Easy Agile Podcast Ep.24 Renae Craven, Agile Coach on team alignment and taking a leap out of your comfort zone.

"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.

"I absolutely loved my conversation with Sarah, she shared some amazing advice that I can't wait to put into practice!"

We spoke about the agile mindset beyond IT & development teams, how teams such as marketing and finance are starting to adopt the methodology and the benefits of doing so.

In celebration of international women's day, we discussed the future of women in agile, and steps we should be taking to support one another towards an inclusive and enabling environment.

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

‍

‍

‍

Transcript

Caitlin Mackie:

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast for 2021. Each episode, we talk with some of the most interesting people in tech, in agile, and in leading businesses around the world to share fresh perspectives and learn from the wealth of knowledge each guest has to share. I'm Caitlin and I'm the Graduate Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile and your host for this episode. We are thrilled to be back and have some amazing guests lined up this season. So to kick us off, I'm really excited to be talking with Sarah Hajipour.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sarah has so much rich and diverse experience in the agile space. She's an agile coach, a business transformation leader, a project and program manager, and more recently a podcast host and author. She's the jack of all trades and has been in the business agility space for over 10 years. In this episode, Sarah and I chat about the significance of goal setting and in particular goal setting in unpredictable times. We chat about her most recent projects, the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour and her book on Agile Case Studies.

Caitlin Mackie:

And of course with International Women's Day coming up, Sarah shared some amazing advice and her thoughts on the way forward for women in agile. She highlighted the importance of raising your hand and asking for help when you need it, as well as embracing qualities that aren't always traditionally thought of in leaders. It was such a thoughtful and insightful discussion. I got a lot of value out of our conversation and received some great advice, and I'm really looking forward to putting into practice. I know those listening will feel the same. Let's jump in.

Caitlin Mackie:

Sarah, thank you so much for joining us and spending some time with me today.

Sarah Hajipour:

Sure. Thanks for having me.

Caitlin Mackie:

So being our first guest for the year, I wanted to ask you about any new year's resolutions. Are you on track? Are you a believer in them or do you have a different type of goal setting process?

Sarah Hajipour:

That's a great question because we discussed this with a couple of friends and we realized new year's resolution is always going to be some kind of like a huge goal that we don't know if we're going to meet it or not. And thinking agile business agility and as an agile coach, I believe in the fact that let's have smaller goals and review them every three months, every six months and see where we at. Instead of looking into huge goals that we don't know what's going to happen because there's always a lot of uncertainties, even in our personal lives regarding the goals that we set up for ourselves. So yeah, that's how I look at it. Quarterly, quarterly personal goals. Let's say that.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Yeah, I think if the last year has taught us anything, I think we can all agree how unpredictable things can become. So those original goals.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's true.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. The original goals might have to take a couple of detours. So what would be your advice for setting career goals in uncertain times?

Sarah Hajipour:

That's a great question. For career goals I believe it really matters that you do something that you're interested in at least. If you still haven't found your passion, that's fine especially people like young professionals. It's okay if you haven't found your passion yet, but you can still follow a basically career path starting with things that you like to do, kind of you enjoy and you learn through the way.

Sarah Hajipour:

I was listening to one of the fashion icons on YouTube a couple of days ago and the interviewer was asking her, "What was your career path? How did you get to this place you are now?" And I loved what she told everybody, the students, and that was go and find a career, find a job and learn. You first need to learn a lot of skills before you decide what you're actually good at. You decide, you understand what's your weaknesses and your strengths, right? Because not all of us have these amazing ideas all the time and that's fine.

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm not very much pro-everybody has to be a visionary and everybody has to have like big, shiny goals and ideas. I think that's perfectly fine to just find the kind of job that or the kind of career path that you're comfortable with and then sometimes get out of your comfort zone and then discover as you go. Life is to explore, not to just push yourself on the corner all the time and just compare yourself with everybody else.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I love that. That's great advice. So you've recently added podcast host and author to your resume. Were they always career goals of yours?

