Easy Agile Podcast Ep.27 Inclusive leadership

"I loved having the space to talk about common interests - all things technical documentation & information architecture" - Henri Seymour

On this episode of The Easy Agile Podcast, tune in to hear Henri Seymour - Developer at Easy Agile speak with Matt Reiner - Customer Advocate at K15t.

Henri & Matt are talking all things technical documentation (we promise this episode is way more interesting than it sounds! 😉)

✏️ Considering technical documentation as a product
✏️ The value of well written documentation
✏️ Why you should be digitally decluttering often
✏️ Information architecture

So many golden nuggets in this episode!

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

Transcript

Henri Seymour:

Hi, everyone. This is the Easy Agile Podcast. We've got an episode today with Matt Reiner. I'm your host for today, Henri Seymour, developer at Easy Agile. And just before we start the podcast, I'd like to acknowledge the traditional Australians of the land on which I'm recording today, the Watiwati people of the Dharawal nation. Pay respect to elders past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people listening to this episode.

Matt is an experienced content strategist with a history of working in the computer software industry, skilled in agile scrum framework, related tools, communication, technical writing, video production, customer interaction, strategic planning. And he's here today to talk with us about writing and specifically technical writing and documentation. Hi, Matt.

Matt Reiner:

Hi. It's great to be here. Yeah, I'm Matt. I'm into all sorts of content things. And one of those is technical writing, which is, I think more interesting than it sounds. I guess you'll have to decide by the end of the podcast, if you think so.

Henri Seymour:

Technical documentation experts. So when you talk about technical documentation specifically, what do you mean by that?

Matt Reiner:

Well, I feel like that term is actually in the middle of a big change right now. In the past, technical documentation was very strictly like, "Okay, we're a team, we're making a thing, a product." Maybe it's an app, maybe it's, I don't know, a go-kart and we need to have a user manual for that. Technical documentation was someone sitting down and writing down, "Okay, here are all the knobs and switches and here's what they do. Here are all the features. Here's maybe why you would use them."

So putting together that user guide, which traditionally was printed material that you would get with the product. But it's become a lot more over time, partially with the internet, because we can just constantly iterate on content like many of us do with the products that our teams make. And then also we are seeing it in new forms. Maybe it's not a printed piece, in fact, most people do not want printed technical documentation anymore, they want it online. Or even better, they want it right in context in your app when they're using it, they can just get the info they need, and then get on with it.

That's what technical documentation is. It's supposed to be there to help you do the thing that you really care about and then get out of the way so that you can do it.

Henri Seymour:

Do you have a description of why good technical documentation? Not just having it, but having it at a good quality in a way that really helps your users, is so important to product users.

Matt Reiner:

Well, I suppose we all find those points in our day or in our journey that we find ourselves in where we want to accomplish something, but we don't know how to do it. So a lot of us have really gotten very used to jumping on Google and saying, "Okay, here's this thing I want to do, how do I do it?" And good technical documentation is there with the answer you need, the explanation you need. Because really ultimately all of us are smart people who should be empowered to do the thing we're passionate about.

And technical writers and communicators who are really all members of our team. People who sit down to create good technical documentation uses few words as possible to get a person on the way they're going. And that's like, when it happens its just like, "Glorious," not to the user. They don't even know that it happened, they didn't even know that they read your writing. But to the writer, it's like, "Yeah, I did it, I did it. They don't even care what I did, but I did it." And now they're doing the thing that really matters.

Henri Seymour:

That's great understanding one of the major differences of like, I've written something and I don't want my user to be spending time on it. I want as little time spent reading this as possible.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can have great pride in your work, but one of those metrics that a lot of people look at for websites is time spent on page. So sometimes you can fool yourself into thinking, "Oh wow, they spent 10 minutes on my page. That means my documentation's really good." But also that might mean that it's not very good and they're having to reread it over and over again. So the true metric is, did they get to the thing they really cared about? And unfortunately, it's hard to measure.

Henri Seymour:

You mentioned now that with the advent of the internet and giving you the opportunity to iterate on those docs in a way that you wouldn't be able to with printed documentation. That iterative thing brings the agile process of iterate on something that you already put out and improve it in the same way that as a developer I do for products. Can you tell us more about that iterative agile sort of process?

Matt Reiner:

Oh yeah. Yeah, it's so true. Documentation used to be back in the waterfall standard, more typical product project management days, documentation was a major part of it. You'd start this project by writing these massive documents of, "Here's what we're going to set out to do. And here's all the considerations, and here's how everything's going to connect up." And that did work really well for a lot of hardware. Which was the thing that we made for a long time. Just everything that humankind made was hardware often, as groups anyway.

And then all of a sudden this whole software thing comes along and we're trying to build that like it's a physical thing. And we get to the end of this two-year software project and people are like, "Yeah, that's not the thing that I wanted." But we're like, "Oh, but we go back to the beginning and look at that documentation, and that's what you said you wanted." But now with the internet and with just agile development, we really need to move away from this place where we start with a pile of documents. And then we develop another pile of documents as our, I don't know, development guidelines.

And then our test plans, and then finally we end up with user documentation. Instead, these days, documentation should really just grow from a very small piece of content throughout that whole agile development cycle into that final user documentation. Because it doesn't matter what we set out to make, it matters what we make. Nobody he wants to read about what we thought we would make, that's straight up fiction. And it's probably not an interesting read. It's really that final user guide that comes out of the agile process, but that's a big change, but it's a good one.

Henri Seymour:

I love that idea of just like, this is gradually growing. There is no specific start block and end block. It's a process. And you mentioned the opportunity to iterate on those documents. Do you have any advice for after you've published digitally your technical documentation from iterating on what you've already got there, improving that over time?

Matt Reiner:

Oh yeah. I know every agile framework is different, but they all have that feedback phase, where... And really that's throughout the whole process, but we do need to dedicate some time. So, there's a lot of different things we can look at. For example, I don't want to say basic, a standard one that we should be looking at is, you should have a help center, where you can implement something like Google Analytics so you can see just, what are people looking at? How long are they looking at it?

Another really good one is, you have to set it up separately in Google Analytics. What are people searching for on your site? You can also use Google... used to be Webmaster Tools. I think it's called Site Tools now, but you can see what were people searching for on Google before they came to your pages. That's all really, really valuable stuff. Then you can get more advanced. You can look at pointer tracking, apps that you can embed on there, which you get some pretty wild stuff.

But then you also, you want to consider having a forum at the bottom of each page like, "Was this helpful? Was it not helpful? Oh, it wasn't helpful? Tell me why. Oh, it was helpful? Tell me why." Just like a YouTube creator, they look for that feedback. That feedback is essential, the thumbs up. In fact, it's very controversial, YouTube just announced that they're going to hide the thumbs down numbers, but a lot of creators are like, "No, no, no don't do that because that communicates the value of this video that is out there."

So there's a lot of those signals. And then there's just really soft signals that, it's hard to know if people are using the content or not. Because you may never hear. Especially, if it is one of those things that they just get in and get out, you're not going to hear anything about that. But the feedback phase, it's really great to... Anytime you're getting feedback on your product that you're making, try to get your documentation out there as well. Because that's the time where people are open to exploring your product and giving feedback.

So why not explore that same documentation, the related documentation to see, "Okay, is this actually helping these people do the thing that they want to do? Or should we improve it just like we do with the product?"

Henri Seymour:

No, that's a really good, comparing the, we've just released a product. Give us feedback with doing the same thing with the documentation. Because that's when it's going to reach its peak use before everyone's got the hang of it. We've just done this feature release, let us know how you go using it, and the documentation is in a sense part of it, especially for more complex products.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

Do you have any background in the customer support side of things? We do customer support in-house as well as their documentation. So we're trying to improve the documentation to lower the support load on our team. Do you have any background in that... Can you solve it?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Well, yes and no. It's interesting. I work at K15t now, I used to be a customer of K15t's, so that's actually how I met the team. And that was also how I met documentation in the first place. At my last job, they brought me in to administrate this system called Jira. And I was like, "I don't know what that is." I told them, "I thought I could do it." And I figured it out, it was this little thing called Jira On-Demand, which is now Jira Cloud. And I introduced Confluence On-Demand to the company as well. And wow, I broke Jira a lot of times.

Luckily it wasn't like mission critical at the time, we were still really figuring it out. But it was through Atlassian's documentation on Jira that I really learned like, "Wow, there is tremendous value to this content here." And then I discovered, "Okay, how is Atlassian creating their documentation? Oh, they're doing it in Confluence. They're writing it in Confluence. They're using these apps from K15t." And so I started using those apps, and then I talked a lot to K15t customer support, just questions and how do I get this started?

And we also do our support in-house, so it's really great. So maybe as a customer, I overused it, I don't know. I should ask some of my colleagues if they got sick of me. But the benefit was very clear because they would send me, "Oh, here's documentation on this. And here's the answer to this question or here are the considerations you should keep in mind." And actually several of our teams now, we're really looking at, especially, for those features that are very robust, people have questions.

So it's like, how can we enable them to help them help themselves? And putting those resources out there is one thing, making sure that Google can find them, well, is another. But that is a really important thing, especially, since as a product team, when your user base grows, so does your need for support. It's just... I don't want to say it's exponential, but it's in line with each other. And so, one of the ways you can mitigate that is, making sure you have good design so that your product is easy to use. And then another is you need to have good content all around that entire experience so that you don't have to keep hiring more and more support people.

Or your support people can specialize and really focus on those deep entrenched issues, and then the documentation should help with the rest. But the secret sauce there is tricky. It's hard to write the perfect content to deflect the cases. That's everybody's dream.

Henri Seymour:

Even if it is just not all of them, but some of the common use cases start to get deflected away from support because people can self service. It does make a difference. And I really understand the idea of Jira documentation as well. Easy Agile works on Jira and it's... Jira is an incredibly complicated product at this point, and I imagine it probably was also complicated when it was Jira On-Demand. Because it's so complicated and so detailed, there's no way to make that easy to understand for a user without that documentation. There's no getting around that one.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. I think there should be a club for the people who have broken workflows too many times in Jira. But yeah, I mean the documentation saved me many times and I would have to put out a... Well, it was a HipChat message at the time. May it rest in peace and I'd have to say, "I broke Jira, give me a minute. I got to go read something." Not the way you want to learn Jira, but it's an option.

