Easy Agile Podcast Ep.27 Inclusive leadership

"I had an inspiring conversation with Renae around the benefits of leaping out of your comfort zone and aligning team behaviour " - Chloe Hall

Chloe Hall- Marketing Coordinator at Easy Agile is joined by Renae Craven - Agile Coach, Agile Trainer, Scrum Master Coach and QLD Chapter Local Leader at Women in Agile.

Join Renae Craven and Chloe Hall as they discuss:

• Renae’s journey to becoming an Agile Coach and Agile Trainer
• Taking a leap out of your comfort zone
• The importance of taking time to gather feedback and reflect
• Building a team environment where everyone feels safe to contribute
• Aligning team behaviour and how prioritising learning impacts team delivery
• Why sitting all day is bad for you and how to bring movement into your work routine
• + more

Transcript

Chloe Hall:

Hello and welcome back to the Easy Agile Podcast. I'm Chloe, Marketing coordinator at Easy Agile, and I'll be your host for today's episode. Before we begin, we'd like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land from which we broadcast today, the people of the Dhuwal speaking country. We pay our respects to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that same respect to all Aboriginal Torres Strait Islanders and First Nations people joining us today. Today we have a very exciting episode for you. We will be speaking to Renae Craven. Renae is an Agile coach, Agile trainer, scrum master coach, BASI Pilates instructor, and runs her own Pilate Studio.

Renee is also a chapter local leader at Women in Agile Brisbane and is the host of the podcast The Leader's Playlist alongside David Clifford. Renae's passion in life is to help people to be a better version of themselves by raising your awareness of areas they wish or need to improve them and to support them in their learning and growth through these areas. According to Renae, coaching is not about telling people what to do. It is about questions to allow them to dig deeper, uncovering realizations and their desire for change. Welcome to the podcast, Renae. Thank you so much for coming today. Really appreciate it and very excited to unpack your story, your journey, and all the success you have achieved, which is amazing. How are you today anyways?

Renae Craven:

I'm all, I'm good. Thank you, Chloe. It's Friday, so I'm always a bit wrecked on a Friday. Looking forward to sleeping in on the weekends and things like that. So yeah, Friday I'm already, always a little bit dreary, but other than that I'm fine.

Chloe Hall:

Well, that's good. Friday afternoon definitely can always do that to you. I'm very pumped for a sleep in as well. I think let's just get straight into it. So some of that I wanted to start was I just want to unpack you as a person, Renae, and kind of your story, who is Renae and the journey you've taken to become so successful today. So if you wanted to provide a little bit of background about yourself.

Renae Craven:

How far back do I go? So I did IT at uni, Information Technology at uni. So I started my career out as a graduate developer, software developer, pretty crap one at that.

Chloe Hall:

Surely not, I don't agree with that. I can't see it.

Renae Craven:

I knew enough to get by, but it was definitely not going to be something that I was going to do for the rest of my life. But back then I was 20 and kind of just was doing things that you were supposed to do when you grow up. You're supposed to go to school and you're supposed to do well in grade 12 and go to uni and get a degree and then get a job.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

So yeah, I ticked all those boxes and found myself with a degree in a job in a good organization. And I was in that development job for a couple of years and then I kind of moved more into team leadership and I was a team leader for a while and then I became a scrum master back in 2010. So that was when I discovered Agile.

Chloe Hall:

Okay. Yup.

Renae Craven:

And I think the rest is kind of history. So when I discovered Agile, things started to make more sense to me. Talking to people, having teams, working together, collaborating together, solving problems together, getting multiple brains onto a problem. That kind of thing was one thing that I never made sense to me when I was a grad straight out of uni. And I'm like, "What do you mean?" Because even during my university, I was a little bit different and I was remote. I did university remotely years ago and with a group of four others, there were four others, it was a group of five. We did everything together, we did all our group assignments, we studied together, we ate lunch together, we just kind of did.

Chloe Hall:

So with the exact same group?

Renae Craven:

Yeah. All the way through uni. I went from that kind of group setting to working and more of an individual on my own like if I've sat in a cubicle with walls that were higher than me, I didn't have to speak to anyone else if I didn't want to. And that never really sat well with me. It was never kind of who I was. So when Agile was, Scrum specifically was here's all these people we're going to throw together in a team and here's all of the problems and you work out together how you're going to solve it.

Someone's not going to tell you what to do or how to solve it, you've got to figure it out as a team, it was a much more, cool this is what makes sense, this works better. Why wasn't it always like this? So yeah, that's kind of where my Agile journey started and it kind of progressed as I did scrum mastering for quite a few years in different organizations, different scenarios, different contexts. And then I guess I was able to comfortably call myself an Agile coach I would say maybe 5, 6 years ago. I mean, there's nothing really that you can do that you go tick, Oh, I'm an Agile coach now.

Chloe Hall:

There's no kind of straightforward degree or certification.

Renae Craven:

No, it's really just experience. And I had experience around and people were telling me, "You can call yourself a coach, an Agile coach now, you've got plenty of experience". I'm like, "Yeah, but I feel like there's so much more that I need to know or that I could learn". So I don't really feel comfortable. But I was working for a consultancy, so that was just how I was being marketed anyway. So that was kind of 5, 6, 7 years ago that that started to happen. And then I do other things as well, like Agile training. I love training people, I run training courses, do the coaching as well. And then I've got my Pilates as well.

Chloe Hall:

Just an all rounder, a lot going on, that's for sure. I think as well, I just want to unpack, you had that transition when you were a graduate developer and you found it quite isolating. And then you came into this concept of Agile when you are working in teams. Was it when you started doing that Agile, did that kind of spike like a passion, a purpose of yours and that's what led you down that Agile training, Agile coaching road?

Renae Craven:

I think, I mean purpose, I still don't know if I know what my purpose is in life. Passion. I think what it helped me understand about myself is where some of my strengths were. And my strengths aligned with what was needed to be a scrum master and a coach later on. So the ability to facilitate, that's a big part of being a scrum master, a big part of being one of the key things about being a coach. And that was just something that I was kind of naturally able to do, but I didn't know until I started doing it, if that kind of makes sense.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I feel like, isn't that always the way, It's like you don't know something or you don't really know your strengths until you just step into it. You've really got to get out of your comfort zone and just try new things, experience new things. Otherwise, you're never going to know.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, exactly. So yeah, can't trying to create that equal participation in a room or in a workshop from a facilitation and facilitating a group of people from different walks of life to an outcome and just letting it kind of flow and let the conversations flow. But still, you've got to get to this outcome by the end of the day or end of the workshop. That was something that I was naturally able to do. And I mean, my first workshop, how I facilitated that, I don't even remember what it was, but I'm sure how I facilitate now is very, very different. But it was still something that I loved doing, that I enjoyed doing. And the training part of it, it's funny because at school I used to hate public speaking. I used to hate.

Chloe Hall:

You sound like me.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. All of that, how I used to get up in English and do an oral exam and things like that. I hated all of that stuff. I was very happy to just hide in the background and never answer a question or never cause any trouble or be disruptive or whatever. Except in maths class I was a little bit disruptive in math class.

Chloe Hall:

I am resonating so much with you right now because I was literally the exact same. And I've always had a bit of a passion for math. So in maths I was super outgoing, would ask so many questions. But in English my biggest fear was public speaking. I just could not stand up for the life of me. It was the worst. I was always so nervous, everything about it. And I think that's really interesting to see how far you've come today from what you thought back then. Was there any type of practices, lots of work that you had to do on yourself to get to this point today?

Renae Craven:

I think similar to what you said before, you got to get out of your comfort zone. And I think, especially early on in my career, that being pushed out of my comfort zone. There's a few leaders that I was working for at the time that, well a handful of people that over the years have pushed me out of my comfort zone. And in the earlier days where I wouldn't have done that for myself. So doing that for me or I didn't really have a choice because I was a good girl and I followed orders back then. It was just something that I went, "Oh okay, well that's cool". I'm glad in hindsight, I'm glad he did that because I wouldn't be where I am right now if I wasn't thrown into the pilot team, the pilot agile team. So yeah, there's things like that where I've been pushed into my comfort zone and just had a go and found out that, oh, it wasn't so bad after all.

Maybe I could do that again. And then you start to build your own kind of resilience, you go, well I've did this before so that's not much harder. I reckon I could do that. Or it's kind of thinking about it like that, but it's also changing. It was shifting my mindset to be you've got to get out of your comfort zone, you've got to screw up to learn. The way that it was at school where you got rewarded for being correct, you got rewarded for doing the right thing. And that's not how I learn. That's not how a lot of people learn. You have to screw up to then go.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

Okay, well next time I do that I'll do this instead.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely.

Renae Craven:

Or getting that feedback of how you did this, well next time maybe you could do this or whatever it is. Just getting that feedback. Whereas, I never got any of that at school. It was always Renae's perfect angel child, whatever it was.

Chloe Hall:

Still, nice though, but yeah.

Renae Craven:

Nice for the parents. Can we have more of Renae's in our class, nice for mom and dad. But in hindsight, it didn't really do much for setting me up for how.

Chloe Hall:

For reality.

Renae Craven:

Yeah

Chloe Hall:

Really.

Renae Craven:

Exactly.

Chloe Hall:

Especially because I've recently gone through that transition from graduating uni into a full time job and working for Easy Agile, I'm always being pushed out of my comfort zone in a good way. Everyone's so supportive, they're always like, "Oh Chloe, try this, try that". And I'm just like, "okay, yep, I can do it". And if it doesn't go amazingly well that's okay. I've learned something and I can do it better next time.