Sarah Hajipour:

No, absolutely not. Well, I'm a little bit of an introverted person. So kind of sit in front of a camera even talking and having people hear me was always like, "Oh my God, I know I need to talk about this even with my teams and stuff," but I will do it only if it's necessary. What got me into podcasting was that I figured there's a lot of questions that I'm finding answers when I'm having conversations and meetups and in different groups, professional groups that I'm in. And I wanted other people to hear those as well. I talked to people who have great insights and have been way longer than me in the career. So I'm learning at the same time. And I wanted to share that learning with everybody else. That's the reason I'm doing the podcast.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I love that. And I think you kind of touched on this earlier, but I think being in the agile space, sometimes it can be a nice reminder for you to have a bit of a focus, but then reflect and understand sort of where to be more effective and adjust accordingly. I know you mentioned that with your career goals, do you think that those agile principles can be applied beyond the usual use case?

Sarah Hajipour:

I do. I believe that it's a very intuitive like agile is a very intuitive way of working and a way of thinking. That's why now it's expanded to other industries. They didn't stay with DevOps and IT and development. It is now a lot of different industries adopting this because it's a mindset change. And just not just using scrum. It's not just using Kanban. It is about understanding how to be able to reflect on and adapt to the faster changes that are happening in the world. And that also applies to our personal lives as well.

Sarah Hajipour:

I mean, I used to have set goals when I was 18-years-old, I'm going to be this at 30, but did they happen? No. In some aspects I achieved much, much more. And in some aspects I just changed my goal. I think the changes that are happening in the world that are more rapid, it demands us to change as well. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. So just to circle back a little bit there for your podcast just for our audience listening, what platforms can they access your podcast on?

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm on all of the main platforms. I'm in Apple podcasts. I'm in Spotify, I'm in Amazon. Most of the prominent podcast platforms.

Caitlin Mackie:

Awesome. And then just again, for our audience, your podcast is called the Agility Podcast with Sarah Hajipour.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's correct. Yes.

Caitlin Mackie:

Awesome. That's great. What do you think has been the most valuable lesson you've learned from your podcast so far? Is it something a guest has shared or something you've learned along the way?

Sarah Hajipour:

What I have learned, I have learned a lot from the people that I interview because I make sure that I talk to people who know more than me and have been in this field more than me, and in different industries. The main thing I would say is that agile business agility is about mindset rather than the tools and processes. And the fact that the world overall is moving towards a more human-centric way of working.So basically that's why I say agile is more intuitive rather than just following ABCD. Yeah. This is the core, the main thing that that I have learned from my interviewees.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, amazing. You've also started writing a book at the moment. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? How did that project begin?

Sarah Hajipour:

I actually love this project. In this book, the way I actually started writing the book was the book came first and then the podcast happened. I attend a lot of meetups. So for young professionals and even for professionals who are very much skilled in what they do, meetups are great place to meet and expand your network and learn from your peers. So I was attending all of these and I was learning from people. And then I decided I really want to have one-on-one conversations with them. And eventually I figured that a lot of the agile coaches, a lot of executive levels and a lot of consultants, they have a lot to share, but I didn't see any platform that kind of unifies that.

Sarah Hajipour:

I said, "Okay what are the learnings that we can share?" A lot of the mistakes because of the meetups groups, people feel safe to share and be vulnerable. And I was in multiple meetups so I heard very similar stories from people, the mistakes that have been repeated by a coach somewhere else. So I thought that'd be a great idea to put these in agile cases. So it's going to be Agile Case Studies and share it with everyone so. Especially the young coaches or stepping into the business, there's a lot of unknowns. I don't want them to be afraid. I don't want them to think, "Okay, this is a huge task." There's always going to be a lot of unknowns.

Sarah Hajipour:

Yes, I just see that. I kind of want to give that visibility that everybody else is experiencing the same, even if they have 25 years of experience, which is amazing, right?

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah.

Sarah Hajipour:

And that's the reason I started writing the book. So I interview with agile coaches and agile consultants that have been around at least five to 10 years and led agile transformation projects. And then from there, one of my interviewers once said, "You should do a podcast. I like to talk about this too." I'm like, "This is great" and that was like the week after I was like running around looking for tools to start my podcast.

Caitlin Mackie:

Oh, amazing. Sounds so good. What's the process been like? How have you found from ideation to where you are now, and then eventually when you're publishing it?

Sarah Hajipour:

For the podcast?

Caitlin Mackie:

For the book.

Sarah Hajipour:

For the book, so I go to these meetups and I listen to what's the coaches and the executives are sharing. The ones that are exciting for me are kind of a new for me, I will ask them, I connect with them over in LinkedIn and people are so open to sharing their experience with you. I've never had even one person said to tell me, "No, I don't want to talk about this or anything." People want to share. So I approach and I say, "Hey, I have a book outline or guideline. It's a two pager." I send it to them and I asked them if they are interested to talk to me about this and they let me know and then I'll select a time.