Henri Seymour:

It is. Sometimes you learn things by breaking things. That's-

Matt Reiner:

That's right.

Henri Seymour:

Really seems like my experience in software so far. You try to break the things that people aren't currently using and that's about all you can do.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

So K15t has recently published Rock the Docs. Can you tell us a bit more about this project?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Rock the Docs, actually, it came out of a lot of that information that I got from K15t. Customer support, I got from K15t documentation, I got from Atlassian documentation. And then some of the stuff I figured out on my own, or some of my colleagues at K15t did. Essentially like, what are the best practices for creating really good content in Confluence? And it really started with a collection of guides on how to create technical documentation content. It's geared toward like making a public help center, but really it's for any kind of content that you want to be like evergreen, longstanding content to be able to help people.

So we initially talked about all sorts of things like structuring your content, content reuse, managing multiple languages, which can be tricky in Confluence. Collaboration, publishing your content outside of Confluence in one way or another, managing versions of that content. So, that's the start of it. And then we saw a lot of positive response with that and we had more general questions like, "Okay, but what are the best ways to get feedback in Confluence?" Or, "How do I make a template or a good template or how do I make a good diagram in Confluence?"

And so we've grown that content to focus on just all sorts of general Confluence things. Because we found that there's a lot of information out there on how to do something. Atlassian documentation really helpful, but there wasn't as much, I'm like, "Why would you do it? And why would you do it this specific way?" And we've been working with Confluence for over 10 years now. Like I said, I've been with Confluence since the crashy early cloud days. It's grown up so fast, it's beautiful.

But we just know we've done a lot of stuff with Confluence, so it's been a real privilege to share that both in like these written guides. And then actually recently we've started publishing a series to our YouTube channel as well, all about Confluence best practices.

Henri Seymour:

That's great. It's real interesting to hear how that started as a smaller project than it turned out to be, because you could see the value in it and the use in it. We've discussed Confluence a few times now and K15t builds apps that use Confluence as a documentation source. Can you tell us more about what makes Confluence useful for building technical documentation? What sort of tools and approaches that make it useful in this context?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Confluence is by nature open, which is not the way technical writing tools are built. In fact, I remember the first time I went to a technical writing conference and someone asked me, "Oh, what tool do you use?" Which is like, what technical communications people talk about, because we're all nerds in that way. And I was like, "Oh, I'm doing it in Confluence." And they didn't really want to talk to me after that because they didn't think I was a serious tech writer. And I was like, "Oh no, no, no, no, this is all happening."

At that point, Rock the Docs didn't exist. So I couldn't be like, "Go over there and see how it works." But the biggest difference is most tech writing tools are just totally locked down. You have two licenses for your two people who are trained professional tech graders, and then everybody else, there's no access. You don't touch it. Maybe your tech writers will send you a PDF and you have to go through the God awful process of marking up a PDF to tell them like what to correct. Or, I've heard of teams printing out the content and people penciling in what needs to be changed.

The review processes are just out of this world insane. And those tools don't fit terribly well with agile processes because it's like, you build the thing over here, and then here's the two tech writers over here in their separate tool. And at some point we'll be like, "Okay, this thing's done. Would you write about it?" So with Confluence, the benefit of using Confluence is, it's accessible to everyone on the team and even people outside the team. And that's incredibly by an official because we've seen with agile, but we're also seeing in this technical communication and in information design field, that teams are less and less looking for those specialized individuals who are trained tech writers.

Which that's an oxymoron because half of us, we don't have degrees in tech writing, we fell into it for one reason or another. But now teams are starting to see, "Hey, I can be a code developer and an information developer. I might not write the final piece of written content that is seen by our customers, but I might write the first draft." Confluence really opens that up for everyone. And especially with like at mentioning and inline comments, review processes are just so fast.

Actually, the reason that I switched to Confluence at my last job, was my product manager threatened me and said, "I will not mark up another PDF. Go and find a good tool that we all want to work in." And that's where we landed on Confluence. It's about bringing the whole team into the writing process instead of having it be this separate thing. Because when it's a separate thing, we lose track of it. And content, we forget how important it is to our product, to the customer life cycle, to... God bless customer support, who really, really need that content to be good and accurate.

And it needs to be seen by the real experts who validate, "Yeah, okay, this is correct. This will actually show people how our product works." And Confluence is like the heart of that.

Henri Seymour:

No, it's great to hear how that all comes together to build the documentation as a team. Can you speak more to the different roles in, specifically in software development and the different roles you're looking to get involved in your documentation process? We are working on building our specific app teams here at Easy Agile as we're growing at the moment.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. That's such a good question. Well, what-

Henri Seymour:

And how do you incorporate... Sorry, this is more specific to my question. How do you incorporate that technical writing process as part of the work of an agile software development team?

Matt Reiner:

Well, first, it starts by rethinking priorities because most teams are like, "Documentation down here, testing and then everything else above." So generally, those two things should be moved up. And actually, the content around our product is... I don't want to sound over traumatic, but if we don't have information, we don't have a product. I don't care how much code you write. If we're not explaining it to people, if we don't have good UI text, if we don't have good in-app help, it doesn't exist. It's not a useful tool, it's just a set of mathematics that humans can't interact with.

So content is essential, so it's really important that we elevate it to the position where everyone on the team recognizes that the content experience that our users have is the product experience they have. So it needs to be part of the product development process. So then the next step, which I know you're talking about team structure, but the next step is really everyone on the team needs to know they're a writer, and they're a good writer. And that's important because a lot of people have never heard that. They've never heard that they're a good writer, and they probably have never heard that they're a writer.

I remember going through university, my writing classes were the things that I didn't pay attention to. I was doing mathematics, and Java programming, and statistics. Even that seemed more important to me, not the writing classes. And then sure enough, it turns out everyone has to write. We all write. So knowing that that is a role that everyone fills is really important. And then when it comes to actually team structure, you need to have individuals who are willing to cross the streams, so to speak. If you're bringing in someone who's focusing on test engineering, they need to realize that the test plans they're writing are very similar to a lot of user documentation that needs to be written.

They're writing task topics, or task instructions, do this, do this, do this over and over again. That's documentation. They could be contributing in that way. Engineers, as I mentioned, they could be drafting the first copy of a lot of what are called concept topics. So areas of documentation where you explain concepts, because they already know what those concepts are. In fact, if you look at the root of a lot of agile development teams, they're using epics and user stories and acceptance criteria. And all those map perfectly into the documentation you needed to create for that new feature you're working on or feature you're improving.

So really, it's essential to have everybody recognize, we are all already creating documentation, so we can contribute. And then of course, you really do want to have at least one probably native English speaker. Maybe not native, but someone who feels confident in their English or whatever language you're authoring in. English is typically the cheapest one to translate to other languages, so that's what people go for often. But that person's the person who takes everything everybody's written, gets it to the right style and tone. And then gets it out there. That's what we are seeing be successful.

Like our teams right now, we don't have any legit tech writers. We have product managers writing. We have product marketers writing. We have engineers writing. Some of the best documentation I've ever read was from one of our German-speaking engineers. I was like, "Peter, this is an amazing guide. You got to get out of this Java and get into English, man. It's great. It's great." So he's done a few, which I really love. But yeah, it's about jumping out of your typical roles and realizing, we're all documenting this stuff, anyway.

Henri Seymour:

I love the focus, especially with your German-speaking colleague. The focus on, it's not just that you must write the documentation because you know how the product works and we need that written down. It's, you are capable of writing the documentation, you can do this. You have that added barrier of safety with somebody who's got the language proficiency that they're going to massage it and edit it at the end.

So, before it gets anywhere, anything that you do is going to get filtered out if it's not working. But you don't need a specific tech-writing background to write the docs.

Matt Reiner:

No, absolutely not. In fact, there's an entire community of what... They call themselves documentarians called Write the Docs. And that whole community, that whole group is focused on, it doesn't matter what you do, it matters that you care about writing the docs, contributing to the content. And that's been a big shift, I think in the industry, where people thought we're separate. But now it's like, "No, no, no, we are all able to do this." And once we can respect the contributions that each of us can make.

And then also, I have that protection of somebody else is going to have their eyes on this, which even my writing, I'm like, "I don't like to send it out until someone else has seen it." Because I make spelling mistakes and typos all the time. I really want to have another colleague look at it. Even if they're not native English speakers, because they catch my typos pretty often. That feeling of togetherness, it's the same way that we feel when we ship out a project or a product.

Whether you did the testing for it, or you wrote the code for it, or you did the product marketing for it. It's like, "It's our baby. Let's send it out and see what happens." Content's the same way.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, part of my daily role and [inaudible 00:28:03]... We don't have QA team separate from developers. Our developers also review our code and it's that sense of, "I wrote this thing, but I have one or two other people who've refined it, who've made sure that it's good enough quality. They've got that fresh eye, so they'll see the spelling mistakes, they'll see the minor little errors that I've just been looking at it too long to notice anymore."

I found the documentation writing process has some parallels in there like, "Here's my thing. I'd like some feedback on it before it goes out into the real world."

Matt Reiner:

Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

That's great.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

All right. Can you talk a bit about the difference between the customer-facing documentation that we've mostly discussed so far and internal documentation?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. There are some differences and there are some major similarities. So this very... It sounds very technical and ugly. The term information architecture, it's really important with any kind of content, internally and externally. And really that's like, if you're a developer you're familiar with XML, you're familiar with structuring things in that way. Our content needs to work the same way. And that goes for internal and external documentation. So, many of the things that they use, writers, when they write a page or an article in the newspaper, they'll use that Pyramid approach, where they put the broad bits of information at the top. And then they slowly focus in on the topic and give more and more information about it.

But you want to make sure that if somebody only reads the first paragraph, they're getting a rough idea of what the information is. And that's really important for successful Confluence pages and spaces. People should be able to start at the top level of the space, understand what the space is about, and then be able to navigate down into the thing that they really want to learn about into the page itself. Which should then be using headings and subheadings and bullet points to get, again, just disseminate that information and break it down. Because everybody skims.

