before we get to that, just reiterating. So, the four components, so there's something that you really lose time in doing, something that you get into the flow of doing very easily. And then, the second component is the thing that you are very confident in doing, something that you do quite well. The third one, being something that pays you well, and the fourth one, being something where there's a need for it. So, just reiterating that. That's correct?

Leandro Barreto:

Correct. Correct.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, I guess getting to that, our second question that like for yourself, you can apply obviously in a business sense, but in a personal sense, what's been your journey there, and do you believe you've achieved Ikigai, I guess, would be my next question?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Well, actually personally, I have some things that's very clear in my life. I'm still not there, but let's say that I'm in the process.

Robert O’Farrell:

Work in progress

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. Work in progress. So, I have clear goals and I have clear in my mind where I want to go in a few years, so I don't get disencouraged if the weather is cold or warm, if the stock market goes up or down. And the only thing that I focus is to be 1% better than I was yesterday. And this provides me a security that prevents me to wasting time and things that doesn't make any sense or simply doesn't matter for me in the future. So, I take my career very, and also my personal life very serious on that point. So, yeah, let's say that work in progress.

Robert O’Farrell:

I love that word security that you use there. It draws a parallel, I think, to a word that we also use when it comes to that plan that we have, which is that focus element, making sure that we do the things that matter. Do you think that it's also given you a sense of focus too on what you take on and what you say yes to and what you say no to with regards to your personal and professional development?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. When you know where you want to go, it's more easy to say yes or no to something that came up to you. Another personal example that I remember was something like 12 years ago, 12 to 13 years ago, my focus was to learn Java, for example, Java programming. Because I know in the midterm, I would like to be a Java architect. So, I have to improve my skills on that programming language.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, the company that I was working was making some changes and then they asked me, "Hey, I know you are good at Java. You are learning, but we need you to start learning this another language, Ruby on Rails during that time. But you have to at least for the moment, forget Java." And then, I was like, "Mm-mm. No, no."

Robert O’Farrell:

It's not what I want to do.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. I totally understand that was a company's decision. But during that point, it begins to separate my focus on what I want to achieve from the company's purpose. So, it doesn't make any sense to continue on that company. I asked to leave. And again, best decision ever, because then I entered in another company that I learned so much. And then, in three years I became a Java architect.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. That's a fantastic example of that focus. I'm quite curious out of those four components that you mentioned before, what have you found quite easy, I guess, to achieve or to at least get clarity around personally? And what have you found more challenging?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. Yeah. So, learning something that you don't know, it's always a challenge but when you have a desire or a clear focus where you want to go in a few years, things start to be clarified for you. For example, in 2014, I did extension of my MBA in United States to learn about entrepreneurship and things that for me was really, really important. But totally new field, I have no idea what to expect but it provides me the vision to... I always had the idea to have my own company in other words. So, I know that in short term, not in short term, but in midterm at least five years to four years, during that period of time, I would like to have my company.

Leandro Barreto:

So, after I did this MBA, I came back to Brazil, and then I started to put myself in situations that makes me learn these new things. And in 2016, I open up our restaurant in Brazil. So, when you have an objective, things, and it's quite funny because the universe starts to help you.

Robert O’Farrell:

You make your own luck in a lot of regards too, I think.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

So, if you had somebody who was looking to learn about Ikigai and came to you for some, for your experience and your advice in how to apply it to their lives, what do you think your advice to someone would be who doesn't know much about it?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Great question. So, one tip that I, or advice that I can give is, and I think that this is fantastic and I apply it in my daily basis. Don't waste time in small decisions on a daily basis because every day we have thousands of decisions to make and our brain capacity is limited daily, at least daily. So, there are some times that we feel like mentally exhausted after, for example, you have six meetings in a row in a day. In the end of the day, you were totally tired. Right? And I once read that the greatest minds don't waste time thinking on small things, for example, Steve Jobs always wore the same jeans and t-shirt every day. And he didn't need to think to use it. He just took it and reuse it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, during that time, what I did in 2018, more or less when I was presented to Ikigai. So, what I did, I lived alone in an apartment in Brazil. So, I decided to change it, my life. What I did, I donated my entire wardrobe of clothes with things that I almost never used. And I was only wear eight t-shirts and two jeans.

Robert O’Farrell:

Quite a collection.

Leandro Barreto:

So, I avoid making those small decisions, especially in the morning, because in the morning, you have a clear mind and you don't have to spend those in small things, because if you think on small things, probably it'll grow during the day. So, for example, another thing that helped me a lot is plan the week. So, Google Calendar exists to be used, right?

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yes.

Leandro Barreto:

So, everything that is very important for you, events or plans that need to be done, put on the calendar. And also, talking about the clothes, separate your clothes a day earlier before you go into bed. So, you wake up more calmly, you drink your coffee calmly, and you focus your efforts on what really matters. And once you have freed your mind from thinking about these small things, you can focus your time and energy on learning new things or getting things done the way it should be. And whether it's learning a new language or a new skill, or you can also read a book in the morning because you have free time, let's say. You can focus on what matters to you exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I'm quite curious about this aspect of finding something that you really get consumed by. And I think in this digital age, we have so many things that distract us. Our phone has a lot of notifications where we have a lot of information at our beck and call and sometimes it can be overwhelming to know what we should focus on, and I guess what we can really get passionate about. I'm curious, do you have any insight into that as to how people can find that thing that they just lose themselves in and that they're super passionate about?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Another thing that worked very well for me is to turn off all the notifications.

Robert O’Farrell:

Get a dumb phone just so you don't have that level of notifications coming through. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Because I read... I don't remember where exactly, but your brain took something like 15 minutes to focus on something. So, if you don't spend 15 minutes of your time, focus on what needs to be done. You cannot focus at all. So, what I usually do, I turn off all of the notifications from my phone. So, the principal one, I just took it off and I don't care about notifications. Also, one thing that I noticed is that when I, for example, when I had Apple Watch. In the Apple Watch, even if you turn the notifications on or off, the iPhone, it keeps doing on the phone. Oh, my God. So, this is one simple device that I can say, because otherwise, you will enter in a black hole in a community and social media and news, and then you'll lose yourself.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I found that personally with the Apple Watch, having something on your wrist that vibrates is incredibly distracting. And I was always very big champion of technology, but that was one area where I just moved away from it, went back to a mechanical watch, just didn't want that level of interruption when I was trying to focus on things. So, I think it's a really key insight to focus.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. In addition to that, when you, for example, when you are in a meeting with someone and you are actually expecting a message for, I don't know, maybe your family, and then it pops up on your phone and you are in a meeting, and then you take a look into the watch and the people notice that you are not paying attention because you are looking into watch. No matter why you are looking, if it's a message or et cetera, you do provide a psychology... How can I say that in English? Oh, my God. Psychology interference. Let's say it.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yep. Psychological interference.