Sarah Hajipour:

And first session, it's like a half an hour. It's a kind of a brainstorming session. What are the key cases that they feel they want to share? Then we pick one and the session after that, they'll actually go through the case with me. I record it, draft it and then share it on Google Drive back and forth until we're happy with the outcome.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. Do you have a timeline at the moment? When can we expect to be able to read it?

Sarah Hajipour:

I'm looking forward to around the end of 2021, because it's 100 cases and I think that I'll have that.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Awesome. It's so exciting. Lots to look forward too.

Sarah Hajipour:

Thank you.

Caitlin Mackie:

Now, I also wanted to touch on International Women's Day is coming up and you've been in the agile space for a few years now. I assume you've probably witnessed a bit of change in this space. Have there been any pivotal moments that have sort of led to where you are today?

Sarah Hajipour:

Well, I think that a lot of women are being attracted to the agile practice, the different agile roles. And I have seen a lot more women as scrum masters, as product owners and as agile managers or agile project managers. A lot of different roles are being kind of flourishing in this area. And I've seen a lot of women contribute. One my goals actually in my book and on my podcast is to be able to find these women and talk to them regardless of where they are in the world. Yeah, I just feel that women can grow really in this area in the agile mindset, because women are more the collaboration piece.

Sarah Hajipour:

I can't tell we're less competitive. I haven't done research on that, but I have discussed it with people. Do you think that women are more collaborative rather than competitive? Because competition is great, but you need a lot of collaboration in agile and a lot of nurturing. You need to have that nurturing feeling, the nurturing mindset, that's what a scrum master does. One of the key characteristics of a scrum master has to be they have to have this nurturing perspective to bring it to the team.

Caitlin Mackie:

It's funny you mentioned because I actually have read some stuff myself about women typically possessing more of that open leadership style and that open leadership seems to complement the agile space really nicely so.

Sarah Hajipour:

That's exactly, yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. Yeah. That's great and I think there's lots that we can take from that, open leadership and the direct leadership. So men and women coming forward and finding that middle ground and yeah, I feel like agile is a great space to do that in?

Sarah Hajipour:

Yeah, I totally agree. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. So what drove your passion? I guess what made you want to pursue a career in this space?

Sarah Hajipour:

I love the collaboration piece and I love the vulnerability because like people are allowed to be vulnerable and in the teams that they work in. And it is a culture that is more human rather than super strict. We're not allowed to make mistakes. We're not allowed to be wrong. Leaders are supposed to know everything right off the bat. But in reality, that's not the case. Leaders have to feel comfortable not knowing a lot of things that are not even known. But a lot of times I always say we're in the unknown unknown zone. And in that zone, even leaders are not supposed to know everything.

Sarah Hajipour:

So a lot of it starts with what are the other things that I learned from my interviewees is that it all starts with the leadership. So the agile transformations, the leaders have to first create that atmosphere of collaboration and of trust and psychological safety among themselves. And then only then they can help with teams to be able to thrive in those kinds of atmospheres as well.

Sarah Hajipour:

Women in agile and women in leadership. I like to say and what I see is a lot of men and women both that are changing their perspective from process of tool-centric to people-centric because it works better for everyone. And I see change really happening in all industries. I see it in retail. I see it in construction, obviously in IT, in finance system. And there's men and women like hand-in-hand trying to kind of embrace this way of thinking and this way of working.

Sarah Hajipour:

And women are being more comfortable to grow and kind of raise their hand and say, "Hey, I can make each page. I can take this role" because they understand because they bring that psychological safety that women for ages, it has been a workplace has been something that was mostly men and we're gradually getting into the workforce or the business world as females. So that psychological safety has allowed women to raise their hand and grow in different roles and leadership roles obviously.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. Has there been any resources or networks, things like that that have helped you along your journey?

Sarah Hajipour:

Learning from everybody else like creating a network, expanding my network to kind of coming in and saying, "Hey, I don't know. I want to know." There is all of these amazing things that are happening. I like to understand how this works and I remember it was one of these founders. Who's the founder of Apple? Oh my God. Don't tell me.

Caitlin Mackie:

Steve Jobs.