We need our content to be skimmable, our spaces need to be skimmable. And that kind of content also makes Confluence search happy, especially the new Confluence Cloud search, which has been greatly improved. There's a whole new elastic search base to that that's being optimized. But it's happy, it's just like with Google when we structure our content like that. So when you have a page that is just a wall of text, no headings, you're not breaking it up into pages or even spaces, nobody's going to be happy with that.

The bots aren't going to be happy with it, the people reading aren't going to be happy with it. So it takes a bit of work to structure, break up the structure of our content. It's probably all good as long as it's up-to-date, but it's really essential that we think about, how do we structure that in Confluence so that people can find it and people can skim it? And that is what seems to plague a lot of internal Confluence instances, because a lot of... Maybe the team isn't so focused on that.

It's like, "Oh, our external help center that's come coming from this space over here, that's fine. Our team space, hot mess, total tire fire." And nobody cares because they think they know where everything is. But then you start to think about, "Okay, but what about the new team member? How do they find something?" Or, "What about the team member who's been away for Paternity leave for six weeks? Are they going to remember where everything is or know where all the new stuff is?

What about folks with disabilities? Is it going to be much harder for them to navigate to the information they need? Because they're working with a screen reader and they're trying to go through a wall of text. They need headings, a screen reader relies on those headings and titles." So there's just so many considerations that really leadership of companies needs to understand, just because you have a process to do something or the information is somewhere, doesn't mean you don't have a major information problem. And maintaining all of your content in Confluence and then maintaining it well.

That is what enables people to avoid the frustrations of searching for information, losing information, having to relearn or rewrite information. I have worked at too many companies that just information sieves everywhere. I don't even want to call them silos because nobody knows where stuff is anymore either. That's what Confluence brings to things, and that's what matters with internal content pretty much as well as external.

Henri Seymour:

That's a great perspective on it. And I can see the silos, it's a really more... Just a one big pile, you can't find anything. I've been-

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

... at Easy Agile for more than half of its life now and I've got that sense of like, "Oh, I know I wrote this down somewhere. I know I've seen this written down somewhere." And we are making a habit, especially as we're hiring more and more people. Every time somebody's going through onboarding, they're going to be looking at all of this documentation with no previous background on it. And we want to hear their feedback on it specifically. Because if it works for them, then that's the documentation that we need for them and for everyone after them, and for everyone who's already here.

Especially, I've been at Easy Agile for almost three years now, and I've seen it grow from eight people to now we're up to high 20s, I think. We're going to cross over into the 30s by the end of the year.

Matt Reiner:

Wow.

Henri Seymour:

The growth of information that we have in our internal documentation, and I'm sure it would parallel the growth of the product documentation for a product that's been expanding for three to five years. How do you manage the documentation and the Confluence spaces as the team and the company grow and you just develop more and more pages out of it?

Matt Reiner:

That is the question since the dawn of the universe or at least the dawn of Confluence, which, what's the difference? The biggest thing is team responsibility, so knowing this is our space, this is our content. And not like in a territorial way, but this is our responsibility. Much the way we should think about our planet, we should also think about our content, keeping it groomed and taken care of, and up-to-date and accurate. And then as things change.

For example, we have a product called Scroll Viewport, which is actually what enables you to publish content from Confluence to a public health center, which is really, really cool. So with that, we had a server and data center version. We've had that for quite some time. That's what I was a user of. And then we set off to develop a cloud version, and cloud requires a whole bunch of new infrastructure, which is a lot of fun and very challenging, but it's a totally different beast.

It's not like you can just lift the server code and just drop it into cloud, which is what as a user I asked them to do for years, "why isn't this on cloud?" Now I know why. So we created a new team that started off this Scroll Viewport on cloud effort. And it was just a very scrappy project at first. And I remember the first page we got up there, it's like, "Whoa, look at this page we published." And then it progressed from there. But then at some point, we needed to bring the two teams back together. And what we could have just said, "Oh, this old Viewport space, whatever. We're just going to leave it there and then just go on with the new one."

But instead the team took time and brought the two spaces together and really went through the old content in the Viewport Server and data center space to say, "Is this all still relevant? Do we still need this?" So it's been reordered in such an amazing way. Several of our teams have gotten really good at making these spaces so that I can come in. Because I work with all of our teams, just get in and find what I need, even though I'm not working their day-to-day. I'm just so glad, I'm so proud of the team for not just letting that space languish somewhere or being afraid to delete or archive content, which a lot of people are.

It's like, "No, what if we lose something?" It's like, "No, no, no, we've moved past this. We really do need to delete it." So that's the kind of attitude it takes is, our teams to split and expand and grow, and we need conscious of that content. Because again, think of the new person, think of the person who's learning something new. Think of the person who maybe does have disabilities and is trying to get the content they need. They just don't have the background that you do. Having been with the company for half its life, you know how to dig through the thought pile to pull out just the thing you want, but they don't.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, and I don't want to be the person that they have to ask every time they need information, "Hey, can you find this for me?" No, no. I want to build a system that means that I don't have to answer the same questions all the time. That's one of the reasons I've been doing internal documentation so much since [inaudible 00:37:36]. I've answered this question once, that will do.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. That's a really good way to motivate any contributors to documentation. "Hey, you know how you wrote that piece of our app that one time and then everybody's asked you about how it works ever since? Just document it once and I promise you can never answer it again." That's good motivation right there.

Henri Seymour:

It is. As well, we've got a team on support models, so I'm working on the store maps and personas, product development team. And that's the same team that gets all of the support requests about story maps and personas. So yeah, the better we make the product, the better we make the documentation, the less of our time every morning we spend doing that. And the more we can get back to our regular jobs.

Matt Reiner:

Exactly.

Henri Seymour:

It's been great for helping us keep in contact with the customers and what they're doing and what information they need when they're using our product. You mentioned that like it's necessary, it's valuable to be deleting an archive-based stuff, pages in Confluence from time to time. When you're looking at a page and wondering whether or not it's time to go, what sort of questions are you asking yourself?

Matt Reiner:

Well, a great one is like, look at the last modified date on that page. That's general a pretty good sign of like, "Are people even looking at it?" In fact, if you're on cloud premium and above, you can look at some great metrics on every page to see like who's looking at this thing? Is this valuable? What are the views like? Just the same way that you would look at your external website to see if your content is valuable or effective. But typically, we have a lot of debris left over from product development or team activities.

Like if you're in marketing and you have a campaign from three years ago, do you really need all of those detailed pages? Maybe keep the overall campaign page, maybe that's useful, but do you really need everything? If you're into testing, do you really need every test plan you ever created? If you're in the legal team, do you really want your legal terms from 10 years ago? Maybe, maybe, I'm not in legal. But often we have this fear of, it's like fear of missing content.

It's like, "Oh no, if I get rid of that, then I won't have it." But information, just like language, just like the way we think, just like the way our teams grow, it changes. And so we need to be aware of that. As we are changing as a team, you should expect our content to change. And part of that is shedding that old stuff. So it's always worth it, like if you're questioning it, ask another subject matter expert and be like, "Hey, I'm pretty sure we don't need this anymore, or we should revise this. What do you think?" But if nobody has any qualms, you should probably delete it.

Henri Seymour:

No, that's great. I am a big fan of decluttering, even digital decluttering. It's, I want people to find stuff and the less pile there is, the easier it's going to be.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. Because somehow bad information is less helpful than no information.

Henri Seymour:

Yes. It's like coming across a question and they're like, "Oh, I tried doing it this way." I'm like, "Oh, that way doesn't work anymore. You're going to have to do... Where did you find that written down? I'll go update out." It's-

Matt Reiner:

Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

... new people doing stuff. The best way to understand where your documentation is falling over. It's the same as you're never going to understand how your product documentation and that your product itself is failing your users until they come to you and tell you, "Why can't I do this thing?"

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Yeah. In fact that that power of bringing in someone new on your team is so amazing. And it's almost hard to impart like first day of onboarding like, "You have fresh eyes, please use them. This is called an inline comment, please put it everywhere." I remember going through our human resources employee handbook, which we had just created not too long before I joined. And I remember them telling me, "If there's any questions, at mentioned us." And I was really afraid to do that. But we corrected a lot of things.

For example, we mentioned do these things on... What was it called after HipChat? The product that lived and died so quickly.

Henri Seymour:

I think I missed that one.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, the one that Atlassian made and then they sold it to Slack.

Henri Seymour:

Now, where do I even start on that?

Matt Reiner:

How am I... It was a great app, I really liked it. But we mentioned in the employee handbook to use that. And I'm like, "Oh, I think we're using Slack now, we should update this content." That's stuff that HR is never going to go through and catch, but your new employees can do that. New people are the best way to tell you if your processes are bad, if your content is better. Maybe not bad, but they're bringing in something new. That's why we added them to the team. And they should not be afraid from day one to ask questions, or poke holes in our already messed up or failing process.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. And I can really see the benefit of the tools in Confluence, like that inline comment. Even if you don't know how you need that page updated or what the new version's supposed to be. It's just coming in fresh, you can go, "Oh, this is weird, or incomplete, or it might be wrong." It's just a little comment. You don't have to change it yourself, just say something. Here's a way to speak up without changing it yourself. And somebody who does know is going to be able to change it for you.

I was excited to hear you talk about information architecture. That's something I only got introduced to last year also. Do you have a general explanation of what information architecture is and why it's relevant to documentation?

Matt Reiner:

Oh, information architecture is, there are whole, people, professionals whose entire career is coming in and helping you. So I'm not one of those professionals, I just play one on TV. Really in essence, information architecture is breaking down what would be a wall of text into a pattern of information that anyone's mind can connect to. That's the real and ultimate goal, and that starts by just breaking up logical chunks. In fact, in a lot of pure technical writing, you break the content into tiny, tiny pieces, chunks or some technical communicators talk about atoms of information, really tiny pieces.

And then once you've broken that down and said, "These are separate pieces," then you assemble them together in an order that makes sense. In fact, you can also do really cool stuff with content reuse in Confluence, using include macros and the new Excerpt Include Macro is very cool in cloud, because you can do new stuff with that. But it's really about breaking apart all your content, figuring out what's the order of all of this? What's most important? What's more specific? What is important for everyone? What's important for just a few people?