Renae Craven:

Yeah.

Chloe Hall:

You can't just sit in your comfort zone forever, you don't get that feeling of when you do something outside of your comfort zone, you just feel so good after and you're like, oh, prove to myself I can do this.

Renae Craven:

Yep. And I think the big part of that is acknowledging the learning is sitting down. So one of the things we do, I do as a coach is one of the key times for a team or an individual to learn is to actually sit down and reflect back and then what was good, what was bad, and what am I going to do differently the next time. And I coach teams to do that, but I have to do that myself as well. So kind of realizing that as a practice, that's something that I have to do is sit down and when I do these things I would need to gather feedback and then I have to sit down and reflect on how it went. What I think I can do better or do differently the next time around I do something like this so that I am also myself improving in the things that I do. So it's really having that time and that practice to learn to sit down and what did I learn?

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, I do. And I agree with that. You need to take the time to understand, reflect, realize what you have learnt. Otherwise, life is so busy and you just keep going and going and going and you can just completely forget and it's good to take that moment. I really like how that's something that you do in your Agile coaching as well. What else do you do when you're coaching teams? What other elements are there?

Renae Craven:

Some of the stuff I've already spoken about, having that equal, trying to get that equal participation, equal voice. Trying to, the buzzword is psychological safety, but trying to make, trying to build an environment for a team where everyone feels safe to ask a question or to voice their opinion or whatever it is. And when we've come from, as a coach, what we're doing is usually coaching teams, people, organizations, through a shift from a certain way of working to an Agile way of working. And that means that the whole telling people what to do and when to do it and how to do it is gone. That's gone. And now you want to build that capability within the team itself. So creating that safe space so that the

team can ask questions and understand what they have to do so that they can collectively deliver something as opposed to someone just telling them what to do.

So it's using your brain, using the collective group brain as well, instead of just having, not using your brain really, just waiting to be told what to do and then you'll know what to do, you just do it. But collectively solving a problem together as a team and then figuring out as a team how we're going to solve that or how are we going to deliver that is something that is quite, that's the bit I love as a coach, working with teams, building that kind of environment where they do feel safe to ask the dumb questions and things like that.

Chloe Hall:

And not have to be like, I think this is a silly question, but you definitely want to remove that.

Renae Craven:

And I think the other part is the learning still, it's exactly the same. It's taking the focus, trying to get the focus off, we must deliver and then we'll do some learning stuff if we get time trying to flip that around so that your, "No, no, no, you need to learn in order to get better at delivery". So take that focus, because a lot of teams will just say, we've got all these deadlines, all of this delivery pressure, we have to get this stuff done. We don't have time to sit down and think about what we've learned or how we can get better as a team. They're never going to get better as a team if they just keep in this endless delivery cycle. Making the same kind of time wasting things over and over and over again. So it's kind of flipping the mindsets of the teams as well to go, "No, hang on, we need to do this otherwise we're not going to get better as a team".

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely. And I think that's where the Agile retrospective fits in perfectly. And I know I actually just came out of my retrospective with my team and we do that weekly and it's so good to come out of that with action items too. And it's like, okay, next week this is how we're going to get better. This is how we're going to advance, this is our focus and there's also no hidden problems because it comes up every Friday, we talk about it. So you're not going into Monday the next week with a grudge or you're annoyed about something with the workflow of the team. You've addressed it, you've left it in the last week, you've brought the action with you obviously, and hopefully it's going to get better from there.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, absolutely. And that's the key. It's the whatever we've decided in our retrospective of what we're going to do differently, we're doing that differently the next day or Monday in your case. It's not something we talk about and then we just kind of ignore it and we just talk about it again in two weeks time or whatever it is. It's the putting into practice the decisions you make as a team and those retrospectives all of the time. They're not massive actions either. They're just little tweaks here and there.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, there's small things.

Renae Craven:

They just kind of build up over time.

Chloe Hall:

And that's the thing, it's like if you do it on a regular occurrence, they are small things, but if you are not doing it regularly, then that's when they build up and they become big things, big problems and massive blockers within the team as well.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, absolutely.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. So I'm wondering too, Renae, when you do your Agile coaching and your Agile training, so you do that on an individual basis as well as teams. Do you think there's an aspect of the mindset, the agile mindset there, and does each individual need to come to work with that agile mindset for the team to be able to flow better?

Renae Craven:

Mindsets. If everyone had the same mindset then it would be robots or.

Chloe Hall:

True.

Renae Craven:

The world would be very boring.

Chloe Hall:

Very good point.

Renae Craven:

I think that's a bit, for me when I think about a team, an agile team, as long as there's some alignment on how the team behaves, why they exist, what their purpose is and how they treat each other and how they solve problems together, then the mindsets of the individuals within that team, they can be different. And that's fine as long as there's that agreement amongst everyone of this is how we are going to behave. I come up against people all the time who have been forced to work in this agile way. So their mindset's definitely not in the mindset that you need for an agile team, but if they're in an agile team and there's people in that team that have got the mindset or the behaviors that you need to have in order to deliver in an agile way, over time it kind of balances out.

And over time those the mindsets will start to shift as well as they see how other people in their team are behaving, how their leaders are behaving, things like that. So I kind of always think of it as more of a behavioral thing than a mindset thing. How do we make decisions, like I said, how do we treat each other, how do we approach problems, who are our customers, all of that sort of stuff. It's more that behavior that I like to, instead of me thinking, oh, they don't have the mindset, they don't have the mindset, I just kind of look at how they behave. Because at the end of the day, you can't force that

mindset. But as a team, when they start humming to working together as a team, they're going to be delivering what they need to deliver. And they all just, that's the whole cross-functional part of it. You're bringing together different minds, different backgrounds, different experiences, different skills, all of that stuff.

Chloe Hall:

Definitely.

Renae Craven:

You're putting them in a team together so that they can use their skills. They're all those different pieces to solve these problems.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, no, definitely. I think the way people behave, it has a lot to do with it as well. And I think on that too, you can be in the right type of mindset, you can behave in the right way. And that has a lot to do with the way you're showing up at work as well. It's the way you come to work. If you're had a bad morning, then that's going to impact how you are that day. Or if you've waking up that morning and you have kind of a set morning routine that gets you into that good routine for the day, that good mindset and behavior, then it can help a lot. And I think as well, this is something I'd love to chat to you about too, because you've got the background of Pilates, you're in your own studio and you've been a instructor for how many years now?

Renae Craven:

It'll be a year and a half since I qualified.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. Nice. Yeah, so I'm also an instructor. I've been teaching I think for about six months now. But I'm just wondering too, so you've got your two passions, Pilates studio owner and then also an Agile coach. Is there that element of setting yourself up for the day in the morning, do you think if someone, they meditate have the type of morning routine they exercise, can they behave better at work essentially? What are your thoughts on that?

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I think definitely the better you feel in yourself or the way feel within yourself, definitely has a direct correlation to how you come across how you behave at work. So yeah, if you've had a rushed morning or a traffic was crap on the way to work or whatever it is, then definitely you're going to be quite wound up by the time you get to work.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely.

Renae Craven:

It's going to impact the way that you respond to questions or respond to people or respond to your team or whatever it is. Yeah, absolutely. But myself, I don't really have a set routine in the morning. I go to gym but I don't go to gym every day. But the mornings that I do go to gym, I never feel like going because no, I just want to sleep.

Chloe Hall:

It's early. Yeah.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. But I have to go in the morning or I won't go to gym. Gym's something that, it's a bit of a love hate relationship. I know I have to do it, but I don't like doing it.

Chloe Hall:

Not even after? That feeling after?

Renae Craven:

Afterwards is good. It was like, but from, oh thank God that's done.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah.

Renae Craven:

Tick I'm done for the day.

Chloe Hall:

Out of the way.

Renae Craven:

If it was in the afternoon, if I went to gym in the afternoon I wouldn't go. It would just be, "Nah, it's too hard or I can't be bothered, I'm too tired". So getting up first thing in the morning, I set my alarm 15 minutes before my gym class starts.

Chloe Hall:

Wow. That is effort.

Renae Craven:

I know.

Chloe Hall:

That is good.

Renae Craven:

I race to get there but I have all my clothes set out the night before so I don't even have to think. I just get out of bed, I put my clothes on and I get in the car and I drive to the gym and.

Chloe Hall:

I do the same thing.

Renae Craven:

I do my class, I haven't had time to talk myself out of it just yet. But afterwards it's like, oh yes, excellent. That's done for the day. And yeah, it is nice to know that you have done that for the day as you start your work day as well. So on my gym days, that's probably my routine to get myself ready for work. But other days they're a little bit more relaxed I guess. I think if anything having a coffee is my, I cannot deal with the world without coffee. So whether I'm at home or I'm in the office, the first thing I'll do is if I get to the office I'll get a coffee on the way in. So I'm drinking coffee as I walk into the office. So yeah, I guess that you could call that my routine.

Chloe Hall:

No, I think a lot of people, a lot of listeners as well will be able to resonate with that. And I used to be like that and then it just, coffee wasn't sitting well with me. I found it was just really triggering my nerves for the day and everything. So it was so hard. I went from drinking two to three coffees a day to getting off it and now I'll drink like a matcha instead. But that was such a big part of my morning routine as well and getting off it was one of the hardest things I've had to do.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I did that once. I detoxed for one of those health retreat things years and years ago and I had to detox off coffee and everything actually.