Sarah Hajipour:

I love this quote from Steve Jobs that says, "There has never been a time where I asked for help and people didn't help me." So just raise your hand and say, "I need help." And what does that help that I need? I need to know about this. What does it mean? What does scrum mean to you? How does it work in your industry? How does it work? And really I think that was the key for me up until now to connect with people and just be vulnerable and let them teach me.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I think my next question would be about how do we amplify that diverse and empowered community of women and our job in increasing the representation of women in agile? And yeah, what do you think is key to achieve a supportive and enabling environment?

Sarah Hajipour:

What I have seen and realized is that women really need to be and are being more supportive of each other. There was a study in HBR, Harvard Business Review in 2016 that said, "If there is only one woman in the pool of the interviewees, there's a zero chance for that woman to get the job, even if she's the best." So this calls for not which women are actually working great on that. Not being the queen bee, but also engaging and including other women. Because the more women in different roles, the more we are going to be receptive in those communities. That I think is a key that we understand that and support each other, help each other, build the communities around it.

Sarah Hajipour:

There is a community Women in Agile that is in different cities and different parts of the world that I'm a member of as well doing a great job. It's not just women actually in those groups. I see men participating as well, but it's predominantly women are trying to give each other insights from all aspects of the agile practices, the agile ways of working and stuff. Yeah.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. So I think what's the way forward? I guess what's your prediction for women in agile? What do we need to do to continue that momentum?

Sarah Hajipour:

I think women will do great in anything and everything they put their minds in, regardless. We're human bottom line and we all have this potential to be able to grow in whatever we put our mind and heart on, regardless of our gender. So I would love for women to kind of be able to get that holistic perspective that regardless of their gender, they can do anything and they are, we are.

Sarah Hajipour:

We read about other women who have been successful in the fields of business that you felt that probably women can't do like women astronauts. There are women physicists. Women engineering leads and all of these that have been less common. The world is changing for the better and that's great.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love that

Sarah Hajipour:

It's a great time to be alive.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. That's exciting. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah Hajipour:

Yes.

Caitlin Mackie:

Yeah. I definitely think that we are beginning to see a huge increase and the visibility of female role models across so many industries. So it's great to have that. But Sarah, this has been such a great conversation. I wanted to finish with a final question for you and that was if you could give one piece of advice to women just starting their career in their industry, what would it be?

Sarah Hajipour:

I would say maybe the best advice that I can give is that we do have the power. And we need to look, number one, beyond gender and kind of have that belief that we can do anything that we want. And second is don't be shy to open up and build your community like build a community, join a community of agile practitioners of agile coaches, even people, specifically people who know more than you.

Sarah Hajipour:

And don't be afraid to ask help. Don't be afraid to say, "Hey, I'm new to this and I love to learn from you guys." Don't be afraid to put yourself out there and you're going to learn a lot that you wouldn't even expect. Just like you're going to get the result so you're going to hear things beyond what you've expected. There's a lot to human potential that could be unleashed when you just put yourself out there and let others contribute to your growth.

Caitlin Mackie:

That's amazing. That's great advice, Sarah. Loved every minute of our conversation. So thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Sarah Hajipour:

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

"It was great chat about Kate's experience working in an agile environment, and learning what artificial intelligence looks like at Optus"

Kate shares her experience of an agile transformation at Optus and the incredible impact it has had on the company. Delivering faster & enabling a sense of ownership & accountability amongst teams.

Kate also shares some great advice from embracing hybrid roles throughout her career, a gentle reminder to never put limits on yourself and adopting a “no risk no return” mentality.

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

‍

Transcript

Hayley Rodd:

Well, thank you for joining us here on the Easy Agile Podcast. Here in Wollongong things are a little different from when we last had a chat. We've since been put into lockdown as part of the Greater Sydney region, but I'm delighted to bring you this podcast from here in Wollongong. And also it maybe helps ease some of those lockdown blues that you might be suffering if you're in the same part of the world as I am today or if you're in another part of the world that is maybe in the same predicament that we find ourselves here in Wollongong in. So, I'd like to introduce myself. So my name is Hayley Rodd and I am the product marketing manager or one of the product marketing managers here at Easy Agile. And I have a great guest today, an old friend of mine but before we kick off with the podcast, I'd like to say any acknowledgement of country.