Leandro Barreto:

Interference. Yeah. Thank you. That will provide a negative influence to other people. So, yeah, that's why you made the right choice to move into the-

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I've heard some people that will actually ask people to leave their phones outside when they go into meetings or leave their laptop outside so that you're present and that you are engaged in the conversation. Because I think even the mere fact that you have your phone near you is a distraction. Even if there's no notifications, its presence is enough to ensure that you're not 100% present in the conversation, which I think is quite interesting from how we focus and our dependency on that rush that we get or that endorphin rush of getting that ping on the phone or that notification.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I thought we could move on to talk about objective and key results. Or for those people that may not have come across this term before, OKRs are collaborative goal-setting methodology and used by teams and individuals to set challenging and ambitious goals with measurable results. So, to break that down further, the objective part of the OKR is simply what is to be achieved and the KR part of it, which is key results, benchmark and monitor how we get to the objective. So, getting to the heart of setting successful OKR is establishing it clear and compelling why. Is there a secret formula to creating a powerful why to get everyone on board?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Great question. So, OKRs, it's all about action and execution. And I think the secret formula, let's say it's having a well-defined proposal and also everyone engaged in seeking the result as the main objective. So, companies in my opinion are made of living ecosystem called human beings. And every human being has its own desires, proposals, goals. And en suite, unite all of the objectives of both the companies and all the people together. That's when we can achieve best results. And that's why some companies are focused on the cultural fit.

Leandro Barreto:

And this is one thing that I see growing a lot in the HR area, companies and persons that must, which the cultural fit must match. It basically means that the person has the same values and desires to achieve results as most of the people in the company or what the company understand as their force that they need to keep growing as a company. And I have seen many technically good people failing in selection, in process selection, simply because they don't adhere to cultural fit. And this is much more than a psychological issue because you don't know how to say like people that cannot work as a group.

Leandro Barreto:

So, it's better for the company to hire someone who can play as a team instead of someone who is like the lonely wolf that keeps working alone. And the results is for only him and not for the entire company. So, yeah, this is the classic example that I can see. And also, one thing that is good for that is nowadays, our fault tolerance is quite good because today at least serious companies don't punish failures. So, they even encourage you to learn.

Leandro Barreto:

And the Spotify models, I remember they say like, "Fail fast and learn fast." So, that was the fail wall was born. So, where everyone shared their failures and they can learn as a team, as a clan, guild. And this is quite beautiful because you can create such an environment where everyone can learn and grow together because humans can fail. And this is normal.

Robert O’Farrell:

Do you think that-

Leandro Barreto:

And-

Robert O’Farrell:

Sorry, I'm just curious. Do you think that companies are more focused around the why these days, or that why has become more important in their measure of success? And you mentioned cultural fit and I love this idea that more companies are much more sensitive to what is their company culture and how does this person work within, or are they going to fit into this company culture? Because the existing people in that company are aligned around their why. And if someone is coming in and doesn't align with that, they understand the impact on their success. So, do you think that company's becoming more and more aware of this and more sensitive to this?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. I think they are. So, as far as they have the right people in the right environment with the right proposal, no matter the why they will find it blindly, let's say. I think it's like a sense of behavior for the people. Because if you see someone from, as your peer, let's say, that's running to an objective that was defined by the company. And you are aligned with your values and goals. You will follow it.

Leandro Barreto:

So, this is good for both persons as human beings and also for the company because they show the proposal, they show what is the why we must be, for example, the first selling company for our product in the market, why, and then people who is working on it, they will take it as a personal objective. And this is when you make the connection between the company's objective and the people's objective because when the company grows with this why, with this north star, the people will grow together with you.

Robert O’Farrell:

I completely agree. I'm quite curious too from the opposite point of view. Do you think that employees are becoming more aware of understanding the company's why before they join the company? Because we've seen with the pandemic that a lot of companies are now moving to this remote recruitment. And so, the possibilities for employees to work for a much broader range of companies now have increased. And do you think that employees are now finding better wire alignment when they're looking for new jobs because they do have a broader pool to play in per se?

Leandro Barreto:

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that's why Glassdoor is so popular. So, when you are invited for a meeting or for an interview, you can see everything from the company. Like from salary to feedbacks from the people who works there or is not working anymore. And then, you can see if there's a match. And this is quite funny because like 10 years ago, which is not so popular, we are blindly thinking to work, let's say, in a position like software development. So, I have to be a software developer. I have to be a...

Leandro Barreto:

So, it was more focused on the position instead of the purpose. And now we are seeing the opposite. Now, the people are looking for the purpose, what the company can help me achieve. And it's more like a win-win-

Robert O’Farrell:

Situation.

Leandro Barreto:

... situation let's say, situation. Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think also a lot of people are really focused on how the company takes care of them as a person. They're very sensitive to the fact that they are committing their time to that company. So, there has to be that alignment around professional goals and personal goals. And I think that it's a great shift to see, to come back to the OKR side of things. I'm curious about what benefits do setting OKRs within an organization give or provide?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think OKRs, they are very, very simple. They do not require a specific knowledge to implement it. So, when you have the people committed and engaged to the goal and the why they want to achieve, then the implementation and using of OKRs became naturally. So, company can benefit because he's straight to the point. He's like, "Objective, it's the direction. And the key results are yes or no." So, keep it simple. That's the main benefit of the companies.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I love that. The fact that there's no gray area. You either succeed or you don't, and there's a lot of clarity around that as well.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that with that aspect of OKRs, in your experience, have you seen OKRs set that tend to stretch the team further than they normally would be stretched in terms of what they attempt to achieve than companies that don't set OKRs from your experience?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, but I think it matters on what the company, what's the culture of the company, because I have seen companies that is setting OKRS in the good way, but I have seen companies that is setting OKRS because it's fancy. When it's fancy, you don't have a clear objective. You don't have a clear vision. You don't have the right people. And then, it's very tricky and you will never achieve what you are proposing.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm curious to dig into that a bit more to get your insight on that. Because as somebody who would come into a company that might be setting OKRs, how would you determine that the OKRs are probably not as clearly defined or that they're implementing a process that don't necessarily have the depth or the belief in doing? So, how would somebody come in and determine that?

Leandro Barreto:

Good question. Good question. So, the idea to have a objective is like to have something that can be... How can I say that, can provide you like a, not a fear, but it's going to be like, provides you a direction for, but the people who sees it, they think like, "Hey, this is quite hard to achieve I think." So, one example for Google, for example. So, Google in 2008, they tend to launch the Google Chrome. And as I remember, the first year was like, "Hey, this is the objective." Like, "Hey, we want to launch the best browser in the world." And the key result is the number of users because the users will tell you if the browser is good or not.

Leandro Barreto:

In the first year, they didn't achieve the key result. But the second year, they rise at the bar again, like, "Hey, now we are much than double the objective." And the second year, they still didn't achieve it. But it was very, very close to it. And the third year, they pass it. So, keep in mind that the objectives must be something that seems like a challenge, a huge challenge, but at the same time, it's very inspirational.

Robert O’Farrell:

Inspirational.

Leandro Barreto:

Inspirational. Thank you so much. For those who are working on it. So, I think this is most of the point.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. And what do you see as some of the pitfalls when setting OKRs for an organization?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. Awesome. So, the pitfalls from my perspective, there are some common mistakes when implementing OKR. So, for example, as I said, not having a clear vision of the goal, so people cannot engage. And especially when you have senior engineers because they don't want to work in something that don't bring purpose for them. Right? So, this is the first one, for example. The second one could be like a system that supports the monitoring of the results. So, you cannot follow up, which is quite important to keep following it if you are, we are close to achieve it. Yes or no? So, a good point.