Chloe Hall:

Oh really?

Renae Craven:

Before two weeks leading up to it and yeah, coffee was hard.

Chloe Hall:

Yes.

Renae Craven:

Very, very hard. Because I love the taste of my coffee. I just have it straight, I don't have any milk so I love the taste of my coffee.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, wow. Okay.

Renae Craven:

But maybe it's also the other benefits of not wanting to kill people that coffee does to me as well. I can deal with the world now. I've had my coffee.

Chloe Hall:

You're like okay, all right. Who needs coaching now? Who needs training? And I'm ready to rock and roll.

Renae Craven:

Yeah, I'm good now.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well the reason as well why I wanted to talk about the whole exercise correlation with work was because I did read your article on LinkedIn about what sitting all day is doing to your body and you're saying how Pilates can help with that. The section that I think resonated really well with me was when you said, when COVID-19 shut down the world and confined everyone working from home, those people who were working in the office environments, you found yourself sitting bent over a PC at home all day and it's back to back virtual meetings, you don't really have that chance to get up, have a break, go for a walk around and everything. And I think, I'm sure a lot of our listeners will be in that reality and even after COVID it is still the case. So I think just for the sake of everyone listening, is there any tips or anything to get you up, get you moving so you're not experiencing that on the daily.

Renae Craven:

I think the other difference is before COVID, sure you were sitting at your desk all day at work but you are also walking to the office and walking to meetings and walking to the kitchen and walking to go and buy your lunch and things like that. And you weren't kind of back to back meetings either. So you had that chance and if you were walking from room to room so you were getting up. Whereas at home it's just back to back meetings and I don't know about you but I run to go to the bathroom in between meetings.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I do. I actually do. Yesterday actually bit triggered by that.

Renae Craven:

I did that too yesterday actually. And even at the height of COVID, the back to back meetings were so bad. I didn't even have a lunch break. I was working, I was making my lunch in meetings and daylight saving as well. It always throws things because Queensland stays where they are and it throws everything out so. So in my article actually, it was more of a paper that I had to submit as part of my instructor course.

Chloe Hall:

Oh cool. Yeah.

Renae Craven:

And as well as my 600 hours of practice and.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. I can relate, I didn't have to do the article though.

Renae Craven:

So I kind of just pulled bits out of that and because I thought this is still relevant and maybe it will resonate with people and especially the people that I'm linked, LinkedIn is the audience, right? So that just things that happen from sitting, sitting down's bad for you, full stop. Where you're working or sitting on a couch all day, whatever it is, sitting down's bad for you. And the longer you sit, the more kind of slouched you get. The more your spine is always kind of in the rounded state, the less you are using your back muscles, your back extensors, the more you're sitting down your pelvis, your hip flexes are shortening because you're always sitting down and that kind of tightens your lower back. And then you've got your, even just using your mouse, you've got that shoulder that's doing extra stuff or backwards and forward stuff constantly. And then your neck as well and your traps, everything gets kind of tight.

So things that you can do. I wrote a, my article's got an example class plan to undo the effects of sitting down all day in an office job. But that class plan uses all of the apparatus. So there's things you can do on the mat or the reformer or the Cadillac or under chair. But I run a few online classes after work and they started during COVID and they're still going. And I designed those specifically to undo, I know those people have been sitting down all day. So my classes are very much unraveling everything that they've done the all day.

Chloe Hall:

The body.

Renae Craven:

I mean my classes, my math classes anyway, they're usually focused around, I mean tips for people not actually coming to a class but undoing, you're doing the opposite of what you've been doing all day. So if you sit all day, stand up, walk around, at least listen to your smart watch when it tells you take a break. Stand up and take a break. And walk out to the letter box and get some sunshine at the same time, if you're lucky there's not much suns around these days.

Chloe Hall:

If it's out, make a run for it.

Renae Craven:

Doing kind of shoulder rolls and neck stretches and hip flexors stretches so that you, like I said, just undoing, doing the opposite of what you do when you're sitting. So think about the muscles or the tendons or whatever they're, even if you're not familiar with what they are, you know there's some at the front of your hip. And when you're sitting you can imagine that they're not being used, they're just being stuck there. So straighten them. Stretch them. If you're rounded all the time in your spine, then press roll your shoulders back, press your chest for and use your back muscles. And I don't even know if people are that familiar with back extensors. I don't know if people understand that. Because you've got your spine and then you've got these muscles that they're twisted that run either side of your spine. I can't remember the scientific name for them right now.

Chloe Hall:

No. Me neither.

Renae Craven:

We just call them back extensors. And when you straighten in your spine, they're working and you're switching them on. It's just working your bicep, strengthening that muscle when you straighten your spine and you can even go past straight and go kind of backwards. You are using those back muscles and you're strengthening those back muscles and it'll stop you being like a rounded.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, just bent over in the computer all day.

Renae Craven:

Hunched over.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah. That's it. You don't want that.

Renae Craven:

So it's really just doing the opposite or yeah. Joining online classes. I can put you through some exercises.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, well we'll definitely share that article as well with this podcast so people can see that program or might be something that helps. For me at work we're very fortunate that we have a standing desk and I think that that is just so amazing. Because if I work from home, I don't have a standing desk and I can feel the difference. My body just feels, you just don't feel right and I feel more fatigued and yeah, I just need to get up and move more often.

Renae Craven:

Yeah. If you stand all day, it's the same thing. You've got to sit as well. You've still got to do the opposite. Standing is like, because you can get slouch when you stand as well, so you can still over time get tired and kind of slouch over or you're still kind of tense in your shoulders and things like that. So you can kind of need to still be aware of your posture when you're standing and just self-correct or still go for walks, still give everything a chance to move the way it's supposed to move not stand still all day.

Chloe Hall:

Yeah, definitely. On that, Renae. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Really enjoyed this chat with you. I think there's a lot that our listers will get out of it and I definitely want to continue more of this Pilates conversation too.

Renae Craven:

Thank you Chloe. Thanks for having me.

Chloe Hall:

No worries, thank you.

"I had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with Dominic Price from Atlassian. It was so enjoyable to reflect on my time working at Atlassian and to hear Dom's perspective on what makes a great team, how to build an authentic culture and prioritising the things that matter."

- Nick Muldoon, Co-CEO Easy Agile

Transcript:

Nick Muldoon:

What I was keen to touch on and what I was keen to explore, Dom, was really this evolution of thinking at Atlassian. I remember when we first crossed paths, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall it was like late 2014, I think.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it was.

Nick Muldoon:

Scrum Australia was on at the time, and you're at the George Street offices above Westpac there, wherever, and we had Slady in the room, there was yourself. I think Mairead might have been there, I'm not too sure.

Dom Price:

No, probably not. I think it was JML's engineering meeting, engineering relationship meeting.

Nick Muldoon:

Right.

Dom Price:

Involved in the

Nick Muldoon:

Hall of Justice, right? Not Hall of Justice.

Dom Price:

Not Hall of Justice. Avengers.

Nick Muldoon:

Avengers. When was the last time you were in Avengers?

Dom Price:

A long, long time ago. A long, long time ago.

Nick Muldoon:

You've been working from home full-time since March, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Although, actually for me I can work from anywhere for three and a half years.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, fair enough. Okay.

Dom Price:

The shift for me was missing the work element. I'm missing the in-person work element because being on the road a lot, having that one day or two days week in the office, there's connective tissue, I didn't realize how valuable that was. Going five days work from home is not a great mix to me.

Nick Muldoon:

No, not a great mix for me either, Mate. I was the one that was coming into the office during lockdown. I was like, "Oh." It was basically an extension of my house, I guess, because I was the only one that was coming in. But I could turn up the music and I could get some work done without-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. All right. Back in late 2014 when we first crossed paths, we're at JML's engineering meeting, and that was before JML had gone to Shopify.

Dom Price:

Yes.

Nick Muldoon:

We were talking about all things. I remember talking about OKRs, which was the Objective Key Result framework that we were using at Twitter that I think Atlassian was looking at for the first time.

Dom Price:

Yeah, we'd been flirting with for a while.

Nick Muldoon:

Flirting with for a while. What was Atlassian using at the time? What was VTFM?

Dom Price:

There was two things we had at the time. VTFM which was Vision, Focus Areas, Themes, and Measures, which was our way of communicating our strategy, our rolling problem strategy. But then off the back of that we had what I would call old school KPIs. Right? We'd pick goals, right, we'd pick ways of measuring those goals, but very KPI-focused and very red, amber, green scoring focused. When we were small, it worked okay. It didn't scale particularly well because it became punitive. If you were green and you hit your score, you got ignored because you were always meant to, and if you were amber or red and you missed by anything, you got punished. Right? It's like, "Please explain." You got the invite to the head master's office.

Dom Price:

We wanted a way of getting stretched into there and also be more outcome-focused, because I think when we scaled KPIs, we got very output-focused like, "What did you do this week? What's the thing that you shipped?" Actually, the thing that we forgot about, and I think it was by accident, it wasn't bad intent, but we forgot about what's the outcome or impact we're trying to have on the customer, because that happens after the event. OKRs were a way of putting stretch in there and building the idea of moonshots and big ambition. But then also, refocusing us on, what is the impact we're trying to have on the end customer, not just what's happening in the sausage factory?

Nick Muldoon:

With that end customer perspective though, did you get that with the VTFM?