Hayley Rodd:

So here at Easy Agile, we acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land where we work and we live. We celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal people and their ongoing cultures and connections to the land and waters of New South Wales. We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their contribution to the development of this tool. And now, to our guest, Kate Brodie. Kate is an old friend of mine from here in The Ngong or Wollongong if you're not from this region. And has been very successful in her pursuit of a career in technology. So a little bit about Kate. Katie is the director of digital AI and CCAI programs at Optus. Kate is now based in Sydney, Australia and is a leader in AI, digital and new emerging technology. Katie is responsible for Optus's AI, digital, portfolio and chapter working in an agile environment every day today.

Hayley Rodd:

Kate leads the development of new products to take to market and scale routines in an agile environment advocating for build, measure, learn culture. Most recently, Kate has been in charge of leading an enterprise first to market API consulting chatbox in Australia, compatible with Google Home. So obviously Kate is an extremely impressive person and I wanted to chat to her today about her career and also her role in the Agile team. But beyond that, I wanted to touch on women in technology and leadership, something that Kate has spoken about recently with Vogue Australia. So, thanks so much to Kate for joining us today. And I can't wait to share some of the advice from the lessons that Kate has learned through her career. Thank you so much for joining me today, Kate. It's really wonderful to see you. So could you tell me a bit about, I guess what your day-to-day looks like when you're at the office?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, thank you for having me. My day-to-day is quite varied. I would say that in my role, I'm very lucky to work with lots of different people, engineers, designers, business people, marketers and more recently a lot of different partners including Google. So, a lot of my day is working between different groups, strategically thinking about how we're going to continue to create a particular vision and future together for our customers. And then parts of it are related more to the technology and how we're ensuring that we've got our teams performing at a level that will allow us to meet those goals. And yeah, day-to-day, I'm talking to a lot of different.

Hayley Rodd:

So, when we were chatting just before we started recording, you were telling me a little bit about your start in marketing and now you've moved over to technology, can you tell me a little bit about how you don't want people to feel pigeonholed, I guess in their careers or in their career path?

Kate Brodie:

Yeah, absolutely. I really believe that anyone can get into anything if they put the effort behind it. And so I really think that no one should ever put limits on themselves. For me, it was partly because I was surrounded by really great people who supported me in trying lots of different things. And I think the way in which you build your confidence and start to move between different disciplines is by getting your hands dirty and just having a crack. So, I think it's important particularly and in this day and age for people to be open and not really put strong defined titles on themselves so that they do have a sense of freedom to kind of move around and try different roles because ultimately what is available today is probably going to look very different in 30 years time so... Yeah.

Hayley Rodd:

And do you still consider yourself a marketer or are you something, hybrid? What are you now?

Kate Brodie:

I would say that I am a technologist. I think that it requires the ability to have a bit of a marketing brain because you need to know how you're going to apply it in order to make a real impact, whether that's for customers, employees or commercially. But definitely with a strong kind of technology digital focus now, I wouldn't say that I would be purely seen as a marketer these days, but definitely it's about having that broad skill set and I think marketing's critical to being able to create great products.

Hayley Rodd:

Perfect. So, when I think of AI, I think of self-driving cars, someone who is very new to the technology industry myself. Could you unpack, I guess what AI means for Optus?

Kate Brodie:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I think that what you've just said is shared by many. Artificial intelligence is just such a broad concept and it really is related to creating intelligent machines that can ultimately perform tasks or imitate behavior that we might consider human life. And so that can range from really narrow experiences like reading a brochure in a different language using AI to kind of rate it in the language that you can understand to kind of these macro experiences like you've just described with self-driving cars and completely changing the way that we travel. So, I think that AI is such a broad term where it will mean different things for different groups. At Optus, it's about creating lasting customer relationships with people and allowing them to connect with others. And so where we use AI in a variety of different places, it can be in our products themselves.

Kate Brodie:

So for instance, we just recently launched a really amazing product called Call Translate. And that's where in the call you can actually interact with people in different languages on that same phone call so breaking down those communication barriers that have existed before. So that's super exciting. And then there's other places where we're using it, for instance in our sales and service functions that we can more easily automate the simple tasks and give more time to our people to grow and create those types of relationships with our customers. So, we're using artificial intelligence in many different ways, but I think it's really exciting in everything that we do, it's more driven towards how can we create a better customer experience. It's not about the technology in of itself, which is what I really like about it.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Nice. And it sounds like that that call translation would just... Could have so many applications and have... I'm even just thinking about in this COVID circumstance we... You're trying to get a message across to people to stay home and all those sorts of things like... Wow. Okay.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And there are some beautiful stories of people who are not able to go home with their young kids, travel home to their countries where their families are. And so they can have the grandkids talking to the grandparents more easily as they are learning different languages. So, it's really cool.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. That's beautiful. So, in your title, there is, I, maybe assume it's an abbreviation, but it's somebody that says CCAI. Could you tell me what that is?