Leandro Barreto:

And one thing that seems quite strange, but it's very, very common in the market is that your product is not finished yet. One personal example that I faced not quite recently, but do you play video games?

Robert O’Farrell:

When I get the time. I have two young boys, so I get very little time to do that these days. But yeah, I do.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I love doing, I don't have also time, but when I have a litle bit of time, I can spend. So, this little time I try to spend in the best game that I found in the market. And here is the point because some years ago, there was a game that was released and before released, there was several gaming platforms, new sites, and et cetera, that was telling us that, "Here is the game challen... no, the game changing for the gaming market, because it's going to be very good. The marketing for this game was really, really good. And the game was like highest expectations for that. It was always in the top. "Hey, you have to play this because it's going to be very great. You are going to be having a great experience on that."

Leandro Barreto:

And the funny thing is that after they launch it, a few hours later, I notice some YouTubers who start testing the game. They began to post videos about so much bugs that they are facing. And within a week, the game had to stop selling because that was a disaster.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

And... Yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I was just going to say, I can think of a few games that come to mind that fit that criteria.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Probably we are thinking the same, but I can say it, so.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Yeah. Do you find that people get OKRs and KPIs confused within an organization? Or have you ever come across any examples of that, where people misunderstand the purpose of between the two of them?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. One thing that came up to my mind is the key result is a simple measure to understand if you are going in the right direction to your objective or not, but KPIs is it's more a performance index for performing for your team. For example, if they are performing in a good way, if we have the right resources for delivering something. And so, I think this is mainly the difference is the KPI, it's a measure for you to, maybe to bonus, to create a bonus for your team or et cetera. And the KR must be not linked to bonus or salary, et cetera. Must be like a direction. Something that, yes, we are achieving it or not. Or if not, what we have to do to correct the direction.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Fantastic. So, coming around to Agile, I'm curious about this marrying of the two, of OKRs and Agile together. How can we combine Agile and OKRs in your experience and your understanding to achieve results that drive high performance?

Leandro Barreto:

Awesome. So, as the Agile manifesto says, "People over process," so I believe whenever you maintain a fail-safe environment along with a good leadership, you can get the most of your team. So, connecting what I said earlier regarding the Ikigai and when you have a good leader, for example, in a safe environment and colleagues or peers who shares the same values and goals as you, then you can extract maximum efficiency because high-efficiency teams are teams that are focused and committed with the company results, and that will achieve great business results. Sorry.

Robert O’Farrell:

I also love that aspect with the OKRs, with that clear definition, too, that Agile, that processes is that sprint by sprint activity where you're going back and you're looping around and looking at the results of that sprint and going back to the customer and getting customer feedback and that real alignment around what you're trying to achieve as well, to give you that clarity of focus that when you are going through that sprint process, you're coming back and saying, "Okay, are we acting on the initiatives that have come out of these key results that contribute to that OKR?"

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. And also, adding to that, that's why we have the goal for the sprint, right? So, we have the direction for the sprint. So, every sprint you can measure if you are achieving this goal or not.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I love it as a mechanism, too, to link back to that, that why piece to really give a clarity around why, which I think a lot of software development sometimes doesn't focus as much as they can on. So, I'm curious, so how can Ikigai mix into this? So, we've talked about that at the start and we talked about the components of it and it was a great framework about understanding a purpose, but how can we use that to achieve better results and stay motivated as a team?

Leandro Barreto:

Great question and also quite difficult. But yeah, I believe there are two thin lines that eventually met in the future. For example, the first one is like the individual as a person. So, how he seems himself in, within the organization and how can benefit, how this relationship can benefit from this win-win relationship. And also, the second one is like the individual as a professional. So, based on the skills that he already has. How can he help the company achieve the results more efficiently?

Leandro Barreto:

So, in a given timeline, these two lines will cross and then you will be able to extract excellent results because you will have a person with excellent internal knowledge, internal as a person, and also engaged with the companies is seeking as a greater objective, as a north star, and also helping your peers to grow all together.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think this is quite like a smile. When you smile at someone unconsciously, you make the other people smile too. So, when you have someone who is genuinely working with a proposal, that person will contaminate other in a good way. And then, you have a continuous string of people delivering consistent results. And I think this is the most important.

Robert O’Farrell:

Have you experienced that yourself where you see someone working with purpose and contaminate or infect how you... infect is again, not a great word, but inspired is probably the best word there, inspired the people around them to work in a similar fashion. Has that something that you've witnessed yourself?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes, yes. I remember back in the company that I was working in Brazil, that was my first day. I was like, "Hmm, there's something strange here," because everyone is so passionate on delivering their best results for their customer, that this thought influenced me in a positive way to start being like hungry for good results, not only for the company but for me as an individual, as someone who have to learn and teach others. And nowadays, I see these companies, it's achieving a great results with a great leader because even if we have a good team, we have to get someone who is a servant leader, who you can follow and maybe follow blindly in a good way. But yeah, I experience it.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. But I'm interested, is there anything that you wanted to talk about personally with regards to either of those three topics or even outside of that, that has been inspirational, I think, in your professional development, in your personal life?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I think Leandro five years ago was totally different person. And when I started looking, not only by myself inside me, but also outside and the opportunities that the world can give me and how can I serve back this, or how can I provide this back to the world? This is very funny because good things start to happen. For example, I never imagined to be working here in Amsterdam. And now, I'm here in Amsterdam, working in a great company with great people, delivering such great results, which is giving me a lot of knowledge to keep learning and keep the wheel turning on, keep the cycle.

Leandro Barreto:

And I think today, like performing the best Leandro's version ever, maybe tomorrow, a little bit more, and I can provide this knowledge to other person and I can also learn from other persons, from other people. And that's very exciting. I think that's what motivates me to wake up in the morning, do my sport things like running and jujitsu, and then let's do the work.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love that, that reflection on the past five years, how far you've come. It sounds like you've had a lot of inspiration from a number of different sources, but is there something in there that you think was key to that? Or was it just a general progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I tried to focus on people who have positive influence on others. So, I try to be more not equal because if you are equal, so you are the same person, so it doesn't provide value to the others, but try to be quite different in your own way. So, yeah, basically, that's what motivates me to get different sources of references and trying to be the best version of myself.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. I love this mix of the philosophical, which is for me, the Ikigai, and the concrete, well, not concrete, but the workflow aspect of the Agile side of things coming together. Have you traditionally worked in Agile methodologies or did you transition between that may be starting, because if you're from the 2000s, so you probably touched on Waterfall at some point in the past and then came into Agile. Was that your professional progression over that time?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I worked a lot with the Waterfall methodology in 2008, when I was introduced to the Agile methodology with Scrum... no, actually 2009, then I saw. "Hey, this is very, very interesting." Let's learn more about it. And then, during this time, I keep working both with the Waterfall methodology and the Agile methodology. And the more I work it with the Waterfall, the more value I saw in the [inaudible 00:54:24]-

Robert O’Farrell:

In Agile. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. And that was quite fantastic because then I also learn about SAFe and how to scale it, and yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

I'm quite curious, like because we had a similar path in that regard and I reflect on where we are with OKRs and Agile, and it's interesting that Agile brought us closer to our customer and we speak to our customer on a more regular basis, which I thought was a massive win over Waterfall where you might have months and months of development, and you've got a requirement that you're trying to put into code, and then suddenly, you have this big delivery and that's when you talk to the customer. And usually, the customer comes back and says, "We want all these things changed." And it's a real pain.