Dom Price:

No. Actually, the first year we rolled that OKR, that was part of the problem. We had the VTFM because that stayed, right? That was like the sacred cow for the first year. That stayed, and we just had OKRs underneath. Yeah, and we're like, "Well-

Nick Muldoon:

So you're mixing them together.

Dom Price:

... which ones do we report? The measures in the VTFM because that's our Atlassian level plan, or the OKRs, which is the things we're actually doing and the impact that we're having. You're like, "Well, both," and you're like, "Well, they don't meet. There's no cascade up or down, left or right, that had them aligned properly." The year after we actually phrased ... we got rid of the VTFM, and we now have our rolling 12-month strategy phrased as OKRs.

Nick Muldoon:

Right. Okay. At that time, Dom, back in 2014, when you were flirting with OKRs, as you said, was the VTFM that you were working to replace, was that company, department, team, individual, or did it just stop at the team?

Dom Price:

Yeah. That's where it didn't really scale, right? The organizational one made sense, and again, when you're smaller, it's a lot easier to draw the linkage between your team or your department and the company one. As we scaled, what happened was we'd have a company level VTFM, and then each department would go and build its own. The weird thing is, and again, this works for a phase, and then you realize it doesn't, is we don't create value up and down the org. We create value across the organization, and so building these VTFMs in departments was honing our craft. But it was doing it at the detriment of how you work across teams.

Dom Price:

I think that it's one of those things that at the time, we didn't realize. If I had a crystal ball, it would have been great. But it seemed like the right thing to do. Engineering had a VTFM. So did Design, so did Product Management, and you're like, "You know we only ship one experience, right?" I don't care if engineering's perfect and design's not because that's letting the customer down because this one experience that we shipped. There was this whole sort of arbitration where we'd build them vertically, and then try and glue them together horizontally, but they'd all been built in isolation.

Dom Price:

Then When it comes to trade offs, and every business has trade offs, whether you admit it or not, when you're like the best laid plans literally stay on paper, right? That's where they exist, then reality kicks in one day after you've built the plan. When reality kicks in, what trade off are you going to make? Are you going to do the trade off that delights the customer, maybe compromises you? Right? then how do you do that internally? Are you going to help Design and Product Management and load balance that way, or say, "Well, yeah, I'm an engineer and we're fine. It's Design's fault. How we'd adapt everyone is Design's fault." We quickly realized that a vertical model brought about some unintended consequences and some odd behaviors that weren't really the kind of behaviors we wanted as Atlassian.

Nick Muldoon:

Back in that time, Dom, in 2014, 2015, did you have the triad then with the product design and later for each of those groups?

Dom Price:

In physical people, yes.

Nick Muldoon:

But in-

Dom Price:

... modeling, no.

Nick Muldoon:

No. Okay. How did that come to fruition, that triad where they were working as one in harmony to deliver that customer experience?

Dom Price:

I think essentially, it's one of those brilliant mistakes when you look back. We're really good at reflecting, and you do a few reflections, and you suddenly see the pattern, and you like, "Hey, our teams that are nailing it are the ones where we've got cognitive diversity and the balance of skillsets." Not where we got one expert or one amazing anything, but actually, you're like, "Yeah, actually -

Nick Muldoon:

If look at some of these patterns-

Dom Price:

Yeah. You're like, "Hey, I just saw that design." They get the product manager in a headlock and have a valid argument at a whiteboard. You're like, "I actually like that. That's what I like, the meeting where there's consensus and violent agreement." Maybe that's the wrong signal, right, that the right signal is this cognitive diversity, this respectful dissent. You see that, and we're like, "Hang on, we have the realization that engineers build great usable products, and product managers are thinking about the whole sort of usability and along with the designers. Viability, you're like, "Oh, we need all three. All three of those need to be apparent for a great experience." You're like, "Cool. Let's double down on that." Right?

Dom Price:

We started to hone in a lot more on how do we get the balance across those? How do we understand the different roles? Because we didn't want to become homogenous. You don't want those three roles to get on so well they all agree. You also don't want to violently disagree all the time, right? A little bit of disagreeing commits great. If they're always in disagreement, then that comes out in the product. How do you find the things that they stand for, and how they bring their true and best selves to each phase? Right? If you think about any given product or project, there are natural phases where their skillsets are more honed, right? In the phases for us, part of managing design is often a lot better with the ambiguous and a whole lot of stuff. When it comes to building, I'm probably going to listen to the engineer more, right?

Nick Muldoon:

And you're handing it over to delivery.

Dom Price:

Yeah. But then also, it's like, well, it's not the ... If you think about delivery time, I think we'd sometimes think of it as the relay race. I think that's incorrect, because everyone's still going to see the relay race. Once I've run my lap, I'm done, right? But in product development, it's not because when I hand over the baton, I still have a role. Even if it's in build phase, the product manager and the designer still have a massive role. It's just that they're co-pilots and the engineer's the pilot, right? You don't disappear, your role changes. I think that was one of the nuances that we got as we started to bring in the right skills, the right level of leadership, the right level of reflection to go, "How do we balance this across those phases, and how do we be explicit on what role we're playing in those different phases?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay, that's interesting. I'm going to want to come back to that when we turn our attention to the customers in the Agile transformation landscape more broadly. But one thing that has got me thinking about with respect to this balance is the fact that Atlassian had the discipline to hire for a triad, right? If I think about, I think this was around 2013 at Twitter, and in one of our groups, we had pick a number, but there would have been 200 people, and there would have been less than 10 product managers. I think we actually had a ratio of like 20. It was something silly like 26 engineers to a product manager. It wasn't even a design counterpart necessarily for each of the product managers. The balance was way off, and it wasn't very effective. Was there a time at Atlassian where there was this reflection? Because I'm just trying to think, in my time at Atlassian, I don't think we had maybe a great balance. I think there was a much heavier in engineering than there was in design and product.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it's one of those things that if it's not there, you don't miss it. Right? It's weird, right? It was a lot of it before my time, but when I listened to the story, it's like even design as a discipline when I started in 2013 was a very small discipline. I think even then, it was kind of like a hack to the notion where it was like, "Oh, yeah, we got some designers. They do the pixels, right? They make stuff look pretty." .

Nick Muldoon:

They do T-shirts and they do like .

Dom Price:

Who knows, right? But it makes us look pretty, right? They drink craft beer, and they sit on milk crates. We had this archetype of a designer, and then you like, "Oh, actually, once you start to understand user experience, the integration points, design languages, design standards, and the experience, once you get your first few designers who say, "Here's how our products fit together," and this is the experience from a customer lens, you're like, "Oh, I'm not sure I'm a fan of that." It wasn't badly designed, but nor was it particularly well-designed. Once you start to make some improvements, then you start to measure customer satisfaction, and you make that experience more seamless, you suddenly see the value.

Dom Price:

I think for Atlassian, I think we started as an engineering company. We added product management, and then begrudgingly added design. Interestingly, in my time there, the most recent thing we've added is research.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Okay.

Dom Price:

Fascinating evolution for us again to go, "What do you mean, research? I'm a product manager. I know everything about the industry in the section of the competition." They're like, "But do you know anything about the customer, and the job to be done at the top tasks, or how they experience, and thinking about things like accessibility, thinking about how our products integrate with other products, thinking about not just from a competitive landscape, but what's the actual job to be done, and what are the ways people are trying to do that, and the drop off points.

Dom Price:

Research has become a new muscle that we had the exact same experience with. First time you roll it out, people are like, "Oh, we don't need that. It's overkill." You're like, "I see, it's really quite good." Hard to integrate because you're giving me findings I wasn't expecting, and then there was a shift both for designers, but also for the product managers to go, "Oh, I can use a resource now because you're this independent group that can help me understand, not just my product and iterating on my products, but a level up, what's the thing that my products trying to do? Who am I competing with, and what does that experience look like end to end?" It's a completely different lens.

Nick Muldoon:

Basically what you're describing there, Dom, is you've still got the triad of the product design and leads. But now you've got this. It's a centralized kind of research team?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Do they drop in for particular projects in different areas?

Dom Price:

Yeah. If you think about it, if you strip it back to plain common sense, I think over time, we got really good at explore and build. But maybe we lost a little bit of the muscle around wonder. These researches are great. The blinkers are out and they wonder, right? I'm sure they physically do this as well, but mentally, they stroll, right? They go quite broad, and when they come back with their insights, you're like, "Wow, that's given me a really good broad perspective." I'll give you a quick example where we're working a lot, and we always are on accessibility. It's easy to look at your current products and start adding stuffing. Right? That's the logical way of doing it. Or you look at your competitor's products, and how do you become a pair or a peer? Easy.

Dom Price:

What our research team did was they actually got a whole lot of people with different sight and mobility issues, and said, "We're going to now get you to use our products and go through some key tasks." They're already using it, but it's like maybe they're on a screen reader, or maybe they can't use a mouse, they can only use keyboard shortcuts. You suddenly see the experience through their lens, and we record it, and it's tracking eye sight and line of sight using all the actions. You've got this level of detail there where you're like, "Well, I know we're trying to build empathy, but actually seeing that experience firsthand is completely different than trying to think about it."

Dom Price:

You just seeing it through the lens of this person. The research team did weeks and weeks and weeks of research with different users, different backgrounds, different disabilities, different products and different tasks to give all of our teams the sense of what is it like as the actual person. Here, you can actually walk in that person's shoes, or it feels like you are.