Kate Brodie:

CCAI stands for Contact Center Artificial Intelligence and it's actually a program of work that is used increasingly by different industries and refers to a particular product that Google is working with companies on. And so it's about re-imagining your contact center. So traditionally today banks, telecommunications companies, big organizations with lots of customers have a lot of customers that contact us regularly. And so this is a way of actually, how do we use AI to increasingly get to a point where you don't need to reach out to us but instead we're reaching out to you to better optimize your experiences with us. So, that's a little bit more of a program piece that's attached to my title at the moment.

Hayley Rodd:

Wonderful. So, prior to your current role, we're just going to get into the Agile space, which I know you seem extremely excited about at Optus and it's had some, I guess will be changes in the... Or it has some... Helped some massive changes at Optus. Before your current role what was your experience with that job?

Kate Brodie:

My current role and my experience with Agile has evolved. So, a couple of years ago, we rolled out Agile at a very large scale across our enterprise. So previously we had been using Agile in our IT teams for software development, but we actually started to roll out agile for product development. And I originally started as a product owner. So I was given a goal around creating a chatbot from scratch that would be supporting our teams. And with that, our Agile transformation involved breaking down the silos of divisions. So functional divisions. We started to merge into cross-functional squads and our squad was given the autonomy and the ownership to take on a particular initiative, and in my case, it was chatbot. And so I've actually experienced multiple roles within Agile including as a product owner and as a chapter lead, which was where I looked after a particular craft of people who run across multiple squads in Agile.

Kate Brodie:

And now more recently, I've got squads that are working within my area to produce these products and these outcomes for us. My experience with Agile has been brilliant. The amount of impact that it's had on our company is incredible. So, over the last couple of years, and this is pre COVID, we had a big target around moving towards a really digital led experience. And so we've seen our customers who used to choose digital around six...

Kate Brodie:

Around 65% of our customers would choose digital a couple of years ago and now it's more like 85%. So these big swings have come as a result of, I think, breaking down those silos and working in a more Agile way. Just on that I think what I like about Agile is that it's not about showcases and stand ups, it's actually about the culture that Agile allows for. So I think it allows for a lot more ideas and innovation because you have this mix of people who didn't traditionally sit with one another being together. And then also you can just deliver faster because you can cut through a lot of noise by working together. And the last piece I think is definitely that ownership and accountability for driving an outcome as opposed to delivering a piece of the puzzle, I think, yeah, Agile's been massive for us.

Hayley Rodd:

So, and you said that it was a big roll out across the organization. So does that mean that everyone within Optus works within an Agile framework or is there still sections that I guess don't employ Agile.

Kate Brodie:

There are areas of the business that aren't completely agile at this point in time. And I think they are areas of the business that makes sense. So sometimes in research and the like, you need to have a bit more freedom to sit back and ideate, although they would adopt principles of Agile so that they time box ideas and the like. From a delivery perspective, most of the organization has transformed into Agile delivery.

Hayley Rodd:

Wow. So it sounds like your customers would be seeing a lot of value from the organization transforming to Agile. You said before that there was a lot of people in your life who allowed you to do things you felt confident in your ability because I guess they helped you get there. So, has there been a mentor that I guess you look back on in your career or even now that has had an impact on where you are?

Kate Brodie:

I think that I've had a lot of different people who have been my mentor at different stages and who I would call upon now. So, I like to probably not have one mentor, but sort of look at the variety of people and their different skills and take a little bit of this, take a little bit of that, learn from this person on a particular area. There have definitely been some people who stand out. And so, early on one of the things that was really useful for me was being supported by a particular general manager who basically sort of pushed me into digital and technology and sort of, I was just very fortunate that he believed in me and said, "Now, you can run this area." I had never really been exposed to it. This is 10 years ago when digital was still sort of seen as more of a complimentary area as opposed to core, to a business.