Robert O’Farrell:

Agile was instrumental in that, but then going up from there and putting that layer of why on top of that, which I think is, again, one of those big fundamental shifts on how we focus on what we are doing. Do you see anything emerging from your experience, your professional experience that is tackling another key challenge with regards to, I guess, how we work and how we deliver value?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. And for example, the customer, they want to see value on what is going to be delivered. They don't want to spend six months to wait something to be delivered. So, I think that's why cloud start being so popular, like SaaS companies, because when you are working on something that is on cloud, for example, you always have the last version. And no matter the day or the hour of the day, there will come new features. And usually, it's transparent for you. And internally from the engineering perspective, the more you deliver, the more quickly you can correct and the more you can understand the market.

Leandro Barreto:

And also, that's why some strategies, some release strategies came up so popular like Canary release. So, you deliver a few things to a particular person, and then you can test it. And if they provides you good or bad feedback, you have time to correct it. So, that's why it became so popular. So, I think during this time from now on, we must see a lot of SaaS companies starting to growing because things are in real life now, real time now, so I think it's natural.

Leandro Barreto:

By the way, there's a good strategy that was implemented by Spot 5 if I'm not mistaken that was like, but this is more for engineering perspective. They have some robots that keeps doing bad things to the servers.

Robert O’Farrell:

Oh, that's the Chaos Monkey.

Leandro Barreto:

The Chaos Monkey.

Robert O’Farrell:

That was Netflix. Yeah. Yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Netflix, yeah.

Robert O’Farrell:

Netflix. And it would take down bits of their infrastructure and break things. Yeah, yeah.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly. It's quite hard to see in some companies, but I think this has become to be more popular during the next couple of months or years, because it will teach the engineers how to deal with that because no one wants to stay working in the weekend. You stay with your family.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. I completely agree. I remember when I first heard about the idea of the Chaos Monkey, that it shocked me that someone would inflict that upon their business and upon, I guess, their systems, but then it only takes a production incident to realize that if you had something like that, that you would've built in some provision should that eventuate. And I think that there's a lot of wisdom to it. And so, I absolutely love the idea. I love this, what you were saying about real-time delivery of value to customers.

Robert O’Farrell:

And I think back to how Agile has really been fundamental in pioneering that, well, not pioneering it per se, but with the release cadence that you get from one to two-week sprints, you're putting yourself in a position where you are delivering more often. And you mentioned Canary deploys, I think within that. Is there any other deployment strategies that you've come across that also support, I guess, that immediate delivery of value to customers?

Leandro Barreto:

Yes. There is another strategy which is called the Blue-Green release, but the difference between it is like the Canary release, you deliver something in the small portions, but the Blue-Green, you, like a switch that you turn on and off.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yes. Yes. Right.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, you can test it. You can deliver new version of your environment or your tool, and then everyone can use it. And if something goes failed, then you have the plan B, where you can just turn on and off, and then you can rearrange the traffic to your tool. But this is very technical.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. Very interesting to me, but we might lose a few of our podcast listeners. One last question from me, just within your current professional engagement, were they implementing OKRs before you joined the company? Or was that something that you've seen introduced over that period of time?

Leandro Barreto:

From my current company, they are currently working with OKRs, so I didn't participate and implemented it. So, I'm just more focused on helping the teams in implementing the KRs. There were some companies that I worked in the PEs that I helped to build it, and also to build not only the objective but also the KRs. And the objective, it's you spend so much time because you have to understand where the company wants to be in the future.

Leandro Barreto:

So, you have to know inside what we have, what we can improve, where we can improve, and then we can base it on that, base it on the objective. We can build up to four key results to be more precise in achieving this. Yeah. But it's quite challenging, but at the same time, very exciting.

Robert O’Farrell:

I think that was going to be my question in your experience in seeing a company go from not doing that to then implementing it, what were the real challenges in doing that? And how long did you see that process take before they really got good at doing that? Because it is not only setting the meaningful objectives and obviously measurable key results but also then getting the alignment from the teams around that. What were the big challenges there and how long did you see that process take?

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah. I think it depends from company to company. I remember back in Brazil, I had to work with companies that spent months on deciding, but at the same time, I remember my own company took three months to start implementing it. So, I think it depends on the commitment of the people who is responsible for this objective. So, yeah, depends on the maturity also of the company, the people who is working, and yeah. Because the OKRs are quite old, but at the same time are quite new for people, for the companies. Right? So, this is like very challenging. And how do you balance it?

Leandro Barreto:

There are some people who doesn't know how to set the correct objective. And then, we came up with the same thing that we are discussing earlier. Like if you don't know where you're going to go, if the objective is not clear enough, no matter if you have good people or bad people, the people will not see value on that.

Robert O’Farrell:

Yeah. And you won't get your alignment because people don't either understand or don't believe in the objective.

Leandro Barreto:

Exactly.

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic insight, Leandro. And I really appreciate your time today. Again, is there anything that you'd like to chat about before we wrap it up? I'm just conscious that we have been chatting for about an hour now and gone off script a little bit too.

Leandro Barreto:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, actually I'd like to thank you, Rob. Thank you, Agile team, everyone. I don't want to spend much time talking also. It was a pleasure and thanks for invite again. And I hope we can think good things in the future. Like, "Hey, I hope I can provide good insights on this."

Robert O’Farrell:

That's fantastic. You certainly have. I've learned a fair bit today as well. So, I'll be going back to revisit some of the talking points from this chat. So, thank you very much again for your time, Leandro. I really appreciate it. And, yes, have a great day. It's kicking off for you and it's ending for us. So, yeah, really appreciate it, mate.

Leandro Barreto:

Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate it too. Thanks again. See you. Have a great day.

Robert O’Farrell:

You too. Cheers.

Leandro Barreto:

Cheers.

‍

‍

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

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

Key topics covered:

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

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

About our guests

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

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

Transcript

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

Opening and introductions

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

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

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

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

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

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

The core problem: When retrospectives become checkbox exercises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The pressure problem and overwhelming solutions

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

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

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

The problem of forgotten action items

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

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

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

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

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

Making action items first-class citizens

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond team-level retrospectives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Expanding the scope of retrospectives

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

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

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

Understanding anti-patterns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The budget analogy

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

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

Jaclyn Smith: It's the contractor.

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

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

Solution 1: Getting leadership buy-in

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

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

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

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

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

Solution 2: Making patterns visible

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solution 3: The power of trend analysis

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

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

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

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

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

Solution 4: The human factor

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

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

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

Solution 5: Breaking down overwhelming action items

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

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

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

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

Jaclyn Smith: I like it.