Nick Muldoon:

If you're a product manager and a designer, and you're ... Because it sounds to me, Dom, like that sort of investigation or exploration that you're describing there with respect to mobility-impaired or sight-impaired people, that's something that it might be hard for me to bring that into my OKRs for our product. For that triad, how do I have ... I'm trying to push forward and chase down monthly active users, or cross-flow, or whatever it happens to be, and that's much more long-running. It's like it's a long-running thread that's just going to stay open for 18 months while we think about this stuff and have these conversations. Does that research group, do they actually have their own OKRs, and are those OKRs annually?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Yes and no. We do mostly OKRs across design, research. We now have a ways of working team. They tend to be shared OKRs or more cross-functional, are cross-functional to shared. The cross-function as in we have the same objective, but different key results.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay.

Dom Price:

If you think about accessibility as an objective, the research team, their key result is about having the latest greatest research and insight so that we can learn and understand. You're like, "Cool, that's your task." Right? The design team, your OKR is to take that insight and turn it into some designs, usability, and then you can actually go along the value chain, and each different person in that value chain has a different OKR.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Still today though, there's no OKRs at an individual level, right? It's all team, group-based?

Dom Price:

We have odds and sods. I've dabbled with it a little bit. Sometimes I think I've always got individual OKRs. The question is whether I share them or not. I think if you think about the majority of knowledge workers, they will have individual goals, "I want to learn a new skill, I want to acquire a new "

Nick Muldoon:

Honing the craft.

Dom Price:

Yeah, right? Whether you write that down and it benefits you or not is not up for debate. When it came to writing them down in a collective, having a single storage of them, any kind of laddering, I think the cost of that is higher than the benefit. Right?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

We strayed away from saying everyone then must have individual OKRs, and then ladder, whatever, because it ends up getting very, very cumbersome, and actually very command and control. What we've done instead is really say to our leaders, and this is leadership by capability, not by title, but saying to our leaders, "This is part of a conversation you should be having on a regular basis with your people around growth, and how you're inspiring them, and how you're motivating them. How are they developing and evolving? What are the experiments they're running on themselves? Right? How are they with other people? What are their challenges, and how can you help them never get those challenges? What are their points of amplification that you should be calling out with them to turn the dial on that? Right? What are their superpowers that we should be really encompassing, right, and nailing?" That's part of a leadership conversation. Does that need to be written down and centralized? No. To me, it becomes a zero benefit to documenting that.

Nick Muldoon:

It's interesting hearing you describe that. That's very much learning and development-focus. If I think back to Andy Grove's High Output Management, my understanding of that at an individual ... of OKRs and an individual level was always with respect to your customers. What am I going to do for my customers? But you've actually framed it, what am I going to do for myself that's going to allow me to be in better service to my customers, maybe next financial year?

Dom Price:

Yeah. It's a secret. I'm guessing this is shared by Atlassian, but this is definitely my view of the world, and I've shared this with enough people now where they understand. You can't be a great teammate if you're not turning up your true best self. You got to take a step back. There's this whole weird narrative around the humility of being a teammate where you're like, "I'm a martyr, and I'll take one for the team." It's BS, because if you're not in the right zone for that team activity, you're not giving your best, right? You're actually the anchor that brings the team down. You step back from that and you say, "Well, how do you be the best?" Because not all work is teamwork. There's a lot of deep work and individual tasks and stuff that needs to be done. You're like, "Right, I need to be the best version of me. Well, what's that mean?"

Dom Price:

It means that before any meeting, I need to have done my tasks, or before any meeting, I need to have done my pre-meeting, right? If we're meeting as a team and we have this synchronous activity, what are the things I need to do to be best prepared for that synchronous activity to deliver the most value? How can I get the most out of that teamwork? How do I turn up and be present? How do I turn up with respectful dissent and challenge, right, and provocation? That requires me first to be an individual. Right? I think one of the dangers in a lot of work environments right now is people have lost the understanding of what it is to be an individual, what your key leadership style, your learning style, how do you turn up? Right? How do you critique? How do you take feedback? All these things that make you you, you need to know those and be aware of them before you can be great in a team environment.

Dom Price:

It's not just the tasks. You need to know you. If you're a great individual, and you've honed that, you can then be a great teammate, and if you're a great teammate, you can deliver great outcomes for your customers. Anything else is an accident, right? We've all been in accidental teams, which has delighting a customer, and we've sat there and gone, "Really not sure what I did to that guy. I'll take it. I'll take the pat on the back. I'll take the kudos, and the bottle of wine, and the congratulations. Not really sure I amplify that. I don't know. If you don't know, you probably didn't. Right? That's not humility. You're probably just a passenger. I think the danger in growth environments is there's lots of passengers who they're a passenger to lots of success, and after a while, they're like, "I'm amazing." You're like, "You're not. You've just been in the right place at the right time repeatedly."

Nick Muldoon:

I got to process that.

Dom Price:

Let me give you an example. Right? A couple years ago, I was in New York with a mate of mine, Sophie. She's unofficially mentored me and helped me a lot of the years, right? I'm talking to her about trying to scale me, and I was really angry about some stuff, and thankfully, it was late afternoon in New York. She bought me [inaudible 00:25:30]. We smashed a drink and we chatted away, and she's one of those people that just calls BS on you, right? I'm like, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge, whinge. She's like, "Oh, cool." She's English as well. She's like, "So I'm guessing you're just going to whinge about it and hope it goes away." I'm like, "All right, fair point. Little bit, my English came out. I actually hoped that maybe even if I did whinge long enough, it would actually disappear." She's like, "That never happens, does it? What are you going to do about it?"

Dom Price:

We chatted when she gave me this challenge, and she's like, "You're not evolving." She's like, "You're adding stuff in, but you're full." She's like, "Cognitively, Dom, you're full." My challenge was I was reading all these business books at the time, and I knew lots of stuff, but I didn't feel any smarter. I wasn't doing anything with it, and it's creating this frustration spiral. She gave me the exercise, and you've probably seen this, the four Ls. She got a bit of paper, and she's like, "All right, write the four Ls down. Reflect on you as a leader. This is selfishly purely about you as a leader. Last 90 days, what have you loved? What have you done personally?"

Dom Price:

I'm like, "Oh, no, no, no, no." She's like, "Not like, because we're not doing likes here, right? We're not being soft. Loved, and own it. Actually, superpower, do more of it." We did that, very uncomfortable few sips of wine. Then she's like, "What's your loathe and what's your longed for?" I had lots of long fors, long list of those, but no loathed. She's like, 'All right, here's the problem. The long for, you're sprinkling in in the 25th hour of every day. No wonder you're not doing well at it, because you never giving it the ... You're not giving yourself any space, or time, or freedom to actually experiment. You're not growing. You're not getting better. You're just adding stuff in." I'm like, "Fair point."

Dom Price:

We went through, found some loathe. She's like, "Right, you're going to remove those. Who are you going to tell those habits, or rituals, or whatever, who are you going to tell that you're removing those because they need to hold you accountable? Because they'll slip back in really easily." I found someone, pinged them. She's like, "Right, the longed." She's like, "I need to let you know that when you add them in, you're going to be crap at them." I was like, "I don't want to be rubbish at anything. I'm a leader. I need to be a superhero. I need a cape, and I need to fly in, and everything must be perfect first time." She's like, "No, the first time you added a longed for, the chances are you'll be rubbish at it. Find someone who has that muscle and let them help you practice it, and you'll get better at it over time."

Dom Price:

Then the fourth L was what have you learned? What experiment did you learn yourself last quarter? What did you learn about yourself?" She's like, "Right, go and tell as many people as you can. That'll build a place where you're learning and networking environment for you." I did it, and then I did it again 90 days later. There's a few times when the power of rationalization kicks in, and I just BSed myself because really easy to do. Then other times where I've got really deep and analyzed on it, and it's enabled me every 90 days to evolve, right? Now, the moral of the story, and this is where we tie individual to team, the number of leaders I know in big businesses driving transformations, but they're not changing themselves. What behavior are they rolling with? They're rolling with the behavior of, "I'm fine. You're not. You all need to change," which is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, role modeling status quo.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. That's interesting. I've certainly heard of the love versus loathed exercise. I like that you, or that Sophie extended it to longed for and learned. I think that's really beautiful, and I'll take that. With the loathe in particular, were there things on that list that you had to delegate or you had to hire someone to do? Because there's things that I think about that I loathe with respect to the business, and typically, they're things about orchestrating, paying suppliers, or whatever it happens to be. How do I address that? I bring the bookkeeper into the business that-

Dom Price:

Yeah. The little game that we played is you're not allowed to outsource it until you drop it. Right? The idea is, you're going to find a way of dropping it first, because maybe it doesn't need to exist, right?

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

Because you've worked at big companies, and you walk around a big company, and you're like, "That person there, they only exist to do a task that someone probably could have automated or got rid of," but they didn't have the time. Also, they put a warm body in the way. Then you add another warm body, another warm body, and you suddenly realize you've got thousands of warm bodies keeping this deck of cards stacked together, and if one card falls, the entire thing comes tumbling down. I removed stuff that I was really uncomfortable removing stuff. I was like, "This is so important." It wasn't. My blinkers were just off, right? Then she's like, "We'll stop doing." She's like, "It's not life or death." She's like, "No, thanks, Dom. Well, you're not a surgeon, so stop doing something, and listen, and see what happens when you stop doing it." I'm like, "Oh, no, but these are really important. People will be angry. I'm a very important person." You remove something and no one bloody notices. You're like, "Why have I been doing this?"