Kate Brodie:

And by him supporting me in having a go at everything that's been... That's actually one of the most pivotal moments I would say in my career very early on that that's really led the way for me to increasingly get into the area that I'm in today. And along the way, obviously, there's been many people who have made a huge contribution to where I'm at and they're both in my career, but also outside. So, people that you play sport with people that you just have, that you share different stories with, I think that often you take a little bit from everyone and hopefully you give back something to those people too.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah, I'm sure you do. So, is there any... Looking back on all those people that you've had throughout your life who have helped you get to where you are, is there a piece of advice that might have stuck with you that you could share with us?

Kate Brodie:

There's lots of different advice. I think one of them is, no risk no return. I really do think that you have to have a crack, you have to put yourself out there. The things that always been the most satisfying experiences have been by having a go at something that I hadn't done before. So I think no risk no return is something that I definitely subscribe to. And then in terms of some practical advice, particularly as a female, I think in your career, something called the assumptive close, which is a sales technique, around almost not asking if someone would like something but sort of implying that they would. I actually would say that I use that technique not to necessarily directly sell to someone, but in everything that I do and I would really encourage most people to use it. It was some early feedback in my career and it's been quite useful along the way.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. [inaudible 00:18:51] after working in real estate for a little while, I think a lot of real estate agents also assume the sale. So, and it just it... I think it can help with the confidence and going in there and I guess almost putting yourself in a position of power in the conversation when you assume you've got this in the bag. So yeah, it probably comes naturally to some people more than others, myself included, but I would struggle with that, but that's a really good piece of advice. So yeah, I'm sure that it will be helpful for a lot of people who are listening to the podcast now. So what about... What's your proudest moment as a leader there at Optus so far? I know that you're in Vogue recently. That's an amazing moment. And as a person who's known you for a really long time, that was a proud moment for me to see someone that I'd known do that, but for you, what's the proud moment?

Kate Brodie:

[inaudible 00:19:58] I think probably my proudest moment is when I've launched something large. So recently we launched a large piece of technology that will change the experience for our customers, but it wasn't as much the launch as it was looking around me and seeing the people that are there with me doing it. And there are quite a few amazing people that I get to work with. And having sort of started with a few of them in the early days, a few years ago, where we were sort of spitballing ideas and we had no products to now having large products that make a real impact to Australian consumers and to our business. It's those moments where it's actually the team around you that it... I'm most proud of. It's just the high engagement and the drive and the culture that we've created where people want to work in this area and we all enjoy creating these experiences together. So I think definitely I'm most proud of the team culture and environment that we've set.

Hayley Rodd:

Yeah. Sounds amazing. We're lucky enough here at Easy Agile to have, I guess the same... A culture that you can be proud of as well, so, I can understand how it can be something that makes a huge impact every day. So, we're getting close to the end of our time together, but again, I guess I wanted to touch on a bit of gender diversity. So how does gender diversity benefit technology companies? What do you think?

Kate Brodie:

I think diversity in general is going to benefit any business and particularly technology businesses, because it's imperative that you have a representation of the population and the people that will use your technology and the experiences that you're trying to create. So I think that it's only by ensuring that we are tapping into the entire talent pool, that we can represent people and represent customers, but also we're going to get the best ideas. And so that's gender diversity but also culturally and in every sort of facet, the more that we can tap into the entire talent pool, the more we'll create better experiences, better technology, solve more of the world's problems and capture more opportunities.

Hayley Rodd:

Mm. Fantastic. And last question, what advice would you give a young woman hoping to enter the technology industry or a technology company?

Kate Brodie:

I would say go for it. I would say don't ever put limits on yourself and speak up, learn as much as you can and get your hands dirty because it's through that kind of confidence... Oh, sorry. It's through working with lots of different people and creating things with people from scratch that you'll gain your confidence as well. And always ask, don't sit there waiting for someone to sort of tap you on the shoulder, ask for that new opportunity, ask for the salary increase, ask, it won't hurt. I promise.

Hayley Rodd:

That's a good advice. What's the worst they could say?

Kate Brodie:

No, exactly.

Hayley Rodd:

No, yeah.

Kate Brodie:

Yeah. And that's why.

Hayley Rodd:

Or they might say yes. And then that's awesome too. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Kate, for your time. That was really wonderful. It was wonderful to catch up, but it was also wonderful to hear from someone who's so young in their career, has... But has also done so much and who has reached some amazing goals, has a team behind them. And I think that there's so many people who will watch this, myself included, who will learn a lot from you. So I really appreciate your time. Thank you.

‍