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

Wrapping up: What's next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jaclyn Smith: Thanks.

Ready to end the frustration of ineffective retrospectives?

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

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

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

👉 Watch the recording here.

"Every time I meet with Tony, I'm always amazed by his energy and authenticity. In this conversation, that really shone through."

In this episode Hayley Rodd - Head of Partnerships at Easy Agile, is joined by Tony Camacho - Technical Director Enterprise Agility at Adaptavist. They are delving into the highly discussed subject of team alignment, discussing what it means to have synchronized goals, cross-functional collaboration, and a shared agile mindset.

They also cover the fundamental building blocks to get right on your journey to team alignment, like the power of listening and embracing mistakes as learning opportunities, stressing the importance of following through on retrospective action items + so much more.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Share your thoughts and questions on Twitter using the #easyagilepodcast and make sure to tag @EasyAgile.

Transcript:

Hayley Rodd:

Here at Easy Agile, we would like to say an acknowledgement of country. This is part of our ongoing commitment to reconciliation. Easy Agile would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast and meet you today. The people of the Darova-speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend the same respect to all Aboriginal, Torres State Islander and First Nations people listening in today. Hi all and welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Hayley. Here's a little about us here at Easy Agile. So we make apps for Atlassian's Jira. Our applications are available on Atlassian's marketplace and are trusted by more than 160,000 users from leading companies worldwide. Our products help turn teams flat Jira backlog into something more visually meaningful and easy to understand.

From sprint planning, retrospectives and PI planning our ups are great for team alignment. Speaking of team alignment, this is what this episode is all about. Today I'm joined by Tony Camacho. Tony is the technical director of Enterprise Agility for Aligned Agility, which is part of the Adaptiveness group. I've met Tony a few times during my time here at Easy Agile and have learned that he's one of the most generous people along with being funny and a clever human being who is incredibly knowledgeable about Jira and a bunch of other agile related topics. It's really wonderful to have Tony on the podcast today.

Hey, everyone, we've got the wonderful Tony Camacho on the podcast today. This is our first time recording from our Easy Agile Sydney office, which is super cool. Tony, I'm not sure if you know, but Easy Agile is based out of a place called Wollongong, which is just south of Sydney. But we've got a Sydney office because we've hired a bunch of Sydney team members recently who wanted a place to come and hang out with each other. So we created this space, but it's 7:00 AM in the morning, so I'm all alone right now. That's how much I love you. So Tony, let's get started on the questions. Team alignment. What does it mean for a team to actually be aligned?

Tony Camacho:

So for us in an agile space that we're having, it's a collective understanding, a synchronization of your team members towards goals, principles, your practices that you're going in. Even more so I would even go down to the point of cadence, you would have those synchronizes. So it's a matter to be consistent with your agile principles and values, your mindset, your shared goals and vision, your synchronized work practices, DevOps, [inaudible 00:02:44], how we're going to put this out. Cross-functional collaboration between the teams, getting your tea shaped partners/teammates shining at that moment, learning from each other, roles, responsibilities things of that type. That's what it means to me. It really means.

It's all about human beings and at that point, having everybody aligning and working to our common goal, that objective that we want to do for the business partner. There's the gold that we're all after as a team. Does that make sense for you guys? We have the same objectives for this initiative and our practices. And finally for me, which I know this is not typically is we're coming to an agreement on the tools we're going to use and how we're going to use them and have a system source record where we know where we can get our troops, our dependencies, find out which teams do have capacity and move forward from there. That would be my overall definition of an agile team.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow.

Tony Camacho:

And teams.

Hayley Rodd:

You've had lots of experience over the years. I guess where my mind goes when you say all those really wonderful things about team alignment is that in my experience when team alignment is when people get it right, it's super great. When people get it wrong, it's really hard. And I actually think it's pretty hard to get team alignment right. You got to really work at it. What's your experience in that?

Tony Camacho:

To me it's like it can be a bad marriage or a great marriage, but it needs work. As we know, all relationships need work. We're human beings, we're not the same. Each one of us brings something to the table of value. So let me give you one example that I've lived with on a team. I'm an extrovert by nature, and I'm a developer, an engineer and typically that is not two skill sets that you hear together. So I've had to learn that when I'm working with my teammates that happen to be sometimes introverts slow down, listen, wait. They've also had to try to learn to respond faster because as an extrovert, if I ask you a question, all of a sudden I'm looking at you, I'm not getting a response, I'm thinking you're not understanding the question. I rephrase the question and now you're in a deficit to two questions.

And now I'm even worse because now I'm like, "Hayley isn't understanding me. What's happening here? Let me rephrase it again." And it can easily fall apart. What I have seen when teams aren't in alignment is that the team isn't a team any longer. It's miserable to go to the team. It's miserable to come into work, when the team is truly aligned, you're rocking and rolling. It's a feeling like you've never had. It's hard to explain to people that when you see the team, because you know it when it's working and you obviously know when it's not working, you're starting to miss deadlines. Integrations aren't happening on time. You don't have a single source of truth. You start having people explaining the same thing in two, three different matters, different priorities. We're not working from the same hymnal. The thing that I took from my... I'm an SPC, so as an instructor, the one thing I always try to explain to everybody, you may have the best of everything out there, but that's not necessarily mean it's going to work together.

So you have to have that type of understanding, how we're going to work together, what is our priorities, what's the tool sets we're going to have and what is our values as a human beings to this team if that... I'm hoping that helps describe some of the things that I've seen that have gone really bad. I have seen it at, I can share a customer that I have seen it gone, but we started off with good intentions. It's a financial institution in the United States and they were trying to make the jump to mobile applications. And at first we were on the same page as a team, but they decided that they didn't believe that cadence was required to be the same across the board. They didn't believe that we could use the same one tool set, we could use multiple different tool sets.

They had spreadsheets flowing all over the place. And what was happening was we lost trust. We were redoing work, there was ambiguity everywhere. We were misaligned and we started paying for it because our customers started complaining. They could see it in the quality of the work. One team had one schema, one background, one type of... You could see the difference when they integrated, it seemed like it was two applications being put out there mashed together. And when you're misaligned, that comes through very, very quickly in your work. There's a saying that we have here. There's a scrum master, I know her name was Sophia Chaley, one of the best I ever met. And what she will always tell people is what a team delivers is what the team is doing is learning. It's building knowledge, it's expressed as code. When we're misaligned, we're learning different things and we're expressing it differently in the code, if that makes sense.

Hayley Rodd:

Like thinking about the fundamental building blocks of team alignment, is there something that a team really needs to get right to be successful at alignment? And what is that in your mind?

Tony Camacho:

Oh, that is for sure. They had to get that right. First of all, the size of the team.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, okay.