Nick Muldoon:

Why was I doing it? Yeah.

Dom Price:

Yeah. Then I-

Nick Muldoon:

Can you-

Dom Price:

One of the big examples for me was meetings. This wasn't a delegate or [inaudible 00:30:24]. This was me just being a control freak, and turning up in meetings where I wanted to be there just in case. We looked at my condo, just a sea, I use Gmail, right, the sea of blue of all these meetings, double booked, triple booked. She's like, "Right." She's like, "Imagine you've got to set yourself a goal of getting rid of 15 hours." I'm like, "What? It'd be easy to create a time machine that adds 15 hours a week. I can't remove 15 hours of meetings. I'm a very, very important person." Then we played this game called Boomerang or Stick. I declined every single meeting, and I sent a note saying, "This is either a boomerang," in which case it comes back, or if it's a stick. When you throw a stick, it doesn't come back. The boomerangs, I want to know what the purpose of the meeting is, what my role is in the meeting, and what you're going to hold me accountable for.

Dom Price:

Two thirds of the meetings didn't come back. Right? The ones that did, I honestly admit to you, I was playing the exact wrong role in virtually all of them. It was funny because I get these emails back and they're like, so one of this meeting I was in, they were like, "Your role is the decision maker." In the next meeting I was like, "I need to apologize. I thought I was the protagonist." Every time they were suggesting something, I'm like, "Well, you could do that, or these three things." I was sending them into a complete spiral, and they were like, "You're a terrible decision maker." I'm like, "No, I'm a good decision maker when I know that's my job because this isn't your title. Your title stays-

Nick Muldoon:

Ah, Dom.

Dom Price:

... the same, right? Your title stays the same, but your role's different in every environment, every engagement, your role is different. We don't call it out, we just assume. Once we clarified those assumptions and realized I've got them all wrong, the meetings I was in, I was way more effective in. Two thirds of them didn't come back. Either the meeting [inaudible 00:32:09], or it didn't need me in that. If you think about it, and me and you know this, our most precious resources are time.

Nick Muldoon:

Time. Yeah.

Dom Price:

Why are we giving it away for free or for negative cost? Right? I'm like, "No, I'm growing all that stuff back."

Nick Muldoon:

Liz and I have been having this conversation for a while now about statistically speaking, I've probably got 50 years left on earth, based on how long a Caucasian Australian male lives. But I've probably only got 40 good, usable years left, because then you kind of like atrophy and all that.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. Liz and I have been going, "Well, if we've only got 40 summers left, what are we going to do with 40 summers?" It's a really good exercise to bring you think real quick, what do you want to be spending your time on?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Absolutely. It's the same thing. You can do that at a meta, macro level for life, and I think you can do it on a annual quarterly basis. With work, there's so many things that we just presume we need to do, and both the four Ls and just my attitude has enabled me to challenge those and go, "Well, I just say why an awful lot right now." So it's like, "I'd like you to come to this meeting." I'm like, "Oh, cool. Why?" They're like, "I don't know. I'd like you there." I'm like, "But why? Because if you can't explain to me what you want me to do, then you probably don't need me there."

Nick Muldoon:

Five whys, right? Five whys.

Dom Price:

But also the reason I'm often asking them why is I'm like, "You do know I'm a pain in the ass when I do come to the meeting, so just I want to double check to you, you really want me there. Because if you converged on an idea and you want to ship it, don't invite me. All right, I'm the wrong person." Just challenging on that and getting that time back, and then using it for things that are way more valuable. I rebalanced my portfolio just like a financial advisor or a market trader rebalances a financial portfolio every quarter, I did the same thing with me. If I don't, then what I'm saying is when I don't do that, I'm saying the version of me last quarter is more than good enough for them for next quarter. What I'm saying is-

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, which is never the case, is it?

Dom Price:

Yeah, I'm saying the world's not changed. The world stayed flat, right, and everything's going on a flat line. That's not the case. If I'm not evolving myself at the same pace as Atlassian or our customers, then I've become the anchor by default. I'm the anchor that slows us down.

Nick Muldoon:

Tell me, what portion of your time today are you spending with customers? Because I know over the years in our conversations, I think about a lunch we had at Pendolino, you, Dave, and I, probably two and a half, three years ago now, but we were talking a lot about Agile transformations at the large end of the spectrum. How much time are you spending with customers today, and what are those conversations like?

Dom Price:

Yeah. I'm probably over the 50, 60% mark right now, but mainly a rebalance again. When COVID hit, the conference scene disappeared, and so I'm like, "Cool, I get to reinvest that time. I could reinvest it internally at Atlassian, and I did do it where we're evolving our ways of working internally and driving some change there. I got involved in that, made sense. But I was like, "Hey, our customers are struggling." First of all, we need to understand how and why they're struggling, and then if we can help them, find a way of helping them. It's funny how the conversation really changed from quite tactical, yeah, 18-month plans and presumed levels of certainty, to going, "Hey, the world's changed. The table flip moments just happened. Our business model has been challenged, our employees are challenged. We're having these conversations about people, wellness, and actually, we've said for years we care about our people, but now we actually have to. What does that mean? All the leaders just trying to understand the shift from peacetime to wartime-

Nick Muldoon:

To wartime.

Dom Price:

... to time peacetime. I think that it's funny that the transition from peace to wartime, I think the shared burning platform, the shared sense of urgency, I think a lot of these transition, they're okay. I wouldn't say they're amazing, but they weren't awful given that mostly the Sydney in Australia haven't manage through wartime. Right? We've had an amazing economic success for a long time. The harder bit, the way more complex bit is going from war to new peace, because new doesn't look the same as old peace. Right? It's a very different mindset to go-

Nick Muldoon:

Who is-

Dom Price:

... about managing in wartime is I don't need approvals because it's a burning platform. We just drive change, just do it, just do it. New peace is different because we're like, "Well, how long's this going to last for? What are the principles I want to apply? How do I build almost from a blank piece of paper?" Very different mindset.

Nick Muldoon:

Was that Ben Horowitz with the hard thing about hard things where he talked about war versus peacetime leaders?

Dom Price:

I've read it in a few things. The most recent one I read-

Nick Muldoon:

Hear different places.

Dom Price:

... in was General Stanley McChrystal. He wrote Team of Teams.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay.

Dom Price:

He did one on demystifying leaders and how we've often put the wrong leaders on a pedestal, and there's some great leaders out there that just didn't get the credit because they were way more balanced. But yeah, there's a few different narratives out there on it.

Nick Muldoon:

With the latest that you're meeting with, I guess, well, one, are they using something like the four Ls that Sophie shared with you?

Dom Price:

Yeah, that's become a lot more popular, I mean, certainly with C-suite and the level down, even board members, actually. When I share that, there's this kind of moment of reflection of going, "Yeah." It's because I get them with the irony of going, "Question one, are you driving a transformation?" They're like, "Yes." You're like, "Cool. Are you transforming yourself?" "No." By the way, reading a Harvard Business Review article on Agile doesn't mean you're evolving yourself. That means you're educating yourself. That's subtly different. We've all read the article. It doesn't make you an expert, so sit yourself down. That is the first moment of getting them bought in.

Dom Price:

Then the second one is just saying to them, "Just be honest right now, what are the things you're struggling with?" For a lot of leaders, it's this desire that they get the need for empathy, vulnerability and authenticity, they get it because they've read it. They understand it, they comprehend it, they find it really hard to do. Right? A lot of them are leaving as a superhero leading through power and control. They've led through success, but they're not led through a downturn and a challenging time, and they're just questioning their own abilities. There's a lot of, I don't even want to call it imposter syndrome, I think there's a lot of people just saying, "I think my role as a leader's just changed, and I don't know that I understand the new version." That's quite demoralizing for a lot of people. It's quite challenging.

Dom Price:

The irony being is that the minute they look to that and talk about it, they've done the empathy, vulnerability, and authenticity. They've done the thing they're grasping for. But instead, they're trying to put this brave face on it. In a lot of organizations, I've seen a lot of ruinous empathy. A lot of people buffering from their team, like, "Nick, I don't want to tell you that bad things are happening in the company, because I don't want you ... I think you're already worried, because I won't tell you that," without realizing that you fill in the gaps, and you think way worse things than I could ever tell you. The information flow's changed, and then for a lot of leaders, the mistake I've seen on mass is they have confused communication and broadcast. Right? Communication is what I hear and how I feel when you speak. Broadcast is the thing that you said. Because of this virtual world, there's lots of loom, and zoom, and videos, and yeah, we're going to broadcast out.

Nick Muldoon:

Broadcast a lot. Yeah.

Dom Price:

But we're getting to listen for the response.

Nick Muldoon:

This has to be a very challenging time for a number of leaders today, but 2018 or 2008, there were a lot of leaders back then that probably, I presume, picked up a lot of scar tissue around GFC. How many of the leaders that you're chatting with today would have picked up scar tissue through the GFC, and they're still finding this kind of a feeling, at least, like it's uncharted territory?