And then just going down like you would with an XML structure or any other sort of hierarchy and tier that information using your spaces, your pages, your headings. And then finally bullets and paragraphs and that kind of thing.

Henri Seymour:

Thanks for getting that generally explained. Is there anything you want to mention in your work at the moment that you would be interested in getting readers onto?

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, totally. A major new effort for me, because I'm just this content explorer, I guess. I've done like technical content, I've written some marketing content. I started speaking, which I enjoy speaking. I got to speak in front of one live audience before... No, I guess a few, and then, the world's shut down for good reason. Because when you're breathing out on a bunch of people, you want to make sure that you're not potentially putting them at risk. So been doing a lot of virtual speaking.

But recently, I mentioned, we've worked on all these best practices on Rock the Docs. And so we've started this video series about Confluence best practices and it's been very exciting to figure out, "Okay, so I know how to create fairly good in Confluence, how to structure that content. Now, can we make a good video?" And it turns out, no, not at first. Made some pretty poor ones or ones that just took way too much time to make. And finally, as you do with any kind of content, we finally got a good structure, a good rhythm. And we also found what are those things people really want to hear about?

And so we've developed 16 of these now on our YouTube channel that are just out there for administrators to share with your users who are asking these questions. Or maybe these are for users directly who just want to subscribe and get these things. But it's like eight minutes of just as much information as we can pack and still speak fairly legible English. And then show just like how do you do this in Confluence? Why would you do this in Confluence? What are the things you should consider in Confluence? What are the best ways to do things in Confluence?

We've actually just started a series of live streams as well, where we're trying to look at those more in depth and then have people live listening in, asking questions and directing the whole thing. So far those have been really great and we're looking to do more of that. So the more people who pile into those, the more direction y'all get to give that content. But it's been new types of content that it's exciting to see, okay, our good written content in Confluence is coming to the real world in a new format. Which has been cool and challenging and fun and scary all at the same time.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. That's sounds like a really exciting project. Rock the Docs is going audio-visual. And I can-

Matt Reiner:

That's right.

Henri Seymour:

... figure what... Get users on there to give you that iterative feedback that we talked about at the beginning. And so is this worth the thumbs up? Do you have comments? What else can we do? And especially in that sort of live stream webinar format, you get that direct contact with your users so you can find out what they're needing. That's that's fantastic. Probably see if I can come along with those. Easy Agile started using Scroll Viewport for cloud specifically earlier this year.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, cool. Oh, cool.

Henri Seymour:

So that's been a major improvement for us actually.

Matt Reiner:

Oh, good. Yeah. I'm just loving what the cloud team is putting out. It's so exciting and so polished and it's just like every team has that documentation space, and Viewport, it lets you put it out there and you're like, "Ah, looks so great. We're so proud of it." You can read it on any device. It's just like it's the magic that everybody wants, but no team has time. Our very few teams have time to make it look that good, so it's nice to have Viewport just do the heavy lifting.

Henri Seymour:

We've got the Confluence space, we've got the documentation. We don't have to make a website about it. It's just, "Go ahead, please make this website happen. Here's what we need on it. Here's the structure." And golly, it looks a lot better now, even just aesthetically, it looks a lot nice in the house.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. And it's nice to know that like some designer peered over the spacing between navigation items to decide how spaced out they should be. And as a writer, I can just like, I don't have to care. I don't have to care. I can throw in Confluence macros and stuff, and they just look really great when they're published. And I don't know how or why, but I'm happy. I can just keep writing. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah.

Matt Reiner:

It would be great to have someone from Easy Agile join us for one of those live streams. Because what we're really focusing on is just like great way to do things in Confluence. We haven't jumped into Jira yet. I'm not as much of an expert in Jira, but I have thought about it because that content doesn't really exist yet. But it's not necessarily app-focused or K15t app-focused. It's just like one of the best ways you've found to do certain things in Confluence, and we're just sharing those with people alive, and it's a lot of fun.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, that sounds great. I've got the parallel of get really into Jira and making Jira apps and Confluence is, "Yeah, we've got a Wiki. This is where we write stuff down." And it is great to have stuff like "There's the visuals on our docs page." But I don't do those. I'm busy making visuals in a Jira app. I don't want to think about that spacing. I've got my own spacing to do.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah. Yeah.

Henri Seymour:

And it really is that, I can just do the writing, I can just do product. I can do my job more because this other stuff taken care of because the experts at K15t have made that happen. And I hope that our apps can do a similar thing for their users of, this is the thing we need, we don't have to think about this. Bring in this app and it will solve a problem for us. It'll help us see what we need to and organize our information in Jira. Which is a different type of information again, but.

Matt Reiner:

Yeah, yeah. It's funny. I've talked with some people who have actually described that whole app part of Confluence in Jira as App Hell. That's a term that I've seen and I can't help but love the community because we all come up with this stuff. But app hell is, it really comes out of not understanding what a platform is partially. For example, if you're using the Salesforce platform, yeah, that's going to be app hell if you really want Salesforce to be a marketing platform. Because Salesforce is a sales platform. But then there's apps, and Salesforce happens to a sell big one. And then all of a sudden it's a marketing platform.

So that is a really interesting perspective shift for people who are used to a tool that just does one thing. Everybody thinks Excel does everything. It doesn't, we really should just use it for spreadsheets, everybody. It's not a platform for other things. Confluence is really good at these core things, Jira is really good at these core things. And then these apps, they come in to answer the questions that don't have answers and do the things that can't be done. And that's why. So is it App Hell or is it App Heaven? That's the real question. Or maybe it's maybe it's App Purgatory, I don't know. I guess the listeners gets to decide.

Henri Seymour:

The constant stream of, and yet another app needs to update. Which to be fair, I think is not a problem on cloud at this point. That's an exclusively an on-premise problem, the constant app update cycle. But we are hopefully moving towards the end of the purgatory perhaps.

Matt Reiner:

Yes. Yes. I think we're all ascending together. We're just reaching new heights all at the same time.

Henri Seymour:

Is there anything else you'd like to bring up while we talking tech docs?

Matt Reiner:

I guess, I typically go back to when I was in university, I had a manager there who told us in this on campus job that I had, "Our job is to connect people with the resources that are already around them. You're not a teacher, you're just here to connect people." And that has really stuck with me. And that is essentially what we all do. Whether we're building a product that connects people with resources or that is the resource or we're contributing to documentation or some kind of content.

We're really trying to enable people to do that greater thing, that higher level thing that is above our content, it's above our product. It's that thing that they truly care about and any part we get to play and that greater thing, that better thing. That's what it's all about.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah, that's really great perspective. That's probably also a really great thing to round off the end of the podcast with.

Matt Reiner:

I guess so.

Henri Seymour:

Yeah. Thank you very much for joining us, Matt, and for talking all things technical documentation with us on the Easy Agile Podcast.

‍

‍

‍

Gerald shared that companies often face the same challenges over & over again when it comes to implementing agile, but the real challenge and most crucial is overcoming a fixed mindset.

‍

"Gerald helps massive companies work better together while keeping teams focused on people and on the customer. I'll be revisiting this episode."

Gerald also highlights the difference between consultants & coaches, and the value of having good mentors + more

I loved this episode and know you will too!

Be sure to subscribe, enjoy the episode 🎧

‍

Transcript

Sean Blake:

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. Sean Blake here with you today. And we've got a great guest for you it's Gerald Cadden a Strategic Advisor and SAFe Program Consultant Trainer at Scaled Agile, Inc. Gerald is an experienced business, an IT professional, Strategic Advisor and Scaled Agile Program Consultant Trainer SPCT at Scaled Agile. Thanks, Gerald. Welcome to the Easy Agile Podcast. It's really great to have you on as a guest today, and thank you for spending a bit of time with us and sharing your expertise with our audience on the Easy Agile Podcast.

Sean Blake:

So I'm really interested and I'm interested in this story that... For all the guests that we have at the podcast, but can you tell me a little bit about your career today? I find that people find their way to these Agile roles or the Agile industry through so many diverse types of jobs in the past. Some people used to be plumbers or tradies, or they worked in finance or in banking. How did you find your way into working at somewhere like Scaled Agile?

Gerald Cadden:

Good morning, Sean. Thanks for having me here guys. I'm very happy to be here with you guys today. Career things are always an interesting question. I'm 53 and so when I look back I wonder how do I get to where I am? And you can often look at just a series of fortunate events. And I worked in retail shoe stores and then I decided to do something in my life. Did an IT diploma then did a degree and I started working in the IT side. I pretty much started as a developer because that was where the money was and so that's where you wanted to go. I didn't stay as a developer long. Okay. All right. I was a terrible developer so I wasn't good at it. It was frustrating.

Gerald Cadden:

I moved into some pre-sales work and that led me to doing business analysis and I really liked the BA work because I got to work with people and see changes. I could work with the developers, still got to work really directly with the customer which was much more interesting for me. So I spent a lot of time in BA doing the development work, doing business process reengineering my transitioned over to rational unified process. When it was around spent countless hours writing use cases doing your mail diagrams, convincing people on how to make the changes on those. And then Agile came along and I had to make a complete brain switch. So all of this stuff that I'd learned and depended on as a BA suddenly disappeared because Agile didn't require that as an upfront way of working. It required that to be in the background if you wanted it and it was more a collaboration.

Gerald Cadden:

So about 2004, 2005 started working with Agile a lot more by this time I was living in the U.S. So that's where I got my agile experience, stayed there for a long time. Got great experience and then I moved over to working with SAFe around 2011. The catalyst for that as I was working for the large financial firm in New York with a team there. And we were redesigning a large methodology for them to implement Agile at scale. Went to a seminar in 2011 at an Agile conference saw Dean Leffingwell presentation on SAFe and just looked up and went, "Well we can stop working on our methodology. It's done."

Gerald Cadden:

So hardly after that meeting I ran outside and tackled Dean Leffingwell because I wanted him to look at my diagrams and everything and give me some affirmation that I was doing the right thing. Dean is got a very frank face and he pulled his frank face and he looked at me and just said, "You know what? Just use SAFe?" And I'm like, "Yeah, we will." And so I started my SAFe journey around that time and we implemented that financial company and I've been on that journey ever since.