Tony Camacho:

Human beings, and I'm not referring back... Going back to say for our scrum practices, I am a CSM. I do know they recommend 8 to 13 people. My best teams have been typically a little bit larger than that. But we had to have the same agreed to the size of the team where it didn't became, didn't become too large where we were over running each other and we weren't listening to each other. We had to understand our goals. We all had the same goals. We used to practice this by, when I worked at Microsoft, we used to have what we used to call our elevator speech. And we would stop somebody and I would go, we're working on this. Watch your elevator speech for this. And if your elevator speech wasn't... It wasn't meant that it had to be in sync with mines, but if I didn't understand it, we had a problem.

Or if it was a different goal where I'm looking at you going, but we're building a Volkswagen, but you're describing to me a Lamborghini, we have a problem. And those were the type of things that we also had to have to make sure that we had the right... Same practices and the tools. That's where I find Easy Agile exceeds. I mean it just exceeds, it meets above the market. It's transparent and it shows everything in front of you right there for me. So when we had the same tool and we were having the same cadence and we could see our dependencies and we could see what I had to deliver for somebody else or somebody had to deliver it for me, that was the types of things we had. We had to have respect. Somebody seems to always forget that we always had to have respect for each other.

We had to embrace the same values of collaboration, adaptability, transparency. The practices that we all know, but somehow we seem to forget when we get into a place where we are not aligned and if you respect my ideas and I respect yours and we're working together, we do not have to agree. But that respect will drive us a long way towards getting to that project vision that we want. And we're trying to meet the customer's needs. And those are the type of things that we needed. We needed leadership. Leadership, I can't say, and if you notice I'm not using the word management, leadership is where you're putting yourself out there in a situation where it can go bad for you as a person, as that leader, trying to make sure that we're making the right choices empowering the people and making them very clear what they can make decisions on and they can't. And it sounds so simple when I talk to you like this, but every time I've had to do some type of transformation, the baggage that sometimes we bring as human beings, the fears, the lack of trust that we have, that's where the scrum masters of product owners come in. And then you need something to make sure that you're having that vision to communicate that vision across. As I mentioned before, some of the tool sets that we have out there. Is that making sense for you at all?

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, it really does. It's really resonating with me. I think when you talk about coming together as a team and putting together a set of values and a vision, it seems so much like a a "duh" moment. It's like, of course you would do that as a team, but I think at the end of the day as teams, we get in the daily business as usual and we think, I don't have time to get together as a team and set that vision because I've got to do X, Y, and Z, that's due next week. But I think it's one of those fundamental building blocks that really sets you up for success to do X, Y, Z quicker down the track. So that's what I've taken away from that.

Tony Camacho:

And I would agree with you. And you came up with a perfect example because a lot of people do that. I have ABC to do for next week, daily. I don't have time. And the problem is that if they would suddenly realize, and it does become apparent to your practices. So once you agree on your practices, your daily standups, if you're doing that, your retros at the end of your sprints and moving forward, once the person feels that they have that respect for you and they're not fearful, they can share that with you, "Hayley, I'm having a problem. I'm having way too much work. I don't know if I am going to be of value here. Or Do you really need me?" "Yes Tony, I do need you, we're going to discuss this and let's discuss your A, B, C and see how I can help you." And they suddenly realized they're not on an island alone. Developers by nature being introverted, we have to break that habit. We have to be able to share. And it's funny, I'm not saying share my lunch, fine, sure, let's share our lunch, but share the workload.

The one thing that I always try to mention to teams, and again that's... I'm sorry, but I do believe in Easy Agile, using this tool. That's where easy Agile also to me makes it apparent. A story belongs to a team, not to a person. And once you know that you suddenly realize, I'm not alone. I'm here working as part of a bigger thing. And most human beings want to be part of a bigger thing. You suddenly realize that it's almost like the baseball metaphor that I use for teams. And I know the market is not baseball, but I think it would apply for other sports, be cricket or sports like that. When I'm batting, it's me against everybody. When I'm on the field, it's us against... I prefer being with the us. And generally that's where things like that, let's do that.

Also, when you're working with more people as a team, there's things that happened there. You minimize the project risk, which I hate using the word project. It should be initiative. It's long living. You're usually a much more adaptable. I don't know all the answers. So when I worked with you, Hayley, and you showed with me some things there, you're one of the most humble people I've met, and I loved it. But when you walked through, you walked me through the tool, it became very apparent, you know it, you feel it, you love it, it's part of you. And that to me is invigorating. It's energy. Who wouldn't want to work with somebody like you? Why not? Let's do this. Right?

Hayley Rodd:

Thank you Tony. I guess one of the things that I wanted to touch on is when you're in a team and you're coming together as a team, you're working on something, how does an individual who seeks recognition for what they're doing, how do they get that? Or how do you leave that? How do you put that ego aside and say, "I'm doing something as a team to the better of the team?" Have you ever come across that or considered that? I'm interested in your thoughts.

Tony Camacho:

So the people that I felt that needed to have that typically how I... Yes, that's a great question because I'm thinking specifically. There was one, a scrum master that I thought that did it the most amazing way ever. Basically she would call out the ideas even if it wasn't that person's, yeah. I feel that Hayley is... You're not having a good day, Hayley. You're not having a good day. And I know you are not getting used to doing, working in the scrum team. It's new to you and everything else. And what she did typically was in front of everybody would be, and it wasn't even your idea sometimes. And she would just say, and Hayley came up with this wonderful idea that's going to save us something, move us forward. Hayley said this to me, it made us think as a team. And we went around it, we talked and we did it.

And that person always usually would be like, "Wow, I got credit for something. Good scrum-masters will see that. Or good product owners will point that out." The other way that I've done it was using something like Easy Agile. It's a great tool to use, believe it or not. I would back off, I'm a developer, but I also played the role of Scrum masters for years. I would step back and I would let one of my teammates run it, hear their voice, feel empowered. It's amazing when you can have people feel empowered because what you're all talking about, there really is about a lack of trust, a lack of psychological safety. And it's for us to be an aligned team, you have to have trust there and you have to break down the fear of judgment. So the other thing that one time happened with a scrum master that I thought was wonderful was is that again against Sophia Chaley, chief stood in front of her room when there was this a bad sprint.

The sprint didn't end well. And she stood up in front of everybody and she basically went, "Sometimes you win, sometimes you learn. This was a learning sprint." She pulled up Easy Agile, she was using at a time, pulled it up, showed the things that didn't work out the way they thought they were going to work out. And she said, these are the actions we're going to take to improve this. And then when somebody who was in management, again not using the term leadership, now I'm using the term management on purpose, was looking to assign blame. Her response was, not screaming, not raising her voice. Her response was, if we need to get rid of somebody or blame somebody, blame me. But I'm here to solve the problem. Let's move forward.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow.

Tony Camacho:

She wouldn't tell. And that was to me was one of the most outstanding moments I've ever seen. And she was at that point actually using Easy Agile that wasn't a financial institution in the United States. I would let you know that teachers use it, figure it out. And she basically showed the board and just went through everything and did that. That was leadership. That was leadership. And generally your teams will follow leadership and they will suddenly step up and you'll see that that's what people who want to stand up. Now, not everybody wants to do that. Some people want to just be team members and that's okay. That is perfectly okay, but the thing that's not okay is that if they don't have trust, right? And to me, that's the biggest thing. When you have people who are resisting change or siloed in their world, they suddenly realize if you can get them to open up it's really, they're just telling you, I don't feel safe.