Dom Price:

Well, and that's, I think, the byproduct. I was going to say problem. The byproduct of the Australian system is we've dodged the bullet in 2008. Economically, we did not get the same hit that the rest. The stock markets got a little hit, and a whole lot of other things took a little bit of a dip, but nowhere near that the size or magnitude of the rest of the world. Both through the mining boom, yeah, the banking sector, a whole of other tertiary markets around tourism doing well at that time, you're like it was a blip, but it wasn't a scar. I think that's where there's a lot of countries have got that recent experience to draw upon, like, "Here's how we do this. Right? Here's how we bunker down. Here's how we get more conservative. Here's the playbook for it." I think a lot of countries haven't got that playbook, so they're getting at it, right? They're doing it on the fly. I think there's that.

Dom Price:

But also I think this one's just different. The global financial crisis was a financial and market-caused issue, right? This is a health pandemic-caused market downturn. I don't think we've got a playbook for that, because we don't know the longevity of it. -

Nick Muldoon:

If you-

Dom Price:

Go on.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah. No, sorry, Dom, I was just going to ask, if you cast your mind back to GFC, were you anxious going through GFC? Have you been anxious this year?

Dom Price:

No. I wasn't anxious at all through GFC because it felt like ... I did a recession in the UK a long, long time ago, and so I've been through that downturn. I've worked in companies that had downturns, even if the general economy was fine, and industries that had shrunk, where at the end of each quarter you're like, "Right, we talk about the books. Who are we letting go? What projects are stopping?" It was always the taking away, not the adding. I've been through that. The thing that made me anxious about 2020 was, this is the first time I think we've had this level of uncertainty. It's funny because a lot of people talk about change fatigue. I actually think humans are quite good at change. I think we actually do that quite well. But uncertainty, we are terrible with.

Dom Price:

It's weird how when we get uncertainty, how different people respond in different ways. Some like to create a blanket of certainty and wrap it around them like, "Now, here's what I know, and this will come true." You're like, "Maybe [inaudible 00:42:16]." I like your blanket, it's comfortable. But it's not necessarily real, right? It's not going to shelter you from the things that we genuinely don't know about. This is where agility has become key, or nimbleness has become key because if I look at the leaders in the companies that are listening, they're actually attentive to their customers and listening, they're the ones that are evolving really quickly, because they've got ... not only have they got the nimbleness as the muscle, but they're listening to cause correct. The ones that have ... think they've rolled out agility in the last few years, but never added the customer bit, they've got small, fast, nimble teams just running around in circles.

Nick Muldoon:

They're not heading in a particular direction. Yeah.

Dom Price:

Yeah. They are clueless, right, because without that overarching like, "Why are we doing this? And that customer that we care for, we still care for, how's that customer's world changed? Right? Because if that customer has changed, how can we change with them?" A lot of companies haven't done that yet, and I think it's some are holding the breath and hoping for the best. Some are just too fixated on, "But we have a plan, and if we stick to that plan," I read a book somewhere that said, "If you stick to a plan, you'll be fine." You're like, yeah, the world just shifted around you. Your plan might not be as relevant.

Nick Muldoon:

It's making me think, Dom, about the Salesforce transformation, Agile transformation in 2006. That was one of the big bang, I think it was one of the early big bang Agile transformations that took place. I don't know if it was Parker Harris or how it actually played out, but the leaders of Salesforce basically said, "You're going to change to Agile. You're going to give this thing a go. Otherwise, all is lost." There's been other examples. I think shortly after, LinkedIn did their IPO. They pulled the end on call, they stopped everything to rework how they work. Is 2020 one of those years? Are the best companies going to take advantage of this as an opportunity to retool how they work? Then the other companies are just going to kind of atrophy and slowly decline over the next five?

Dom Price:

I think the best ones probably built some of the muscle already, the ones that are now reacting, right? I think if you are aware of the market, all COVID's done is put an accelerant on the stuff that was changing anyway. Right? Yes, it's not ideal, but it's stuff that was happening regardless, right? I think we really had five or 10 years to equip ourselves, and we got given three months instead. I think a whole lot of companies that saw those patterns emerging, changing people habits, technology, practices, ways of working, customer demand, experience demands, you put all those together, that's why Agile transformation has been a massive hit for the last three, four, five years, right? The ones that were prepared for that are awesome. The ones that responded quickly, that are like, "Brilliant, don't let a crisis go to waste. What can we do?" They'll do well. The ones that have dug their heels in and are being stubborn ,saying the world will return to normal and it's just a matter of time, they're the ones that I fear for, because that atrophy that may have been a slow decline, I think that becomes a cliff. Right? Because in a consumer-

Nick Muldoon:

Slow decline, and then they just fall off the edge at some point.

Dom Price:

consumer world, consumers spending goes down, sentiment goes down, and relevance suddenly becomes really important. Is your product relevant to your customers? The people that understand that, and then have agility in how they deliver it, that's a winning combination. I think the interesting, I was talking to a friend about this on the weekend because they were like, "What's the difference between the successful ones and the not successful ones?" It's hard to pinpoint a single reason. But the one that stands out for me is the Agile transformations that have been people-centric are the best. A whole load of them were tool-centric or process-centric. I will send all my people on a training course. I'm going to make you agile, I'm going to give you some agile tools. Go. You're like, "Did you change their mindset? Did you change their heart? Did you change the things that they're recognized for, their intrinsic motivations? Did you change those things?" Because if you didn't, their inner workings are still the same, right? You've just giving them some new terminology.

Nick Muldoon:

I think that's a really, really, really good point. I go back to if I cast my mind back to the first Agile conference that I went to over a decade ago, the conversation back then was very much around training the practices, teaching the practices to your people, and then it evolved into a tooling conversation. But again, teaching the practices and software are just tools, and it was probably 2013, 2014, I guess, when the modern Agile movement came out, and they were talking a lot about psychological safety. Go back to where we started the conversation, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Psychological safety, bring your whole self to work, and that will free you and enable you to do something tremendous for your customers. Give me a sense of the customer conversations that you've had throughout 2020. What percentage do you think have psychological safety, truly have that psychological safety?

Dom Price:

Yeah. I have to remind myself that psychological safety isn't an all or one, right? It's a sliding scale. I would say it's improved, where it's done with authenticity. The danger is, it becomes a topic where people are like, "I was working from home. There's an increased chance of stress, it's a whole of a change. Things are going wrong. Oh, I know what, let's just talk about psychological safety a lot." You're like-

Nick Muldoon:

That's not it.

Dom Price:

... "There's no correlation between talking about and doing." Right? It becomes the topic, right, the fashion, right? Just like wellness and mindfulness have become fashionable to talk about, doesn't mean we've got any better at it. And so that-

Nick Muldoon:

But isn't that the thing, Dom? Agile was the fashionable thing to talk about, and so we talked about it, but nothing really changed in a lot of these organizations.

Dom Price:

Yeah. It's not dissimilar with psychological safety. What has happened though is over time, the leaders that are truly authentic, vulnerable, build that environment where you can bring your best self, and they appreciate the respectful dissent, but they will still, at the right time, disagree and commit. They're like, "Nick, I heard your view. Thank you for sharing. Our only decision at this point, we're going down Path A. I know that you're in Path B. We're going down Path A. When we leave this room, we commit to A." I hear you. You want me when we're coming to A, and here's the signals we'll assess to make sure it's the right path. If it's not, we'll course-correct. Those people are thriving in this environment, and more people want to work with them. What this environment has done is it's shone a massive light on the difference between managers and leaders. Managers manage process and they like control. Right? Leaders are about influence and people.

Nick Muldoon:

Do you think, so the fact that people are working remote and working from home, that's made it easier to see who the leaders are.

Dom Price:

Yeah, it's shone a light on-

Nick Muldoon:

Because the managers are just trying to count time.

Dom Price:

Yeah, count time, but they're also thrashing around busy work, because they're like, "I'm the manager. I need to show that I'm doing something. I would manage tasks in and around the office, and what I meant some people to do. If we're autonomous, and they just do it, then what's my role?" You suddenly start seeing business. This noise comes out of them, which isn't, "Here's an outcome I achieved, or here's how the team's doing on team cohesion or bonding." They're not talking about about big meta level things. They're sharing these transactions with you, and you're like, "I assumed you're always doing the transactions. Now, you're showing me them all. It's a bit weird." Right? It's just a behavior, right? We must have a process for that. Well, what's the process? You're like, "Actually, what about the process of common sense?" Right?

Dom Price:

If you think about pre-COVID, most organizations that would allow people to work from home once or twice a week had a giant process and policy about how you apply to work from home that one day a week and everything, and then suddenly they're like, "Well, actually, we can do that. Everyone's going to go work from home." But now things have settled down a bit, the process police and the policy police are coming back again going, "But what about, what about? We pay Nick to do 40 hours a week, and what if he didn't do 40 hours?"

Nick Muldoon:

40 hours a week.

Dom Price:

Who cares? Nick delivered his outcomes and his customers are over the moon. As long as he's not doing 80 hours and he's not burning out, doesn't matter? Right? The idea of 9:00 to 5:00, Monday to Friday as a construct is being challenged. The idea of you needing to sit at a physical desk for eight hours a day to do your work, when actually at least half of your tasks you can do asynchronously, that's been challenged. But for the managers who want manage process and control, they're like, "But if Nick can work from anywhere, and we trust him to do the right work, what do I do? I'm his manager. You're like, "You could inspire him. You could coach him, mentor him. You can lead him, you can help him grow, you can do a whole lot of stuff. Just don't manage his tasks for him. He's quite capable of managing a to-do list." It's challenging that construct again. For a lot of people, that's uncomfortable because that's a concept that we've just stuck with for years.