Sean Blake:

So take us back 10 years ago to 2011. And you're working at this financial company, you've heard of this concept of SAFe really for the first time you started to implement it. How did the people at that company respond to you bringing in this new way of thinking this new framework? It sounded you already had the diagrams on the frameworks and the concepts forming in your mind did you find that an easy process? I think I already know the answer, but how complex was that to try and introduce SAFe for the first time into an organization of that magnitude?

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah, this is a very large financial firm, a very old financial firm so very traditional ways of working. So what's interesting is the same challenges SAFe comes up against today they're present before SAFe even began. And so the same challenges of the past management approaches trying to move to faster ways of working was still there. So as we were furiously drawing diagrams in Visio, trying to create models for people to understand it was hard to create a continuum of knowledge and education that would get people to move from the mindset they had to the mindset we wanted them to have. And it was an evolving journey for myself and the team that I was working with. I work with a really great guy and his name is Algona, a very, very smart man.

Gerald Cadden:

And so the two of us we're always scratching our heads as to how to get the management to change their minds. And we focused on education, but it was still a big challenge. I finished on the project as they started with SAFe. I moved to different management role in the company that we continued the work there. Michael Stump he used to work for Scaled Agile I think he works now at a different company, but he continued a lot of that work and did a really good job and they did implement SAFe. They made changes, but they faced all the same challenges. The management mindset overcoming moving away from the silos to a more network structured organization. Just the tooling, just the simple things was still a challenge and there's still a challenge today. So the nature of the organization is still evolving even in the modern day Agile world.

Sean Blake:

You mentioned there that part of the challenge is around mindset and education. Have you found any shortcuts into how you change a team's mindset? The way they approach their work, the way that they approach working with other teams in that organization? I assume the factor of success has a lot to do with, has the team changed their mindset on the way they were working before and now committed to this new way of working? And can you talk to us a little bit about how do you go about changing a team's mindset?

Gerald Cadden:

Maybe I'll change the direction of your question here, because what I've found is usually you don't have to work too hard to change the mindset of a team. Most of the teams are really eager to try new things and be innovative. You only come across some people in teams who may be their career path has got them to a certain point where they're happy with the way the world is and they don't want to change. The mindset you really need to change is around that leadership space and that's still true today. So the teams will readily adapt if management can create the environment that allows them to do it and if they can be empowered. But it's really... If you want to enable the team it's getting the leadership around them to change their mindset, to change the structures that are constraining the teams from doing the best job they can.

Gerald Cadden:

And so that for me was the big discovery as you went along and it's still true today. As Agile has been evolving I've noticed that people don't always put leadership at the top of the list of challenges but for me it's always been at that top of the list. A lot of people want to look at leadership and say things about them unflattering things, but you have to remember these are human beings. And the best way to come to leadership is to really begin with a conversation, help them understand. They know the challenges, but we need to help them understand what's causing the issues that are creating those challenges.

Gerald Cadden:

As you work with them and educate them you can to open their minds up a little more. Does that mean they'll actually change? Not necessarily. Political motivations, ideologies other things constrained leadership from moving. But conversations and education I think are the way to really approach leadership. And getting to know them as a person, take an interest in their challenges, take an interest in them as an individual. So create that social bond is an important thing. As a consultant that was always hard to do because as a consultant you're always seen as an external force and it's hard to build that somewhat social relationship with that leadership and build that trust.

Sean Blake:

Yeah, that's so true. Isn't it. I remember on an Agile transformation that I was on previously, how Agile coach really would spend just as much time with the leadership team as they would with us the Agile team. And it seems strange that the coach was spending so much time trying to really coach the leadership team on how they should think about this new way of working, but you put it in the right context there it's so important that they create that environment for their people and for their teams to feel safe in trying something new. Yeah, that's really important.

Gerald Cadden:

I think if you looked at how Agile evolves, when you look at the creation of the Agile manifesto and its principles and then the following frameworks like ScrumXP, et cetera it evolved from a team perspective. So everybody made the assumption that we needed to create these things for the teams to follow, but as people worked with teams they found that it wasn't the teams at all the teams adapt, but the management and the structures of the organizations are not adapting. And so that's really where it went.

Gerald Cadden:

I can't recall the number of countless Scrum implementations you worked on and you just hit that ceiling of organizational challenges. And it was always very frustrating for the teams. I think there's a an opposite side to that too is that too many in the Agile world just look at the teams as the center of the world and you can't approach it from that way either the teams are very important to delivering value to the customers, but it's the organization as a whole that delivers value. And I think you really have to sit back and just say, "The teams are part of that how do we change the organization inclusive of the teams?"

Sean Blake:

Okay. That's really interesting. Gerald, you've spoken a bit about teams and mindset, when you go into an organization, a big auto manufacturer or a big airline or a financial services company and they're asking for your help, or they're asking for your training, how do you assess where that organization is up to? What's their level of maturity from an Agile point of view? Do you have organizations that are coming to you who have in their mind that they're ready to go SAFe and then you turn up on day one and it turns out no one has any real idea about what that type of commitment looks like?

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah, it's a good question. Because I think as I look back at the history of this, in 2011, 2012 when SAFe really got going, as you went forward I mean, there was no concept of where to begin. Consultants were just figuring it out for themselves and like most consulting or most methodologies they got engaged in an IT space and at the team level. And people would try to grow from the team level upwards. And at some point we need to know I've struggled a lot with this because I was just trying to figure out where it is that. So my consulting hat was always on to sit down, talk to people about their challenges, find a way to help figure out how to solve the challenges whether it was going to be Scrum or SAFe or whatever is going to be right.

Gerald Cadden:

Those are just tools in the toolbox. But when Scaled Agile as I was working with... Excuse me, as I was working with SAFe, Scaled Agile brought out the implementation roadmap. It produced so much more clarity that came later in my time with SAFe and I wish it had come earlier because it really began to help me clarify that initial thing that we call getting over the tipping point. How to work with the organization you're talking to, work with the right people, understand their challenges, help them understand what causes those problems, which is the more traditional ways of working the traditional management mindset, help them connect SAFe as a way to overcome those challenges and begin to show them. If you looked at the roadmap it's this contiguous step-by-step thing, but what you find in reality is there are gaps between those steps and in those gaps is the time you as a transitional team are having lots of conversation with the management.

Gerald Cadden:

If you put them through a training class they're not going to come out of the class going, "Oh, wow that's it. We know what to do." It takes follow-up conversation. You have to have one-on-ones one on many conversations, cover topics of gains so you can remove the assumptions or sorry the misassumptions. So it's a lot of that kind of work that the roadmap its there for those who are implementing SAFe today use it. It is one of the most helpful tools you'll have.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Yeah. I think just acknowledging the difference between the tools in the toolbox and then the other fact that you're dealing with humans and you're dealing with attitudes and motivations and behaviors and habits there's two very different things there really. It sounds you need to take them all together on that journey.

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah. A side to that we train so many SPCs like SAFe program consultants. We train them, training them out of classes all the time with us and our partners. The thing that you can, you can teach them about the framework, but you can't necessarily teach them how to be a good consultant or a good... I want to say I use the term consultant and coach, right?

Sean Blake:

Yes.

Gerald Cadden:

Sometimes I like to say a good consultant can be a good coach, but a good coach can't necessarily be a good consultant because there's another world of knowledge you need to have like how do you sit down and talk to executives? How do you learn the patients and the kinds of questions you need to ask, how do you learn to build those relationships and understand how to work the politics? So there are things outside the knowledge of an SPC that they need to gain. So young people coming in and running to do this SPC course I want to prepare you for everything, but it gives you the foundations.

Sean Blake:

So when you're in a organization or you're coaching people to go back to their organization how do you teach them those coaching skills so that when they come in and they've got to learn the politics, they've got to identify the red flags, they've got to manage the dependencies, they've got to bring new teams onto the train. How do you go about equipping that more human and communications of the toolbox really?

Gerald Cadden:

I think you can obviously teach the fundamentals of the framework by running through the training courses. But mentoring for me is the way to go. Every time I teach a training class I make it very clear to people when they go back and they're starting a transformation don't go this alone. Find experienced people that have done this and the experience shouldn't just be with SAFe their experience should be having worked with large organizations having experience with the portfolio level if necessary. Simply because there are skills that people develop over years of their career if they don't have at the beginning.

Gerald Cadden:

I mean, if I look back at some of the horrific things I had said in meetings and in front of executives my boss would put his hands up in front of his face because I was young and impulsive and immature and I see that today. So when I first came to the U.S I worked with some younger BAs and they would say things in a meetings and you quickly have to dance around some things to, "We didn't really want to say that right now." So I think mentoring is the skill. We can teach you the tactical skills, but teaching you the political skills, the human skills is something that takes mentoring and time.

Sean Blake:

Mentoring so important in that context. Isn't it?

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah.

Sean Blake:

Okay. So let's rewind 12 months ago to March 2020, a month that's probably burned into a lot of people's mind is the month that COVID changed our lives for the foreseeable future. I know that Easy Agile had a lot of content out there, articles about how to do remote PI Planning, how to help your virtual teams work better together and we didn't know that COVID was coming we just saw this trend happening in the workforce and we had this content available.

Sean Blake:

And then I was checking out our website analytics and we had this huge spike in what I assume were people in these companies trying to work out for the first time, how to do PI Planning virtually, how to keep very literally their release trains on the tracks in a time where people were either leaving the state, working from home for the first time, it's really like someone dropped the bomb in the middle of these release trains and people scrambling on how we are we going to do this virtually now? Did you have a lot of questions at the time on how are we going to do this? And how have you seen companies respond to those challenges?

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah. I remember being in Boulder, Colorado in January of 2020 and I just come back from vacation in Australia and that's when COVID was coming around and you were hearing about things in January, 2020. I was talking with my colleagues and we were wondering how bad this is going to be within two months the world was falling apart. And for us I think a good way to tell that story is to look at what Scaled Agile did. We knew our business that it was very reliant on our partner success and it still is today. And so as we began to see the physical world of PI Planning and training, as we began to see that completely falling apart the company had to quickly adapt.