I've been doing this all my life. I'm great at it and now you're asking me to do this. And you need to somehow get them to get the feel that they are bringing something of value. They are helping you move forward. And you're meeting them halfway if you have to. But yeah, that's the biggest problem I've ever seen that we've always, it always comes down to the human being in that. The rest of it, you can always come, you can always change that. But there's some of the things that you also have to do. I think that some people run into Hayley that I think me and you live in our world as we're moving up is sometimes we are, there's an ambiguity of the things that we have to do. And I've seen you do that, people in our roles will have suddenly, even if it isn't part of our role, will take it on and we have to learn. That's it. But yes.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, I think that, yeah, it's so true that the [inaudible 00:19:23] the psychological safety needs to be there. And I think back to so many teams that I've been a part of that it isn't there. So you have to feel like you got to lay your mark or put your mark on something and show your value. Because if you're not showing your value, then you get questioned. And so I think that that's such a common thing that I see in teams and it actually creates, not a camaraderie, but a competition between teammates and it breeds the wrong environment. So it's just really interesting. One thing that I did want to touch on that you spoke a lot about a couple of questions ago was respect and making sure that teams have respect for each other. How does a team member show respect for their teammates? What are some really good examples of respect and how can we display it or embody it or enact on it as team members?

Tony Camacho:

So let me show you a lack of respect right now. Yeah. Hayley, we're talking about this.

Hayley Rodd:

Looking off camera, avoiding me. Yeah.

Tony Camacho:

One of the main things was to really to learn to listen. Sit down, believe it or not, I found the best thing is sometimes taking a deep breath, listening, not responding, recognizing what that person may be feeling and going through at that moment because it's hard what we do. It's half art and it's half science. Let them learn that making a mistake is not a failure, it's a learning moment. Have that discussion there. Take their concerns real. So it's funny because you just made me think of something. That's one thing where I could show respect to my teammates would be as a scrum master, if I was a scrum master, hold effective retros. Really listen to what they're saying in the retros, report back on the things that you said you're going to improve in the retros. So we said these are the three things we're going to improve on or these are things that are assigned to me.

Make it real. Make it a story. Show it on the board and say, "This is where we're going. This is what's happening. This is what I'm blocked by. Can somebody help me?" But I am working this for you. Get them, really be sincere. I don't mean buying pizza or bring a lot of scrum masters will bring pizza and donuts to the office. No, it's make their lives really better. Be that advocate up for them. And if you're a teammate, be an advocate for each other and be sincere. Have the bravery to stand up and say that's not a fair assessment. But the biggest thing is to really listen. Because a lot of times when somebody's saying something to me, I'll make it personal. Me, I have sometimes have, I know I'm feeling uncomfortable, but I cannot explain why. And just having you there, looking at me and talking and going through it, I suddenly realize it may have been something different and I want to hear your ideas.

But I would have to, if I wanted to show myself to help that teammate, I also got to make myself vulnerable. If you're coming to me, I should share, but I should active listen, right? And really I respect your different perspective. It's okay. We all have different perspectives. Problem I find is that in ourworld, that we're moving so fast sometimes we don't stop to listen. We lack patience. We're moving too fast. So I'll share one for you that I'll be sincere. I had something medically came up and I was being a little abrasive with the team. So finally I called a meeting with our team and they saw me cry. I was okay with it. I was like, "I had no reason to be like this. You guys were showing me love, you were showing me respect, you're backing me up, helping me with my work. And I was still being utterly terrible."

And it hurt me. It hurt that I was doing that, but I needed them to see me and I needed them to listen to me, give me that second to get it off my chest. And in the end I started crying. A 60-year-old man crying in a meeting going, "I shouldn't have done that to you. That was wrong." And it wasn't contrived. Some of the people there were 20 year old people on my team and they were in tears. And it was because they felt, they told me after this, they felt my pain that I was in, because I wanted to help. It's the most frustrating thing. To your point before, how do I feel? I wanted to help. I wanted to be there and I couldn't. Physically, I wasn't there. My mind was all over the place and I was being rude, being blunt, and I could use some other terms. Please don't. But that's really the main thing for me was it's really simple what we do. I just listen and just show respect for other people. And sometimes we forget.

Hayley Rodd:

I think that so many of the messages that you are talking about are not just for developer teams, they're for every team, every team in every walk of life. I think that they're just so fundamental to successful human relationships, whether it be personal or professional, I think so. I think there's just so many good messages. One thing that I wanted to touch on was that you're talking about active listening and when you think back on your career, and maybe this is totally off script, but when you think back on your career, how have you become a better active listener over the years? How have you improved that skill? As you said, you're an extrovert, you want to get in there, you want to fix the problem. How do you get better at that?

Tony Camacho:

I had some very, very smart people that put up with me, listened to me, and then had the courage to approach me after and teach me and teach me and didn't embarrass me in front of anybody. Did it in a manner that they said, "Do you think maybe this could have been better Tony?" As I said, I'm 61 and still I'm an extrovert and I still have high energy and I still make mistakes. As I tell everybody, every day I wake up, I make a mistake, I just got up. But I could have stayed in bed longer. But also the thing that I've learned, and it's just by the nature of getting older, it's not the age part of it. It was watching people come up trying to do the same thing I did that I failed at and I was an instructor for Microsoft for a long time.

And seeing how, because to me seeing how a person's minds works is amazing. So what happens is I'll just... You know what I tried that, it didn't work for me, but I will say after class with you to show it to me again because maybe you solved it. I'm not that arrogant. And the nature of our business is that I find this, that the more you learn, the more you realize how little you know. That was the biggest thing that opened my eyes. Now it's like, oh my Lord. You meet somebody like John Kern, you meet somebody like Sophia Chaley who come from different perspectives, brilliant people, and you suddenly see that they happen to do things slightly different and you just watch them and you're like, "Wow." And the thing that I love about our job, which I guess you must love, everywhere we go, every team we work with, it's different. It's different.

Everybody always asks me, how do you do that. And I'll tell them, "Look, I will share with you the ways I did it. I have a varied background. I've always been consulting." I've done the ATM space, I did for space enabled warfare, I've done for health industry, everyone's been different. Someone from government regulation, but most of the time different human beings. So I have a saying, I've earned every scar in my back, their minds. I've learned people, you have to give people the chance to have their scars. Yes, it may be pain, I'm not saying fail, I won't let them fail. But sometimes people want to do something. So that's the way I would do it. Let them do it. And I just watched and learned that what happened was as I went in and the more I learned and I suddenly realized how little I know, I was like, I started with FORTRAN, I used to work in the dead 28.

And then you start working your way up and you start realizing, "Wow, I don't know as much as I thought I know." And I had the luck of running into working at Microsoft and having the pleasure of meeting Bill Gates. Now, no matter what you say about Bill Gates, because a lot of people do say some crazy things and some of them may be true or may not. But the one thing you can't take away from him is you go into a room with him and you suddenly see how he puts all these ideas together and comes up with a bigger picture. You suddenly realize, "Wow, people tell me I'm really smart, not that smart." And then you learn, humility is a good thing.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, I think humility is just such an important asset to have and to try and grow on because leaving your ego at the door and being open to learn from other people and not think that everything is definitely a life lesson that sometimes you need to go through. And some people go through it and still don't take away the life lesson. So yeah, I think it's so interesting. I guess we don't have too much longer left, but I wanted to touch on thinking about it from an ROI perspective. How important is team alignment from a return on investment? What do you gain from a business perspective when you have an aligned team?