Nick Muldoon:

This is going to lead to a lot of change. I guess I've been thinking with respect to remote, Dom, I've been thinking much more about the mechanics of remote work and logistics around pay scales, and geographic location, and pay, and all this sort of stuff. But you're really opening my eyes to a whole different aspect. There are, in many large organizations, there are a lot of middle managers, and if these roles are no longer valuable, what do all these people do, and how do we help them find something that they love and that they long for? Because presumably they've not longing for-

Dom Price:

Yeah, that's the thing.

Nick Muldoon:

... task management.

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah. They're probably not deeply entrenched in that as being something they're passionate about, right? It's just like they found themselves in this role. This is the interesting thing. If you look at rescaling, I've been looking at rescaling for a few years as a trend, right? How do we look at the rate of change in both technology, people practice, whatever else? That means that we're all going to have to rescale, right? The idea of education being up until the age of 21, and then you're working 45 years doesn't exist, right? So lifelong learning. You look at that, and you go ... Amazon did a great example last year. Bezos and Amazon put aside a billion dollars to retrench a thousand people that they were going to dispose. Right?

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

From their warehouses, right?

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah. They're on automation to displace those people. What was came out recently and said, there's I think, it's like 1,500 people who will be displaced because they're going for fully autonomous distribution centers. They're looking to retrain those people and redeploy them elsewhere. You're like, "Cool, how are we doing that?" The reason I mentioned it is I think we assume it for low skilled, high volume tasks, because that's associate what we've associated with technology disruption in the past. But if you think about it, there was I think about a year and a half ago, McKinsey had a report called The Frozen Middle Layer. It was about how this frozen middle layer was going to thaw and be exposed, right, as these middle managers. There's thousands of them. That phrase, the middle layer, COVID just poured the icing on that. Right? [inaudible 00:53:26]. They're all going, "What? Me? No, no, I've only got 10 years left in my career. Let me sit here, manage a few tasks. I'll take inflationary pay rise every year. I won't cause any trouble." You're like, "I don't know. You can retrain here."

Dom Price:

These people haven't been engineered to think about retraining before. They've been engineered to think about comfort and conservatism and safety. I think we need to appreciate that they still have value in the workplace. I just don't think it's the old value. For them, the four Ls-

Nick Muldoon:

This is going to be a huge shock to this frozen middle layer, as McKinsey called it. I think about so we're Wollongong, Port Kembla. We're in a working class, steel town, and over the course of, pick a number, over the course of 25, 30 years, 20,000, 22,000 people have been let go from the steelworks and they're been told to retrain. I'm sure a portion of them do, but a lot of them that are older, like you're talking about someone that's in their 50s that's got 10 years on their career, right, they probably just took early retirement, and maybe they found something else to do in the community, whatever it happens to be. What are the structures that we provide for this huge crew of people to get them re-skilled in our businesses so that we don't lose the tacit knowledge and get on to the next thing? How's Atlassian thinking about this?

Dom Price:

It's also about front-loading it, right? We have to hold our head in shame as a general society, how light we leave it. When I hear stories about those steelworks closing down, and you're like, "Why are we surprised by that? Why are we surprised when Holden stopped developing cars in Australia? Really? But really, you're surprised?

Nick Muldoon:

We saw it coming.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

We propped up the car industry in Australia for 35 years.

Dom Price:

Yeah. You put tariffs on anyone importing to make your own industry look good, and then those tariffs go away, people are looking for cheaper. Unfortunately, we signed up for a global economy, right? It's a borderless business model that we're in, and whether you like that or not, it's what we signed up for. The reality is instead of reacting each time this happens when it's normally too late, how can we respond? How can we use these brilliant algorithms and data managing to go, "Here are world economic forum future skills, here are large employers, here are other skillsets about people." You try and give that out, and you're like, "These are the ones most at risk, and they're at risk over the next 18 months." Cool. Start retraining them now, but not when they're out of the job when they go, "Well, now, I'm out of my job. Now, what do we do?" You're like, "I don't know. Buddings? I don't know."

Dom Price:

We've got way more data and insights than we probably give ourselves credit for. I think one element is front-loading it, and the next one is saying, "How do we not recreate this problem again?" If you look in the US right now, the largest employer, not by company, but by job type is driver.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Yeah, by role. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dom Price:

By role, right? So Uber driver, truck drivers, manual drivers, people behind the wheel driving a vehicle. Where's billions of dollars worth of investment going in, Google, Amazon and every other? Right? Autonomous vehicles. You're like, "Cool."

Nick Muldoon:

Autonomous vehicles. Get rid of all those people?

Dom Price:

If I-

Nick Muldoon:

What are we doing to reskill those people?

Dom Price:

Yeah. Or even better, what are we doing in our education system to say, "How do we help people coming through the education system be more resilient with their future skills? I don't like the idea of being able to future-proof people. I don't think we've got a crystal ball, so let's part that. But how do we make people more resilient in their skills, well, all the skills we think will be required? World Economic Forum do great research every few years and publish it, and then I look at the education system, and I'm like, "That was built in 1960. We're tuning kids out that if you talk to.

Nick Muldoon:

Hey, hey, hey, Dom, okay, okay. I'm getting anxious at the moment. Let's end on a high note. What are things that make you optimistic for the next decade? All right? In 10 years time, how old are you going to be in 10 years time? Like 45 or something?"

Dom Price:

52.

Nick Muldoon:

52?

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. Oh, yes.

Dom Price:

Getting old.

Nick Muldoon:

Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay. Okay, so when you're 52, what are you looking forward to over the next decade? What's exciting?

Dom Price:

There's a couple of things we need to realize, right? Very first thing we need to accept is our future is not predetermined, it's not written, and it's not waiting for us. Right? We design it and define it every single day with our actions and inactions. As soon as we have that acknowledgement, we don't sit here as a victim anymore and wait for it to happen to us. We go, "Oh, oh, yeah." Then like, "We have to decide on the future. No one else does. We collectively do." That's the first step. You're like, "Oh, I've got way more say in this than I ever realized." The second one is, we need to drop a whole load of stuff around productivity, and GDP, and all these things that we've been taught are great measures of success, and just be happy and content in life. If you've got four years left, I've probably got 30 something years left, I want to enjoy those 30 years. I have no vision of being buried in a gravestone somewhere with, "Dom was productive."

Nick Muldoon:

Dom, this is great. What we've got to do for society over the next 10 years is get society out of KPIs and into OKRs.

Dom Price:

Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

Right?

Dom Price:

And get a balance out of going, "How ... This is what I've learned from COVID, right? You know this, I did 100 flights last year. I did a few at the start of the year and trip to the UK in the middle of COVID. But I've not traveled since June. Now, admittedly, the whole work from home thing, I'm going insane a little bit, but the balance of life, like sleeping in my bed every night, hanging out with friends, meaningful connections, right, actual community. I've lived in the same apartment for three years, and it took COVID for me to meet any of my neighbors, and it took COVID for me to meet the lovely ladies in the coffee shop downstairs. I'm like, "I've lived above you for three years, and it's only now you've become a person." Right?

Dom Price:

There's so much community and society aspects we can get out of this. The blank piece of paper, if you imagine this as a disruption that's happened to us, and there's no choice, and we can fight against it, that the options we have to actually make life better afterwards. Whether it be four-day working week experiments, or actually working from anywhere means that a whole other disabled, or working parents can get access to the workforce. Funny, if you get more done. Unemployment in the disabled community is 50% above that of the able-bodied community, not because of any mental ability, just because it's hard for them to fit .

Nick Muldoon:

Logistically. Yeah.

Dom Price:

You've just changed that, right, with this crazy experiment called COVID. If we start to tap into these pockets of goodness, and actually, we sees this as an opportunity to innovate, right, and I hate the P word of pivot, but forget pivoting, to genuinely innovate, what might the world look like, and how can we lean into that? How do we get balance between profit, and planet, and people, and climate, and all those things? If we do that, we've got a chance to build this now and build a future we want that we're actually proud of. I think the time is now for us to all stand up because it's not going to happen to us ... Or it will happen to us. If we choose to do nothing, it'll happen to us. It doesn't need to. I'm really excited because I think we're going to make some fundamental changes and challenges to old ways of working and old ways of living, and we'll end up happier because of it.

Nick Muldoon:

Don, I'm super jazzed, man. Thank you. I really appreciate your time today. That's a great place to finish it up.

Dom Price:

I hope some of those things come true.

Nick Muldoon:

Okay. I hope some of those things come true, right? I feel like the things that are in our power, the things that we can directly affect, takeaways for me, I've got extending the love and loathe into the love, loathe, long for and learned. I think that's great. I also like the boomerang versus the stick with respect to your time and what's on the calendar, and just jettison the stuff that is, well, it's not helping you, or the teams, or anyone else. Yeah.

Dom Price:

You could do it like [inaudible 01:01:33]. If it ends up being important, you can add it back.

Nick Muldoon:

Sure.

Dom Price:

[inaudible 01:01:38].

Nick Muldoon:

The big takeaway from this conversation for me is that it's in our hands. The choice, we make the decisions. It's in our hands. I think about, was Mark Twain, whether you think you can or whether you think you can't, you're right.

Dom Price:

Yeah. Yeah.

Nick Muldoon:

You might as well think you can and get on with it.

Dom Price:

Yeah, yeah, give it a red-hot stab and see what happens.

Nick Muldoon:

All right, cool. Don, thanks so much for your time this morning. Really appreciate it.

Dom Price:

It was great chatting.

‍

"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.