Gerald Cadden:

We already had a set of priorities set for the PI and we implement Scaled Agile internally in the company. At the time we're running the company as a train itself because it's 170 all people. So they had to reprioritize the different epics, we pushed a new features and it was all about what do we need to change now to keep our partners afloat by getting them online and a really good team at Scaled Agile in a really cross-company effort to get short-term online materials created to keep the partners upright so they could keep teaching. They could find ways to do this, to do PI Planning, to do they're inspecting adapts all online. And so we pushed out a lot of material just simply in the form of PowerPoint slides that they could then incorporate into tools like Mural, Al tool. SAFe collaborate we went about developing this and we've been maturing that over time.

Gerald Cadden:

And so now we're in a world where we have a lot more stability. We saw a big dip like everybody else, but the question is, are you going to come out of that dip? And so what we did notice within probably even the second quarter of that year where the tail end of it we saw it starting to come up again, which our partners starting to teach more online. So the numbers told us that the materials we're producing were working. So for us it was just a great affirmation that organizing yourself the way we did organize yourself, the quick way we could adapt saved us. So Scaled Agile could have gone the way of a lot of companies and not being able to survive because our partners wouldn't have survived. We had the ability to adapt. So it's a great success story from my perspective.

Sean Blake:

Well, that's great. We're all glad you're still around to tell the story.

Gerald Cadden:

Yes we are.

Sean Blake:

And Gerald, whether you're reflecting on companies you've worked with in the past, or maybe even that internal Scaled Agile example you just touched on. Are there specific meetings or ceremonies or checking points that are really important as part of the Agile release train process? What are the things that really for you are mandatory or the most important elements that company should really hold onto during that really set up stage of trying to move towards the Scaled Agile approach?

Gerald Cadden:

So I interpret your question correctly. I think for me when you're implementing the really important things to focus on as a team first of all is the PI Planning. That is the number one thing. It's the first one people want to change because it's two days long and everybody has to come and it can cost companies a quite a significant sum of money to run that every 10 to 12 weeks. And so you will run very quickly as I had in the past in the car company you run very quickly into the financial controller who wants to understand why you're spending $40,000 a quarter on a big two-day meeting. And so they lie, they start questioning every item on the bill, but that's the most significant one.

Gerald Cadden:

PI Planning is significant. The inspect and adapt is the other one simply because at the end if you remove that feedback cycle, what we call closing the loop if you remove that then we have no opportunities to improve. So those two events themselves create the bookends what we get started with and how we close the loop, but there are smaller events that happen in between the team events are obviously all important. But more significant for me is the constant, the event for the product management team or program management team how are you going to filter them, excuse me.

Gerald Cadden:

Who are going to need to get together on a regular basis to ensure that then we call this the Sync. So this is the ART Sync or the POPM Sync. You need to make sure those are happening because those are these more dynamic feedback loops and ensure the progress of good architectural requirements or good features coming through so that when you get to PI Planning the teams have significant things to work on. So if you had to give me my top three events, PI Planning, inspect and adapt, and the ART Sync and product POPM Sync.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. I know there's always that temptation for teams to find the shortcuts and define the workarounds where they don't have to do certain meetings or certain check-ins, but in terms of communication it must be terribly important for these teams to make sure they're still communicating and they don't use the framework as an excuse to stop meeting together and to stop collaborating.

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah. I mean, I went through when I started implementing at the large car company in the U.S I decided to rip the bandaid off. They had several teams working on projects and they weren't doing well, when I looked at the challenges and decided we're going to implement SAFe some of the management they were, "Are you crazy? Why would you do this?" But they trusted me. And so we did rip the bandaid off and we formed them all into a not. We launched set up. And I remember at the end of the PIs some of the management have had a lot of doubts that were coming up after they sat through the PI and they said they just couldn't believe how great that was.

Gerald Cadden:

Even though the first PI was a little chaotic they understood the work and the collaboration, the alignment, just the discussions that took place were far more powerful for them. And teams were happier, they were walking out to a different environment. So it changed the mood a great deal. So I think the teams their ability to be heard in one of the most significant places is during PI Planning, they get that chance to be heard. They get that chance to participate rather than just be at the end where they're told what to do.

Sean Blake:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). So it really empowers the team.

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Sean Blake:

That's great. So as a company moves out of the implementation phase and becomes a little bit more used to the way of doing things what's the best way for them to go about communicating that progress to the wider organization and then really evangelizing this way of working to try and get more teams on board and more Agile release trains set up so that it's really a whole company approach.

Gerald Cadden:

Yeah. A good question. So I think first of all the system demo that we do. So the regular system demos that take place, this is an event where you can invite people to. So when you get to the end of the program increment, the 10, 12, or the eight, 10 or 12 weeks and you're doing your PI system demo that's a chance for you to invite people that may be in the organization who are next on the list and they're going to be doing this, or they're curious, or if you have external suppliers who you're trying to get on board as part of the training have them come. Have them come to these events so they can just participate. They can see what goes on and it takes away some of the fear of what that stuff is. It gives them work much.

Gerald Cadden:

So the system demo whether you do it during the PI, but definitely the PI system demo and you want that one. So more ad hoc things and one of the things that I've seen organizations really fail to do is when they're having success the leadership around the train need to go out and I hate the term evangelize, but go out and show the successes. Get out and talk about this at the next company meeting present where they were and where they are now. But as part of that don't share just the metrics that show greater delivery of value show the human metrics, show how the team went from maybe a certain level of disgruntlement to maybe feeling happier and getting better feedback, show with how the business and technology have come closer together because they're able to collaborate and actually produce value together rather than being at odds because the system makes them at odds.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. Gerald is there anything else you'd like to share with our audience before we wrap up the episode? Any tips or words of encouragement, or perhaps some advice for those who are considering scaling up their Agile teams.

Gerald Cadden:

I think that the one piece of advice again, I'll reiterate back to the earlier point I made is as you are going through the implementation process and you're starting to launch your train and train your teams figure out how you're going to support them when you launch. Putting people through an SPC class or through all the other classes they won't come out safe geniuses. They'll have knowledge and they'll have the enthusiasm and have some trepidation as well, but you need good coaching. So figure out as you're beginning the implementation pattern where you're designing the teams et cetera, figure out what your coaching pattern is going to be. Hire the people with the knowledge and the experience work with a partner for the knowledge and experience. They shouldn't stay there forever if you work with consultants.

Gerald Cadden:

Their job should be to come in and empower you not to stay there permanently, but without that coaching and coaching over a couple of PIs your teams tend to run into problems and go backwards. So to keep that momentum moving forward for me it's figure out the coaching pattern. The only other one I would say too is make sure that you get good collaboration between product and the people who are going to be the product management role on architecture, get rid of the grievances, have them work together because those can stifle you. Get in and talk about the environments before you launch. You don't want funny problems when you, "Oh, the architecture is terrible." Okay. Let's talk about that before we launch." So just a couple of things that I think are really important things to focus on before you launch the train.

Sean Blake:

Awesome. I really appreciate that Gerald. I've actually learned a lot in our chat around. It's the same challenges that you had 10 years ago it's the same challenges that we have today. The really the COVID is the challenge of how do you focus on the mindset change. We've talked about the teams are eager to change. There might be a few grumbly voices along the way, but really it's about leadership providing a welcoming and safe environment to foster that change and the difference between being a coach and a consultant, the importance of mentoring. Wow we actually covered a lot of ground didn't we?

Gerald Cadden:

I may get some hate mail for that comment, but...

Sean Blake:

Oh, we'll see. Time will tell. Thanks so much Gerald for joining us on the Easy Agile Podcast. And we appreciate you sharing your expertise with us and the audience for the podcast. Thanks for having you.

Gerald Cadden:

Happy to do it anytime. Thanks for having me here today.

Sean Blake:

Thanks Gerald.

TL;DR

Henrik Kniberg, the agile coach behind Spotify's model, discusses how AI is fundamentally transforming software development. Key takeaways: AI tools like Cursor and Claude are enabling 10x productivity gains; teams should give developers access to paid AI tools and encourage experimentation; coding will largely disappear as a manual task within 3–4 years; teams will shrink to 2 people plus AI; sprints will become obsolete in favour of continuous delivery; product owners can now write code via AI, creating pull requests instead of user stories; the key is treating AI like a brilliant intern – when it fails, the problem is usually your prompt or code structure, not the AI. Bottom line: Learn to use AI now, or risk being left behind in a rapidly changing landscape.

Introduction

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping how software teams work, collaborate, and deliver value. But with this transformation comes questions: How do we maintain team morale when people fear being replaced? What happens to code quality when AI writes most of the code? Do traditional agile practices like sprints still make sense?

In this episode, I sit down with Henrik Kniberg to tackle these questions head-on. Henrik is uniquely positioned to guide us through this transition – he's the agile coach and entrepreneur who pioneered the famous Spotify model and helped transform how Lego approached agile development. Now, as co-founder of Abundly AI, he's at the forefront of helping teams integrate AI into their product development workflows.

This conversation goes deep into the practical realities of AI-powered development: from maintaining code review processes when productivity increases 10x, to ethical considerations around AI usage, to what cross-functional teams will look like in just a few years. Henrik doesn't just theorise – he shares real examples from his own team, where their CEO (a non-coder) regularly submits pull requests, and where features that once took a sprint can now be built during a 7-minute subway ride.

Whether you're a developer wondering if AI will replace you, a product owner looking to leverage these tools, or a leader trying to navigate this transformation, this episode offers concrete, actionable insights for thriving in the AI era.

About Our Guest

Henrik Kniberg is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur whose work has shaped how thousands of organisations approach software development. He's best known for creating the Spotify model – the squad-based organisational structure that revolutionised how large tech companies scale agile practices. His work at Spotify and later at Lego helped demonstrate how agile methodologies could work at enterprise scale whilst maintaining team autonomy and innovation.

Henrik's educational videos have become legendary in the agile community. His "Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell" video, created over a decade ago, remains one of the most-watched and shared resources for understanding product ownership, with millions of views. His ability to distil complex concepts into simple, visual explanations has made him one of the most accessible voices in agile education.