Tony Camacho:

So I'm going to use a term that I dislike and Hayley, you can smack me the next time we meet. But I'm trying to use it as, I don't because it's effective resource utilization, right? But I'm not referring to human beings to that point because it may be human beings. The problem is that's a large market. But as Agile people I won't refer to you as a resource, I refer to you as a fellow human being, you are a partner on my team. You're my teammate. You're not a piece of wood. But that is unfortunately a term that is used. And we will have effective utilization, we'll have common goals across our organization. If you're using any of the message less, bad, safe, pick it, you start focusing on your value streams. You should have improved product quality because we have the same cadence. We're putting things out there and we're having the same views there.

You'll have I think better customer satisfaction and loyalty. They start seeing your product quality going up, being consistent, look and feel and hopefully you are delivering what they want. When you have your teams aligned, you're much more adaptable. Hayley, your team's got capacity? I don't. We don't have capacity to do this. Do you have capacity? Yes I do. Or we find someone or we break it down together and we present an idea to our partners. That's the things I like and I think in the end you have reduced risks at that point.

Also, I think that the thing that they have in is that it's indirect, but nobody knows about. Nobody really talks about it is that if I was upper management C-suite, when we start doing this and we're having the teams aligned, first of all, your teams become safer, your teams feel more comfortable, they're working with the same people. They start becoming very effective and they start producing ideas. They're the knowledge workers. They know this better than anybody else and then they feel empowered to share ideas. The places that I thought that I had the best teams was once they asked... Well, and I got it, I don't know how, I was running a train and they asked to talk to the CTO and all they wanted to do was to talk to the CTO and make that person human. They asked her what she did in a previous job. Amazing. She worked as a factory worker and she also worked in construction. She used to drive, one of the things, nobody would've believed this. And what happened was they started sharing ideas with her and she embraced them. You know what that did to the team, the teams all, they were like, now that's out there, that's ours. Look at that. That was ours. I mean ownership, it's unbelievable.

And unfortunately we are working on a capitalist market, which is fine, that's who we are. I mean we're in IT, it's a return on investment. Return on investment in the end, you start seeing much more efficient use of your money, much more efficient use of your dollars. Also, I would also imagine for the people above who are in the C-suite, they suddenly realize that the organization is going in the same direction. I think psychologically they feel that we now I have this team behind me pushing towards the same goal where a lot of times, every time I do an agile transformation, the first thing we always hear is we know they're working. We don't know what they're working on. And that's where something like Easy Agile bridges that and then you can use that information to go further. And that's wonderful because then at that point, everybody's on the same page. So you're a team now all the way from top to bottom. As opposed to I'm going to my team at work and that's it. So it's just really about return on investment, making sure that we are hitting our customers with everything we got. And I don't mean in a bad way, but we're delivering for our customers with everything we got. It's now efficiency, right? And that's it. That's about it.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, that's so powerful. I think it sort of nicely ties everything together because we've talked about a lot of things in the last half hour or so. And I think that at the end of the day, if you can get team alignment, just as you said, there's this ROI that can really shine through and it's a powerful thing for the whole organization to get right and to see the fruits of that work. So one last thing. Can you share your perspective on PI planning? I know you just mentioned safe a little bit for being the initial launchpad for team alignment.

Tony Camacho:

I love it. You have everybody in the room, you get to meet the people, you start making those connections to people. You start seeing them as human beings, not as this email or this text that you're sending across that you're going through there. So could I share one real experience from that? That's a PI planning house.

Hayley Rodd:

Please

Tony Camacho:

Do. So when I was working at Microsoft, I work for product quality online, which I know right now, considering the problems Microsoft is having, you're pretty much going now, "You suck Tony."

Hayley Rodd:

Never.

Tony Camacho:

No, we had our people distributed all over the world. And what was happening was that when I would talk to my short teams, I would ask them, and I was being facetious at a point because I just couldn't get the true answer was I would ask him, can you build the Twin Towers by tomorrow? And the answer would inadvertently be yes. Next day would come. Obviously you can't do the twin towers overnight. Ask them again, will you get it by next week? The answer would be yes. And they were feel for all of that. So when we had the PI planning, we did.

Microsoft went, got a hotel room in Seattle, a hotel room, a hotel in Seattle, rang our offshore teams. And then when they got to see me in person, they suddenly realized that I wasn't telling them I need the twin towers by tomorrow. I really wanted them to tell me when they could get me the twin towers. And I would defend it because they saw me right there in PI planning, defending, saying, "No, this is not possible." And when they saw me doing that, suddenly it was like the sky's open, sun's came through and now I was getting true answers. And what happened was it gave him an opportunity. And I realized that guys, you keep hearing me as sermon. It's always about the human beings, it's about those connections. It's about seeing the people. It's hard. It's two days of a lot of work. But once you get that work done, you come out of there a line, sharp direction. We know what our north is, now, do we know exactly where our true north is? As an agile team, we shouldn't, right? We should be refining it as we get there.

Find out exactly. But we know more or less where the direction is. We more or less know we're all on the same page. We all know that what we have to deliver to make this work out what other people have to deliver for us or we have to deliver for other people. So we suddenly feel part of something bigger. Bigger, right? We are now talking to the, if you're a developer or an engineer, software engineer, you're starting to see the power brokers and why they're doing this. You get the chance to ask them questions. What more could you ask for, right? I finally get to see the people who are making the decisions and I can ask them why. And they can tell me what the business value is and I can make the argument to them that maybe I don't think that's as much business value or we need to fix these things first before we can get that right and move our way on. What more could I ask for? I have an opportunity to make my case and I get to see the other people I'm working with. It becomes, when you're dealing with 125 people and you're on a train, you will become family.

We spend more hours sometimes with these people than we do with our family members at times. And it also gives you a sense of... Besides trust, a sense of a safety. You know it's not just you, it's all of us. So the saying that usually I see that the better executive say, I heard that in one PI planning, you fail, I fail. I fail, you fail. My job is to keep you employed. Your job is to keep me employed and to keep this company together. It's synergy, right? So it's amazing.

Hayley Rodd:

Beautiful.

Tony Camacho:

Yeah, I know. I'm all about the human. Sorry.

Hayley Rodd:

No, I am right there with you. I'm so glad that we got to have this conversation. We've talked a lot over the little while and every time we meet, I'm flabbergasted by your energy and your authenticity. And I think that this conversation that really shown true, so thank you Tony for taking the time to be with us. I'm going to say goodbye to all our listeners. I'm going to say another big thank you to Tony. So Tony is part of aligned agility and that is part of The Adaptivist Group. And yeah, thanks Tony for being here with us and thank you for everyone who has tuned in and listened to this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. Thank you.