More recently, Henrik has turned his attention to the intersection of AI and product development. As co-founder of Abundly AI, he's moved from teaching about agile transformation to leading AI transformation – helping companies and teams understand how to effectively integrate generative AI tools into their development workflows. His approach combines his deep understanding of team dynamics and agile principles with hands-on experience using cutting-edge AI tools like Claude, Cursor, and GitHub Copilot.

Henrik codes daily using AI and has been doing so for over two and a half years, giving him practical, lived experience with these tools that goes beyond theoretical understanding. He creates educational content about AI, trains teams on effective AI usage, and consults with organisations navigating their own AI transformations. His perspective is particularly valuable because he views AI through the lens of organisational change management – recognising that successful AI adoption isn't just about the technology, it's about people, culture, and process.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Henrik continues to push the boundaries of what's possible when human creativity and AI capabilities combine, whilst maintaining a pragmatic, human-centred approach to technological change.

Transcript

Note: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.

Maintaining Team Morale and Motivation in the AI Era

Tenille Hoppo: Hi there, team, and welcome to this new episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. My name is Tenille Hoppo, and I'm feeling really quite lucky to have an opportunity to chat today with our guest, Henrik Kniberg.

Henrik is an agile coach, author, and entrepreneur known for pioneering agile practices at companies like Spotify and Lego, and more recently for his thought leadership in applying AI to product development. Henrik co-founded Abundly AI, and when he isn't making excellent videos to help us all understand AI, he is focused on the practical application of generative AI in product development and training teams to use these technologies effectively.

Drawing on his extensive experience in agile methodologies and team coaching, Henrik seems the perfect person to learn from when thinking about the intersection of AI, product development, and effective team dynamics. So a very warm welcome to you, Henrik.

Henrik Kniberg: Thank you very much. It's good to be here.

Tenille: I think most people would agree that motivated people do better work. So I'd like to start today by touching on the very human element of this discussion and helping people maintain momentum and motivation when they may be feeling some concern or uncertainty about the upheaval that AI might represent for them in their role.

What would you suggest that leaders do to encourage the use of AI in ways that increase team morale and creativity rather than risking people feeling quite concerned or even potentially replaced?

Henrik: There are kind of two sides to the coin. There's one side that says, "Oh, AI is gonna take my job, and I'm gonna get fired." And the other side says, "Oh, AI is going to give me superpowers and give us all superpowers, and thereby give us better job security than we had before."

I think it's important to press on the second point from a leader's perspective. Pitch it as this is a tool, and we are entering a world where this tool is a crucial tool to understand how to use – in a similar way that everyone uses the Internet. We consider it obvious that you need to know how to use the Internet. If you don't know how to use the Internet, it's going to be hard.

"I encourage people to experiment, give them access to the tools to do so, and encourage sharing. And don't start firing people because they get productive."

I also find that people tend to get a little bit less scared once they learn to use it. It becomes less scary. It's like if you're worried there's a monster under your bed, maybe look under your bed and turn on the lights. Maybe there wasn't a monster there, or maybe it was there but it was kind of cute and just wanted a hug.

Creating a Culture of Safe Experimentation

Tenille: I've read that you encourage experimentation with AI through learning – I agree it's the best way to learn. What would you encourage leaders and team leaders to do to create a strong culture where teams feel safe to experiment?

Henrik: There are some things. One is pretty basic: just give people access to good AI tools. And that's quite hard in some large organisations because there are all kinds of resistance – compliance issues, data security issues. Are we allowed to use ChatGPT or Claude? Where is our data going? There are all these scary things that make companies either hesitate or outright try to stop people.

Start at that hygiene level. Address those impediments and solve them. When the Internet came, it was really scary to connect your computer to the Internet. But now we all do it, and you kind of have to, or you don't get any work done. We're at this similar moment now.

"Ironically, when companies are too strict about restricting people, then what people tend to do is just use shadow AI – they use it on their own in private or in secret, and then you have no control at all."

Start there. Once people have access to really good AI tools, then it's just a matter of encouraging and creating forums. Encourage people to experiment, create knowledge-sharing forums, share your own experiments. Try to role-model this yourself. Say, "I tried using AI for these different things, and here's what I learned." Also provide paths for support, like training courses.

The Right Mindset for Working with AI

Tenille: What would you encourage in team members as far as their mindset or skills go? Certainly a nature of curiosity and a willingness to learn and experiment. Is there anything beyond that that you think would be really key?

Henrik: It is a bit of a weird technology that's never really existed before. We're used to humans and code. Humans are intelligent and kind of unpredictable. We hallucinate sometimes, but we can do amazing things. Code is dumb – it executes exactly what you told it to do, and it does so every time exactly the same way. But it can't reason, it can't think.

Now we have AI and AI agents which are somewhere in the middle. They're not quite as predictable as code, but they're a lot more predictable than humans typically. They're a lot smarter than code, but maybe not quite as smart as humans – except for some tasks when they're a million times smarter than humans. So it's weird.

You need a kind of humble attitude where you come at it with a mindset of curiosity. Part of it is also to realise that a lot of the limitation is in you as a user. If you try to use AI for coding and it wrote something that didn't work, it's probably not the model itself. It's probably your skills or lack of skills because you have to learn how to use these tools. You need to have this attitude of "Oh, it failed. What can I do differently next time?" until you really learn how to use it.

"There can be some aspect of pride with developers. Like, 'I've been coding for 30 years. Of course this machine can't code better than me.' But if you think of it like 'I want this thing to be good, I want to bring out the best in this tool' – not because it's going to replace me, but because it's going to save me a tonne of time by doing all the boring parts of the coding so I can do the more interesting parts – that kind of mindset really helps."

Maintaining Code Quality and Shared Understanding

Tenille: Our team at Easy Agile is taking our steps and trying to figure out how AI is gonna work best for us. I put the question out to some of our teams, and there were various questions around people taking their first steps in using AI as a co-pilot and producing code. There are question marks around consistency of code, maintaining code quality and clean architecture, and even things like maintaining that shared understanding of the code base. What advice do you have for people in that situation?

Henrik: My first piece of advice when it comes to coding – and this is something I do every day with AI, I've been doing for about two and a half years now – is that the models now, especially Claude, have gotten to the level where it's basically never the AI's fault anymore. If it does anything wrong, it's on you.

You need to think about: okay, am I using the wrong tool maybe? Or am I not using the tool correctly?

For example, the current market leader in terms of productivity tools with AI is Cursor. There are other tools that are getting close like GitHub Copilot, but Cursor is way ahead of anything else I've seen. With Cursor, it basically digs through your code base and looks for what it needs.

But if it fails to find what it needs, you need to think about why. It probably failed for the same reason a human might have failed. Maybe your code structure was very unstructured. Maybe you need to explain to the AI what the high-level structure of your code is.

"Think of it kind of like a really smart intern who just joined your team. They're brilliant at coding, but now they got confused about something, and it's probably your code – something in it that made it confused. And now you need to clarify that."

There are ways to do that. In Cursor, for example, you can create something called cursor rules, which are like standing documents that describe certain aspects of your system. In my team, we're always tweaking those rules. Whenever we find that the AI model did something wrong, we're always analysing why. Usually it's our prompt – I just phrased it badly – or I just need to add a cursor rule, or I need to break the problem down a little bit.

It's exactly the same thing as if you go to a team and give them this massive user story that includes all these assumptions – they'll probably get some things wrong. But if you take that big problem and sit down together and analyse it and split it into smaller steps where each step is verifiable and testable, now your team can do really good work. It's exactly the same thing with AI.

Addressing the Code Review Bottleneck

Tenille: One of our senior developers found that he was outputting code at a much greater volume and faster speed, but the handbrake he found was actually their code review processes. They were keeping the same processes they had previously, and that was a bit of a handbrake for them. What kind of advice would you have there?

Henrik: This reminds me of the general issue with any kind of productivity improvement. If you have a value stream, a process where you do different parts – you do some development, some testing, you have some design – whenever you take one part of the process and make it super optimised, the bottleneck moves to somewhere else.

If testing is no longer the bottleneck, maybe coding is. And when coding is instant, then maybe customer feedback – or lack of customer feedback – is the bottleneck. The bottleneck just keeps moving. In that particular case, the bottleneck became code review. So I would just start optimising that. That's not an AI problem. It's a process problem.

Look at it: what exactly are we trying to do when we review? Maybe we could think about changing the way we review things. For example, does all code need to be reviewed? Would it be enough that the human who wrote it and the AI, together with the human, agree that this is fine? Or maybe depending on the criticality of that change, in some cases you might just let it pass or use AI to help in the reviewing process also.

"I think there's value in code review in terms of knowledge sharing in a large organisation. But maybe the review doesn't necessarily need to be a blocking process either. It could be something you go back and look at – don't let it stop you from shipping, but maybe go back once per week and say, 'Let's look at some highlights of some changes we've made.'"

We produce 10 times more code than in the past, so reviewing every line is not feasible. But maybe we can at least identify which code is most interesting to look at.

Ethical Considerations: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility

Tenille: Agile emphasises people over process and delivering value to customers. Now with AI in the mix, there's potential for raising some ethical considerations. I'm interested in your thoughts on how teams should approach these ethical considerations that come along with AI – things like balancing rapid experimentation against concerns around bias, potential data privacy concerns.

Henrik: I would treat each ethical question on its own merits. Let me give you an example. When you use AI – let's say facial recognition technology that can process and recognise faces a lot better than any human – I kind of put that in the bucket of: any tool that is really useful can also be used for bad things. A hammer, fire, electricity.

That doesn't have so much to do with the tool itself. It has much more to do with the rules and regulations and processes around the tool. I can't really separate AI in that sense. Treat it like any other system. Whenever you install a camera somewhere, with or without AI, that camera is going to see stuff. What are you allowed to do with that information? That's an important question. But I don't think it's different for AI really, in that sense, other than that AI is extremely powerful. So you need to really take that seriously, especially when it comes to things like autonomous weapons and the risk of fraud and fake news.

"An important part of it is just to make it part of the agenda. Let's say you're a recruitment company and you're now going to add some AI help in screening. At least raise the question: we could do this. Do we want to do this? What is the responsible way to do it?"

It's not that hard to come up with reasonable guidelines. Obviously, we shouldn't let the AI decide who we're going to hire or not. That's a bad idea. But maybe it can look at the pile of candidates that we plan to reject and identify some that we should take a second look at. There's nothing to lose from that because that AI did some extra research and found that this person who had a pretty weak CV actually has done amazing things before.

We're actually working with a company now where we're helping them build some AI agents. Our AI agents help them classify CVs – not by "should we hire them or not," but more like which region in Sweden is this, which type of job are we talking about here. Just classifying to make it more likely that this job application reaches the right person. That's work that humans did before with pretty bad accuracy.

The conclusion was that AI, despite having biases like we humans do, seemed to have less biases than the human. Mainly things like it's never going to be in a bad mood because it hasn't had its coffee today. It'll process everybody on the same merits.

I think of it like a peer-to-peer thing. Imagine going to a doctor – ideally, I want to have both a human doctor and an AI doctor side by side, just because they both have biases, but now they can complement each other. It's like having a second opinion. If the AI says we should do this and the doctor says, "No, wait a second," or vice versa, having those two different opinions is super useful.

Parallels Between Agile and AI Transformations

Tenille: You're recognised as one of the leading voices in agile software development. I can see, and I'm interested if you do see, some parallels between the agile transformations that you led at Spotify and Lego with the AI transformations that many businesses are looking at now.

Henrik: I agree. I find that when we help companies transition towards becoming AI native, a lot of the thinking is similar to agile. But I think we can generalise that agile transformations are not really very special either – it's organisational change.

There are some patterns involved regardless of whether you're transitioning towards an agile way of working or towards AI. Some general patterns such as: you've got to get buy-in, it's useful to do the change in an incremental way, balance bottom-up with top-down. There are all these techniques that are useful regardless. But as an agilist, if you have some skills and competence in leading and supporting a change process, then that's going to be really useful also when helping companies understand how to use AI.

Tenille: Are you seeing more top-down or bottom-up when it comes to AI transformations?

Henrik: So far it's quite new still. The jury's not in yet. But so far it looks very familiar to me. I'm seeing both. I'm seeing situations where it's pure top-down where managers are like "we got to go full-out AI," and they push it out with mixed results. And sometimes just completely bottom-up, also with mixed results.

Sometimes something can start completely organically and then totally take hold, or it starts organically and then gets squashed because there was no buy-in higher up. I saw all of that with agile as well. My guess is in most cases the most successful will be when you have a bit of both – support and guidance from the top, but maybe driven from the bottom.

"I think the bottom-up is maybe more important than ever because this technology is so weird and so fast-moving. As a leader, you don't really have a chance if you try to control it – you're going to slow things down to an unacceptable level. People will be learning things that you can't keep up with yourself. So it's better to just enable people to experiment a lot, but then of course provide guidance."

AI for Product Owners: From Ideation to Pull Requests

Tenille: You're very well known for your guidance and for your ability to explain quite complex concepts very simply and clearly. I was looking at your video on YouTube today, the Agile Product Ownership in a Nutshell video, which was uploaded about 12 years ago now. Thinking about product owners, there's a big opportunity now with AI for generating ideas, analysing data, and even suggesting new features. What's your advice for product owners and product managers in using AI most effectively?

Henrik: Use it for everything. Overuse it so you can find the limits. The second thing is: make sure you have access to a good AI model. Don't use the free ones. The difference is really large – like 10x, 100x difference – just in paying like $20 per month or something. At the moment, I can particularly strongly recommend Claude. It's in its own category of awesomeness right now. But that of course changes as they leapfrog each other. But mainly: pay up, use a paid model, and then experiment.

For product owners, typical things are what you already mentioned – ideation, creating good backlog items, splitting a story – but also writing code. I would say as a PO, there is this traditional view, for example in Scrum, that POs should not be coding. There's a reason for that: because coding takes time, and then as PO you get stuck in details and you lose the big picture.

Well, that's not true anymore. There are very many things that used to be time-consuming coding that is basically a five-minute job with a good prompt.

"Instead of wasting the team's time by trying to phrase that as a story, just phrase it as a pull request instead and go to the team and demonstrate your running feature."

That happened actually today. Just now, our CEO, who's not a coder, came to me with a pull request. In fact, quite often he just pushes directly to a branch because it's small changes. He wants to add some new visualisation for a graph or something in our platform – typically admin stuff that users won't see, so it's quite harmless if he gets it wrong.

He's vibe coding, just making little changes to the admin, which means he never goes to my team and says, "Hey, can you guys generate this report or this graph for how users use our product?" No, he just puts it in himself if it's simple.

Today we wanted to make a change with how we handle payments for enterprise customers. Getting that wrong is a little more serious, and the change wasn't that hard, but he just didn't feel completely comfortable pushing it himself. So he just made a PR instead, and then we spent 15 minutes reviewing it. I said it was fine, so we pushed it.

It's so refreshing that now anybody can code. You just need to learn the basic prompting and these tools. And then that saves time for the developers to do the more heavyweight coding.

Tenille: It's an interesting world where we can have things set up where anyone could just jump in and with the right guardrails create something. It makes Friday demos quite probably a lot more interesting than maybe they used to be in the past.

Henrik: I would like to challenge any development team to let their stakeholders push code, and then find out whatever's stopping you from doing that and fix that. Then you get to a very interesting space.

Closing the Gap Between Makers and Users

Tenille: A key insight from your work with agile teams in the past has been to really focus on minimising that gap between maker and user. Do you think that AI helps to close that gap, or do you think it potentially risks widening it if teams are focusing too much on AI predictions and stop talking to their customers effectively?

Henrik: I think that of course depends a lot on the team. But from what I've seen so far, it massively reduces the gap. Because if I don't have to spend a week getting a feature to work, I can spend an hour instead. Then I have so much more time to talk to my users and my customers.

If the time to make a clickable prototype or something is a few seconds, then I can do it live in real time with my customers, and we can co-create. There are all these opportunities.

I find that – myself, my teams, and the people I work with – we work a lot more closely with our users and customers because of this fast turnaround time.

"Just yesterday I was teaching a course, and I was going home sitting on the subway. It was a 15-minute subway ride. I finally got a seat, so I had only 7 minutes left. There's this feature that I wanted to build that involved both front-end and back-end and a database schema change. Well, 5 minutes later it was done and I got off the subway and just pushed it. That's crazy."

Of course, our system is set up optimised to enable it to be that fast. And of course not everything will work that well. But every time it does, I've been coding for 30 years, and I feel like I wake up in some weird fantasy every day, wondering, "Can I really be this productive?" I never would have thought that was possible.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Agile Teams

Tenille: I'd like you to put your futurist hat on for a moment. How do you see the future of agile teamwork in, say, 10 to 15 years time? If we would have this conversation again in 2035, given the exponential growth of AI and improvements over the last two to three years, what do you think would be the biggest change for software development teams in how they operate?

Henrik: I can't even imagine 10 years. Even 5 years is just beyond imagination. That's like asking someone in the 1920s to imagine smartphones and the Internet. I think that's the level of change we're looking at.

I would shorten the time a little bit and say maybe 3 or 4 years. My guess there – and I'm already seeing this transfer happen – is that coding will just go away. It just won't be stuff that we humans do because we're too slow and we hallucinate way too much.

But I think engineering and the developer role will still be there, just that we don't type lines of code – in the same way that we no longer make punch cards or we no longer write machine code and poke values into registers using assembly language. That used to be a big part of it, but no longer.

"In the future, as developers, a lot of the work will still be the same. You're still designing stuff, you're thinking about architecture, you're interacting with customers, and you're doing all the other stuff. But typing lines of code is something that we're gonna be telling our kids about, and they're not gonna believe that we used to do that."

The other thing is smaller teams, which I'm already seeing now. I think the idea of a cross-functional team of 5 to 7 people – traditionally that was considered quite necessary in order to have all the different skills needed to deliver a feature in a product. But that's not the case anymore. If you skip ahead 2 or 3 years when this knowledge has spread, I think most teams will be 2 people and an AI, because then you have all the domain knowledge you need, probably.

As a consequence of that, we'll just have more teams. More and smaller teams. Of course, then you need to collaborate between the teams, so cross-team synchronisation is still going to be an issue.

Also, I'm already seeing this now, but this concept of sprints – the whole point is to give a team some peace of mind to build something complex, because typically you would need a week or two to build something complex. But now, when it takes a day and some good prompting to do the same thing that would have taken a whole sprint, then the sprint is a day instead. If the sprint is a day, is there any difference between a sprint planning meeting and a daily standup? Not really.

I think sprints will just kind of shrink into oblivion. What's going to be left instead is something a little bit similar – some kind of synchronisation point or follow-up point. Instead of a sprint where every 2 weeks we sit down and try to make a plan, I think it'll be very much continuous delivery on a day-to-day basis. But then maybe every week or two we take a step back and just reflect a little bit and say, "Okay, what have we been delivering the past couple of weeks? What have we been learning? What's our high-level focus for the next couple of weeks?" A very, very lightweight equivalent of a sprint.

I feel pretty confident about that guess because personally, we are already there with my team, and I think it'll become a bit of a norm.

Final Thoughts: Preparing for the Future

Henrik: No one knows what's gonna happen in the future, and those who say they do are kidding themselves. But there's one fairly safe bet though: no matter what happens in the future with AI, if you understand how to use it, you'll be in a better position to deal with whatever that is. That's why I encourage people to get comfortable with it, get used to using it.

Tenille: I have a teenage daughter who I'm actually trying to encourage to learn how to use AI, because I feel like when I was her age, the Internet was the thing that was sort of coming mainstream. It completely changed the way we live. Everything is online now. And I feel like AI is that piece for her.

Henrik: Isn't it weird that the generation of small children growing up now are going to consider this to be normal and obvious? They'll be the AI natives. They'll be like, "Of course I have my AI agent buddy. There's nothing weird about that at all."

Tenille: I'll still keep being nice to my coffee machine.

Henrik: Yeah, that's good. Just in case, you know.

---

Thank you to Henrik Kniberg for joining us on this episode of the Easy Agile Podcast. To learn more about Henrik's work, visit Abundly AI or check out his educational videos on AI and agile practices.

Subscribe to the Easy Agile Podcast on your favourite platform, and join us for more conversations about agile, product development, and the future of work.